A 2,000-mile rowing race around Britain got under way yesterday.
The Royal Rowbarge Gloriana led the racers through London’s Tower Bridge as they embarked on the GB Row 2013 event.
Sally Kettle, 36, who was the first woman to row the Atlantic Ocean twice from east to west, is part of a two-woman team in the race.
She said: “It’s not going to be as physically tough as an ocean row. We’ve got six hours with the tide and six hours without. It’s going to be a mental challenge more than anything else.”
Ms Kettle, from Kingston upon Thames, southwest London, said the fact that the race was around Britain meant it could be tempting to pull into land and take a break.
“I can smell a fish and chip shop from a mile away,” she joked.
“Seeing land is quite tough and actually avoiding land is quite tough too. It’s very dangerous around the coast of the UK with tankers and the coastline.”
Briton ‘died on US rafting trip’
A British man has died following a white-water rafting trip in America, it has been reported.
Steve Morton, 47, from Cambridge, fell from a boat while exploring the rapids and canyons of Six Mile Creek in the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska, Sky News said.
He was reportedly pulled from the water unconscious and was airlifted to hospital in Anchorage where he died.
His wife Vanessa Langlois told Sky News that her husband had been on a climbing holiday and just days earlier had reached the summit of the nearby Mount McKinley, the highest mountain in the US.
She spoke to him shortly before his fatal adventure.
“He told me how happy he was to be coming home to see his fab family again and how much he had missed us,” she told Sky News. “He was buying gifts for all the children.
Bucket list
Two longtime friends ended up in jail in the US thanks to a ‘bucket list’ that included stealing from a store.
Police in Florida say 36-year-old Andrea Mobley and 38-year-old Jennifer Morrow face petty theft charges after stealing bathing suits and beef jerky during a shopping trip to Wal-Mart on Wednesday.
The Ocala Star-Banner newspaper reports the women told police they hadn’t seen each other in years and stealing from a retail store was on the ‘bucket list’.
Hot wheels
Some Austrian firefighters didn’t have to leave their station to deal with a recent alarm. The blaze came to them instead.
Fireman Roland Brandl says that colleagues were doing chores at the station in the town of Pregarten on Wednesday when a car sped in with flames shooting from beneath it.
One man grabbed an extinguisher and doused the fire. No-one was hurt. The blaze was apparently caused by a cleaning cloth which was left under the bonnet.
Rival protesters come to blows
Rival protesters clashed outside the Palace of Westminster yesterday, as BNP supporters and anti-fascist campaigners came to blows.
At least one man, a BNP activist, suffered a large cut to the nose after initially fierce shouting from either side of gated barriers spilled into violence.
Dozens of police sought to break up the disorder, at around 1pm yesterday, after the chanting escalated.
Police sniffer dogs were also deployed to help calm the situation, as tempers flared.
One BNP supporter who was injured in the scrap said: “I’ve put my best suit on today and come out for a peaceful demonstration and this is what’s happened.
“And to think they call us thugs!”