Wairarapa farmer rows across Cook Strait - ‘It’s all about attitude’

Wairarapa farmer Jamie Strang rowed Cook Strait, raising money for Farmstrong.

What does it take to row across Cook Strait?

If you ask Wairarapa farmer Jamie Strang, it takes determination and the right attitude.

On July 9, in about five hours, he completed the journey across the strait.

Jamie, who has also been a judge for the Ballance Farm Environment Awards, says he chose to stop a few metres off the coast of the South Island because the water got rough and the tide turned.

“I’d satisfied myself that I could row that far and I still had energy to go on.”

He says he didn’t want to go near the rocks on the other side so as not to cause damage to the skipper’s boat or his own boat.

The seeds for the journey were sown more than 20 years ago when, then in his 50s, Jamie cycled the length of New Zealand.

“I’ve done a lot of riding of bikes over the years,” he says.

When it came to preparing for his rowing feat, he felt his time riding bikes would have given him that bit of strength he needed in his legs to be able to row.

So he bought an offshore rowing boat from a Nelson distributor two years ago and began learning how to row by using videos on YouTube.

“I’m not sure that my rowing style is very good but I learned it ... as best I could.”

He was able to train using a hydro dam exactly 500 metres long in the hills just behind where he lives in Gladstone.

That also allowed him to get up close to nature, especially a family of swans.

“Rowing up and down, there’s been lots happening as I row that nature’s doing all around me. Which is a whole lot better on your brain than sitting in a shed with a rowing machine.”

He also went to Wellington Harbour a few times to get a feel of what it might be like on a “bigger bit of water”.

“I rowed across Lake Taupo, which is about 32km, just to prove to my brain that I could do it.”

He had thought about doing it a year ago but hadn’t been able to find someone as a pilot to take him across, but that extra year of training gave him the confidence he needed.

At 76, it might be assumed that his age would be a barrier, but it shouldn’t even come into it, Jamie says.

“You can put the barrier up wherever you want to. It’s just purely in your mind.”

Would he have done it when he was younger?

“It never crossed my mind when I was 20, 30 or 40 to go across Cook Strait. Why would you?

“It just became something I wanted to do [and] it’s done now.”

As for whether he plans to do any more rowing, Jamie says he’ll keep using it as it’s keeping him in good shape.

He believes that every one of us has something in us that makes us all want to do something different.

“It’s important that we have that little bit of drive, that little spark in us to do whatever it is, big or small, important or not important – that little spark that we need to have in us to do whatever we’re going to do.”

Jamie’s feat was raising money for Farmstrong, an organisation mostly farmer-based which helps raise awareness for mental health for those in rural communities.

“It’s been a pretty stressful year for some agricultural situations and it just seemed like a grand idea to ask people to put towards that if they wanted to.”

Leanne Warr has been editor of the Bush Telegraph since May 2023 and a journalist since 1996. She re-joined NZME in June 2021.