Qualifying to row the Atlantic

Jake Still is training for a huge challenge – rowing solo across the Atlantic in just under 500 days’ time, fundraising for The Rivers Trust and Aire Rivers Trust with every stroke. This is the second of his guest blog posts, documenting the long journey to even reach the start of the race. Read his first update if you missed it, here.

Words: Jake Still

What does it take to qualify for the World’s Toughest Row?

Words by Jake Still

To get the start line of the race, you must complete the required training hours on the water. As a minimum, rowers must complete 120 hours, 24 hours must be during the night and at least one session must be over 36 hours. As a solo rower, this will mean I will have to learn to successfully anchor offshore because it would be impossible to do this without having to sleep. Ultimately, these hours are about getting used to living on board rather than rowing. Afterall, I will be spending at least 40 days at sea and everyday things like sleeping, cooking, hygiene and even going to the toilet are no-longer trivial tasks when you’re on a boat that will rock about.

Before I took Azula (the name of my boat) out to sea, I began my early training on Lake Windermere. This was so I could familiarise myself with basic navigation, steering and handling without having to deal with tides and other hazards on the coast. Sessions were short (around 4 hours) and I would mark some waypoints and make sure I practiced heading on the right course of ground either manually steering with the oars, or by learning to use the autopilot. For coastal training, it is very important to be proficient in navigation. Compared to sculling on a river, it is a lot different on an ocean rowing boat because every movement feels sluggish.

The hardest part of training session is the logistics of getting Azula into the water! Specifically, the rudder which must retrofitted after launching and usually means having to get into the water to attach. Luckily, I had an old diving dry suit to avoid getting wet!

A man in a white teeshirt looks at the camera as he rows a large white boat solo on a lake

While I was training on the Lakes, I was also taking Azula around West Yorkshire to public events to showcase her and tell people about the challenge I am undertaking. I took her to Baildon Carnival, Farsley Festival and to Adore’s Weavers Court Care home in Yeadon. It was exciting to be engaging with my local communities and answering all their questions and explaining everything on board Azula. I also brought an erg (an indoor rowing machine) and challenged the public to row as far they could in one minute. It was great to see people all ages have a go, from as young as 4 up to 70 and there was plenty of competitive spirit among the communities, especially among fellow cadets and friends. One girl came back multiple times to try and best her score.

A row of pensioners pose in front of the boat with Jake

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At the end of July, Azula found her new home in Hartlepool Marina, where she will mostly stay over the course of the next 18 months. For my first open sea session, I did a 3-day training camp with Duncan Roy (Ocean rowing trainer/coach) and not only did he teach me the skills to safely train out at sea but to thrive on it. Water sessions included being able to get in and out of the Marina, being able to deploy the anchor (for emergencies or resting), passage planning routes and navigating them and using the VHF radio to cross the Teesside Shipping Channel (home to vessels of 200m+ length). It was amazing to be out in the open sea and feel as though crossing an ocean is becoming more of a reality. On day 2, I got to see the Teesside offshore windfarm up close and was lucky enough to see some seals popping their heads out like meerkats. To finish the day off, I had the opportunity to anchor offshore and sleep out on the water. Felt a bit like camping back in Scouts, minus the bobbing about on the water. Also had to use the bucket for the first time. Thankfully the water was flat and there were no spill issues. The only awkward bit was manoeuvring your bottoms through your harness gear and equipment.

A man stands on a white boat with oars in a calm ocean with blue skies and a windfarm visible behind

The next steps for me are to continue getting more experience out on the water and build up my skills and confidence over the Summer and early Autumn and at least qualify for the race.

You can follow Jake on social media (@jakedarcystill) or support his goals on the donation plaform Givestar.

First, La Gomera

At the end of 2025, data scientist and rower Jake Still plans to embark on an almighty rowing challenge while fundraising to support the restoration of his beloved rivers back home. Spending up to 50 or so days at sea alone, he’s aiming row across the Atlantic solo. This is the first in his series of guest blog posts, in which he’ll keep us updated with his training and eventual race progress.

The World’s Toughest Row Atlantic 2024 race is nearing the end with the last few boats still to come in and officially marks 10 months to go until I launch from San Sebastion in La Gomera. Earlier in December, I had the opportunity to travel down to La Gomera to see the race start line. It was exciting to be down there and see the marina with all the boats lined up in the water and how amazing to see the support from the locals with the race banners spread across the various local businesses such as restaurants.

If you can, it is advised to travel to La Gomera before your race year because it has been very helpful to familiarise myself with the process getting to the island and the knowing where everything on the island is. It is a little thing to help take pressure during my race year. To travel to La Gomera you have to fly Tenerife and then take the ferry across. The ferry was an interesting ride and my first taste of being rocked by deep water waves in the Atlantic as it travelled between the islands, a teaser to what will happen daily on my little rowing boat.

Visiting the start line La Gomera is one of the rare moments when you get to experience the largest fleet of ocean rowing boats. It was very beneficial seeing many different crew boats because each crew had their own unique setup and seeing the different approaches helps to generate ideas for what additions/work I need to do on my boat to prep her for the Atlantic. It was lovely to catch up with some of the crews I had met throughout 2024 either through doing sea survival courses together or training up in the North Sea at Hartlepool. Got the chance to hop on their boat and ask them lots of questions and deep dive into their kit. One of things I wanted to check was how spares were being secured. It was great to see them set off in La Gomera and having met some of the crews made the 2024 race more special to watch them as they traverse across the Atlantic and seeing them finally arrive in Antigua was amazing.

It was not only just current rowers there. There were lots of past rowers and future rowers, some who had raced in the previous year and others who enjoy coming back every year. It was fantastic speaking to them too about their own stories and how they found their crossing. La Gomera is very special for ocean rowing because of the World’s Toughest Row and it is great to be a part of this awesome community.

We wish Jake well with his training and eventually on his epic challenge. You can follow his progress via occasional blogs on this site.

Ellie’s Weir…ed Blog

In this post our GIS whizz Ellie Spilsbury outlines some of the work we have been doing to identify ways to improve the sustainability of the fisheries in our rivers and hopefully aid the return of salmon for the first time since the Industrial Revolution.

*Look closely and you will see hundreds of Minnows collecting at the bottom of this weir, unable to ascend. See the area in the water that looks dark brown; they are Minnows.*

Visit each of the three sections for more detail:

A familiar Story

Data analysis with a Salmon Splash of professional opinion

(Tr)outcomes expected

A familar story

Once upon a time, our River Aire had the highest Salmon population of any Yorkshire river. Then came the Industrial Revolution, which saw the wool and fabric industry boom throughout Yorkshire. Mills were constructed accompanied by weirs to harness our river’s energy. Although the mills are now closed and are becoming swanky new flats, the weirs often remain, isolating ecosystems that lie between them. Weirs disrupt the natural transport of sediment downstream, causing a build-up of silt and gravel behind the weir, which is detrimental to the habitat of spawning fish. Since 2011, one of the Aire River Trust’s goals has been to increase the connectivity of our river and its tributaries by removing or re-configuring weirs to allow fish passage. Following earlier work to install fish passes through and downstream of Leeds, significant steps towards this goal were made in 2022 with the successful construction of four fish passes as part of the DNAire project.

When we see water flowing over weirs, creating the sounds of waterfalls and visually pleasing white waters, it is easy to forget their man-made heritage and artificiality. It is hard to imagine seeing through the eyes of a migrating trout or salmon; every cell in its body instinctively directing it upstream to spawn, using both the stars and the earth’s magnetic field for navigation and then facing an unpassable wall of Yorkshire-dressed stone. It is often not just the height of the weir that presents the issue but the combination of weir height and the shallow depth of the concrete sill below the weir. The height at which salmon and trout jump is directly affected by the relative depth of the water at the foot of the barrier and the “hydraulic jump,” which boosts their leap.

The Environment Agency (EA) has identified around four hundred river obstacles within the Aire Catchment. However, we believe there to be many more. For example, the EA recorded two barriers to fish passage on Pitty Beck, yet on our Bradford Becks Walkovers, we found 11. This pattern is most likely repeated on each beck. Currently, tackling the removal of every weir in the catchment is unattainable. So, how did we prioritise them into a workable top twenty?

Data analysis with a Salmon splash of professional opinion

With help from The Rivers Trust, we are the first regional rivers trust to code an ArcGIS tool to accurately calculate the length of a river (including tributaries and forks) that would be opened and re-connected by the removal of every mapped weir in the Aire Catchment. Alongside this, we analysed ecological assessment data, invertebrate biodiversity, local community data (including deprivation), and weir visibility to the public. We assigned a score to each outcome and designed a weighted decision-making matrix that identified the weirs that scored the most highly. The data only tells us half the story, so we took our results to our expert team and discussed those weirs for which a solution in the short(ish) term might be feasible.

Once we had twenty feasible weirs, it was time to ground truth our ideas. The purpose of site visits is to add or, more often, diminish our confidence in the feasibility of the weir so that we only carry the most achievable sites to the next stage. We evaluated the weirs’ condition, site access, utility services or abstraction points, and landowner engagement by photographing and recording the area, our thoughts, and encounters.

The most surprising discovery for me was the actual size of a weir. After months of viewing photographs without visual perspective, weirs can appear to be half the scale of the real-life structure. Take a moment to analyse this photo: how tall do you believe it to be? See the very bottom of the blog for the upside-down answer.

(Tr)outcomes

We are fast approaching the end of the site visits and write-up stage. It is time to narrow our shortlist of twenty weirs down to four. So, it will be back around the table for our professionals to decide on the four “leak” proof projects to invest in. These four weirs will be subject to a comprehensive feasibility study and design process. I hope my next blog post will include more designs, machinery, hard hats and re-naturalised rivers.