By Julia Michelle Dawson
Row Row Row your boat gently … well you know how that goes.
Now edit to … across the Pacific Ocean
What? Yes, that’s exactly what fellow Brit Lia Ditton intends to do.
Chocolate – it’s the one luxury Lia won’t be giving up when she rows solo from Japan to California. In fact she’s taking 80 pounds of it! It probably won’t affect her waistline one iota since she will burn off 6,000 calories a day in her journey. She is packing 400 hundred pounds of food. At the end of the five-month journey she intends to have none left – not even a crumb of chocolate.
“Why?” is the one question everyone asks when I mention Lia’s story. Why is she’s rowing alone. One nameless person so boldly suggested she couldn’t get a date. When you see Lia you’ll know she can definitely get a date – she is attractive and a warm people person.
When I asked her why, she gave me one word. Frustration. I was perplexed. She explained. She had had the experience of sitting on the rail of a race boat off the coast of New England and to resolve the fact the she was freezing without the warmth of a real job on the boat she begged to be a grinder. This was on a boat with a rule of no women on the boat. She looked back at the person at the helm – a job she coveted and realized she would never get unless she was the only person on the boat. So she took up ocean life solo and in no small manner – she sailed the Atlantic solo in 2005.
Lia is amazed at how many more women are out racing today than 18 years ago when she was just a novelty. They were shocked that she was a woman and actually had skill.
Now she is a licensed captain and has sailed the equivalent of eight times around the globe. She has crossed an ocean three times alone. Ditton was also the 53rd woman to row across the Atlantic.
Lia is proud of the fact that her rowing will help educate children about ocean sciences. She will be transmitting data and her experience daily to help develop a program.
To help fund her adventure she is selling “slices” of her new boat to corporations and individuals. Sixty vertical slices will be sold. At the end the boat will be cut up to be given to the donors as wall art and motivation for future generations.
Lia is here to learn the California coast line. You can see her colorful 22 foot “row boat” out on the water in the Santa Monica Bay. This is not your grandmother’s row boat. There are compartments at the bow and stern. Storage in the front. The sleep compartment is in back which is 5’8” long. Exactly how tall Lia is – no room for luxuriously rolling over to catch a few more Zs on a Sunday morning.
In March 2020, Lia will depart Choshi, Japan and row 5,500 nautical miles solo and unsupported to the Golden Gate Bridge. To date only two people have done this – both were men.
Sailing has been a part of Lia’s life since she was young. Her family owned a 19 foot sail boat which they sailed with her parents and brother over the summers to Italy. She hated it as a teenager. The taunting from her father would start at Christmas time each year, “If you haven’t a job – you have to go on the boat.” She says she learned to navigate just to be able to use a land bathroom.
A curious six year old asked Lia, “If astronauts go to the moon and you are going across an ocean, doesn’t that make you an aquanaut?”
She won an art contest at the age of eleven for drawing Josh Hall’s boat the Spirit of Ipswich. Fifteen years later she hired him as her rowing coach.
Lia misses some of our creature comforts when at sea: the sofa, a toilet that isn’t a bucket. Surprisingly she said she misses the silence. “We buy photos of things we think are peaceful, such as the Arctic, but it’s actually noisy.”
When she gets back to land she finds the weight of gravity unforgiving. Her feet feel like lead on the hard ground. She has to readjust to the lack of movement. She will reach for a glass on a stationary table and miss because she is used to adjusting for the movement of the boat.
Follow Lia’s journey and support her at RowLiaRow.com
