Stop Drifting, Start Rowing

by Roz Savage

  In fact, my mind was already racing with what to do next. I was compiling a mental list of all the items that needed to be replaced, repaired, or added to my boat to make her seaworthy again; and I was determined to resume my quest as soon as possible. Abandoning my bid felt very wrong, and I wanted to right the wrong at the earliest opportunity.

  I made a vow. “Stay safe, Brocade. I’ll be back soon.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

  “No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.”

  —AESOP

  Having been saved from the tumult of the storm, I could have died on the way back to shore. Usually U.S. Coast Guard helicopters operate on a maximum range of 120 nautical miles, allowing 20 minutes to hover while they conduct the rescue, followed by an immediate return to land. I would later find out that when the helicopter set out for the Brocade, my reported position was 132 nautical miles from their base. So we were running on fumes by the time we reached the California coast—or, to use the euphemistic Coast Guard terminology, we were “fuel critical.”

  But reaching the coast did not mean we were safe. We needed to land where there was fuel, and the closest option, at Point Arena, became socked in with fog as we approached. The next refueling point, Ukiah, was another 15 minutes away, and we were now whatever comes beyond “fuel critical.” Possibly official terminology fails at this point and something more salty becomes appropriate.

  However, as you can deduce from the fact that I am alive to write this book, we survived. With the last few drops of fuel, we made it to Ukiah and safety. When I later found out what a close-run thing it had been, I was relieved for all our sakes that I hadn’t abandoned the relative safety of my boat only for us to stall and plummet into the California redwoods. That would have been a tragic waste of the lives of four courageous men: Lieutenant Stephen Baxter, Lieutenant Kevin Winters, Flight Mechanic Jason Bauer, and Rescue Swimmer Chuck Wolfe. And it would have spoiled my day, too.

  IT WAS COMPLETELY DARK BY THE TIME the big bird touched down in Ukiah. Following the crew through the cool Northern California night, I wobbled barefoot across the gravelly tarmac to the single-story military building, the ground lurching beneath my feet as my confused brain tried to adjust to being unexpectedly back on dry land after the rocking and rolling of my boat. The hour was late, and the building was locked. A call was made. While we waited for the key holder to arrive, I asked where I would stay and what would happen next. The crew didn’t answer my questions directly, but they assured me that everything would be all right.

  How could everything possibly be all right? I had no clothes, no money, and no ID. I realized that it would have been a good idea to put my passport in the case with my laptop and mobile phone, but the thought had not even crossed my mind. I couldn’t have brought money because I had none on board the boat. I hadn’t planned to need any until I reached Hawai’i, there not being too many shopping opportunities in mid-ocean.

  After a few minutes, some Coast Guard personnel appeared and unlocked the buildings to let us in. We stepped through the door and into a room that to me seemed surreal in its normality. A small kitchenette on the far side of the room contained a kettle, microwave, refrigerator, jars of coffee, and boxes of teabags. The furniture was simple and utilitarian. It was exactly as you would imagine a military lounge to be—functional, minimal, overly bright, and yet drab. I blinked in the harsh fluorescent light, feeling very much the odd one out as the Coasties chatted and bantered.

  I suddenly felt very lonely. It may seem bizarre that I had just spent ten days completely alone apart from the company of whales and sea lions, yet now that I was surrounded by people I was uncomfortably aware of my very solitary status. They were military; I was civilian. They were simply spending another day at work. I had just had my long-held dreams turned upside down—literally. They were in familiar surroundings, while I’d been plucked from the sea and transplanted to this strange place. They would go back to their families and homes at the end of this shift. I had no way to get back to my floating home, or anywhere else for that matter.

  I missed the Brocade. I felt like a part of me had been wrenched away in a traumatic amputation. Despite my attempts to face failure with equanimity, I wanted nothing more than to return to her and to carry on. To use the phrase ironically, I felt all at sea. I stood uncertainly by the door, pulling the grey blanket more closely around me in an attempt to comfort myself both emotionally and physically.

  When there seemed to be an opportune moment, I coughed slightly to remind them of my presence and said, “I’m getting cold. Do you have any dry clothes?”

  I had assumed that they probably plucked distressed sailors from the sea every day of the week, and therefore had a wardrobe full of spare clothes for precisely this eventuality. But it turned out that I was mistaken. The helicopter crew rifled through their own duffle bags to try and find something that would fit me. I was embarrassed by this and tried to backtrack, insisting that I was fine, but they wouldn’t hear of it. I was touched by their kindness and compassion towards a stranger in need.

  A female Coastie offered me the use of their shower and I gratefully accepted, glad to have something to do and an opportunity to be alone again. Supplied with an odd assortment of men’s garments, I was ushered towards a locker room and a hot shower, and told to help myself to whatever shampoo and shower gel I could find in there.

  I shut myself into the locker room and peeled off the immersion suit. Hundreds of little flecks of white rubber from the rotting lining stuck to my legs. It’s strange what the mind focuses on in a crisis. I had noticed this phenomenon before, on the Atlantic. When a knockdown on that ocean had nearly tipped me overboard, my most immediate concern was that I had lost my thermos mug containing the last portion of my favourite freeze-dried meal, chilli con carne. Now, my attention fixed on these unsightly patches of white rubber lining.

  I looked in the small mirror on the wall of the locker room. A strange face stared back at me. My eyes were red from saltwater and shadowed by dark circles of tiredness. My skin was sunburned and salt encrusted. My hair was plaited into pigtails, as it usually is when at sea to stop it getting irretrievably tangled, but most of it had escaped from the pigtails and was sticking out in a messy, matted halo around my face. A few clots of dried blood were visible on my scalp. I looked exactly like someone who had been tumbled around in a capsizing boat, dunked in seawater, blown around by helicopter rotors, and baked until crisp. I was a complete mess. The sight made me think of murdered Banquo’s ghost in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, dragged back from the dead.

  I turned away from the disturbing sight in the mirror and stepped into the shower. The hot water felt wonderful on my cold, salty skin, and I stayed in the shower until I was warmed to my core, then emerged into the steamy air. Getting clean had done wonders to restore my circulation and my spirits and, to an extent, my looks—although it had no impact whatsoever on the pieces of white rubber. They were still stuck to my skin like superglue. I would spend the next few days trying to scratch them off with a fingernail until my skin was red and raw.

  Chuck, the Coast Guard swimmer, had loaned me his navy shorts and a grey T-shirt. He was a big guy and they were a poor fit, but better than my own soaking clothes. I returned to the lounge looking marginally more presentable, but feeling self-conscious about my lack of underwear and the blobs of white rubber stuck to my legs. I am quite used to being completely naked when alone on the ocean, but going commando in the company of others was a different thing entirely. It all added to my general feeling of strangeness and displacement.

  The female Coastie made me a mug of hot chocolate, and one of her colleagues had ordered pizza. While we waited for the food to arrive, I asked for paper and pen, and sat jotting down the list that I had been mentally compiling during the helicopter ride of things that needed repairing on the boat before I could set out to sea again. I had no idea at this stage how I was going to reco
ver my boat, but I would worry about that later. My situation was rather overwhelming, and I could only focus on one problem at a time. I wanted to get these things down on paper before I started to forget.

  It also gave me another excuse to keep myself to myself. I fielded a few questions about my boat and my expedition, but I wasn’t feeling particularly conversational. I didn’t bear a grudge against these guys—I knew they had only been doing their job. But under the circumstances, I just didn’t feel much like talking, despite their sympathy.

  The pizzas arrived, as big as coffee tables. Normally pizza is not the kind of food I would eat, but for the first time in two days I no longer felt seasick, and I was suddenly ravenous. This was no time to obsess about nutritional standards and trans fats. I ate two enormous slices, while secretly wishing to be sitting on my boat with a freeze-dried meal while serenely watching the sunset, as I had done during the calm days before the storm. The Coasties ate and chatted socially amongst themselves while the TV blared.

  Once we had eaten our fill, we returned to the helicopter for the final leg of our journey. It was after midnight by the time we reached the base in Humboldt Bay. I was tired, but before I was allowed to go to bed I had to be examined by a medic. He checked my blood pressure, listened to my heart and lungs through a stethoscope, shone lights in my eyes, and made me watch the tip of his finger while he moved it back and forth.

  By now my personal fuel tank was as empty as the helicopter’s had been, but I was reminded that I had to make some phone calls to reassure various people that I was safe. I picked absently at the white rubber flecks on my legs while I made the calls—to my mother, the weatherman, Nicole the PR agent, and Brooke Glidden, the member of my team who had been the primary liaison with Global Rescue. I was warm now and starting to enter a post-traumatic euphoria at having survived the stress of the storm. The people on the other end of the phone line probably would have said that I sounded in good spirits, although the truth was that I was too tired to know how I felt.

  My calls completed, a friendly young Coastie called Gino showed me to the room in the barracks where I would be staying for the night. The cheap wooden door swung back to reveal a large, rather bleak room with a stained brown carpet, a queen bed with a pile of folded sheets and blankets placed on its bare mattress, two large recliners in front of a TV, a microwave, and a bright green fridge—a bizarre splash of colour. The bathroom was institutional looking, with stainless-steel sinks and white tiles. A mop, bucket, and bottles of cleaning fluids stood in the corner.

  It was late—nearly one in the morning—and it had been a long day. I had barely slept in the last 64 hours, and I was exhausted. I put the linens on the bed, took off the borrowed clothes, and swung my weary body in between the sheets. There was a lot to worry about, not least being the fact that my precious boat was drifting abandoned 100 miles offshore, but there was nothing I could do about it until tomorrow. I fell asleep almost immediately.

  I woke the next morning with a jolt and a profound sense of being in the wrong place. I had been dreaming about the rescue as my subconscious replayed the previous day’s events and tried to make sense of them. In my dream I had still been on my boat, and it was a shock to find myself on dry land. Wrong, wrong, wrong. This was not where I was supposed to be. I thought about my boat and wondered how she was doing. Was it still rough out there? Had she capsized again? Whose version of the weather forecast had proved to be true?

  A loud, military rap at the door came again. I looked at my watch: 7 A.M. I’d had six hours of sleep—nowhere near enough to make up for the deficit. I sighed and swung my legs out of bed. Pulling on the oversize T-shirt, I swayed over to the door.

  It was Gino. “Good morning!” he greeted me, as cheery as he had been the night before, although he must have had even less sleep than I had. “What would you like for breakfast?”

  He handed me a laminated sheet of breakfast options, none of which complied with my usual nutritional rules. For both health and environmental reasons, I generally choose unprocessed foods from the lower end of the food chain. I have even managed to incorporate these principles into most of my expedition meals, depending heavily on organic whole foods such as raw-food crackers, raw snack bars, bean sprouts, porridge, nuts, nut butters, powdered coconut milk, and dried fruit. Everything on this menu looked very processed and desperately unhealthy.

  “Umm, breakfast roll, please.” I picked the least of the evils.

  “The base commander would like to see you,” Gino went on. “When you’re ready.”

  “Okay. Can I have a bit of time to get myself together?” I asked, blearily.

  “You betcha!” said Gino. “Just give me a call when you’re ready. I’ve got some clothes for you, too.” He handed me a pile of folded dark-blue garments with a pair of black military boots on top and departed.

  I closed the door and assessed my outfit for the day: a pair of navy Coast Guard pants, a navy Coast Guard shirt, and a pair of black Coast Guard boots, size 10. Still no underwear. I guessed that was not included in military issue kit. I quickly showered and got dressed. The boots were three sizes too big for me, but if I laced them up tightly, they didn’t flap around too much.

  I was very much aware of my impending appointment with the base commander, but there was a task I wanted to complete as a matter of urgency. I took my laptop out of its case and typed out an account of the events of the previous day as accurately as I could remember them. There had been so many conversations with so many people, passing by in a haze of fatigue, and already I was having difficulty placing events in logical sequence. I needed to try and chronicle what had happened and identify the pivotal moments that had led me from the wilds of the open ocean to this brown barrack room with its créme de menthe green fridge.

  An hour or so later I had finished, my typing interrupted only by the arrival of my breakfast, an unappetizing, microwaved roll containing cheap fatty ham, a flat disc of reconstituted egg, and a soggy layer of processed cheese. I thought longingly of the tasty and healthy Lärabars that I ate for breakfast on board the Brocade. I ate a few mouthfuls of my breakfast and put the rest in the bin. I have a near-pathological hatred of wasting food, but something as synthetic as this didn’t count.

  The contrast between what I preferred and the food on offer here only served to reinforce my sense of disempowerment. I had gone from being totally in control of my world, captain of my ship, to being utterly dependent on others. I’d had all the freedom of the ocean, but now that freedom had been abruptly stripped away. I imagined it must feel a little like this to be institutionalized, in a hospital or a prison. I had been sucked unwillingly into a system, and all decision-making power had been taken away from me. And I couldn’t see my way out of the situation.

  It was time to meet the base commander. I knew that this interview could be important; the previous year the Coast Guard in the Canary Islands had forcibly towed back four solo ocean rowers and forbidden them to depart again from Canarian waters. I did not want to end up in a similar deadlock with the U.S. authorities, so it was vital to convince them that my project was safe and viable.

  Gino took me to meet Paul, a short, friendly faced man, and my fears of censure turned out to be needless. There were only a few moments when I felt I was being called to account—at one point Paul said he wanted to make sure that I would not be a “repeat offender,” as he put it, and I hastened to assure him that I had all necessary safety equipment, skills, and procedures. I emphasized that it was only due to an unfortunate sequence of events that I had run into trouble this time, and that it would be a relatively straightforward matter to avoid those things happening next time. Provided I had adequate water ballast and two sea anchors, I should not need to trouble the U.S. Coast Guard again.

  The interview over, I prepared to meet the press, who had been summoned by the Coast Guard. I understood that I owed them this PR opportunity, and that it was a chance to express my gratitude, but the words of appreci
ation stuck in my throat. I smiled and attempted to act normal, but inside I was mortified. They had bagged a trophy with my rescue, and I was being paraded before the public as an example to others. With every fibre of my being, I yearned to be back on my little boat.

  THE PRESS CALL OVER, I RETURNED TO MY ROOM to consider what to do next. I was determined to continue my Pacific row within a matter of days, but a few significant logistical challenges stood in my way.

  I was now in Eureka, five hours north of San Francisco, with nothing but the clothes I stood up in. I couldn’t get anywhere with no ID and no money. I didn’t know anybody within a radius of several hundred miles. I had a mobile phone and a laptop, but who to call? What to do?

  Luckily, help was at hand. Brooke Glidden, my Global Rescue liaison, texted me the phone number of some friends who lived in Eureka. I knew nothing about Rich Ames other than that he had known Brooke’s family for a long time, but when I called him from my mobile, he came to pick me up from the Coast Guard base. He turned out to be a white-bearded, blue-eyed man, with a mischievous sense of humour, deriving great entertainment from my big black “kinky boots,” U.S. Coast Guard military issue. He and his wife, Marilyn, took me in and fed and clothed me for the next two days while I tried to figure out how to get back to San Francisco. A small support group sprang up around my cause, with various friends of the Ameses helping out by providing Internet access, clothes, a duffle bag, and a much-appreciated dinner party, where I gratefully anaesthetized myself with good red wine and began to relax for the first time since before the storm.

  But still only half my mind was in Eureka. The other half was out on the ocean, reaching out towards Brocade, wondering how she was faring without me. It was a source of bitter humour to me that “Eureka!” was uttered by Archimedes when he stepped into a full bath and discovered the principle of displacement as it overflowed; in Greek, the word means, “I’ve found it!” By contrast, my abiding memory of Eureka was that far from finding something, I had lost just about everything—my dignity, my autonomy, and my boat.