Four men in a boat

The dust has settled on the four men in a boat saga…

The blisters repaired… The strained friendships recovered… Any fitness gains lost…

But we’re delighted to be able to tell you that through your support we’ve managed to raise £2,374.61 worth of donations (not including gift aid which takes it up to around £2,800)

If you’ve been putting your donation off, you’ve got until the end of October to do it… But you may as well do it now.

Don’t even think about looking at our photos until you’ve donated!!!

PS – any ideas what to do with the fourmeninaboat.com website once we stop accepting donations…?

It’s a ready made website complete with matching twitter and Facebook accounts (with followers)

We’ve just been treated to a fantastic steak dinner by Glenn, Ginger and Alex Irvine at their house… Glenn and Ginger are Alex’s parents and the driving force behind the charity.

It was a fantastic opportunity to learn more about the condition and the charity and also to find out more about how the money will most likely be used. It’s a very worthy cause and the crew would like to assure you that every one of your donations will make a difference while they try to piece together the parts of the puzzle which makes up the condition.

If you’re interested, any of the crew will be more than happy to explain it to you.

When James set £2,000 as our fundraising target I thought it was a bit ambitious with all things considered (things like only creating the donations page less than a week before we were due to start)

But we’ve been overwhelmed with support all along and thanks to a donation from Tom Killick that has tipped us over the edge, we’ve now hit that target and hope that more donations will still come in.

A huge thanks to everyone from the crew!

Alex Irvine is an NA patient, family friend of James and from the London Apprentice in Isleworth back to Putney, the cox of the crew.

Alex did an amazing job steering us home and would definitely put some of LRC’s regular coxes to shame. Here’s what she had to say:

Dear James, Iain ,Mark and Stephen,

Thank you all for making my sunday afternoon a real treat. I really enjoyed coxing the boat and I hope I didn’t steer her too far off course A special thanks to all your friends for giving so generously to the cause.
I have still got a few of my friends to follow up on so who knows we might make that 2000 without gift aid after all

thanks again
love alex

Sitting in the middle of the boat we weren’t sure if Alex was having a good time or not because all we could hear was James giving her his life story… but to eliminate any doubt here’s a photo:

Alas, we’ve made it.

We rowed back from the London Apprentice with Alex coxing us.

Alex is an neuroacanthocytosis patient and the main reason we got involved with the charity.

She did a great job steering us back down the river and we hope that she had as much fun as we did.

We’ve got some photos that we will post in due course but for now we’ve got other priorities… (sorry Valerie… We can’t stop him!)

Huge thanks to Tom Mannington for arranging food and drink for us here!

It definitely eased the pain on leaving the upper Thames and coming back onto the tideway.

Looking forward to doing the final stretch although there are a few more hours before the tide turns… Time to make sure we are properly hydrated!

After a quick stop for a stretch we are currently waiting at Molesey Lock.

Best estimate is that we will arrive at the London apprentice for 1ish.

We escaped the angry campsite owners and are in our way to the Old Apprentice to pick up a special passenger!

The locks are getting a lot bigger down this end of the river!

After a delicious meal courtesy of Mr & Mrs Clarke (thank you very much from all of us) we turned up at the campsite and may as well have punched them in the face they were so unhappy to see us…

But after we explained that we’d just arrived having been held up by locks and that we’d actually intended on going to Molesey they were more understanding…

Bav obviously made this up, we’d intended on camping here all along but we are too easily distracted by food!

Having dinner. No time to write anything more!

Foooooooood!