It’s been a tough inaugural Great Pacific Race. Many of the rowing teams had to turn around after just a few hours, and the US Coast Guard has had to do a tough rescue of the four-man Pacific Rowers team. One of the teams to have abandoned was Vancouver’s two-woman Row the Pacific Team. Leanne Zrum suffered tremendously from seasickness and dehydration and the duo decided to turn back. Rebecca Berger scrambled to find a replacement, and did, but they could not get out to sea fast enough to have support assured. Here’s Berger’s latest statement:The USCG has urged us not to continue with our intention to row from Monterey to Hawaii as part of the Great Pacific Race. Â In light of the rescues over the weekend, Â they feel increasingly that the conditions are not fit for the task.
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Simply put, we’ve missed our window to get out of the bay with the coast guards blessing.
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One option available to us would be to completely disassociate ourselves from the organized race and continue on as planned.
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After giving it some thought, I made the very difficult decision to postpone the row at this time.
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The Team ClearlyContacts.ca campaign has been a long and fruitful one with the support of so many generous, inspiring people, and organizations.  The set backs of the past few weeks are a lot to process and “recalculating” has been a challenge in itself.
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The Great Pacific Race is an amazing event with potential to become a bi-annual success. Â I do not want to do anything to jeopardize the future of the event or the future of the sport.
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I’d like to thank Lia Ditton for stepping in to replace Leanne Zrum at such short notice.  In the five days we worked together I learned a lot and the Honey Badger is a better boat for having her onboard for such a short time.
We wish Berger and all other rowers good luck in the future.
