It’s been a crazy week for the Row for Hemophilia team. The Great Pacific Race was set to start on June 5th. If you didn’t real the earlier post, this is an endurance rowing race from California to Hawaii. One of the rowers, Jacob Pope (a rower for University of Georgia) is a hemophiliac and is using this race to raise awareness and money for the cause.
The day before the race was to start, the race decided that they couldn’t participate because Jacob is a hemophiliac. Which they knew about. Which was the whole point.
You can imagine their frustration. They’ve trained for a year, prepared a boat for a 40-80 day row and suddenly they aren’t allowed to do it.
But they are a determined pair, so they just got busy.
They organized the same safety precautions that the race was offering. They got Coast Guard approval. They got approval from both harbor masters. They changed the registry of their boat (recently purchased from the race director) to the US because the Coast Guard gives US vessels priority. They arranged for GPS tracking.
It took a while, but a week later, they were ready to do it on their own.
They left about 3AM Pacific Time today. So the rest of the race has about a six day head start. You can see their position here, though it may be several hours behind (the map updates 7 times a day).
Will they pull it off? Who knows. Rowing to Hawaii is pretty much crazy by definition. But I’ll be following and cheering.
Steve Fischer's Random Blog 
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