http://www.rozsavage.com/

She has a track record. She's already rowed solo across the Atlantic.

Surprisingly, I am not too despondent now I have got used to the idea. It was becoming very wearing on the nerves, wondering each day if the watermaker was going to work or not. If it is really dead, it is almost a relief to know for sure how things are, rather than living with perpetual hope and frequent disappointment.

While I send my hope and sympathy to Roz, her situation immediately reminded me of one of my favorite passages from the Bushido text Hagakure:

Once a group of ten blind masseuses were traveling together in the mountains, and when they began to pass along the top of a precipice, they all became very cautious, their legs shook, and they were in general struck with terror. Just then the leading man stumbled and fell off the cliff. Those that were left all wailed, "Ahh, ahh! How piteous!"

But the masseuse who had fallen yelled up from below, "Don't be afraid. Although I fell, it was nothing. I am now rather at ease. Before falling I kept thinking 'What will I do if I fall?' and there was no end to my anxiety. But now I've settled down. If the rest of you want to be at ease, fall quickly!''

Oftentimes, the fear and anxiety of misfortune can be worse than the misfortune itself.

Links to online transcriptions of the Hagakure can be found at del.icio.us/nilesgibbs/hagakure+text.

If you're interested in following Roz's adventure, subscribe to my Unofficial Roz Savage Feed, or check out her official blog: The Voyage: Roz Savage: Rower, Writer, Speaker.

Roz Savage is a rock star.  Not a guitar-playing, chain-smoking, swarmed-by-fans sort of rock star, but a rowing-across-the-Pacific-Ocean-by-herself sort of rock star.  Yes, after tackling the feat of rowing across the Atlantic Ocean single-handed, she is now taking on the Pacific.  And she is doing so in part to raise environmental awareness:

"I believe that our every word, every action, has consequences and effects far beyond what we will ever know.  So I try to be mindful of the consequences of my actions, knowing that somewhere, somehow, they will have an effect."

Roz crosses oceans as a promise to herself that she will lead a life worth living.  And she hopes to inspire others with her success and the lessons she has learned along the way.  You can follow Roz as she ventures west across the Pacific via her blog.  We hope you are as inspired by her passion and strength as we are.

For those of you who don't know, Roz Savage is a British woman currently attempting a solo rowing journey across the Pacific Ocean, as part of a greater project to circumnavigate the globe using surface transport called The Voyage.

There are several ways online to monitor Roz's journey, many with RSS feeds, so I decided to mix them together into just one.

Actually, my initial inspiration came from a bug in her official blog feed, the entries of which didn't point to the proper blog posts, making the feed inconvenient to use.

Though they've addressed the bug, I still wanted to be able to follow everything that Roz says without signing up for every service she's on or filling up my feed reader with a dozen of her feeds.

The Unofficial Roz Savage currently mixes feeds from the following sites:

• SailBlogs (blog): The Voyage: Roz Savage: Rower, Writer, Speaker
• YouTube (videos): TouTube - rozsavage's Channel
• Twitter (messages): Twitter / rozsavage
• SmugMug (photos): rozsavage's photos- powered by SmugMug
• TWIT.tvt (podcast): Roz Rows the Pacific

Subscribe to Unofficial Roz Savage via RSS or email.

Be sure to check out her official site or check out further Roz Savage links online.

Disclaimer: I did not create the content aggregated through this feed. I'm not trying to steal thunder from anyone, especially Roz. I'm merely a wide-eyed fan that thought others like me might want something like this. Be happy!

Update (07-JUL-08): The wonderful RSS aggregation service FEEDblendr went down, so I've migrated the list over to Feed Rinse. The URL is the same, but you may get some duplicate/out of order posts for a short time.

"rozsavage: You have sent an invalid keyword. Your message was not delivered. Begin your message with the keyword and try again or contact ..."

For all I know this is still happening. I have not dared start following her again.

Presumably she uses some automatic system which got stuck in an endless loop. Hope she spots this and stops it before she qualifies for a record she wasn't bargaining on - largest mobile phone bill ever.

Odder still, I started noticing some traffic reaching this website (ie Hasta la vista, Vista!) with the search string "You have sent an invalid keyword. Your ..."

So I tried entering that string into Google and it only gave one result. This! Yes, it's a page on this website, but that search string does not appear anywhere on it.

I confess to being mighty puzzled.

When I decided to leave high heels and dayplanners behind to travel a different path through life, I chose to varnish boats. When Roz Savage left her life as a management consultant and investment banker, she decided to row a boat across the Atlantic. The only woman in the 2005-2006 Atlantic Rowing Race to singlehand from the Canary Islands to Antigua, she competed with twenty other boats; only one other was single-handed. Boats in the rest of the fleet were crewed by two or four people, and all arrived in Antigua ahead of Ms. Savage, who crossed the finish line after 103 days at sea.

Even at the time, the fact that she arrived in last place seemed a bit beside the point. After breaking every one of her oars (and patching them with duct tape), losing her satellite phone and stereo, watching clouds put her solar-powered water desalination unit out of commisision and having to cut free her sea anchor while dragging through the water held only by her safety harness, being alive seemed the point.

But the troubles she endured didn’t quell her enthusiasm for her sport or her determination to meet the challenge she’d set herself - to row around the world. After completing the Atlantic race, an interviewer asked how it was possible to accomplish such a feat with so many odds against her. Although she rowed during her time at Oxford, she wasn’t a professional, and certainly didn’t fit the physical profile of an open-ocean rower.

Ms. Savage replied that drive and passion were the keys- simple desire, fueled by perseverance. “Stay dedicated and work hard,” she said. “and only worry about the things you can control. In life there is so much we want to do but we scare ourselves out of living the life we want, because of all the ‘what ifs’. I only concentrate on what I can control. That is how I rowed across the Atlantic.”

Having conquered the Atlantic, she set her sights on the Pacific, and began a single-handed row in 2007. That attempt had to be aborted due to rough weather and several capsizes. After a redesign of the boat, including the addition of 200 pounds of lead ballast in the hull and some fine tuning of her provisions, she again rowed out of San Francisco, early on the morning of May 25. This Pacific crossing will take place in three stages. Despite some issues with wind and currents, she still is on track with Stage 1.

The Pacific Challenge
Stage 1 (2008): San Francisco to Hawaii (2324 statute miles, course 247 degrees)
Stage 2 (2009): Hawaii to Tuvalu (2620 statute miles, course 224 degrees)
Stage 3 (2009): Tuvalu to Australia (2324 statute miles, course 252 degrees)

Since her departure last week, I’ve been following her progress through her blog. I find her delightfully direct, filled with common sense and without pretense. As befits an Oxford grad, she’s unapologetic about adding the occasional literary tidbit to her musings. On May 30, she confided,

“Sisyphus might sound like an unpleasant disease, but in fact he was the guy in Greek mythology who was condemned to push a boulder up a mountain for all eternity. As soon as he stopped pushing the rock would roll backwards, so he just had to keep pushing away. I know how he felt.”

“I continue to row hard just to stand still. The wind has continued to strengthen, so despite rowing all day I have slipped back slightly towards the California coast. The seas have been rough, and once in a while a wave slaps into the side of the Brocade sending a torrent of cold salty water over me. The skies are leaden, with no sunshine to help dry me out. Everything on the boat is damp and dank.”

“The weather forecast is for the winds to get stronger and the waves to get bigger - and all coming out of the northwest. It seems that my Sisyphean task is going to be a tough one, and it’s hard to put that out of my mind for long.”

Sisyphus ~ Franz von Stuck

When I found “Sisyphean” in Roz Savage’s daily entry, I felt as though I’d found a sister. The title of this blog, The Task at Hand, is taken from one of my original poems about the work of the “Sisyphean poet”. For the poet, “even the right word takes effort”, and it is effort that Ms. Savage understands as well as anyone on this planet. The irony is that I first learned about Sisyphus in the context of drudgery, mindlessness and resentment. After all, he’d been condemned to his fate, and those who introduced him to me seemed to assume nothing positive was going to emerge from all that effort.

A woman who commented on Roz Savage’s blog had quite a different take. As she said in response to the Sisyphus reference, “If he wasn’t a guy with a boulder, a mountain and a task, there would be no story to remember him by. It’d be like, ‘You remember the guy. Well, he was a guy.’ So, you see, you are the gal in the rowboat on the ocean going to Hawaii.”

That woman has it exactly right: Sisyphus isn’t remembered for his status as a god, his history of making trouble, or his ability to get his own way by garden-variety deceit and trickery. He’s remembered for his boulder, his mountain and his task. And even though we speak of him being condemned to fruitless labor, having no power over his fate or circumstances, I sometimes wonder about the nature of his effort, and the limits of our understanding.

When I first encountered the image of Sisyphus shown above, I was absolutely startled by intimacy I saw between Sisyphus and his rock. He didn’t seem to be pushing it, he seemed to be resting against it, almost as though his struggle to move the rock higher and gravity's determination to tumble it down had been perfectly balanced. This was a man who knew his rock, living in relationship with it and embracing it with intensity.  Albert Camus, in his exploration of The Myth of Sisyphus, was equally fascinated by the sight of Sisyphus walking back down the mountain to find his rock and begin his task anew.  Reading Camus, you can't avoid the sense that Sisyphus not only is rolling and re-rolling his rock, he's re-deciding his fate on a regular basis.

For von Stuck and Camus, there is a vibrant humanity that shines through Sisyphus, and I find myself thinking, "Perhaps Sisyphus had more choice than we realize."  Perhaps that is why his story, his image and his myth continue to resonate as they do: not because of his condemnation but because of his choice.

The obvious question is, if Sisyphus had a choice, why would he continue to roll that rock?  The answer may be as simple as another question: why do any of us do anything?  Why would Roz Savage endure isolation, fear and exhaustion to row across oceans in a glorified tin can? Why do perfectly well-adjusted men and women withdraw completely from society and journey into the desert to live in silence, contemplation and prayer?   Why do researchers follow their hunches and their data for years, or artists refine their vision for decades?   Why do athletes train, or poets write?

Part of the answer is that effort, like virtue, is its own reward.  Contrary to what some believe, work is not a curse, exhaustion can be cured, and simple desire, fueled by perseverance, can move mountains, climb mountains and, if necessary, do some rock-pushing straight up those mountains.

Sisyphus has his boulder and his mountain.   Roz Savage has her rowboat and her ocean.  I have my words and my night.  Each of us has our task, and our obstacle.  The only question is whether we will embrace those tasks and continue on, or step aside and let gravity have its way.

Funny enough, around the same time my wife also discovered a Frenchman named Xavier Rosset who is trying to live on his own in an uninhabited island for 300 Days. His website is in French so it is a little hard for me to fully understand what is written there; fortunately, another blogger, Cheyenne Morrison, wrote about Xavier and I was able to read about his experiment in full.

These two tales definitely emphasize the old saying, "Where there's a will there's a way."

Here she encounters some playful friends.

In the sidebar you can find A LOT of links to sailors. In many of them it´s a certain movement at this time of the year. One of my favorites is the one of Roz Savage who crossed the Atlantic rowing in 2006 and now is on her way to go for the Pacific summer 2008.
I found this crazy you tube clip on her page:

Here follows some links to sailors, friends we have met here, which are not yet in the sidebar:

www.alnair.org with Muriel, Stéphane and Falco on Alna'Ir, in French
www.bluewatersailors.com with Bente, Arnd and Siri on Narwal, in German
www.castingoff.mysite.com with Phillippa, Paul and Oscar on Pondlife, in English
www.freewebs.com/onthenose with Liz and Bob on Yanina, in English
and of course:
www.sailingpeterpan.blogspot.com with Susan and Jan on Peter Pan, in German

...We got some Goodbyes to do, and hopefully a lot of See you soons too..!
I'll get some more sites then..

Until then do check out, and fill in some harbours, at www.theharbourmap.blogspot.com!

And,
Best wishes from Tassa and Tiago!
They send two new favorite video links, for a more lovely world:

The cat, the rat and the dog
The kitten and the crow

Fresh photos from the beach today: