Nuevo Vallarta, Mexico
It is exactly one year since I set out from La Gomera to row 3000 miles across the Atlantic. My first dispatch shows I didn’t get off to a promising start.
It’s hard now to identify with that nervous ocean rower taking her first tentative strokes in between hanging over the side of the boat to be sick. By the end of my 103 days at sea I had long since found my sea legs, and knew much more about the ocean and about myself than I did at the start.
And yet in another way I can still relate to that feeling of taking on a large project and feeling daunted. I am up to Chapter Three of my Atlantic book, and I feel I have so much I want to say that the closing line seems as far away as Antigua is from the Canaries. While I was out on the ocean someone wrote to me, ‘After this nothing will ever seem difficult.’ Not true. Life always will be and always should be full of challenges.