Four Mums in a Boat: Friends who rowed 3000 miles, broke a world record and learnt a lot about life along the way. Janette Benaddi

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      ‘A dream?’ chipped in Richard. ‘Honestly, if we all followed our dreams where would we be?’

      But no one was listening to Richard, or Ben, or Mark, or Mike. We were carried away with the excitement of the idea. Why couldn’t we? Why couldn’t some amateur rowers, who had only ever pootled up and down the River Ouse, make it across the Atlantic? Stranger things have happened, surely? We clinked glasses and toasted our ambition and Frances’s idea. What a ride! What a journey! What a trip that would be!

      That night, rather the worse for wine, Helen posted excitedly on her Facebook page. ‘I can’t believe I have just agreed to row the Atlantic!’ And Frances spoke animatedly to Mark as they walked home.

      ‘I can’t believe I asked them to row the Atlantic with me and they said yes! Isn’t that great?’

      ‘No,’ he replied. ‘It is not great. It’s not great at all.’ But then he paused and looked over at her. ‘But if you really want to go and you really want to do it, then it’s okay by me. However, I want you to know that the idea does not make me jump for joy. Not one little bit.’

      Perhaps our partners were all hoping we’d forget about it, that the plan would simply disappear, like most plans discussed after a few bottles of wine. They expected it would evaporate along with the hangover.

      And for a long time, they were right. We did vaguely discuss the possibility of rowing across an ocean the following Saturday over cups of coffee at The Grange. Helen told Niki the story and we had a laugh on the sofa at the foolishness of it all.

      ‘Rowing the Atlantic?’ she asked. ‘That’s a long way.’

      ‘I know!’ agreed Helen. ‘That’s what Richard said!’

      ‘We’d drunk quite a lot of wine by then,’ added Caroline.

      ‘Ben is positively encouraging me to go, the sod!’ said Janette.

      Only Frances stayed silent, thinking. The problem with saying something like ‘I want to row an ocean’ and declaring your dream, revealing your innermost desires, is that it can’t be unsaid. And once the genie was out of the bottle, it was all Frances could think about. She was determined to do it.

      It was fairly obvious what Mark thought about the idea, and indeed all the other husbands. Their surprised, incredulous faces that night around the dinner table said it all. Not one of them believed we could pull it off. Four mums rowing an ocean? It was clearly a ridiculous idea and, anyway, who was going to do the washing if we went?

      But Frances mulled, she daydreamed, she googled the hell out of the event and she quietly would not give up. She kept mentioning it to Mark, as a way of getting him used to the idea.

      ‘I thought if I kept talking about it, slipping it into conversation, he’d believe that I was serious. That I really could do it. The seed that had been sown by reading all those books from the library years before was finally germinating. Why couldn’t I have an adventure? Does being a mother of two mean you can no longer dream? No longer do anything for yourself?’

      So that Friday morning in May, she could not control it any more and she emailed them all. ‘It was the grey suits, the grey road, the grey everything, and I wanted a bit of sunshine and a bit of memory-making. I was feeling increasingly frustrated and underappreciated at work. I just kept thinking, “Am I going to do this for another 10 years and then retire? Is this it? My life?”’

      Janette, of course, replied almost immediately. But the others did not. There was nothing but radio silence, so much so that Frances began to think that perhaps she’d misjudged the mood. It was, after all, her idea, her mid-life crisis! Maybe the others wanted nothing to do with it…

      At least Janette was up for it. In fact, Janette was so up for it that she was ready to row that Christmas. She was a little disappointed to learn that the two of them weren’t taking off in six months’ time but in two years.

      ‘We’ve got to plan, we’ve got to train, we’ve got to get a boat – we can’t possibly be ready this year!’ explained Frances as the two of them trawled the Talisker website, working out how to register. And register they did. Just the two of them. It was 500 euros each. They were the first to register for the 2015 race. In fact, they were the only team to register for quite a long time. Whatever was going to happen, Frances and Janette were going to row an ocean. There was a small matter of some training and a boat, but they were on their way.

      Janette immediately signed herself up to a five-day practical RYA (Royal Yachting Association) Day Skipper at Sea programme in Spain. Of course she did. ‘Well, I was definitely going to row the Atlantic, so I thought I should get started. Also we did have a yacht already, so we thought it was a good idea to do some sort of professional training!

      She and Ben flew to Girona, Spain, where they were joined by an elderly chap from Australia who wanted to work on cruise ships in his retirement and a young girl who was keen to work on yachts, and that was it. For five days they learnt how to reverse, turn, hoist sails and get them down again.

      ‘To be frank, I wasn’t very good. I was rubbish. Ben was trying to help me so that I could pass the test. He was whispering things in my ear, telling me which way to go. At one point we were in a man-overboard situation where they’d thrown a fender into the sea to simulate a body, which I then proceeded to mow down. The skipper wasn’t pleased.’

      ‘Now, Janette,’ she said, ‘if that was a person, they would be dead by now.’

      ‘I also launched the 40-foot yacht headlong into the pontoon. I have never seen anyone move so fast in their life when she realised I was about to plough the whole boat into the dock. She grabbed the joystick out of my hand and plunged it into reverse.’

      Both Janette and Ben got their International Certificate of Competence and another one in marine VHF (very high frequency) radio.

      ‘It was a bit of a joke, really, as I was completely incompetent, but the one thing I really did learn that week was the incredible power of the sea. It really opened my eyes. It gave me a flavour of what the ocean could do. We left port one day for a practice and we had to turn back because the weather was so bad and the seas were so big. I had no idea it could get that rough out there. I had no idea how strong and powerful the ocean could be.’

      If Frances and Janette were fully signed up to the idea of crossing the Atlantic, the rest of us were most certainly not.

      ‘Have you heard that this lot are still going on about this ridiculous idea?’ asked Richard as we all sat down to dinner at Helen’s house one evening towards the end of June. We thought the rowing dinner had gone so well, we’d decided to get everyone together again for a plate of lasagne and some wine. Although this was not quite the feedback Frances and Janette were after! ‘It’s madness. You can’t row the Atlantic! I don’t know who you lot think you are. You’re a bunch of nutters!’

      ‘We are,’ agreed Janette, sitting down next to Richard and taking a mouthful of lasagne. ‘Total nutters!’

      ‘But we are going to do it,’ insisted Frances.

      ‘And you’re letting her go?’ Richard asked Mark, pointing at Frances with his fork. ‘Are you?’

      ‘It’s not for me to say yes or no,’ said Mark. ‘It’s always been her dream to go, to row across the Atlantic.’

      ‘Yes, СКАЧАТЬ