Team Northern Atlantic 2011

We’ve completed week 2 of the Concept2 World Rowing Challenge.  As of 11pm this evening, March 29, 2010, we have 2,227,875 meters behind us, or approximately 1,385 miles.  So we’re not quite to the half-way point yet and we’re still behind schedule.  The great news we received last week, however, was that the guys from the newly formed team, Ocean Adventure Racing Northwest, composed of Jordan Hanssen, Greg Spooner, Adam Creek and Richard Tarbill, graciously signed-up to our team and are now helping us slog our virtual way from New York City to the Isles of Scilly.  Jordan Hanssen and Greg Spooner were two members of the 2006 four-man crew who actually won an ocean rowing race over this same course becoming the first Americans ever to successfully row this stretch of ocean, land-to-land, West to East.  So it’s great to have them on our team!

If you notice on the Google Map image below, we’ve just cleared the coast of New Foundland and The Grand Banks area, and we are just about at the same longitude of the location in which the HMS Titanic sank.  You’ll also notice, many miles off of to our port, the Hibernia Oil Field.

In consideration of the markers of interest just pointed out, and the fact that we’ve just cleared the New Foundland coast and are now at a spot where the warm waters of the Gulf Stream race eastward while the cold waters of the Labrador Sea flow southward, I imagine this to be a particularly scary stretch of ocean.

We are, virtually, at 48 degrees West, 46 degrees North.  This, oddly enough, is almost the exact location where Harbo and Samuelson reported coming into near contact with their first iceberg.  When I read about this is David Shaw’s book, ‘Daring the Sea’, this literally made the hair on my arms stand up.  About 330 more miles East is where Harbo and Samuelson experienced their big capsize where they lost most of their provisions and water, so we have that to look forward to this week!!

Here’s a video of Team OAR Northwest’s West to East fours race in 2006:

Mike and I attended an ISAF Safety at Sea Seminar at the US Naval Academy this weekend (March 27-28, 2010). It was a great event and we both learned a great deal about seamanship and boating safety. The speakers were exceptional, and the information provided was, for the most part, lucid and pertinent. One of my favorite presentations was made by Captain Matt Klunder, USNA Commandant, who admonished the importance of the sea throughout American history, and exhorted us to help expand appreciation for the sport of sailing and nautical sport in general.  As Americans, the sea is in our blood.

I also particularly enjoyed the talk presented by Gary Jobson as he provided a number of colorful, and somewhat scary, anecdotes from his heavy weather sailing experiences, particularly the 1979 FastNet race and his experiences on board Ted Turner’s vessel, Tenacious.

The in-the-pool demonstrations were enlightening in that we learned how difficult it is to get into a life raft with foul weather gear on. Moreover, life rafts are not comfortable – even in a calm swimming pool.

The Navy Midshipman did live man-over-board demonstrations in their 44 foot yachts and we got to see a live demo of a rescue at sea operation with a real Coast Guard helicopter!  The real-life demonstrations truly helped to interject a sense of reality to rescue at sea and the difficulty thereof.  Stuff happens!

Especially pertinent to our own objectives were the discussions on weather, heavy weather sailing and the Gulf Stream – the warm water current running South-to-North up the Eastern Seaboard. The information on warm and cold water eddies off of the Gulf Stream were tasty morsels of information. We want more!

More importantly, however, I think this weekend helped us to better understand just how much more we need to learn!

Education + Preparation = Success

Happily, Mike and I passed our ISAF Certification Tests so we are both eligible for international offshore sailing events now!

Our Concept2 World Rowing Challenge Team, ACR – NYC to Isles of Scilly, has ergged a whopping 856,604 meters so far in the first week of competition. That’s approximately 532 miles. There are only 21 members on our team; so that’s about 40,791 meters per member over the last week. Those are not bad averages. Our goal is to cover the roughly 3000 mile distance from New York City to the Isles of Scilly in just four weeks, however, so that puts us far behind schedule, unfortunately. We should have about 1,206,750 meters behind us by this point (we are 350,146 meters short!). So we only accomplished 70% of our first week’s distance quota.

WRC Challenge - First Week Distance Covered

Day two of the C2 WRC for Team ‘ACR – NYC to Isles of Scilly’ has been fantastic! What a great way to start St. Paddie’s Day! We’ve gone from from 12 members to 16. On the first day, we logged just under 100,000 meters. As of right now, we have logged 218,956 meters!! And I know my partner Mike Altarace is currently slogging out another 20k, so we should finish the day with just under 240k meters in two days. That truly is an amazing accomplishment! I hope we can keep the momentum up!

Our goal is to row the 3000 mile distance between New York City and the Isles of Scilly in just thirty days. In ergometer parlance, that’s 4,827,000 meters! As of today, the 16 of us have gotten us roughly 4.5% of the way to our goal on day two.

My body is really hurting right now. In addition to the pain, I’m trying to train myself to get up at 0430 again for the start of the Spring Rowing Season. We’ll see how I do tomorrow, for my second attempt this week. Thankfully, the season does not start until March 31st!

The Concept2 World Rowing Challenge this March 15th and goes until April 15th. The challenge pits teams against one another in a race to collect as many ergometer meters per team as possible so that the team with the most meters come April 15th, wins! The main prize is a Concept2 rowing machine! If we win it, we will donate it to the T.C. Williams High School rowing program. Today I set up a team and loosely associated it with my rowing club, Alexandria Community Rowing, called ‘ACR – NYC To Isles of Scilly.‘ Our goal is to erg/row 3000 miles on our ergometers, which is roughly the distance from New York City to the Isles of Scilly. This distance is approximately 4,827,000 meters. That’s a lot of meters! We hope to have 12 or more ACR members and friends join the team to reach this distance by April 15th, so if you’re interested follow the instructions here (http://www.concept2.com/us/motivation/challenges/team/teammember.asp) and join our team. The more team members we have, the fewer meters we collectively have to row in order to hit out 4.8 million meter goal.

I’ve just setup the ‘Row The Pond’ online store in order to help raise some funds for this rowing project of ours. Wednesday, March 17th, 2010, is St. Patrick’s Day this year. Before next Wednesday arrives, however, you must get yourself a ‘Row The Pond’ St. Patrick’s Day T-Shirt from our online store. Look cool, impress your Irish friends while drinking a pint of Guinness, and support a worthy cause all in one purchase. Talk about a return on investment!

It’s about time we put the Winter behind us and got on with the Spring already. But before we do, Mike and I had to put in one last ergometer piece to remember the snowpocalypse of 2010 by. On March 7th, 2010, we set up a small shade tent and our Concept2 Ergometer at Gravelly Point Park in Arlington, VA. At 0800, Mike started into his first 10,000 meter piece with a goal of alternating rowers every 10,000 meters until we hit 100,000 meters rowed, all with the aim of supporting our charity, the Prostate Cancer Foundation, and to get some long-distance training time in together as a team, outside. We could not have asked for a more perfect day and nicer people to talk to. And even though the Park Police threatened to throw us out because we did not have a permit, they ultimately let us stay, so many thanks all around!

Oh, our final time for the 100,000 meter piece was 7 hours, 10mins, 40sec, and 6 tenths.

It was a really fun experience, and I look forward to some long distance rows on the water moving forward.

By the way, our next training objective is to attend the March 27-28 ISAF Safety at Sea Seminar at the US Naval Academy. We’re already signed-up and confirmed for the event, so we’ll see you there!

This Sunday, March 7th, 2010, Mike and I are setting up an erg out at Gravelly Point Park in Arlington, just North of the Reagan National Airport, to do a 100,000 meter erg piece for charity. That’s right! We each owe the other 50,000 meters of continuous ergging, but we’ll take turns doing 10,000 meter pieces until we hit 100,000 meters. It’ll be great training for an ocean row, and we’re hoping to raise awareness, as well as some money, for our Charity, the Prostate Cancer Foundation in the process.

So take your bike out on the Mt. Vernon Trail to encourage an early arrival of Spring and stop by and say ‘hey’! I’m sure we’ll be the only two people at the end of the airport runway sitting on an erg Bring your family and friends too!

Please also consider giving some spare change to our charity, the Prostate Cancer Foundation. Make a donation on behalf of Team Northern Atlantic 2011 here: http://tinyurl.com/ydk979z.

The World Record Time for Tandem Heavyweight 40-49 year old men is 5:58:48.9. Two college women captured a World Record for their category last December with a time of 7 hours, 17 minutes and 56 seconds. Here’s a video clip of some news coverage of their success.