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When Ed asked me to be part of the team, my first reaction was,
"Yeah, sure, sounds really great,"
hoping that it was another one of his mad ideas that would never happen.
And then it got increasingly more serious
to the point where I started to think, "I should get out of this."
Then eventually I just sort of thought, "Well, why wouldn't I do it?"
My name is Natasha Kirby
and I am doing the 500-mile Pedalo Challenge.
It is a challenge where we get on a pedal-powered boat
and try to circumnavigate the Scottish coast.
So, go from Inverness through the lochs -
Loch Lochy, Loch Linnhe -
round into the Irish Sea, up over the top of Scotland
and back to Inverness again.
The trip in total we're hoping will take us up to three weeks.
If we hit that right, we should be doing about 17 knots.
It'll be like a speedboat.
Because we're going through Loch Ness, we thought it'd be funny
if we shaped the pedalo like the Loch Ness monster.
It can't be a beach pedalo
because it would take us a year to get round the coast of Scotland,
so it's been built by the University of Southampton from an old sailing boat.
The original sailing boat was called Mutley.
It's bad luck to change the name of a boat once you've named it.
So, we've called it Mutley. We like it.
So, team 500-mile Pedalo,
it's Ed, Ed is my boyfriend,
and me...
..and then my brother Nicholas,
and then a guy called Sholto who is a very old friend of Ed's.
Planning for the challenge started almost a year ago
and has been pretty much non-stop since January I would say.
Coming up is our Isle of Wight sea test and I'm excited
because if it goes well, we'll be feeling so great about the challenge,
which starts in... less than six weeks.
We've come down to the Isle of Wight. Today we are in Cowes.
Tomorrow we're unleashing her
on the sea for the very first time.
Up until now we've only done tests
on lakes and inland water,
so this will be the first big test.
The challenge is raising money for two charities.
First is Cancer Research.
The second is Parkinson's.
The reason I'm doing the challenge and feel so strongly about it
is last year my mother passed away very suddenly from lung cancer.
She was diagnosed at the beginning of May last year
and then passed away less than six weeks later.
The reason we're raising money for Parkinson's
is because Ed's father has Parkinson's.
I understand he was an incredibly vibrant man
and now he really struggles with the simplest of things.
With the challenge we're hoping to raise £250,000.
At the moment we're over £50,000,
but, you know, every penny raised can do something good.
This test is apparently, according to everyone in the Isle of Wight,
on different waters to the Scottish waters.
I'm not actually sure really what that means.
I think what they're trying to say is it'll be a lot choppier up in Scotland.
So, Mummy... What would Mummy think?
She would think it was completely ridiculous.
I mean, she would be proud of us. She always was of whatever we did.
But I think she would just think we were mad!
We're trying to check to make sure that in heavy swell or with big waves
that the pedalo is stable
and we can keep pedalling
both into the wind, across the wind and round some choppier waters.
I don't want to jinx it, but so far, quite good.
I think we're going to anchor up and have a bit of lunch and then carry on.
So, you know I said I didn't want to jinx it?
Yeah... we just broke it.
We may need to be towed in a bit.
We thought we'd try to put a bit more power through the thing
and see what we could do and then something snapped.
Once you lose all drive, you're dead in the water with something like this.
We haven't really spent longer than two hours on it
without something going wrong.
But we know the problem, we know how to fix it
and we know what we're going to do to make it much better.
Once we get over this, it'll be fine. We'll do a few more tests before we go.
It's just really annoying.