ROWING/Atlantic Challenge: Liam Gorman salutes a remarkable couple who will attempt to row the Atlantic for charity.

It's a tale of romance and adventure - and real danger. Paul Gleeson and Tori Holmes set off from the Canaries in the Atlantic Challenge rowing race today (10.30am) with no rowing experience and only their belief in themselves and a good cause to sustain them.

Gleeson is a 29-year-old personal finance consultant from Limerick who won junior and senior Munster Cup rugby medals with Crescent Comprehensive in Limerick, and headed for Australia in 2002 to play some rugby and take a bite out of life.

When he chose to do a charity cycling marathon which took him across Australia from Perth to Sydney, he had a logistical problem: he needed someone to follow him in a car and organise the charity side, so he put an advertisement in the newspaper.

Enter Victoria "Tori" Holmes.

"To this day she still slags me about it," he says. "I wasn't looking at her and saying, 'She's nice'. I just wanted somebody that wouldn't do a runner with the car!"

The slight 21-year-old from Alberta, Canada, had worked in Bangladesh with a Canadian charity before travelling through Asia to Australia. Gleeson had found a partner, who helped raise Aus$400,000 for impoverished children from his endurance. And stole his heart.

Their commitment to row the Atlantic, which should raise hundreds of thousands of euro for the charity Concern, is a step into the unknown for a young couple who have been together little more than two years. Although he admits "there is bound to be the odd row", Gleeson talks of his partner's surprising maturity for her years.

"I have as good a chance of getting on with Tori as with anyone else. Talking to people who have done it, they all say you have to be so considerate of the other person's feelings."

They are both lost in admiration for rowers Eamonn and Peter Kavanagh, who gave them the boat in which they used to become the first and only Irish crew to complete the race, in 1997. The Christina was named after the Kavanaghs' mother, and Holmes and Gleeson are intent on getting it across the Atlantic in 60 days. But if they are forced to abandon the boat, it will be burnt at sea to avoid it becoming a danger.

"Eamonn and Peter have been brilliant," says Gleeson. "They're two tough bastards. Real old-school."

The Kavanaghs will wave the young crew off this morning. Tori's parents hope to be in Antigua to greet the pair, and Gleeson's parents, Bert and Lourdes, are holding their breath at home.

"The folks went nuts when I told them a year ago I was going to do this," says Gleeson. "Their way to deal with it has been 'out-of-sight out-of-mind'. They've been supportive, but my father said, 'If we go out there the last thing your mother will see is you heading off into the Atlantic."

The Kavanaghs, who said they would never do the race again despite their impressive placing of fifth in 1997, have eased some of the couple's worries about their inexperience as rowers. Their endurance rather than their skills will be the key factor.

"Eamonn said, 'You can learn to row - and out there you will be thrown about so much anyway,' " says Gleeson.

While Olympian Gearóid Towey and crewmate CiaráLewis will cherish hopes of bettering the Kavanaghs' performance, and maybe even being the first boat home, Gleeson is targeting getting through the first stage and keeping going.

"The first week or so will tell a lot. People will either be saying 'we could win this' or 'we could be here for a long time'."

Gleeson's two months traversing Australia on a bicycle is not his only claim to having the tough-mindedness for this trip. He mentions in passing that he broke his back when he fell off scaffolding as a young man - and then plays it down as a mere compression fracture of a vertebrae low in his back which has healed. "I wouldn't be concerned about it," he says.

Why this race? "At some stage it's going to get rough. And that's the interesting thing - you can learn something about yourself," he laughs. "But that's me saying that on dry land."

This morning he heads off into the ocean with his loved one on one hell of an adventure.

To contribute to the Gleeson/ Holmes race text Row to 57252. Each text is worth €2 to Concern.