Motherships / Support Boats Required for California to Hawaii Event

[NewOceanWave]

I am organising an ocean rowing race from California to Hawaii in 2014. I know it seems like a long way off but I'd like to find some motherships / support vessels for the event.

Although the whole event is likely to take between 40 and 90 days I'm hoping to find 4 support boats and so each boat would spend around 20 days with the floatilla before continuing onto Hawaii.

The level of support that the motherships would provide would be minimal (providing additional freshwater to crews who have a broken watermaker, taking ill entrants onboard, providing additional pieces of kit an equipment to crews (all of which would be supplied by us))

Additional crew members including experienced sailors could be provided as well as a cash amount to help cover bills relating to the trip.

So if you have a vessel that you think would be suitable and you'd like to be considered as a support boat / mothership for the event please don't hesitate to get in touch.

PM me for more details as the race website is currently being built.

Yours in adventure

Chris Martin

New Ocean Wave

[GordMay]

Greetings and welcome aboard the CF, Chris.
Interesting project.

[DeepFrz]

I have never heard of support ships for ocean rowing events.

It would be very difficult to stick with a row boat for 20 days.

[Alecadi]

DeepFrz, I concord
More over after some weeks the rowing boats would be quite far from each other and 2 support boats at a time would not cover all.

[NewOceanWave]

Hi there,

Support vessels have been used for the majority of ocean rowing races. The rowers do spread out a lot and they aren't there to provide emergency cover just to help rowers who have broken bits of kit (oars, watermakers, rudders) or those who decide that the challenge is too much for them or get ill or injured and break up the tedium with a visit. Normally there is one or two boats cover the whole fleet for the full race period of 40-90 days.

I'm hoping that by having 4 support boats the first can cover all boats easily from the start then as they get to the front of the field the second boat comes across the back of the fleet. I don't want to have support boats trying to crash through the waves upwind when a second support boat behind could get to a boat in need much easier and quicker.

With 25-35 boats in the race there will certainly be more than enough boats to try and find. Bearing in mind as they are 25ft long, 6ft wind and without a sail they aren't easy to spot.

Thanks

Chris

[donradcliffe]

My crew spotted one in the middle of the Atlantic--at first I thought it was a jetski, but it turned out to have 4 crazies on board. I tossed them some beers, but they couldn't row upwind to retrieve them. I was in Antigua when some of them finished--60 to 90 days, living on MRE's, sitting on sheepskins with boat-butt an ever-present threat. Looked like lots of fun.

However, I didn't hear of any escort vessels. Some of them were running low on food, so they talked the Ocean Planet round-the-world racer into bashing back 3-400 miles to weather to provision them.

[captain58sailin]

Welcome to the Forum, N.O.W., sounds like a fun adventure. I'll pass the word up around my way, we sometimes like to go in for a bit of off the wall cruising.