International waters

 

Waterwoman Lia Ditton, with legions of ‘believers’ behind her, hopes to become the first woman to cross the Pacific Ocean by rowboat

“My boat was getting pummeled. We were being dragged up wind, up steep waves by an unexpected westbound current. Many of the waves smacked the cabin. Sleep was out of the question as my boat was tossed from side to side. Every time I tried to sleep, I kept hearing voices — people outside! There were no people outside.” — Lia Ditton, July 6, 11 a.m.

Lia Ditton was exhausted. The 38-year-old had been at sea for more than two weeks on her row from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
Her trip was part-training and part-promotional journey, to rally interest in her plans to become the third person, and first woman, to compete a trans-Pacific row between Japan and United States.
Ditton has sailed and rowed across the Atlantic Ocean and skippered her sailboat to a third-place finish in the Transpacific Yacht Race, from San Pedro to Honolulu.

Everything was going well on row down the California coast until rounded Point Conception. The channel’s shallow shelf created a rolling wave that unlike any wave Ditton had ever seen.

Then the Santa Anas came rushing down from the mountains, unleashing their furies.

The “roaring slammers,” as Ditton called them, lifted her up and down the faces of 20-foot the waves. It was 3 a.m. and pitch black. She had been rowing in three-hour bursts for the last 12 hours. Her internal fuel gauge, she said, had gone from “amber, to red, to grey.”

As she began to pull in her sea anchor, she looked at her sleeping cabin and saw a small hand trying to push open the hatch from the inside.
“That’s not real, Lia,” she remembered telling herself.
“Never underestimate the power of a pair of fresh socks to boost the spirits. Quickly at sea, you learn that dry trumps fresh, but dry and clean? What a marvel.” — Lia Ditton, June 28, 8:30 p.m.
Lia Ditton was London-born, the oldest of three. She went to school for art and writing. During her second year of art school, she decided to take a sabbatical and travel to India.

“I was going to learn to carve stone,” Ditton said, smiling. “I didn’t carve any stone.”
Instead, at 21, she was bitten by the travel bug. She went to Thailand to recover from an illness caught in India and stayed for three months before stumbling upon the Phuket King’s Cup Regatta. Many of the boats were looking for crew. She wound up traveling to 10 countries over the next five months.
“I just knew I wouldn’t be able to be a poor artist after that,” Ditton said.
After finishing what became a four-year sabbatical, Ditton returned to school with the idea of sailing across the Atlantic, from the United States to England, as performance art. She wanted, to explore the idea of absolute solitude.
In 2006, Ditton solo sailed from the U.S. to England and then lived on her boat outside the Tate Gallery for 28 days, the length of time it took her to sail across the Atlantic. The logistics, themselves, were a challenge. She needed permission from 15 government bodies, including MI6, the UK’s foreign intelligence service.
“I was measuring my boat with my friend and noticed a security camera over a warehouse door swiveling in our direction,” Ditton said. “The door opened and five men popped out with dark glasses and dark suits. I turned and said, So great to see you.’”
Ditton’s life has been buoyed by what she called “extreme optimism,” which has led her to challenge long-established rules on a quest to learn what’s possible.

Art school, as a culture, nurtured this.

“No one says no. It’s art school – they want to talk about it, make a picture, a sculpture,” getting to the root of an idea, even if it’s making a performance out of a solitary trans-Atlantic journey.

In the years since that exhibition, Ditton’s found ways to share her experiences with followers and fans. Her recent journey, from San Francisco, has seen her blogging her way down the coast, from her boat, using a phone and a transponder. She estimates that each post, ranging from a few sentences to a few hundred words, costs her about seven dollars.

Those devices, along with her standard equipment (oars, sea anchor, emergency gear) are sure to come on what she estimates to be a six-month journey across the North Pacific. The rest of her decisions and gear are likely to be pretty utilitarian.

“My decision-making is going to be, what is this going to take away from my food?” Ditton said. She is planning to stuff almost every nook and cranny of the boat with food. “I’m basically going to cuddle the food until I eat that amount.”

The options are not especially limited, but it’s a matter of getting the most bang for her buck, in terms of a weight-to-calorie ratio. She plans on consuming about 6,500 calories per day to maintain her multi-hour rowing bursts, so she’s packing in dense nutrients. Meal replacement shakes, powders and dried meats and cheeses.

Many of her decisions come to making sure she’s got enough of the right kinds of nutrients, and the right delivery systems. Clif bars, granola and nutrient bars often marketed to outdoor adventurers, have become “vehicles for nut butter,” spread with almond or peanut butter.

That need for efficiency has carried over with her from the sea back to the mainland.

“You start looking at the density of calories. Salad, to me, is a waste of space,” Ditton said. “That’s what I call it, and friends tease me about it, but it’s a waste of space.”

Everything on her training boat is, essentially, a prototype for what she hopes to be her final ocean-crossing boat. Ditton is still finding the sweet spot for her oar-locks, relative to her body and the waves she’s looking to cut through.

Her center seat is a chimera of pads, sheepskin and roller-skate wheels, which she hopes to 3D print into one solid piece, now that she’s found her perfect arrangement.

At this point, Ditton seems confident in her training and ability (perhaps a symptom of her “extreme optimism”) but she needs for funding and sponsorships.

She’s started with her Patreon. A core of her “believers” send money each month. As of this writing, she’s gathered the support of 62 users for a total of $1,413 per month.

It’s a callback to the artist tradition of patrons, though, in this case, it’s men and women from across the world contributing as little as $2.50 a month, rather than Renaissance royalty (though I’m sure Ditton wouldn’t turn down a hefty contribution of gold).

“The Patreon thing has been special. I’ve had a patron in San Francisco reach out to a colleague down here who reached out to another friend,” Ditton said. “It’s a network, and it spreads out.”

Patrons are offered increasingly personal levels of access in accordance with contributions, from access to a patron-only newsfeed and signed memorabilia to phone calls and the assurance that their personal photo will be on the wall of her boat cabin, motivating her along.

“Everybody who signs up for my Patreon are my believers… they’ve been so wonderful and so powerful to me,” Ditton said.

“Our lives have brushed together in some ways — who I am or what I’ve done has reached into another soul, and they felt they wanted to be a part of this,” Ditton said.

She’s hoping for that same level of connection with the sponsors she’s working to attract, searching for partners, not just money.

“They have to have a message that aligns with those values or goals – and for a project like this, I want companies that are somewhat progressive,” Ditton said. Companies that provide something more than just a product for her to hawk. TTh avid audiobook listener said she wouldn’t mind having a company such as Audible on her side.

Ditton has also partnered with educational companies to create STEM-based lesson plans, based on her travels.

That, she feels, is the “real giveback.” Appropriately so, too, as she credits a local sailing hero for expanding her own worldview.

She was about 10 years old when she was “dragged” to her local town hall, in Ipswich, Suffolk. The town was celebrating sailor Josh Hall, who had sailed around the world in his 50 foot “New Spirit of Ipswich.”

Students from the local schools were encouraged to draw the boat for a competition, which Ditton won, leading her to meet Hall.

“Up to that point, I didn’t know that people could do things like that. My mother is a teacher, my father is a management consultant — our futures were quite mappable,” Ditton said. “He showed you can lead a life less ordinary…. I’d quite like to be that person for children, and for girls in particular.”

Her monetary goal is $150,000, with hopes to set off by spring 2019. Until then, she’s going to continue her tour. She is soon heading to Lake Tahoe to row the lake’s 70-mile circumference, and then around Alcatraz island, near her San Francisco home.

Today I enjoyed the most favorable weather since the start of my voyage from San Francisco. I also had a view of Anacapa Island, a series of great hulks of rock with a white lighthouse on one end. I was grateful for the clement weather. After a fitful night’s sleep, I slept for a few hours in the morning and in the afternoon. — Ditton, July 13, 10:15 a.m.

As Ditton approached Santa Barbara amid the turbulent waves, she was hit in the face with hot air, as if someone had opened an oven door. The waves were so powerful that she couldn’t row, leading her to drop her sea anchor, which was a mistake.

Though meant to stabilize the boat, its drag threw the small craft into further disarray. Waves crashed into the open cockpit.

After hours of fighting the waves, pulling up the sea anchor back and working to stay out of shipping lanes (“It was like it should be etched in a lithograph,” Ditton said) a conversation with Coast Guard established she wasn’t in any “immediate danger,” leading her to get a solid hour-and-a-half of sleep.

The next morning, she woke up not fully recharged but charged enough to make it to Santa Barbara. She was exhausted and it was the July 4 weekend, but she was finally in port.

“I was beyond tired, and yet,” Ditton said. “I can’t continue, says this little voice, but you do. The human body can go a lot further – it’s like the fuel gauge on the tank. You can keep going, but you don’t know it until you get there.”

To follow Lia Ditton’s travels, or to support her via Patreon, visit rowliarow.com.

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