Wrekin Rowers full of praise for supporters as Covid means crewman is still not home
Three of the four men who captured the county’s imagination by rowing 3,000 miles across the Atlantic are home after their epic voyage... and are full of praise for the thousands of people who supported them.
Stuart Shepherd and brothers Gary and Stuart Richards are back from Antigua after completing the Talisker Whiskey Atlantic Challenge as the Wrekin Rowers in January.
The fourth member of the heroic crew - Martin Skehan - remains in the Caribbean after he and his wife Lynne caught Covid. They are both doing fine but cannot travel back for a while.
“When we were tired and a wave had left us soaking wet and we were feeling a bit down, then we would think about all those people who were supporting us,” said Stuart, the team’s 57-year old captain.
“It was like having not just one extra crew member, it was like having a thousand crew members in the boat with us.”
The men have now raised £109,000 for the Severn Hospice and the RNIB and are being recognised in the street, especially in Wellington. They are set to make an appearance at the town’s festival in May.
People there sang the crew’s sea shanty to raise morale after a marlin strike pierced the side of their 16 sq m, 1.5m-wide craft.
“You can’t underestimate how much that meant to us, to motivate us not just to compete but to row hard,” said Stuart.
The "ordinary" middle-aged men have now been invited to give talks at local schools, and a presentation event to hand over two huge cheques for their chosen charities is already in the diary.
Gary, aged 56, said: “Before the marlin strike here we were, four guys in our 50s and 60s competing with full army teams in their 30s and PT instructors.”
The men prefer not to think about what might have happened if the marlin fish’s deadly spear had hit one of them.
They fixed the hole by stopping it up with a sandwich box lid. It slowed them down by two days but they still finished in just over 40 days.
A perilous moment came just minutes away from the finish line when they disengaged an auto helm device and the boat turned round and headed towards a coral reef and rocks.
But they sorted it out in the nick of time to receive a heroes’ welcome from family members on the harbour in the dark which will live long in their memories.
Even after 40 days on a small boat and the occasional bicker while tired, dehydrated and lacking sleep, they remain firm friends.
They are all members of the Shropshire Adventure Rowing Club in Shrewsbury, and the Welsh Sea Rowing Association, and will take to the water again.
But four of them reenacting the voyage again won’t happen. Stuart said he has done his challenge and has no intention of doing it again.
You can still donate to the causes by visiting justgiving.com/team/wrekin-rowers.
