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Eddystone Challenge
The Eddystone Challenge:
Measuring Up
Imagine the scene. It’s a summer Sunday afternoon in St Peter Port. The awards get-together has brought the Guernsey Regatta to a finish. The ERC women’s “A” crew quad has just won the Sunday morning event, a 36-minute sprint round the bay, and after a creditable second place in yesterday’s 16K slog spirits are high. Gathered around the table in the regatta marquee are some of the Exmouth rowers, and Rob Williams is wondering where next to take all this stamina and adrenaline. Victory has a thousand daughters and one of them – in the sweet aftermath of line honours – is the up-coming Eddystone Challenge. 28 miles there and back? Six hours of relentless combat with the elements? No problem. “We were all quite busy after those two races” recalls Allie Giles. “And it just seemed a great idea.”
Over the following weeks, in that loose, slightly disorganised Exmouth way, plans firmed up. Originally, in the aftermath of Guernsey, there seemed to be enough volunteers for two quad crews but injuries and second thoughts took their toll. By the pre-Challenge entry deadline, five names went down on the ERC form: Anna Childs, Caroline Huxley, Rob Williams, Mike Mulholland and Brian Hitchcock. None of these guys had ever rowed together as a crew. And time was moving on.
Allie Giles, meanwhile, had found herself a seat in Hash Anchorettes, a Plymouth boat with a spare berth. Alone amongst the Challenge contenders, Allie had a taste of what lies in store. Back in 2006, she rode out in a yacht as a reserve rower in case of emergencies but conditions beyond the breakwater led to the Exmouth crew having to turn back. The seas, she said, were enormous. Most of her shipmates aboard the yacht were seasick and the rowers were being tossed around by wave after wave. But that determination to one day give the Challenge her best shot never left her.
This year’s Challenge was scheduled for Saturday 15th August. Vile weather led to the cancellation of last year’s event, and a succession of frontal troughs seemed to be offering a repeat performance, but Rob Williams rallied the Exmouth crew for a shake-down cruise with just five days left before the Challenge weekend.
Mike Mulholland, a volunteer for last year’s cancelled Challenge, felt the crew bedded in well. “We put in a decent distance,” he says. “Out through the deepwater channel, then across to the Parson and Clerk, and back via Dawlish. We tried to cross the sandbank off the beach but there wasn’t enough water and so we had to backtrack to the Fairway Buoy and return via the channel. You’ve got to be talking 16K - and it seemed to go well.”
Fine. Except that the Eddystone, from launch to retrieval, is exactly three times that distance.
By now, the crew had found their individual positions in the boat. Anna Childs was to be stroke. She’d been rowing for barely more than a year or so and her longest row to date was a social outing to Teignmouth and back with a couple of hours on the beach in between. Yet she refused to be intimidated. “I know I’m stubborn enough never to give up,” she says. “I wasn’t expecting the Eddystone to be easy but I’d climbed Kilamanjaro before and pushed my body to the absolute limit. After six hours at high altitude I had legs like jelly and nothing I’ve done since has ever been that hard.” Anna was 24 when she climbed Kilamanjaro. She is now 31.
Rowing three in the boat was Brian Hitchcock. Brian started his rowing in fine boats at university in Durham but a spell in Hong Kong gave him lots of experience in ocean rowing on the South China Sea. He’d done a number of four-hour endurance races in kayaks but had never climbed a mountain the size of the Eddystone.
Behind Brian was Mike Mulholland. After years of playing water polo at national level, Mike is no stranger to the pressures that competition can impose on a bunch of athletes. In the case of the Eddystone, he acknowledges, the battle was between the sheer distance and your own physical and mental resources, yet the chemistry of the crew would still make the difference between success and failure. “From the start” he says, “you need to know how hard you can push a crew without breaking them. With people you’ve never really rowed with before that can be a difficult call.”
At bow sat Caroline Huxley. Like Anna, she’s a relative newcomer to offshore rowing but a season on the water plus line honours at Guernsey have given her a passion for the sport. Was she daunted by the prospect of rounding a lighthouse she wouldn’t even see for three hours? “Someone suggests a row like that and you just think yeah, why not? How many times is a girl going to get an invitation like that?”
Rob Williams is a relatively seasoned rower by comparison with the two women, with experience in both fine boats and offshore quads. He’d been the driving force behind the ERC’s Challenge bid from the start, and the decision to cox the boat on the day seemed a natural extension of the care and commitment he’d put into the entry. A homeopath by training, he has a fascination for the subtle and ever-changing rhythms of the human body, and his personal challenge was to somehow lead four very different characters through an experience that would – in all probability – stay with them for the rest of their lives.
“What the cox has to do over a distance like this is to think himself into the mind of each of those four individuals…to watch them like a hawk, to anticipate their low points, to celebrate their high points, to keep talking, keep urging, keep supporting, keep supplying the framework within which this crazy experience takes place.” Welfare Officer? Navigator? Psychologist? Wave watcher? Helm? “All those…” he says, “…plus something else. Shepherd.”
Ali, meanwhile, famously immune to panic, decided to put in a little light training on her own. “I went out in a single a couple of days before the event and sculled around for a bit. It was lovely. I really enjoyed it.”
The eve of the Challenge found Mike Mulholland down at the clubhouse. The crew had elected to take Pebbles to the Eddystone and back and he was determined – in his phrase – “to scrub the arse off the boat”. Alone in the compound, he set to with the hose and a brush. To date, most of the others had done the heavy lifting and he felt this small contribution might help redress the balance. It was also, he says, a signal of intent. “I was going to get round that lighthouse” he says, “come what may.”
Saturday arrived beneath a blanket of heavy cloud, one of those mornings when the palette offers nothing but a limitless choice of greys. With Mike Drew at the wheel, and Pebbles behind, the crew set off for Plymouth. Mike and Caroline had slept badly. The wind speed was hovering a shade above Force Four. Should the wind stiffen further, the Challenge would be cancelled.
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