Out & About May 2017

All at sea Local artist Lesley Foden has just turned 60 and has set herself the challenge of rowing round Great Britain, to raise money for the RNLI and Sea Changers. ANGELA KNIGHT caught up with her between training sessions.

I t’s early February before dawn, there’s frost on the ground and two terriers, Bert and Monty, are guarding a shed in a quintessentially English country garden as the church clock chimes the hour. From within, comes a whooshing sound – and, it has to be said, a bit of heavy breathing – it is the sound of their mistress, Lesley Foden, who is working out in the early hours – on a rowing machine.

the odd submarine surfacing alongside, Lesley will be arriving back, across the finish line, where she started at Burnham-on Crouch, on July 29. When I ask her why she is putting herself through this, she replies cheerily, “To see if I can – and because I’m 60 this year. “I also want to want to inspire older people to exercise, raise awareness of plastic pollution in the seas and to raise funds for Lifeboats and Sea Changers”. It’s fair to say that Lesley usually leads a fairly uneventful life – she is an artist, painting exquisitely-detailed still lifes of nature. Lesley was drawing before she could write and ever since she can remember she was always drawing from nature. Her dream as a child was to be Gerald Durrell’s illustrator on his travels. She paints, for example, bees, onions, flowers and animals, in such detail that you are tempted to touch them, they seem so real and have a richness reminiscent of the Dutch style. 

– clockwise, and you could say backwards too, because she will have her back to the direction in which she is heading. On June 3, at Burnham-on-Crouch, she will step into the sleek rowing boat, Liberty , draped with a Union Jack on the front, and start the gruelling challenge, rowing 24 hours a day, two hours on and two hours off, round the clock for eight whole weeks.

Lesley says that at first Bert and Monty were terrified to see this ‘creature’ with a head-torch tiptoeing into the shed in the dark before dawn. When she emerged in the light they were overjoyed to discover that there wasn’t a one-eyed monster in the shed, it was just her putting in some training. This summer, Lesley will be embarking on an 1,800-mile journey rowing around Great Britain

Liberty will stop seven times to change crew – at Cowes, Padstow, Dublin, Oban, Lochinver, Fraserburgh and Scarborough. Depending on currents and waves the boat could be either 150m or 60 miles from the shore line. If she survives sea sickness, strong coastal currents, conflicting tides, whirlpools, huge waves, crossing shipping lanes and perhaps

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