Mike Noel-Smith
This is the story of two men who followed their dream of crossing an ocean and discovered the adventure of a lifetime.
Former army officer, mountaineer and film stuntsman Mike Noel-Smith couldn’t resist when his friend Rob Abernethy called him up one day and suggested the ultimate challenge – becoming the first Britons to row the Indian Ocean.
The pair took advice from expert seamen, studied weather charts, trained for months, and planned the trip down to the last detail. But like many before them, they discovered that the sea is a dangerous and ungovernable mistress, capable of turning from calm to lethal rage.
This is a pacey, often funny, and ultimately touching tale of courage, fear, love and bloody mindedness in the face of the unconquerable power of the ocean.
Adventurous readers will wish they’d been able to join Mike and Rob on their unforgettable trip, sharing every twist and turn, triumph and disaster.
The rest will be glad they stayed at home and enjoyed the book!
Mike Noel-Smith spent 18 years as an infantry officer in the British Army. After retiring from the Army in 1992, he became Operations Manager of Challenger World specialising in outdoor management training, a post he held for 3 years before taking the post of Director of Training at Insights Ltd under Will Carling the former England Rugby Captain.
There he was responsible for the design and delivery of leadership development programmes for business teams with KPMG, Royal Mail, Vickers Plc, British Telecom, Standard & Poors and many others. He has also delivered motivational training for The England Cricket team, Harlequins RFC and The Royal Sun Alliance Ocean Racing Team.
A keen ski mountaineer and rock climber, he has led expeditions over much of the Alps, volcanoes in Mexico, the mountains of Africa as well as the deep jungles of Central America. In addition to his love of altitude, in 2003 he and his colleague Rob Abernethy rowed 2000 miles into the Indian Ocean before tropical storms battered both them and their boat leading to a dramatic rescue by an Australian warship. Mike had been seriously injured and for 4 days the pair remained at the mercy of the ocean until the rescue was successfully completed in atrocious conditions at nightime.
His ethos in life is to ‘prepare well and follow your dream’. He shows business audiences that the power of teamwork combined with sound leadership and a determination to win despite crisis and hostile environments will always pull you through. Not least of all he demonstrates that a powerful self determination linked to a positive attitude can make the difference when it really matters.
Mike is married to Buffy and they have three children aged 22, 20 and 15 years and live in Devon. This is his first book.
DAY 41 - Friday 31st May
Location: 23:07:745S 91:25:974E distance covered: 1631nm
Two men in a boat. OK, it was a rowing boat, but apart from that, our adventure bore little resemblance to Jerome K Jerome’s comic masterpiece. Rob and I weren’t pootling around the waterways of Britain – we were over 1,700 miles out into the Indian Ocean, in the middle of a violent storm that was quite outside our worst nightmares. Three men would have been useful.
We were rowing from Western Australia to Africa and outside our survival cabin the wind howled and the waves pounded the sides of our boat TRANSVenture.
We lay in our stern cabin ironically called the ‘coffin’ dozing in and out of sleep. Condensation dripped from the ceiling and mixed with the sweat drenching our clothes. We were constantly jolted from side to side. It was like a screen theme park cinema, where the seats move to the motion of the film and there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop the ‘ride’. We both felt helpless, but a desire to keep our macho counsel stopped us from discussing our fear. It was only later, when we were safely home that we admitted how scary and claustrophobic the coffin was just then. We were cowering from the storm in a space that was just 6 foot 2 inches long by 4 wide at its widest end, tapering down to 2 foot at the back of the boat. The roof was only 3 foot off the floor –sitting upright was laughable.
We had expected bad weather after our ‘met’ update some 12 hours previously. We had battened down against the forecasted 25 knots of wind and up to 7 metres of swell. Unfortunately for us, the weather system bearing down on us exceeded our worst fears and we were gripped by a violent storm that raged for another 24 hours.
Eight thousand miles away in the USA, our trusty weatherman, Lee Bruce studied satellite photography and foresaw the approaching nautical nightmare. He tried calling our satellite telephone, but we had switched it off to save power. He called our project director in the UK to see if he could warn us, and finally, unbelievably in the circumstances, he tried to reach us by email. What he saw on the satellite was pretty bad – gusts topping 40 knots and ocean swell increasing to 9 metres. In short, a tropical cyclone. That’s a dangerous, unpredictable weather system by anybody’s book, even the most experienced and well-equipped of sailors.
Our 21 foot rowing boat was about to be put through a grueling test of its seaworthiness. Tony Bullimore, a vastly experienced round-the-world yachtsman suffered conditions like these in the Southern Ocean off the coast of Australia several years before our row. The result was a complete capsize of his boat (three times the size of our craft), irreparable damage and a massive rescue operation to save him from drowning.
A huge wave rushed in on us like a steam train. There was a second of silence followed by an enorm
