Stop Drifting, Start Rowing

by Roz Savage

  The following day, Nicole backed the trailer down a ramp to launch the boat. Neither of us enjoyed trying to manoeuvre the thing in reverse, but on this occasion I had to be in the boat, ready to man the oars as the boat floated up off its trailer, so I had a cast-iron excuse for delegating to Nicole. Once afloat, I rowed around the corner and moored the Brocade to the fuel dock in readiness for the launch, which was scheduled first thing the next morning.

  The following day I was awake early, roused by a mixture of anticipation and anxiety, both eager and reluctant to get started. Conditions were perfect: the air still, the water like a mirror. Nicole and I carried a few bags of fresh provisions down to the boat, the more durable rations such as snack bars and dehydrated meals having been stowed on board long before.

  A small group of people had gathered on the dock to see me off, including a news crew from Eugene, Oregon. They had been none too keen to come, as it was a considerable drive from Eugene and they would have to set out around 3 A.M. to get there in time. But Nicole had coaxed and cajoled in her most winsome way until they had finally relented and agreed to come and report on my departure. We’d hoped for much more media coverage, and if I’d been leaving from San Francisco we would have had it, but Crescent City was an obscure outpost of humanity, far from big urban centres and media outlets.

  There were a few other well-wishers. A father had brought his little girl, no more than a toddler, to present me with several bars of imported Lindt chocolate for my voyage. Several men from the local boatyard had come to see me off, too, but generally it was a low-key affair. Although more media attention would have been welcome, I decided that a quiet departure suited me just fine. Celebrations were for arrivals, not departures.

  After a few words to the TV camera, I got into my boat and Nicole pushed against the oar to propel me away from the floating dock. I looked at my watch and noted the time to be recorded later in my logbook: 6:49 A.M., 12 August 2007. A smattering of applause accompanied the first few strokes of the several million that lay ahead.

  The day was beautiful, and I was in a relaxed mood as I paddled out of the harbour. That didn’t last for long. No sooner had I cleared the harbour wall than there was a gentle crunching sound, and my boat stopped dead. I swore. I had run aground. It was low tide, I knew that, but I’d had no idea that the water would be this shallow. Embarrassed, I scanned the harbour wall. I didn’t see anybody. I gave a sigh of relief that apparently my humiliation had not been observed.

  I tried to push the boat off the sandbank with the oars, but to no avail. Sighing with irritation this time, I took my feet out of the rowing shoes, rolled up my black leggings to my knees, and gingerly swung my legs over the side of the boat into the chilly water. It barely covered my ankles. I pushed the boat off the sandbank, clambered back on board, and quickly resumed rowing as if nothing had happened.

  Unfortunately, you can always count on a photographer to be around when you least want them to be. The following day The Daily Telegraph in Britain published an article under the headline: “Roz Savage runs aground minutes into journey,” with a photograph of me standing in the water, bending over slightly with my hands on my knees as I survey the situation. If it had been a caption competition, my facial expression suggested that anything I had to say at that moment would most likely be unprintable.

  Afloat once more in golden morning sunlight, I rowed past the historic lighthouse at Battery Point, a pretty whitewashed cottage with a large maritime light sticking out of the middle of its red-tiled roof like a preposterously overgrown chimney. As I paddled out to the open Pacific, the mist thickened while the sun continued to shine, creating a glowing, ethereal haze. Small groups of sea lions swam alongside my boat, their heads popping up like periscopes from the waves to check me out. They were playful, rolling their black, water-sleek bodies around and over each other like roughhousing teenagers, bringing a smile to my face.

  Rick had predicted a clear run for the first four or five days out from the coast, which we hoped would be long enough for me to put a safe distance between myself and the rocky shoreline before the prevailing westerly winds kicked back in. I quickly fell back into the routine of ocean rowing, which will be familiar to readers of my first book, Rowing the Atlantic….

  AFTER A NIGHT THAT MAY OR MAY NOT INVOLVE much sleeping, depending on how rough the sea is, I wake up as the first rays of daylight seep into my sleeping cabin. The space is about the size of a queen bed at its widest, tapering down to a little over a foot wide at the stern of the boat. I have just enough headroom to sit up at its highest point, which is also the widest, again tapering down towards the stern. The walls and ceiling form a continuous arch, so it’s rather uncomfortable sitting against the wall of the cabin as the curve forces me to hunch over. Lying down is by far the most comfortable position on the boat, and it’s one I adopt with great gratitude, my favourite moment being when the day’s rowing is done, my blog has been updated, and my head hits the pillow for some well-earned rest and recuperation.

  The bunk runs down the middle of the cabin, so my body weight doesn’t tip the boat off balance, and on either side of the bed there is a lee cloth, a strip of canvas the same length as my bunk and about a foot wide, fixed to the cabin floor and suspended by cords from the ceiling. The purpose of the lee cloths is to stop me being tipped off the bunk if a big wave knocks the boat onto her side.

  Depending on the temperature inside the cabin, I lie either in or on a sleeping bag, which in turn rests on a foam mattress, thin enough that I can fold it back to get to the storage lockers beneath. My luxury is a proper pillow, which usually goes mouldy while at sea, but is essential to any hope of sleep.

  I lie in the bunk with my feet towards the stern and my head towards the entrance hatch that leads out to the rowing deck. This makes it easier for me to check my marine instruments during the night. They are mounted in a panel to one side of the entrance hatch.

  My first thought on waking is always, Where am I? I want to know where the boat has drifted overnight. Unlike rowers, winds and currents don’t sleep, so I never wake up in the same place where I stopped rowing the night before. I plan my route to work with the prevailing winds and currents, rather than fighting them, which means that about 90 percent of the time I will wake up a bit closer to where I want to be. Sometimes I wake up a lot closer—my best ever night has been 22 nautical miles to the good—but more often it’s just a handful of miles, and sometimes I wake up farther away, which is not a good start to the day.

  So my first act upon waking is to turn on the GPS to allow it to get a fix on the satellites while I’m extricating myself from my sleeping bag and grabbing a Lärabar (a whole-food bar made of nuts and dried fruit) for my breakfast. By the time I have my logbook and pencil at the ready, the GPS has identified my position. At this point it is my tradition to utter, “Hurrah,” or “Boo,” as appropriate.

  Then I pop my head out of the hatch to take a look at my red ensign, the British maritime flag, which also makes a good weathervane, its direction and demeanour revealing the angle and strength of the wind. Making a mental note of my estimates, I close the hatch and note down in my logbook the wind speed and direction. Consulting various instruments, I add the amount of charge in my two solar-powered ship’s batteries, the distance and bearing to my final destination, the number of hours I have spent sleeping and rowing since my last entry, and a one-line comment on how I feel about life at this particular moment. This varies from the poetic to the profane, depending on circumstances.

  As I finish the last bite of my Lärabar, I pick up my iPod from where it has been charging overnight and roll it up with my sun hat, rowing gloves, and a few spare Lärabars. I pick up my seat pad and a clean(ish) cover made out of lightweight and superabsorbent fabric (actually a pack towel, intended for use on camping trips), wrapping the cover around the pad, fixing it with Velcro. Placing the sun hat and its contents on the seat pad, I push the bundle out onto the deck, with me following close
behind, closing and securing the cabin hatch firmly behind me. As well as providing dry space for sleeping and storage, the two cabins also act as buoyancy chambers, the air trapped inside making the boat unstable when upside down so that eventually it returns to the upright position. Keeping the hatches closed at all times apart from the barest moments required to enter and exit a cabin is the first rule of ocean-rowboat safety.

  I attach the seat pad to the rowing seat with two press studs. I release the oars from their overnight stowage position, still in the oarlocks but swiveled around so that the oars are flush with the sides of the boat, with the spoon ends each secured in a clip on either side of the sleeping cabin. I sit on the seat and pull on my sun hat and rowing gloves. I secure the iPod to a hook on the deck using a carabiner, put in the earbuds, and hit the play button on whatever audiobook I’m currently enjoying. Time to row.

  I usually row four shifts a day, of two to three hours each, depending on motivation, energy levels, and conditions both present and forecast. Between shifts I update my logbook, eat, have a siesta if required, and do various chores around the boat. I try to keep these to a minimum, as I don’t enjoy tinkering for its own sake. I’d rather be pushing on towards my destination. Daily tasks include tending to the pot of bean sprouts that supplement my onboard diet, retrieving more raw-food crackers or freeze-dried meals from their respective storage hatches and moving them to my designated galley locker, writing the daily blog post, phoning my mother, and occasionally scrubbing gooseneck barnacles off the bottom of the boat—by far my least favourite task. I don’t enjoy having to work underneath the boat, as it makes me feel rather vulnerable, and it also makes me feel guilty to prise the barnacles off their happy home on the hull, sending them to certain death in the depths.

  Around sunset I take my dinner break, boiling water on a Jetboil camping stove in order to rehydrate my freeze-dried dinner. I don’t mix it in the bag, which would leave a residue that would quickly start to smell bad (I keep all trash on board until I reach port). Instead, I decant the freeze-dried rubble into my trusty thermos mug, wide mouthed with a screw-top lid, and add any extras that might make it more palatable, such as powdered coconut milk, herbs, spices, or other seasoning. This task is a lot easier said than done. Trying to transfer powdered foods from packet to mug in a brisk sea breeze is a messy business, and as often as not I end up with my skin liberally coated in various ingredients, which get stuck in the sweat and sun cream, but it’s worth it to sit back and enjoy a well-earned meal while watching the sun set.

  I row for a few more hours after dinner, and then bathe using a bucket, a sponge, and my favourite tea tree and mint shower gel, which makes my skin tingle with cool freshness. Finally, I retire to the cabin for the night.

  DURING THOSE FIRST FEW DAYS OUT from Crescent City, I spent long hours at the oars, but there were some light headwinds that slowed my progress, sometimes to a paltry one knot or even less. I would usually expect to make at least two knots—still not exactly a phenomenal speed, but twice as fast as one knot nonetheless. (One knot is one nautical mile per hour. A nautical mile is about 1.15 statute, or land, miles. This is equivalent to 1/60th of 1 degree of longitude at the equator, there being 360 degrees of longitude making up the circumference of the Earth.)

  I kept plugging away, doing what I could to get as far from land as soon as possible, but it was like trying to run the wrong way up an escalator. After six days I had made some progress south, but was still only 20 nautical miles from land.

  On the eighth day, the headwinds abated. The instruction from my weatherman was to “row like hell.” I did. But on the ninth day I rowed not like hell, but into hell. My logbook entries for 21 August record the rising wind speed. At seven o’clock in the morning, it was a rower-friendly 15 knots. Two and a half hours later it was 23. Then 34, 39, 43, 47…

  Initially it was exhilarating. After the frustration of the headwinds, I was delighted to at last be heading in the right direction. I recorded a video of myself plying the oars, singing the theme tune from Hawaii Five-O as I surfed down the waves. It all seemed great fun, and I was in high spirits.

  But as the wind speed rose beyond 40 knots, the exhilaration gave way to anxiety. The waves were now growing quite large, higher than forecast, and I clipped myself to the boat to avoid being swept overboard. Later, when the waves grew higher still, to around 20 feet, I retired to the sleeping cabin, which was by far the safest place to be. It was uncomfortable, noisy, and scary, but nothing too bad could happen to me while I was in there.

  Conditions that night became worse. My last logbook entry of the voyage, on the morning of 22 August, records, “2 capsizes in night. GPS and wind monitor no longer working.”

  Despite these problems, it never crossed my mind to abandon the attempt. When American Tori Murden was attempting to become the first woman to row solo across the Atlantic, her boat capsized 11 times in one night. That was my benchmark, and the situation was far from being as serious as that. I was determined to keep going. I spent the morning of the 22nd inside the cabin, riding out the storm as best I could. I would just have to hold out until the storm abated, which Rick now told me would be within 24 hours. It would no doubt be a very long 24 hours, but on the Atlantic I had spent longer than that cooped up inside during periods of strong headwinds. I knew I could do it without succumbing to cabin fever. It wasn’t hard to reconcile myself to prolonged spells indoors when I considered the alternative of spending time on a wave-drenched deck.

  But that afternoon, control of the situation started to slip away from me. Unbeknownst to me, somebody had contacted the Coast Guard, thereby setting in motion a chain of events that rapidly acquired its own momentum.

  A small plane appeared overhead. For a while I tried to ignore it, hoping it would go away. I told myself that it must be there for somebody else. The trouble was that there wasn’t anybody else. Eventually I had to admit to myself that: (a) they were there, (b) they were there for me, and (c) they weren’t going away.

  Reluctantly, I picked up the VHF radio handset and established contact. A disembodied voice from the plane announced itself to be the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG). They told me that they’d received a report that I was in difficulty. I berated myself. In my last blog post, I had mentioned the capsizes, the knock to my head, and the loss of my sea anchor. It had never occurred to me that this might provoke a call to the authorities.

  The voice on the radio went on to tell me that a 660-foot tanker, the MV Overseas Long Beach, was going to bring me a replacement for the missing sea anchor, and that a U.S. Coast Guard ship, the Dorado, was on its way. They also said that the USCG Control in Humboldt Bay wanted to talk with me immediately “to discuss the viability of your voyage.” I felt like I was being called into the headmaster’s office. Sulkily, I took my satellite phone from its waterproof case and turned it on. The marine radio worked only as far as line of sight, to ships or planes in my vicinity. To call the shore, I would need the more powerful technology of the satellite phone.

  The station commander in Humboldt Bay interrogated me at length about my onboard safety equipment. I found it difficult to conceal my irritation. Before my departure I had repeatedly invited the Coast Guard in San Francisco to come and inspect the Brocade. After being referred from department to department and ultimately to the Coast Guard Auxiliary, I was informed that they did not inspect leisure craft (as they categorized the Brocade, with no apparent irony), and so my boat did not fall within their remit. I had tried as hard as I could to be proactive in getting their approval, but they had not seemed interested. I knew that my safety provisions were of the highest standard, and that this satellite phone call was a waste of expensive airtime.

  In my mind, the voyage was still viable. I had my oars and my rowing seat, as far as I knew my watermaker was still working, and apart from a couple of minor knocks to the head I was fine—no symptoms of concussion or any other serious problems. After crossing the Atlantic with her, I trusted the
seaworthiness of the Brocade, and I knew that the risk of death was extremely small provided that I stayed with her.

  To be unambiguous about this, I have the utmost respect for the U.S. Coast Guard. Its members are brave people, putting their lives on the line to ensure the safety of all seafarers within their jurisdiction. They have to go out in the worst conditions, no doubt often to help people who with a little more foresight and preparation would not have got into trouble in the first place.

  But I did not feel that I was that kind of person, nor was I in the kind of dire straits that warranted their intervention. My situation was not ideal, to be sure, but it was not life threatening. Furthermore, I’m not American, so I felt I had no right to call on the U.S. Coast Guard for help. For that very reason, I had taken out private insurance with a medical-evacuation company called Global Rescue that claimed to be able to rescue their clients from anywhere in the world. Given just how extremely remote I was likely to be, I hadn’t wanted to take them at their word, so my team had spent a lot of time with them discussing my plans and devising a set of emergency procedures. We had a flowchart detailing who would do what in every potential scenario we could think of, from a minor communications failure to a full-on Mayday situation. Everyone in my team had a copy of it, and knew what their roles and responsibilities were. If I had wanted assistance, and if I had asked for it, our procedures would have swung into action.

  But in my view, a couple of very minor cuts to the head did not constitute a medical emergency, and I hadn’t even considered calling on Global Rescue.