Day 1 on Lady Susan

If you’ve looked at our tracker recently you will have noticed we’ve not moved for a few days. We’re in a fishing village called Torvag, waiting for a storm to pass. We ummd and arrred whether to go out but decided that a storm would not be the best introduction to open sea rowing. Whether we made the right choice we’ll never know but we’ve certainly questioned it over the last few days. The plus side is we’ve had time to put together some of the footage from our first 36 hours on the boat, the time it took to get from Tromsø to Torvag.

You may have seen the rather professional footage of our departure from Tromsø on our social media pages. We couldn’t get permission for the drone to go passed the bridge which I thought was a shame because the bird’s eye view of us going under could have been a great shot. As it turned out we were quite happy the drone retreated back to land because as we approached the central arch of the bridge, a current began to push us towards one of the pillars. Before we knew it we were wrapped around the bridge with a current preventing us from being able to row off. We’d literally hit the first obstacle we had encountered. It took us a good five minutes to peal ourselves off the bridge. We were suddenly very grateful that the local TV station had failed to make an appearance and sadly we don’t have any footage of the fiasco for your entertainment. However, if I may, I would like to commend the A2A team for their responsiveness, presence of mind, and creativity in levering the poor Lady Susan off the bridge. Fortunately we were against rotting wooden cladding so the only damage was to a couple of slightly bruised egos. The first and surely not the last of stressful situations upon our boat.

Here’s some footage from Day 1