It looks like the boys are attempting to go one better than the girls in the endurance rowing stakes. The star of last week's Obiter, Carolyn Kirkham, rowed from London to Paris - but Charlie Marlow, a 26-year-old solicitor from City firm Charles Russell, is attempting to follow in the footsteps of double Olympic gold medallist James Cracknell and row across the Atlantic. He will be joined (as Cracknell was by TV presenter Ben Fogle) by rowing partner Matthew Mackaness, a 26-year-old chartered surveyor.


'I have hardly done any rowing,' Marlow says, rather worryingly - but then again, there is plenty of time for practice, as the duo will sally forth in 2009. Each will row two hours on, two hours off, over the 3,000-mile course, starting off in the Canary Islands and finishing in the West Indies.



The world record is currently a palm-blistering 39 days, but, 'depending on how the training goes', Marlow says an attempt on the record is not out of the question. Nevertheless, the main target is to raise around £80,000 for charities Brain Tumour UK and Shrewsbury House, a youth and community centre based in Everton, Liverpool. Charles Russell is one of the main sponsors, but Marlow says further sponsorship is more than welcome.



'It was now or never,' he says. 'Given the career I'm in, you rarely get the chance to do something like this - something with such a long time commitment.'



The Charles Russell team also hit the water in May, coming in 4th at the Manches Cup 2008, the legal regatta, on board J109 High Tension. And if that wasn't enough, they were also in action back on dry land, when 20 of them completed a 95-mile charity cycle from Oxford to Cambridge, raising £14,000 for the Make-a-Wish Foundation. Tim Tyndall, partner and head of Charles Russell's Cambridge office, said that 'for the more casual cyclists, the Chiltern hills felt like Everest.'



Obiter can only wonder what they put in the water at Charles Russell.