Annals of Adventure III–(sorry, I’ve run out of water noises): The French are everywhere! On Thursday rower Maud Fontenoy, 26, dipped her oars for the final strokes of a gruelling transatlantic rowing voyage that took her from the Canadian coast to La Coruna, Spain in a mere….117 days! That’s a ridiculously long time to be on the Atlantic in a scaled up 25-foot rowboat, and in fact it was about 6 weeks longer than Fontenoy originally intended. Contrary winds kept her at sea, presumably wishing she had just gone to the Riviera for the summer. But Fontenoy has guts. She kept plugging away, and then spent the last two days of her voyage without sleep, dodging container ships off the Spanish coast and wrestling with dangerous currents. Fontenoy is not the first woman to row solo across the Atlantic but she is the first to do it from west to east. It’s not an easy row. To date there have been 22 attempts, of which seven succeeded, 12 failed, and three ended in death. Maud’s personal web site is a disaster, but you can find out more about her voyage, as well as lots of interesting stuff about ocean rowing (like the fact that the longest rowing voyage–across the Pacific–took 361 days!), at the Ocean Rowing Society.

Transatlantic Triumph of the Will: “I’d shake your hand, but my blisters are too big…..”

(Photo: Ocean Rowing Society)