Rowboat in a Hurricane

by Julie Angus

  But Colin was distracted by something in the distance, and didn’t respond. Then I saw what held his attention: a boat! An open fibreglass fishing boat powered by an outboard motor headed towards us.

  “Bonjour!” yelled one of the three men onboard.

  “Bonjour!” I yelled back. I guessed they were from Martinique, a neighbouring French island north of St. Lucia.

  “Habitez-vous Martinique?” I yelled in my rusty high-school French.

  “Oui!” the man replied.

  I felt thrilled to talk to other humans face to face, but these fishermen had little interest in us.

  One of the men pointed beneath our boat. “Poisson?”

  I nodded my head. They dropped their baited lines into the water and made a wide circle around our boat, moving at about six knots.

  I peered into the water. Ted, Fred, and crew had followed us all the way here. Thankfully the fishermen wouldn’t be interested in such small fish. They wanted dorado. As these men surely knew, schools of dorado gather under flotsam and other slow-moving objects. I searched the waters beneath us, but couldn’t see any of our golden friends. Perhaps they were off hunting or had been scared away by the noise of the motor.

  But then it began. The lines jerked, and the men pulled fish after flapping fish over the sides of their boat with long gaffs. I’d like to say we defended our fish and yelled at the fishermen to leave us alone, or tried to row away from their nets, but we didn’t. Caught up in the shock of seeing other people, by the time we thought of doing something, it was too late. Content with their day’s catch, the men pulled in their lines and headed back to Martinique.

  I peered into the waters under our boat. I didn’t see one dorado.

  “They didn’t get Legend,” Colin said.

  “How do you know?” I asked, feeling my eyes grow moist.

  “I was watching them the entire time. Legend wasn’t one of the ones caught,” Colin said.

  I wasn’t convinced. We had last seen Legend the previous day, his giant, sleek body cruising the depths beneath us. And it had been difficult to observe the fishing boat through the waves. They could easily have hauled in Legend without our noticing it.

  Suddenly Legend’s unmistakable form appeared in the water off my starboard oar. He was the only dorado we saw return after the fishermen left; he stayed with our boat for about an hour. When we came within five kilometres of land, the giant fish descended out of sight. We never saw Legend again.

  We could now see the island’s palm trees distinctly, but the wind still blew at thirty knots. Colin joined me at the oars and sat in the second rowing station, and we rowed in tandem for the first time since leaving Portugal. It had been more efficient for us to spend longer hours rowing individually. But now, hearing the thunder of exploding waves on shore, we needed to maximize our power in order to navigate the final tricky stretch into the sheltered harbour.

  Our speed climbed as the current channelled through the passage between St. Lucia and Martinique. We were rowing due south, at a ninety-degree angle to the current, to create the vector to angle us directly past St. Lucia’s northern tip. With tension running high and waves thundering onto volcanic rocks only one hundred metres away from us, we finally rounded the point and slipped into the lee of St. Lucia. The reduced wind and current still pushed against us, and we had to turn suddenly and row with all our strength just to hold our ground. I was thirsty and exhausted, but we couldn’t stop for a second. If we lost any distance whatsoever, the force of the currents would increase, and we would be swept away from St. Lucia with no chance of making it back. I looked at the GPS. We were moving at zero knots.

  “Harder, harder!” I screamed.

  Colin’s brown skin was soaked with sweat. We pumped in unison to break the stalemate. Suddenly the digital display flashed 0.1 knots east. Perfect. We struggled and pulled, and finally it moved to 0.2 knots. I felt like I was going to throw up, but we couldn’t give up, or our next stop would be Costa Rica. I wanted my margarita. In the distance I could see tourists relaxing on a sandy, golden beach. Our speed began to rise quickly—0.4 knots, and then a few seconds later, 1 knot. We had broken free of the currents! A strong wind still blasted against us, but now we moved steadily forward.

  “Yes!” Colin screamed.

  We didn’t have detailed charts for St. Lucia, but fortunately one of our reference books had some information on the island, as well as a small-scale chart. We knew that a sheltered harbour and marina lay on the north end of the eastern shore, and that the island was home to about 150,000 people who spoke English and a French-based Creole. We anticipated easy communication and all the luxuries we dreamed of.

  “That must be Pigeon Island!” I said, pointing to the rocky outcrop. “Rodney Bay Marina is just around the corner.” I couldn’t wait to stop rowing. We’d been paddling at a sprinting pace for almost four hours, and my arms had become quivering spaghetti.

  We slid through the narrow opening that led into Rodney Bay’s turquoise lagoon. The perpetual rolling waves of the open ocean suddenly ceased; for the first time since departing Lisbon four months earlier, our boat didn’t rock. I slowed my pace and marvelled at the tropical paradise. A tin rowboat painted bright blue, red, and orange pulled up beside us. The boat’s name, Marley, was painted on the side and, judging by its Rastafarian rower, it could only be a tribute to the legendary Bob Marley.

  “Ya, maan,” he said, drawing out his vowels. He swung his dreadlocks over his shoulder and bobbed his head rhythmically, as if to the beat of a song we couldn’t hear. “Where you come from?”

  “Portugal.”

  His eyes widened, and he let out a long whistle. “No waay, maan. All the way in a rowboat! Welcome to our island.”

  News of our arrival spread, and a few other boats came out to greet us—excited locals in their aluminum boats and yachters with inflatables. We passed our video camera to a young man piloting an open boat with Sparkle Laundry emblazoned on the side, and he filmed our final moments rowing to shore. I was overwhelmed by all the boats, noise, people, and cheers; I felt like I was in a trance.

  We left our flotilla to pull into a free berth near the customs office. A long-haired man in his late twenties walked quickly down the dock with a bag in his hand. He introduced himself as Jean-Marc.

  “I saw you coming,” Jean-Marc said in a heavy French accent. “And I thought to myself, ‘What would I want if I had just rowed across an ocean?’ So I go to the liquor store and get you cold beer.”

  “Thank you,” we said in unison. We couldn’t have dreamed of a better welcome.

  Colin got off the boat first, climbing unsteadily onto the dock. He had a hard time keeping his balance and grabbed our new friend’s shoulder for support.

  “This is not easy,” Colin said. “My knees feel loose, as though they’re going to snap.” Colin leaned against Jean-Marc with a beer in his hand, making it easy to misinterpret the cause of his poor balance.

  Colin insisted on capturing my first steps on camera, so I savoured the cold beer while he set up the equipment. I couldn’t believe how quickly our surroundings had changed. Half an hour earlier, we struggled against winds and waves, prepared to spend another month at sea, and now we had access to all the luxuries of land. Reaching land had been my wish so many times throughout this journey, and I often wondered if that wish would ever come true. Now that we had actually landed, I couldn’t get over how dreamlike it seemed.

  My first step helped me catch up with reality. The dock rolled beneath my feet like a boat in pitching waters, not a pier in a calm lagoon. I struggled with the conflicting input; my eyes told me that the dock was stationary and that the boat pitched, but my sense of balance relayed a different story. I took several tentative steps and stumbled, catching myself just before I fell. After 118 days on a boat, I had all but forgotten how to walk.

  We finished our beers with Jean-Marc and awkwardly made our way to the marine offices to register, but by the time we arrived
they were closing. They told us to come back the next day. Everything about this island, including the registration procedures, seemed laid-back.

  Rodney Bay, the main marina on St. Lucia, has mooring space for more than two hundred boats, and all the amenities any yachter (or rower) could dream of, including restaurants, a grocery shop, a liquor store, a repair shop, and a marine store. Overwhelmed by choices, we tried to decide which fantasies to fulfill first.

  We had dreamed about so many things over the previous few months. The top ten things I wanted to do on land were almost all food-related. I wanted a strawberry margarita, fresh fruit, ice cream, thin-crust pizza loaded with cheese, good coffee, and chocolate. I also wanted a shower, clean clothes, new books, and a Canadian newspaper. Colin’s list wasn’t that different from mine. He wanted a piña colada, black licorice, Maynard wine gums, fresh fruit, good coffee, ice cream, Thai lemongrass coconut curry, fresh salad, and a Canadian newspaper. A shower and clean clothes did not appear on Colin’s wish list. I suspected he rather enjoyed not having to bathe.

  We worked with unparallelled dedication to fulfill our wish lists. I couldn’t remember ever setting about a task with such enthusiasm. We started at a quaint café that served a cornucopia of ice cream flavours. I finally decided on pistachio, although I pledged to return daily to sample the remaining flavours, and Colin found his favourite, coconut. We had often dreamed of this moment, especially on the days we’d sweated on the oars, with the relentless sun scorching our skin and nothing colder to drink than lukewarm water “It’s even better than I imagined,” Colin murmured to no one in particular, closing his eyes in ecstasy.

  We sat on a wooden beach, silently savouring our ice cream and enraptured by the activity around us. Vacationers strolled hand in hand along the waterfront, yachts motored into and out of their slips, locals sold fruit and straw hats, and shops buzzed with activity. Our surroundings seemed so alien. It was as if we had spent the past four months in a parallel world, and now the two worlds had merged.

  After we finished our ice cream cones, we returned to the same café for coffee and reclaimed our seat by the water, delighting in the strong Colombian java. We wanted to explore the area and learn what our surroundings had to offer, but the fifty-metre walk between the café and the park bench was all we could muster. The ground continued to roll under each step we took, and I was exhausted from using leg muscles I’d forgotten I had. We must have looked like a couple of drunk invalids, not like athletes.

  That night we had dinner with a Canadian yachter in an adjacent upscale restaurant. We ticked several more items off our wish lists: I ordered a Mediterranean pizza with salad and a margarita, and Colin had a Thai chicken curry and a piña colada. Our first meal on land after a third of a year in a rowboat was divine. We must have made terrible dinner companions; not only had we forgotten the etiquette of small talk after so many months alone, but we were too smitten with our culinary experience to focus on much else.

  The next day we continued down our top-ten lists. Soupie from the Sparkle Laundry (our volunteer cameraman when we’d first arrived) picked up our dirty clothes and returned them clean and folded. I showered in the marina bathroom—my first time bathing in fresh water in four months—and watched as layers of grime peeled off my body and discoloured the water. I marvelled at the lather the soap and shampoo formed in fresh water and savoured the feeling of being truly clean. What I liked less was trying to comb the knots and mini-dreadlocks out of my wet hair. After pulling out enough hair to create a small shag carpet, I emerged just as clean and neat as my freshly laundered clothes. Colin, too, looked dapper, apart from a persistent dreadlock.

  Now that we were scrubbed and well-fed, we focussed on the logistics of preparing for the last leg of our row. This wasn’t easy. Our boat had become the local tourist attraction, and a constant stream of interesting people distracted us. Generous people took us out to dinner, gave us money to buy meals, and helped us out. The marina manager waived our moorage fees. A Norwegian family with three young kids in the sailboat moored next to Ondine gave us a laptop computer to use for the rest of the journey, and Kevlar matting to fix our broken oar.

  We spent most of our days either on the boat or at the nearby Internet café, and all our nights on the boat (the only nearby hotel cost several hundred dollars a night). Our inability to walk more than a few hundred metres was prohibitive, but I was quite content to remain close to the boat. I felt uncomfortable and even a little agoraphobic when we strayed too far. Getting used to the real world again would take time.

  A few days after we arrived, our new lead sponsor, Truestar Health, flew their representative Garie MacIntosh out to meet us. Garie, a neat man in his mid-twenties, arrived at the marina with a duffle bag full of goodies, including nutritional supplements to complement our diet for the journey home. No more worries about scurvy.

  As Colin and I checked our e-mails at the nearby Internet café, we received more good news. Wallace & Carey, a Canadian distribution company that had helped with the first half of Colin’s expedition, offered financial assistance to see us home, and a few other people made donations. For the first time, I finally felt at ease with my decision to row across the Atlantic. The end was drawing close, and we no longer faced pending bankruptcy. From the beginning, despite all our plans and preparations, it had felt like we were running a fine line, both financially and logistically. Now I felt the balance swing in our favour.

  We spent much of our time in St. Lucia cleaning the boat and restocking it. We had four months of trash to dispose of—mostly food packaging—and several grocery carts full of freshly purchased food to pack. We ordered charts for the Caribbean Sea and for Costa Rica, and purchased large, buoyant fenders to tie to our cabin for extra flotation (if we capsized, they would help the boat right itself).

  The outside of the boat needed to be cleaned, too. I leaned over its side to scrub a brown stain that had formed above the water line, and a movement in the murky water caught my attention. I peered into the depths.

  “Colin, come here quick!” I yelled.

  Colin clambered out of the cabin, where he had been scrubbing the mouldy lockers with bleach. “What is it?”

  “I think Ted and Fred followed us into the harbour.”

  “No, they couldn’t have. It’s crowded and polluted in here, and they’re deep-sea fish,” Colin replied.

  “Well, what’s that, then?” I said, pointing to Ted as he surfaced six inches from my hand.

  Colin’s mouth hung open. “Wow, I guess they really are staying with us. I wonder if they’ll follow us back out to sea.”

  AFTER TEN DAYS in St. Lucia, we were ready to leave, but the weather wouldn’t let us. Six-metre waves and ninety-kilometre-an-hour winds hammered the island. Two local fishing boats actually sank, while most of the yachters huddled safely in the marina waiting for conditions to improve. We followed suit.

  St. Lucia is a much better place to wait out foul weather than the open ocean. We explored the nearby beach, which offered a panoramic view of St. Lucia’s most famous landmark, the Pitons—twin towers of rock that stretched into the sky. The Pitons formed when lava hardened within two volcanic vents and subsequent erosion removed the surrounding rock, leaving only the two jagged tusks that gave St. Lucia a unique profile. We spent many hours lounging around in the marina coffee shop, reading tourist booklets that detailed the island’s history. We learned that the island had switched between British and French control so often that it has been deemed “the Helen of the West Indies” after the mythical

  Helen of Troy, the beautiful daughter of Zeus. France and Britain fought fourteen wars for St. Lucia, until finally, the British took complete control in 1814. Then, in 1979, it became an independent Commonwealth Nation.

  After two days of waiting, the weather improved, and we embarked on the final leg of our voyage across the Atlantic Ocean.

  16

  THE FINAL LEG

  TO COSTA RICA

 
WE FOUND LEAVING St. Lucia much different from setting off from Lisbon. Four months before, I had been nervous about my abilities and uncertain what the future would hold. Now I felt more confident and looked forward to this final leg. During our stay in St. Lucia, I had actually begun to miss life on the ocean: the birds, the fish, the simplicity.

  Unlike our departure from Lisbon, we didn’t have to worry about leaving with the outgoing tide. We knew that the west-flowing currents and wind would sweep us along as soon as we paddled a few kilometres from shore.

  At 10:00 AM on February 1, I untied the ropes and Colin lowered the oars. We waved goodbye to about twenty people who’d gathered on the dock to wish us good luck and snap photos. Air horns blasted, and shouts of “Bon voyage!” filled the air. Several dinghies and sailboats trailed us as we left. This warm send-off reflected the generosity we’d felt throughout our stay on St. Lucia.

  Swiftly, we moved away from the island, and the waters transformed from turquoise to a darker blue as the ocean floor dropped away. The waves increased in size, and soon the boat swung wildly back and forth. Oddly, I felt I was home again, back in our world of two.

  We had chosen our route to Costa Rica carefully. We wanted to avoid as many coral reefs as possible. These fragile ecosystems can be damaged by even a slight impact; they could also easily lead to a shipwreck for us. Sadly, the rise in ocean temperatures has started to kill the microscopic plants, called zooxanthellae, which have a symbiotic relationship with coral polyps. When the plants die, so do the corals. Most of the coral colonies in the Caribbean have already undergone some bleaching (a term that describes the loss of colour in coral that occurs when the zooxanthellae die). When conditions improve, coral reefs can recover from bleaching, but as ocean temperatures continue to rise and as oceans become more acidic, the reefs may reach a point from which recovery is impossible.

  It has been predicted that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef—the largest reef, not to mention the largest living organism on Earth, and the only one visible from space—will lose 95 per cent of its living coral by 2050. The 2004 report Implications of Climate Change for Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, commissioned by the WWF and the Australian government, found that although the Great Barrier Reef is one of the healthiest reefs, rising ocean temperatures are causing the coral to bleach and eventually die.