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FACULTY OF EDUCATION
THE UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND
Our students
Intrepid academic to row
the Pacific Ocean
What would you do if in your first attempt to row an ocean your small boat is
attacked by a shark, the boat flips and leaves you with a head injury that needs
stitches and you end up getting rescued in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean?
When that happened to Tara Remington in her first ocean row she went and
rowed the Atlantic again. Now she’s about to take on the Pacific.
The 43-year-old PhD candidate and University of Auckland Professional Teaching
Fellow will row from Los Angeles to Waikiki, Hawaii this May with American
Paralympian Angela Madsen.
Tara is doing the 4,000km odyssey to raise money for New Zealand girl
Charlotte Cleverley-Bisman. Charlotte lost her arms and legs to meningitis as a
baby in 2004. Now a 10-year-old, she needs on-going assistance with prosthetic
limbs as she grows. Tara’s row will also help raise enough money for Charlotte to
attend Camp No Limits, a special camp for amputees and their families held in the
United States each year.
Tara first got involved with Charlotte’s charity through the Meningitis Trust in the 2007 Atlantic Rowing Race, and now her
daughter Jade is Charlotte’s pen-pal. “To use the row as an opportunity to fundraise as well is very important to me,” Tara says.
Tara will also use the experience towards her PhD studies in adventure based learning. She is hoping to include the row as a
chapter in her thesis: a case study on learning through adventure-based education. This chapter will comment on the characteristics of
learning in an extreme adventure context, the strengths and limitations of auto ethnography as a method for recording learning in that
context, and areas for further research.
Tara predicts the journey will take between 45 and 55 days of hard work. But she isn’t stopping there. Her quest to complete the
Pacific Ocean with Angela takes place in two stages with the second stage between Hawaii and New Zealand planned for 2017.
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