Female rowing crew to take on the perils of the Pacific
Female rowing crew to take on the perils of the Pacific
In spring 2025, the all-female crew Seas The Day will embark on an adventure of epic proportions. The courageous and brave team is attempting to row non-stop and unsupported across the Pacific Ocean, a journey of 8000 miles, and will involve traversing the wild waters between Peru and Australia.
The crew will be rowing in their boat Velocity which has already rowed the Atlantic three times. Wimbledon-based Lottie Hopkinson-Woolley will be in the boat alongside Jess Rowe and Miriam Payne, and the trip is expected to take between 150 and 200 days.
Lottie
We caught up with Lottie about her training and what has inspired her to take on this monumental quest. Lottie lives in Wimbledon Park and she grew up locally attending The Study Girl’s Prep. Her love of the water has been with her since she was a little girl: “I have always been obsessed with sailing, and spent a lot of time in the Isle of Wight during my holidays, and that’s where I was happiest.
“I loved London to an extent, but I found city life quite restrictive and I craved more space for sport.”
Lottie ended up going to boarding school in Sussex and her love of the outdoors continued. She went on to be an instructor on the Isle Of Wight at the age of 16, and taught sailing there for a few years, before going to work for Mark Warner in Greece.
It felt like a challenge was always going to be something in Lottie’s sights and it was a question of when rather than if she would take on a major expedition of some sort. “I had always been a keen follower of sailing and races and expeditions. I saw Jess and Miriam had rowed the Atlantic in 2022 and I followed their progress and I was really keen to do something similar. So we put our heads together and came up with the idea of rowing across the Pacific Ocean!”
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Lottie is the youngest of the crew at the age of 24. Miriam is 25 and from Yorkshire and Jess is 27 and from Guildford, and so the logistics of the training schedule aren’t straight-forward. “We are spread all over the country and so are currently training separately,” Lottie explains. “We are training mainly on rowing machines at the moment. I am doing about an hour, or an hour and a half a day, and there are weights sessions as well.
“We have now spent about ten days on the boat together over the last few months, and are getting ready to embark on this personal and major challenge, of both body and mind.”
At the end of this month Velocity will make its way to Peru. The team will go out at the end of February and prepare to start this incredible challenge at the end of March/beginning of April.
When I ask Lottie what is inspiring her and what she is doing this for, she says: “I really want to show young girls that anything is possible. I have heard over the years, generalisations and comments like, ‘Women don’t belong on the oceans…’ and really we want to try and encourage and show young girls that there is a world out there, where they can get off their phones, explore, and do anything they set their mind to.”
The row itself will be a gruelling and tough challenge: one person will be rowing all the time, and the plan is to do stints of ‘three hours on and then three hours off’.
“We are going to have to get used to the sleep deprivation as it will be tough going once we have started the challenge… And of course there’s the lack of bathroom facilities, so you have to get used to the ‘do it in a bucket and then chuck it’ philosophy’,” Lottie laughs.
How do Lottie’s parents feel about her taking this challenge on? “At the start they were a bit terrified I think. There is a lot that can go wrong. There are 30-foot waves to consider, large container ships, storms, sharks… so plenty that can happen which is out of your control, and I think that’s their main concern. But now they’ve got used to the idea – they are excited and supportive.”
The ‘Seas The Day’ team is raising money for the Outward Bound Trust, and once all the sponsorship for the trip has been sorted there will be a real focus on the charity side of things.
There will also be a live tracker on their website when the girls set off, so that people can follow their progress.
