Ocean Rowing: Catching up with Roz and Sarah

It has been some time since I checked in on Roz Savage and Sarah Outen, each of whom are still out on an ocean, in pursuit of their dreams of a solo crossing.

We'll start with Roz this time out. She's continues to make great progress towards her goal of reaching Tuvalu on this, the second stage, of her trans-Pacific row, which began last year when she completed the first part of her journey by going from San Francisco to Hawaii under her own power. If everything stays on schedule, next summer she'll finish the journey, going from Tuvalu to Australia.

Reading Roz's dispatches from out on the water over the past few days have been brutal. Strong winds from the southwest have been blowing in her face and have prevented her from making much progress, and at times she's dropped anchor just to hold her position or to limit her losses. In fact, earlier in the week, when she hit the dreaded "doldrums" she faced 15 miles of negative drift in one evening alone. Pretty disheartening to work all day to make progress, drop anchor at night, only to discover you're further way from your destination when you get up the next morning. But to her credit, Roz always seems to keep a positive attitude, and the appearance of a beautiful sea turtle and a whale shark along side her boat this week have helped to bolster her spirits some.

According to the RozTracker, she is now 60 days out from Hawaii and has covered more than 1900 miles of her 2600 mile journey. She's also taken approximately 805,000 storkes of the oars along the way.

Jumping over to the Indian Ocean, Sarah is plugging away, and inching ever closer to her destination of Mauritius off the coast of Africa. Over the past couple of weeks, Sarah has increased her hours at the oars each day, and as a result, her forward progress has been great. She now has less than 500 nautical miles to go before she hits the beach, and becomes the first woman and youngest person to solo row across the Indian Ocean. The weather report says that she should expect great weather for the next week or so, which means that her progress should be good.

You can follow Sarah's progress on her own tracker, which currently has her closing in on the final destination. It seems that if everything stays on track, she should be coming home in the early part of August, which is good, because according to her blog, she's running desperately low on chocolate bars.

Watch for more updates on these two very soon. It won't be long before I'll be announcing their return to land.