Taming the beast

Day one in the boat was hard work but there were signs of progress, whether its enough with two days to go is another matter. The fact is that these boats don't exist in the UK, so even though we have trained pretty well, it was back to square one when we got in the boat. Balance is a tricky thing, we basically eskimo rolled our way down the first mile and then got it sorted after that. A few bad rolls later on cost further time, particularly when Dauman lost his paddle - in all 16 miles took 4 hours, a pace that will likely lead to disqualification at one of day 1's checkpoints. We are still positive though, lots of basic mistakes were made and there were significant improvements later on.