Waikato? Pah!

Jock Wishart is a friend of mine. I think he may be partly to blame for this project, along with others such as Hobbs, Colin Fellows, Malcolm Knight and Mike Hart, whose tendency to do extreme things in rowing boats has rubbed off on me in a small way. I should also apportion blame to Gill Fellows, who was my first coach in the noble art of skiffing.

Jock has turned up in my life with a spooky consistency: I first met him back in my university days, when he inspired our crew and gave us the belief to win our little event.

He isn’t always the best communicator: a product of his independence and focus, I suspect, but he always remembers people and kept in touch over the years. In the early 90’s, he rang me up to inform me that he had accepted the role of Head Coach for the Oxford University lightweights on condition that I join his team. For me, that was possibly the catalyst that has led to coaching, both rowing and business, becoming ‘my thing’. After turning around the fortunes of OULRC, Jock moved on to other things. A few years later, he cajoled me into rowing with him for a couple of seasons with a crew of veterans: I recall we won most of our races - it would be churlish to allow facts to interfere with that picture.

A spinoff from all this was his invitation to me to run the team selection and development processes for some of his wacky adventures: we started by building a team to walk to the Magnetic North Pole. Here’s the thing: although Jock dreamt up some fairly wild ideas, they tended to succeed because the
y were founded on careful preparation. Plus he was able to motivate experts in their field to contribute.

In one 18 month period in the 90s, he rowed across the Atlantic with a tough cookie called Duncan Nicholl (I helped select Duncan, without telling Jock that the key criterion was the ability to put up with…er, Jock), led the crew which established new speed records for powered circumnavigation in a trimaran and captained the team that broke the London-Paris rowing record in the CNA Maritime Challenge. The latter brought all of these mad rowing types together, along with the great Andy Ripley, who has the distinction of being the heaviest cox I have ever had to pull along, but also the funniest.

Along with all of this, Jock represented his country at rowing and yachting and is a veteran of the 1980 America’s Cup, as well as being a former European Dragon Boat Racing Champion. A British University championship medal winner in rowing, sprint canoeing and weight lifting, he was Project Leader of the team that broke the Round Britain powerboat record in 1989.

A lifetime interest in polar exploration led to him becoming a member of the first team to walk unsupported to the Geomagnetic North Pole in 1992. Four years later, in organising The Ultimate Challenge, the first ever televised trek to the Magnetic North Pole – an expedition comprising largely of novice explorers.

Now, he is off on another one: he is going to try to row to the Magnetic North Pole. This puts our trip down the Waikato into perspective!

The expedition to the Magnetic North Pole (as certified in 1996) will set off from Resolute Bay in July/August 2011, the crew plan to row for 450 miles before finally reaching the Magnetic North Pole at 78 degrees, 35.724 minutes North, 1

04 degrees, 11.915 minutes West.

The Ice Boat

For the full story, have a look at www.rowtothepole.com :