As I have been struggling with motivation and balancing work, travel, life and training, there has been one consistent bright spot for me. The thought of doing the Blackburn challenge. I have been having a blast rowing open water, I like the adventure of it and the newness of it.
So, we are heading back to the cape this weekend, and the weather looks favorable to do a long row. The forecast for Saturday morning is for partly sunny, around 50F, and light wind from the east. That is my new favorite wind direction because it is an offshore wind and that keeps the waves under control.
The tide will be low, so I want to stick to deeper water, That gives me an opportunity to work on rowing to a compass heading and following a planned course.
I laid out a course that is just about 23km (12.5nm). This is a bit over half the length of the Blackburn Challenge (22nm) , but a good long row. It should take me just over 2 hours, depending on the sea state.
Here’s the course plan.
For a fun comparison, here’s the annotated course map for the Blackburn.
Quantified Rowing 
You should get your planned and actual course exported to Google Earth and then compare.
I have done a race with compass and map reading skills once and i will never forget that. It was great.
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Are you allowed to use a hiking computer which shows coordinates and bearing and compares with the planned course?
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Because personally, I would like an ‘analog only’ challenge better.
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You are allowed gps units, so you can program waypoints if you like. I don’t have one, so I didn’t think I was going to do that. I was planning to do it by compass and navigation marks.
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