Rowing Across the Pacific
A year after successfully crossing the Atlantic in a rowboat, Roz Savage is on her way to conquer the Pacific.
Roz realized that living according to her values would make her happier than earning a big income and aquiring possessions. As an odd life focussing expiriment, she decided to write two obituaries for herself. This is an excerpt from her About page:
One day I sat down and wrote two versions of my obituary. The first was the one that I wanted to have. I thought of the obituaries that I enjoyed reading, the people that I admired. They were the adventurers and risk-takers, the people who seemed to have lived many lifetimes in one, the people who had tried lots of things, some of them successes, some of them spectacular failures, but at least they’d had the guts to try. They didn’t give a damn what anybody thought of them; their own opinion of themselves was all that mattered. They lived life with a greediness for new experiences, and gumption, and a gung-ho attitude that defied the attempts of naysayers and nigglers to pigeonhole them or put them down. These people really knew how to live.
The second version was the obituary that I was heading for – a conventional, ordinary life – pleasant and with its moments of excitement, but always within the safe confines of normality.
The difference between the two was startling. Clearly something was going to have to change.
This is certainly a unique way of finding a new direction in life, and it seems to have had the desired effect. Roz is a firm believer that an ordinary person can do anything when they put their minds and souls into it, making us all extraordinary. So, having successfully rowed across the rough Atlantic, she will now make the trek across the world’s largest ocean.
This past Sunday, the 39-year-young British woman rowed out from the California-Oregon border in America for the first of three legs across the Pacific, which will eventually deposit her in Australia some time in 2009. Her vessel is an 8-meter customized rowboat named the Brocade.
To keep in touch with civilization, Roz has a notebook with satellite internet access, a satellite phone, and a GPS tracking system that keeps everyone aware of her whereabouts. So long as she doesn’t have another repeat of last time where everything completely broke, we can count on her blog to be updated regularily.
I’m glad that a camera crew isn’t going to trail along and record the whole thing as an attempt to make the “next big thing” in reality-TV. There are just some adventures that shouldn’t be ruined with the glamorization that is often seen on the tube. This journey is not going to be easy by any stretch of the imagination, and no matter how talented a TV crew, viewers would likely never know the discomfort, pain and frustrations that would be involved with such a trek.
After reading such an inspiring story, I’m almost tempted to write some obituaries of my own. I’m sure the exercise would provide some clearer indications of what I’d like to complete before my journey ends.
You can follow Roz’s journey on her site, rozsavage.com.
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[...] Link to Article t-pain Rowing Across the Pacific » This excerpt is from an article posted at [...]
[...] few weeks back I had wrote about Roz Savage and her trek to row across the Pacific Ocean while blogging about it. She’s already [...]