Lots of Orestone, Lots of Challenge

It was a while back, and Les Norcliffe was having a fidget.  His beloved Chiefs were powering from triumph to triumph, his stewardship of social rowing at ERC was producing a fine crop of flapjacks and sundry other nibbles, but it simply wasn’t enough. On the western horizon, visible on most days if you knew where to look, was a little knob of rock called the Orestone. Crews competing in the Torquay regattas knew it intimately but that wasn’t the point. Les fired up a map and did the measurements. There and back from Exmouth beach?  Nearly twenty two miles.

‘I was after putting another event on the club calendar. It was there in the distance. In 2013 and 2014 we rowed it on strictly a club basis, an extended outing if you like, and it was obvious that it worked in all kinds of ways.  Rowing for four hours, you really get to know people, to depend on each other, and once that’s happened it doesn’t go away. You’re breaking new water. You bond. And that’s what a club like ours should be about.’

The following year, 2015, Les dreamed up a name, The Orestone Challenge, extended the course by four miles to turn it into a full-blooded marowthon, and then threw the race open to competing clubs.  Three turned up on 16^th May, joining two Exmouth crews, male and female.  The visiting clubs were Plymouth Mayflower Mixed, Plymouth Fire and Rescue Mixed, and Devil’s Elbow Ladies.

The latter duo called for volunteer coxes and Les put two veteran names in the hat: Peter Todd (aka ‘Toddy’) and yours truly.  Pete Bradshaw had already volunteered to cox Exmouth Men. Between us, we three had all been to the Orestone and back at least once, knew the water, and – more importantly – understood Les’s stipulations about the course: out through the buoyed channel, no turning right until the Fairway buoy, anti-clockwise around the Thatcher Rock, then the Orestone, and finally a straight line back to the Fairway Buoy. Twenty six point whatever miles? Easy.

Or so we thought. Conditions on the day weren’t promising: a strengthening westerly wind and the taste of rain in the air. From the beach, thanks to the breakwater that is Pole Sands, the water looked OK but all three of us knew that another world – wetter, bumpier and altogether less forgiving – lay beyond the Fairway Buoy.

The dynamic in any boat relies on five individuals staying on speaking terms and it certainly helps to know your crew. In this respect, Pete Bradshaw was the lucky one. ‘I was rowing with guys I knew, all of them from the club.  Charlie Angell was in the stroke seat.  He’s a fit boy, strong as you like, and you could have put a metronome on him from the moment we got going. Once he’d set the beat, it never wavered.’ 

Toddy, on the other hand, was looking at four unfamilar faces, all of them from the Devil’s Elbow club in Long Eaton, up in the East Midlands.   ‘All four of them had driven down in Jools’ Mini, and they were keen to get stuck in. A row this long and this demanding was a bit of a novelty, I’m not sure any of them thought they’d win but the whole point about Les’s Orestone was getting to finish it.  Twenty six and a bit miles there and back?  In a proper sea? That’s the real challenge.’

For yours truly, however, it was a very different story.  One look at the Plymouth Fire and Rescue crew as I ambled down the beach told me they were there to win. A gruff nod. A bonecrushing handshake or two. A muttered exchange of names. Then into the boat and away.

The race got off to an untidy start, and we found ourselves – from memory – in third place amongst a scatter of boats.  Plymouth F&R don’t do third place, not even with twenty six miles to go, and the pressure to squeeze the life out of the crews ahead fired up within seconds.

Lead Alpha male in the boat was Steve in the three seat. The two guys behind him were used to being beasted, while Ellie – in the stroke seat – had also learned not to answer back. She was younger than the rest of us and was rowing fine boats at university. She had a rower’s build – tall, rangy, obviously fit. The sweetness of her rhythm eased the boat through the water and by the time we’d overhauled the two crews ahead, things were looking brighter.

Then Steve spotted the crews behind hooking a right and leaving the channel way before the agreed turn at the Fairway Buoy.

‘Look, cox,’ he was outraged. ‘Bloody get after them.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

`We’ll get disqualified.’

‘Disqualified? Rubbish. Just do it.’

‘No.’

This, I realised in seconds, wasn’t the answer he wanted and this minor difference of opinion set the tone for much of what followed but by now I’d seen enough of these guys’ attitude and potential to know that I was sharing a boat not with a crew but with a force of nature. Absolutely nothing with arms and legs was going to get between them and that first anti-clockwise turn around the Thatcher Rock, and then onwards to the fabled Orestone.

And so the modest fleet began to thin out, shepherded by three safety boats.  In one of them were local dentist and long-distance swimmer Hedley Saunders, plus Ted Draper from the Exe Sailing club, and with the Thatcher Rock growing ever-larger in the distance, they realised that the Devil’s Elbow girls had stopped. Toddy takes up the story.

‘Jools was in the stroke seat and was having bra problems. I think one of the straps was starting to rub. It could only get worse so she decided to take the thing off. Ted and Hedley were there in a flash, of course, only too happy to lend a hand, but Jooles waved them away. I volunteered to look after the rogue bra, and off we went again.’

An hour into the race, and Plymouth Fire and & Rescue were comfortably out ahead. Comfortably is an abuse of language. It was wet, cold, lumpy, and altogether horrible but under Steve’s lash we were responding to every move from Exmouth Men behind us and maintaining what I suspected was Plymouth’s usual lead. By now, I’d got to know Ellie well enough to realise that she depended on a constant supply of chocolate.

She’d given me the Galaxy Bars before we started and now she needed refuelling. This was problematic. We were in a Rushworth, and the conditions demanded constant baling with the hand-pump if we weren’t to sink.  My other hand I reserved for the tiller which meant brief pump-pauses to strip more wrapping from the Galaxy Bar before feeding Ellie. Try doing that with one hand.  Not easy. Try that special Orestone Contortion, left hand holding the Galaxy Bar, right hand steering while also dealing with bits of wet plastic wrap, and the consequences can be untidy.

‘Why are we going round in circles, cox?’

‘Don’t ask.’

‘Just sort it out, yeah?’

By now, the Thatcher Rock was looming. It’s the landward of the two formations and I was doing my best to cast it in the role of our saviour trophy, that glorious hard-earned moment when the tiller goes on after ten plus miles trailing a generally straight line and we turn onto a new course, but Plymouth Fire and Rescue were daunted by absolutely nothing, least of all a full marathon.  Last week, because the weather was impossible, a couple of these guys had to make do with twenty six miles on an Ergo, probably in their bedrooms.  Enough said.

Exmouth Men were second around the Thatcher Rock.  By now, following Charlie’s masterful stroke, they’d established a comfortable rhythm in rising seas and conversation was drifting towards the long homeward leg to come. ‘Our blokes knew this water only too well,’ says Pete Bradshaw. ‘They knew what it can take out of you, and they understood the mindset you need to survive.  I had absolutely no doubts they were there to give the Plymouth guys a run for their money.’

Psychologists will probably tell you that leaving the Rock and heading home is a bit of a mixed blessing.  On the one hand you’ve nailed the bloody thing and left it behind you to get progressively smaller. On the other, one snatched over-the-shoulder glance at the low grey blur on the horizon tells you that all the cox’s bright chatter about ‘downhill’ and ‘not long now’ is nonsense.  Thirteen miles is thirteen miles. And conditions were getting worse.

It was at this moment that Ellie started to cry.  The blisters on her hands had burst and her blade handles were slippery with blood. Worse still, she was running out of Galaxy Bars. All she could look forward to was another two hours of constant pummelling from the wind and the waves with no prospect of the pain and the hunger and the near-despair ever letting up. Steve, as it turned out, had no time for any of this.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘My hands hurt.’

‘Of course they bloody hurt.  That’s why we’re here. Man up, for God’s sake. Just get on with it.’

By now, I’d begun to suspect that these two were closer than I’d thought. In my little world, four and a half hours in company is a long time without the distractions of a chat. Chatting, of course, is wasted energy in circumstances like these but rowing for us oldies has always been a conversation afloat, and all the better for it, and after a while I asked Ellie how long she and Steve had been rowing together.

‘Forever,’ she said numbly. ‘He got me into it in the first place.’

‘How come?’

‘He’s my dad.’

It was at this point that Jules, stroking the Devil’s Elbow crew, collapsed.  ‘She just slumped backwards,’ says Toddy. ‘We’d rounded the Thatcher, and then the Orestone, and we were heading back, way out in the middle of nowhere. The other crews were some distance ahead, and to be honest we all felt just a tiny bit alone. Jools began to come round. She was obviously exhausted, but she was cold as well, and for a moment I thought about giving her the suit, and putting her in the cox’s seat, but she thought more rowing would probably get her warmer quicker, so we settled for that.  So I gave her a bit of a cuddle and a hug and then set a new course to take us inshore out of the wind.  I remember that coastline around Teignmouth crawling past, stroke by stroke. Getting home seemed to take forever.’

By now, Plymouth Fire and Rescue were a couple of miles abeam of the Orcombe Rock, still in the lead, and beginning to close on the buoyed channel off Exmouth.  Ellie had said a prayer or two and seemed to have perked up a little, while the guy in bow was showing signs of hyperthermia. Even firemen, I’d discovered, can get knackered and there was definitely an unvoiced feeling that we should put this bloody race to bed. Hence the dialogue that followed.

‘What’s that, cox?’  Steve has spotted the distant river entrance way off to his right.

‘That’s Exmouth.’

‘So why aren’t we going for it?’

‘Because we have to go in through the Channel.’

‘Channel?  Line of sight, son. Just do it.’

‘No.

‘Why not?’

‘Because Les will make us go round again. You really want that, guys?’

This, of course, mirrored our brief conversation when we left, and my question went unanswered, even by Steve. But by now, I’d realised just how hard it is to find the Fairway Buoy in any kind of dodgy weather and the thought of over or under-running it had begun to haunt me.  Then came one of those blinding flashes of inspiration.  Ahead, wallowing in the shortening seas, was a yacht. It had to be heading for the Fairway Buoy.  I toyed with putting this possibility to Steve but decided against it.  The moment he suspected I was lost, he’d either tear me limb from limb and eat me alive or chuck me overboard.  Better to do an Ellie, and hope that God was on our side.

And so we went on, colder and colder, more and more knackered, four exhausted bodies trying to take the punch out of wave after wave while little me hunched ankle-deep in a soup of abandoned Galaxy Bar wrappings and sundry ropes, trying to still my racing brain.  What if the yacht ahead wasn’t heading for Exmouth at all?  What if I led the entire fleet to Budleigh? Or Sidmouth? Were there enough lifeboats and helicoptors in the entire world to cope with the consequences?

Thankfully, the yacht found the Fairway Buoy, a tribute to his on-board radar, and yours truly took a slightly sadistic pleasure in beasting my new friends down the final kilometre to take line honours in a time of four hours, thirty four minutes. The Plymouth guys were, in a word, magnificent.  Space blankets, hot drinks and pasties were waiting for us on the beach, but even now, after twenty six merciless miles, they shrugged off offers of help to hoist the boat onto the trailer and drag it up the beach.  Never bend the knee to the wind, to the weather, or to simple exhaustion. Never admit a single moment of weakness. A comprehensive win is all that matters.

Centuries of unforgiving war in the Balkans have bred a wry phrase that, until now, I’d yet to properly understand: to the victor, the bones.  Very nearly true but not quite. Because winning is what Plymouth Fire and Rescue deserved and winning never happens by accident. Line honours also, I suspect, gave them great satisfaction.

There’s an even happier postscript to this saga, in the shape of what happened to Jooles, from Devil’s Elbow, in the wake of the Orestone Challenge.  ‘I don’t know whether there’s a connection,’ says Toddy, ‘but that outing seemed to be a real milestone in her rowing career. They all drove home in her little Mini that night, probably with the heater on full blast, and I kept up with her Facebook page over the months to come.  She started winning race after race in boat after boat, singles, doubles, the lot, loads of fabulous photos, and then she laid plans to enter the Tallisker Trans-Atlantic Challenge, from La Gomera to the Caribbean.  I’m not sure what Antigua can offer that Exmouth can’t, but I suspect Les has a lot to answer for….’