The Celtic Challange

the worlds longest true rowing race  

After hard training over the winter months ,including night rowing ; force 8’s off St. Annes Head and trying times attempting to get served in the Griffin at Dale ; an intrepid group of six rowers from Llangwm joined with Dale Rowers on their first Irish Sea Race .

From the start the pace was hard . All night in the Stena bar, as Aberaeron rowers slept with their oars and the Aberystwyth crews suffered from a complete alcohol ban imposed by their coach , our team partied .

We arrived in Arklow at race start to discover a small town composed of Guinness and parties . Some kindly soul had us booked into a hotel with two bands followed by a disco .So, we partied some more .Some all night long .

The race started next day with the   boats shooting out of Arklow as if on a 2mile sprint and we were wondering what we had let ourselves in for.The pace was hot . The first section of eight boats[for mixed and the single all girl crew] was led by an Aberdyfi all men crew including a Ward Evans Atlantic Challenge rower,who were soon only a blip on the horizon to us We knew however that they would have slower crews on change over and as complete novices had no expectations in any event .

Early in the evening we suffered a major calamity as the weight of the heavily vibrating light mast. fixed to the rudder caused its failure, our cox at the time Sam Evans had to lean backwards out from the boat in order to stabilise its effect on the boat, and steering with the rudder became impossible.

At next crew change the Safety boat crew lashed the offending article rigidly and from then steering was purely by rower pressure, no one wanting to ease off of course as by now we had Aberdyfi in our sights and much to our surprise seemed to be reeling them in.

During the early hours of the morning it became apparent that due to the unexpectedly calm weather we were on a record run. more to the point we were now clearly gaining on the lead Aberdyfi boat and this news spreading rapidly between our two support boats gave us all a tremendous lift and all our weariness left us.

We passed into lead position as the first rays of an idyllic dawn began to light the night, and from then on were unstoppable .[The Aberdyfi rowers later confessed that they were so demoralised by our speed that they were also overtaken by their second boat to come an eventual third ]. With the lights of Aberystwyth appearing we shortened our last two crew changes to 40 minutes from 1 hour and entered Aberystwyth   full throttle at about 5am in the morning to a crowd of cheering disbelievers who were all convinced we were the hot favourites Aberdyfi !

Eventually of course we did manage to persuade the drunken mob otherwise [the bar had been open all night !] and claimed our trophy and champagne. for 30 minutes we were undisputed world record holders, but two mens crews from the second section, came in to take our title by gaining 25 seconds per mile on us over the 80 mile run ! Actually the Arklow [1 st .] and Aberystwyth rowers had had a hard face to face battle over the entire race and had been crew changing every 30 minutes over the last 20 miles .

As the first Mixed crew home the Danglewms won the prestigious Dolphin Trophy ;and as best all novice crew took the Pen Dinas Trophy also .

We had a wonderful weather window but we had trained well, constant training without a cox had meant that the rudder loss was not as significant as it might have been for other boats.

We had perfect navigators in the Dale Y.C.Commodore, and John Renolds our RIB drivers were second to none and most of all ,we all bonded well With no pre-conceptions we went out to enjoy ourselves and have fun ; and it worked for us .

The   Llangwm Rowers ;      Samantha Evans ; Helen Stewart ; Bob Charles ;Chris Kersey ; Paul Brant ; Crispin Cutting    ; aided by Ben Cutting on the RIB. Time 15 hr17m