Boating Law Facts

British travel to the Caribbean in recent months has been overshadowed by the rise in Air Passenger Duty. Last year, the British Government reclassified Caribbean travel, meaning that it now costs 50% more to travel to the islands than it did in 2009. This rather ridiculously means that the 8 hour Caribbean trip is more than a 12 hour Los Angeles excursion. It will be sometime before the UK Government gets its act together (on this and other electable promises), so how should UK citizens get to the Caribbean in the mean time? Well, if you don’t mind the excruciating physical pain, you could always row there. Nowadays, it only takes as little as thirty one days after all.

The successful attempt was achieved by a five person Durham University crew, who went the scenic route to Holidays to Barbados in the days between January 6th and February 7th. 3,000 miles, 31 days, 23 hours and 31 minutes before landfall in Barbados, the crew set off from Tenerife. The previous record was set in January 2008, and it now looks rather ample: 33 days, seven hours and 30 minutes. For this time, the boat stayed in motion for twenty four hours every day: this perpetual motion was achieved by shift work, with three rowing at any one time and a maximum of two hours rest for those taking a breather. Even with optimal sleeping time, precious little comfort would have been on offer. Barely as wide as a bathtub, the 40 foot multihull boat was incredibly cramped.

And if you were serious about taking this unconventional means of transport to get to your Holidays to Jamaica, you’d find it hard not to be put off by the various wear and tear that these intrepid rowers experienced. The rowers found themselves re-carving their seats to better suit the redefined contours of their blistered bottoms, attempting in vain to alleviate the pain. In conjunction with the heat closer the equator, the crew were required to strip to air their sores, something the one female crew member was hardly excited about. ‘I’ve seen enough male dangly bits over the last month to last me a lifetime’. Presumably then, ‘enough’ is ‘four’. Personally, if getting the Tropical Sky of the Caribbean by boat is really going to involve full frontal nudity and ‘danglies’, I’d rather run there. Or maybe just fly.

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