Product Description

STUCK IN A corporate job rut and faced with an unraveling marriage at the age of thirty-six, Roz Savage sat down one night and wrote two versions of her own obituary -- the one that she wanted and the one she was heading for. They were very different. She realized that if she carried on as she was, she wasn't going to end up with the life she wanted. So she turned her back on an eleven-year career as a management consultant to reinvent herself as a woman of adventure. She invested her life's savings in an ocean rowboat and became the first solo woman ever to enter the Atlantic Rowing Race.

Her 3,000-mile trial by sea became the challenge of a lifetime. Of the twenty-six crews that set out from La Gomera, six capsized or sank and didn't make it to the finish line in Antigua. There were times when she thought she had hit her absolute limit, but alone in the middle of the ocean, she had no choice but to find the strength to carry on.

In Rowing the Atlantic we are brought on board when Savage's dreams of feasts are nourished by yet another freeze-dried meal. When her gloves wear through to her blistered hands. When her headlamp is the only light on a pitch-black night ocean that extends indefinitely in all directions. When, one by one, all four of her oars break. When her satellite communication fails.

Stroke by stroke, Savage discovers there is so much more to life than a fancy sports car and a power-suit job. Flashing back to key moments from her life before rowing, she describes the bolt from the blue that first inspired her to row across oceans and how this crazy idea evolved from a dream into a tendinitis-inducing reality. And finally, Savage discovers in the rough waters of the Atlantic the kind of happiness we all hope to find.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #117323 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781416583288
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"Bold and invigorating....The author's courageous success story is a testament to self-sufficiency." -- Kirkus Reviews

Review
"The Vikings didn't even row an ocean solo, but Roz Savage did all three thousand miles in just over one hundred days. Rowing the Atlantic is a grand adventure -- mind boggling, inspiring, and a book that I just couldn't put down. A fantastic read!" -- Lynne Cox, author of Grayson and Swimming to Antarctica

"Bold and invigorating....The author's courageous success story is a testament to self-sufficiency." -- Kirkus Reviews

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
four

WHAT WAS I THINKING?

day two of the Atlantic Rowing Race dawned clear and sunny. I was woken by a beam of sunlight shafting across my eyelids like a searchlight as the boat rocked on the waves. Eventually I had become too exhausted to worry any more and managed to get a couple of hours of sleep during my last rest shift. I took a physical inventory of my body. I was relieved to find that my seasickness had abated slightly, but I had woken up with a worrying ache in my ribs. When I'd been struggling with the watermaker the day before I'd leaned across my knee to reach something and had felt a sudden pain in the side of my ribcage, so I'd probably pulled a muscle. This was a cause for concern -- there would be no recovery time. I had to get back to the oars. But the brightness of the day helped to banish the demons that had haunted the night, and overall I was starting to feel more positive.

My appetite never disappears for long -- more's the pity. I hadn't eaten much the day before and I was hungry so I set about making a breakfast of tea and porridge. Although I had practiced the procedure a number of times on dry land, the prospect of using the camping stove apparatus on the open sea made me anxious. Highly flammable liquid fuel combined with an erratically tipping rowboat seemed a potential recipe for disaster.

I reached into my cabin, undid a couple of latches, and lifted out a section of the floor. Fixed to the underside of this panel was a nine-inch-high stainless-steel cylinder that would act as a windbreak. A camping stove was mounted to the board inside it. A flexible tube led from the camping stove to a pressurized fuel bottle, which was also fixed to the panel. To use the stove I inverted the whole assembly so that the panel formed a base with the cylinder on top, and secured the panel outside in the cockpit using a couple of swivel latches. Peering in through a viewing hole in the side of the metal cylinder, I pumped the plunger into the fuel bottle to create the necessary pressure, turned the valve to allow a teaspoonful of fuel to dribble into the top of the burner, and lit it with a barbecue lighter. Big yellow flames immediately erupted from the stove. This was exactly as it was supposed to work but the flickering flames leaped alarmingly from the top of the protective metal cylinder and I quickly pulled my long hair back out of the way to prevent it from catching fire. When the yellow flames subsided I turned the valve to change the flame from flickering yellow to high-pressure blue so I could start cooking.

I turned the valve too far and the flame went out, starved of fuel.

"Bugger." I swore out loud.

This was not supposed to happen, but even in practice on dry land it had done so with annoying regularity. Now I would have to wait for the apparatus to cool down before I could try again. If I tried it too soon, the residual heat would cause the fuel to evaporate before I had time to light it.

At the second attempt I got the stove fired up and put the kettle on to boil. In just a few minutes it was steaming away and I used an oven cloth to lift it and poured the boiling water into a wide-mouth thermos, over the instant porridge I had already put in there. I gave the mixture a good stir and then put the lid on to allow the porridge to "cook." It was supposed to be cooked over heat while stirring, but a sticky porridge pan was too much trouble to wash up, and I'd found through experimentation that the porridge would absorb the water quite adequately if I left it to sit in the thermos for a while. I put the remainder of the hot water into a larger thermos to be used later for hot drinks and to rehydrate my dinner. After waiting ten minutes I opened up the thermos of porridge and added dried fruit and ground cinnamon and ginger, stirring them into the gooey porridge mixture.

"Mmmm. Yummy." I sat on the deck by the hatch to the aft sleeping cabin, my feet in the footwell, and spooned the hot food into my mouth, relishing the comforting sensation as it warmed my core and restored my blood sugar levels. I immediately started to feel better. I congratulated myself on managing to prepare breakfast without setting fire to either the boat or myself, and decided that maybe the ocean wasn't such a bad place after all. Maybe I could even begin to feel at home here. I needed to start focusing on the positive aspects of my experience, rather than the negative. This one small victory helped restore my sense of self-belief, which had taken such a knocking the night before. As I ate I looked out across the waves, sparkling in the morning sunlight. I wondered where the other crews were, and how they had fared during their first night at sea.

I looked over at the Argos locator beacon, blinking its red light in the corner of the cockpit behind my rowing position. It was sending a message from my boat that would bounce off a network of satellites orbiting the earth to a central control center in France. Each of the boats in the race had been equipped with one of these, so the race organizers and anybody checking the race website would be able to see the latitude and longitude of every crew. I knew that Mum would be anxiously watching the little purple blob that represented Sedna and me, as we edged our way slowly across the online map of the Atlantic. It made me feel irrationally safer to know that she was watching over me. I made believe that the red blinking light of the Argos was beaming a slender umbilical cord through the ether, from me to my mother, and found the thought reassuring.

I scraped the last of the porridge out of the thermos, savoring every last dollop, washed up using a little hot water from the large thermos, and returned the camping stove to its stowed position inside the cabin. I was just about to start my day's rowing when I spotted a white sail wending its way across the waves toward me. As the sail came closer I could see it was attached to a vessel -- the support yacht Aurora.

I had not seen the yacht, nor indeed any of the rowboats, since they had disappeared into the distance while I was struggling with the watermaker. During my preparations for the row some people had seemed disappointed to hear that I would be a competitor in a race, rather than going totally solo. They seemed to imagine that I would be in a little flotilla of boats rowing together across the Atlantic, chatting and laughing and comparing notes at the end of each day. There was also a misconception that the support yachts would be constantly on hand to provide tea, sympathy, and homecooked food. The truth was that I would be very unlikely to see any of the other competitors, and the support yachts would be there for me only if I chose to contact them, and even then they could be up to a week away. But I did not plan to make contact, for I was afraid that if I started an ongoing dialogue with them I would fail in one of the key tasks I had set myself: to assert my independence and self-sufficiency, and to find out what I could do when cast entirely on my own means.

I had spent most of my life relying on other people for support -- my parents, teachers, boyfriends, and my husband -- and now I wanted to find out if I was strong enough and resourceful enough to survive alone. I was tired of having to rely on other people, for a few disappointments had taught me that I could truly rely on nobody but myself. Within the last couple of years I had some grand schemes that had depended on other people to provide something -- the financing for a coffee shop, a boat for a trip around the world, the premises for a baking business -- and in every case the plans had fallen apart. It had been nobody's fault, but circumstances change, as do people's priorities, and each of these promises of support had failed to materialize. More recently, the drive to raise corporate sponsorship for my row had been one letdown after another -- promises implied, only to be told, "Sorry, we've had budget cuts," or "There's been a change of strategy." As for men, in no other area of my life was it more true that hope had given way to disappointment. In my headlong, headstrong way I had tended to throw myself wholeheartedly into relationships, with giddy expectations unfounded in reality, only to suffer disillusionment and pain when the honeymoon period ended and the violins of romance trailed off into discord and then embarrassed silence.

My lifelong tendency to rely on others meant that my repertoire of practical skills was sadly limited, and although I suspected that I was capable of more than I imagined, in ordinary life the temptation to take the easy option and ask for help was too much for me to resist. The only way that I could resist the temptation was to remove myself from it -- so one of the reasons that rowing the Atlantic had appealed was that it would be the perfect way to effectively cut myself off from any hope of assistance. I would be forced to fend for myself. A blunt-speaking Australian oar maker had summed it up when we had been talking at Henley Regatta the summer before. "You women," he'd said. "I know what you're like. You flutter your eyelashes and you get someone else to do the dirty work for you. You're going to have to stop fluttering the eyelashes and start doing things for yourself if you're going to survive out there on the ocean."

So this was my goal: if I could get myself from the Canaries to Antigua, alone and unsupported, I would have passed my selfimposed test of self-sufficiency. This meant that I felt very protective about my solitude, and did not welcome intrusions. The less contact I had with the outside world, the better -- I did not want to be tempted into relying on anyone else for support. For better or worse, right or wrong, this was my adventure and I would do it my way.

The sleek white craft pulled alongside and the skipper, Lin arker, called me on the VHF radio to ask how I was doing. The truth was that after my hearty breakfast I was once again feeling nauseous from the motion of the boat, and the discomfort in ...

Customer Reviews

Okay adventure, but not overly exciting.
As this book is presented as an "adventure" book, that is the way I will judge it.

Anyone who has the courage to row across the Atlantic Ocean, the physical ability to carry it off, and the intelligence to plan the trip in such a manner that they are actually able to complete the trip has my admiration in their feat.

Many people have died in this attempt. In fact, during the particular race the author writes about, nearly a fourth of the competing boats sank and those rowers needed rescued. Fortunately, fatalities were prevented because of both luck and the support provided by the race organizers. This is an extreme "sport" that few would attempt and even fewer are able to accomplish. True, the author had several years of rowing experience, but nothing that really prepared her for the tremendous physical and emotional distances she had to deal with in rowing the Atlantic.

This is an engaging, well-written book (up to a point). However, as an adventure book, it does have its faults. For one, rowing the Atlantic Ocean alone has been done many times before, both by men and by women, so it has lost its "firstness" factor. For example, nearly everyone remembers who was the first to fly the Atlantic alone, but few would remember the second or the third or the sixth to do so. Most people would even remember the words spoken by the first man to set foot on the moon, but does anyone remember what the second man said? In "Rowing the Atlantic", there is simply no suspense in whether rowing across the Atlantic Ocean alone can be done. We know it can be done; it has been done. We just don't know whether or not author will be able to do it.

Secondly, the trip isn't terribly eventful. Yes, the author's cook stove quits working so she has only cold food, she has problems with her oars, but she is never left without working oars, and she loses her telephone service near the end of the trip. Also, the weather was bad at times and she is physically drained, but there is nothing here that really made this particular trip any more adventuresome than many others that have gone on before--or that have been written about before. Obviously, these troublesome situations are much more eventful to the person on the boat; but to the reader, unless they are new to adventure books, this is not really a suspenseful trip. In fact, I thought the part of the book that dealt with the author quitting her job, training for the trip and getting her boat ready was the bigger adventure of the book.

Also, while I salute the author for changing her life and "finding herself," I found it ridiculous that she blames her infidelity to her husband (and later her divorce) to her desire to find out who she really was. Imagine a man saying, "Yes, I cheated on my wife because I was trying to find myself." By the way, the author made a point of bringing this up in the book; I am just stating my opinion on it. So when the author speaks of an "unraveling marriage," it certainly appears that a great deal of the unraveling was of her own undoing. Also, at the end of the book when her now ex-husband shows up to support her, she claims that she still loves him but she has moved on. Imagine, again, a man saying this about his wife, "I love her, but I have moved on." The author should realize that how you treat people on your quest to find yourself is just as important, if not more so, than actually finding out whom "you really are" (whatever that means).

In the end, I would rate the first half of this book as a four. It is well-written, it moves along quickly, it was interesting to learn what lead the author to change her life around, and it was engaging to see whether she was going to be able to carry off her adventure. But by about half-way through, I felt the book to be losing its momentum, because the adventure seemed to be over and all that was left was to reach land. while this is a reasonably decent book, it is not anywhere near the adventure that books such as "The Long Walk", "Adrift", "Carrying the Fire", "Endurance", "Travels in West Africa", "Alone", "Alive", "Man Eaters", "Running the Amazon" or similar books rate. It is these books that rate as four or five star books to me, so I can not rate "Rowing the Atlantic" as a five star book.

Overall all then, I give the book a three star rating because it is just an average adventure book. It is a well-written book and it is enjoyable to read, but it is just average. Anyone who quits their job and rows a boat across the Atlantic Ocean deserves a five star rating for having the spunk to attempt the feat, but that doesn't make the book a great book. What I am saying with my comparisons to other adventure books is that while this is an entertaining book to read, it will never make the list of the top 50 adventure books of all time. And since it is advertised as an adventure book, that is the way I am going to rate it.

A winner by any standard
This is the story of a young woman who realised that being ordinary just wasn't enough and set out to discover who she really was.

She did this by entering the Atlantic Rowing Race in 2005; rowing a 23' boat 3,000 miles alone across the Atlantic Ocean. She had no experience and her expectations were based entirely on optimism and the determination to at last do something entirely on her own.

Roz Savage switches smoothly between the story of her voyage and the events in her life that led to it, and the two lines intersect perfectly. She describes her thoughts and fears as she deals with a series of disasters, all overcome by ingenuity or sheer persistence or by ignoring them. She includes some very personal revelations and her self-deprecating style is quite moving. I had to pause every so often just to absorb what I had just read.

Roz demonstrates by often painful examples that getting outside one's comfort-zone is extremely uncomfortable. She reveals her innermost thoughts and weaknesses, but leaves us to observe her strengths.

It is very well written and both exciting and intimate, so I could almost hear Roz's voice narrating as I read.

Unusually for me, I read the book straight through at one sitting. Rowing the Atlantic is entertaining and inspirational at many levels and I cannot recommend it too highly as a good read for anyone of any age or background. It's a keeper--a book to re-read every year or so and ideal as a gift for `teens and adults alike.

My wife and I have had the good fortune to meet Roz Savage and were very impressed by her, but until reading this book we had not realised just how special she is.

Clearly by not seeking to rely on friends, Roz has made many of them.

"We hug."
It wasn't until I read the simple paragraph above at the end of chapter 21 describing the embrace shared between you and your wonderful mum at the end of the race that I could breathe normally again. Even though I knew the ending, my heart was in my throat for the duration of the incredible journey you took me on. Along the way I had many doubts that "we" would ever make it. I say "we" because your book has that rare capacity to put the reader right in the cramped boat with you, almost experiencing your despair, hopelessness, sense of danger, exultation, the discomfort: aching shoulders, blisters on hands, boil on your poor bum, even the sting of the salty spray of the of the wind on your face. You lay bare your heart (among other body parts) and your honesty comes through every sentence. Thank goodness you gave your readers the luxury of that lovely massage at the end. We needed that!

Your former life on your commute and at the office: "flourescent-lit, gray blandness of it all depressed my spirit, but I wanted the money and prestige, so I pushed my doubt aside and got on with it. Everyone else seemed to find it quite normal, (me: lol) and I hoped eventually I would too." Luckily for us you never did find that life normal so you were able to take us on a grand adventure, that definitely would not have been as much fun if we had to stay in the office with you.

It was amazing to watch you evolve from being so materialistic (how many people know this about themselves, much less admit it?) and then to express so beautifully your new philosophy of life of which I have no room here to comment on, other than to say you could write a whole separate book on just that, and I would proudly display it on my (read often) bookshelf alongside Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and Tolle's "A New Earth." (Also any books by Patrick McDonnell creator of "Mutts" comic strip).

Btw, when I finished reading "Rowing the Atlantic" late last night, I then read a bit of Teddy Kennedy's "True Compass". A wonderful book as well, but in the bit I read, he was sailing in his luxury yacht... just wasn't the same.

Roz Savage is dedicated to wonderful causes: to bring awareness to Climate Change, plastics in our oceans, etc. Can one 5'4" beautiful English woman make a difference in how we treat our beautiful planet? Well, for me, as I sit writing this review at my favorite Starbucks armed with a journal (a la Roz), I made sure to order my coffee in a "for here" cup so it wouldn't end up in a landfill.

I plan to tweet Oprah about Roz and encourage others to do so if you enjoy this book: it would not only make a fabulous selection for her book club, but with the Oprah sticker on the front of the book, just imagine how fast the Roz message might get spread to the far corners of our oceans and earth. It can't be fast enough!