Roz Savage Rows Across Pacific
June 2009

Roz Savage rowing across the Pacific Ocean.

Roz Savage is en route to becoming the first woman to row solo across the Pacific Ocean. She left Hawaii on May 25th and has rowed 400 km towards the tiny island of Tuvalu, still some 3,700 km away. This is the second leg of her three-part, 13,000 km journey that began in the USA and will end in Australia.

Last year, also on May 25th, Roz rowed away from San Francisco. In 100 days she travelled 4,811 km and reached Honolulu, making her the first woman to row from California to Hawaii solo. And next year she plans to complete the final leg from Tuvalu to Australia.

Roz has not always been this adventurous. The daughter of Methodist ministers, she studied law at Oxford University and spent over a decade working as a management consultant. Then one day she wrote two potential versions of her obituary and decided that she wasn’t on track for the one she wanted.

Her induction to ocean rowing came the same year as ours, 2005, when she rowed solo from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean. We followed her journey (after completing our own) and marvelled her perseverance in spite of countless challenges (all her oars broke, as did her camping stove, stereo, cockpit navigation instruments and satellite phone). They were bone-weary days and psychologically exhausting, but there was a compelling side to the experience Roz wished to repeat.

Not only has she become an accomplished ocean rower, but Roz is a champion for protecting our oceans and an ambassador for BLUE, an active community contributing to a healthy planet.  Roz has also launched an eco-challenge called Pull Together that promotes walking and cycling over driving, and encourages people to pledge to walk 10,000 steps a day – the same number of oar strokes she takes.

Roz’s blog post from today (she blogs every day and tweets four times daily) is a comical one. During the night two boobies paid her a visit and stayed for a sleepover. In the morning she found them “perched on the fore cabin and looking at me guiltily, like two naughty teenagers caught smoking behind the bike sheds”. They had used her boat as a latrine and “had made a hell of a mess”.

“Why, with a whole ocean to do it in, did they have to liberally dollop their droppings all over my cabins?” she muses.

Roz reports that her progress is still slow; she rowed 10.5 hours today and covered 20 nautical miles. But the sky is streaked with high wispy cirrus clouds, which she hopes is a sign of coming trade winds.

You can follow Roz’s progress easily. She blogs every day, tweets even more often, and regularly posts videos and photos. 

For more information:

www.rozsavage.com