Spring Edition 2019

PROFILE
“If there’s one message
I’d like to pass on it’s
that you don’t need to
be an adventurous child
to be a confident and
adventurous adult”
place, and have a lot of fun and adventure”.
To this end she quit her job in 2003 and
spent three months travelling around Peru.
Seeing receding glaciers at first hand brought
an environmental epiphany. Desperate to raise
awareness of climate change Roz’s ideas “bumped
into each other” when she became friends with, “A
guy who had rowed across the Atlantic with his
mother, and I realised you didn’t need a big bushy
beard to have an adventure”. Roz decided rowing
solo across oceans would give her the experiences
she needed to raise environmental awareness
through blogs, talks and further books.
Roz’s first solo, self-powered ocean voyage
took over a year of planning. New to adventure,
she managed her fear by “planning the heck out
of it”. Excel spreadsheets tracked everything she
ate and drank, her exercise and heart rate. Was it
time well spent? “Probably not, in practical terms,
but I wanted to do everything as professionally as
humanly possible, to build the belief that I could
actually do this. But I don’t think anything can
prepare you for spending months alone at sea”.
Roz had to be self-reliant for each of her three
ocean crossings. Food was planned in terms of
calories per cubic cm with freeze-dried meals, nuts,
and beansprout seeds to grow. “After crossing the
Atlantic I ended up addicted to sugar. It’s fine to
eat sugary snacks when you need 5,000 calories
a day, but after losing two stone
while at sea I put it all back on,
and then some, on dry land!”
Her Atlantic music playlist also
went awry. Electronics were
solar powered and there wasn’t
enough sunshine during the
first month for anything but
essentials – water purification
and GPS satellite. After a month
of silence there were two sunny days of music and
then the stereo abruptly stopped: it had rusted
in the hostile sea salt environment. But this was
nothing compared to what else nature threw at her.
“It was brutal. 2005-2006 was the roughest year
ever for storms, which included Hurricane Katrina.
Never mind getting into the smooth, meditative
rhythm I’d imagined. I was terrified. It took weeks
to believe the boat wasn’t going to break up.”
The physical environment was testing, and
the mental landscape even worse: “I suffered ››
Machu Picchu, Peru 2003
RECORDBREAKER
Roz currently holds the following four world records:
1
2
3
4
Longest ocean row by a female solo
154 days, finished Oct 2011
First female to row the Pacific ocean solo
Finished June 2010
Most days at sea by a female ocean rower
510 days by Oct 2011
First female to row three different oceans
2005-06 Atlantic, 2008-2010 Pacific, 2011 Indian
SPRI NG 19 ★ schoolnotices.co.uk 19