by Roz Savage
I had done some research into the problem of plastic pollution before I left dry land so that I would have the facts and figures on hand when writing blog posts on this huge environmental problem. All research had to be done in advance, as the unreliable, slow modem of my satellite phone would only allow me to send and receive e-mail. It didn’t have the bandwidth for me to browse the Internet.
I had found out that the floating debris accounts for only about one third of the total; the rest has sunk to the ocean floor, where it interferes with the natural gaseous exchange between the ocean bed and the water. Although roughly 20 percent of this pollution comes from ships, the other 80 percent comes from land. The plastic photodegrades in sunlight, breaking into smaller and smaller fragments. Although less visible, these are in a way more insidious than larger pieces because they can be eaten by smaller fish, so they enter the food chain lower down. The associated toxins accumulate to higher levels as they move up the food chain, until they end up on the dinner plate of the apex predator of the oceans—us.
The more I found out about the problem, the more horrifying it seemed, so the last thing I wanted on my boat was dozens of plastic water bottles, which by now had become complete anathema to me. Ever since I had my environmental epiphany and started to perceive the Earth as the ultimate closed-loop system, I’d been unable to acquire or dispose of anything without considering where it had come from and where it was going to end up. Being in expedition mode did not in any way assuage my green guilt. My principles applied no less on the ocean than they did on dry land. Nature would not care whether I had an excuse. The end result would be the same—yet more unnecessary plastic, and I couldn’t square that with my conscience.
I HAD A STRANGE INTUITION that a suitable solution would present itself, so I played for time, pointing out to my mother that I still had plenty of water reserves stashed in rubberized canvas Dromedary bags in hatches under my bunk and beneath the forward cabin. For now, these would keep me alive.
I had to take these storage bags, one at a time as required, and carefully decant the contents into the red jerrycan that resided in the footwell, being careful not to spill a single precious drop. While my watermaker was still functioning, I went through most of the jerrycan’s two and a half gallons in a single day, using the water for drinking, rehydrating freeze-dried meals, watering the bean sprouts in the sprouting pot, and taking sponge baths. Now, each time I unscrewed the lid and inserted the tube of the small hand pump to get water for one of these purposes, I would count each squeeze of the pump’s bulb and use the absolute bare minimum, aware that this water had become a scarce and finite resource. There is nothing quite like life on a small rowboat with a broken watermaker to make you aware of the vital necessity of water—except for maybe living in places where water has to be carried home from a well in heavy pitchers. I felt great sympathy with the women of the world for whom this is a necessary part of everyday life.
Now that every drop was sacred, certain luxuries had to go, such as bathing in freshwater. From now on it would be saltwater baths only. Usually the whole point was to wash the salt off my skin, from both sweat and the sea, so although a saltwater sponge bath was better than nothing, it left me still rimed with a thin layer of stickiness and was rather unsatisfactory.
At least I didn’t need to worry about water for laundry. As has become traditional in ocean-rowing circles, I normally row naked once out of sight of land, as it reduces chafing and is generally more hygienic. I am not at all given to exhibitionism and cannot imagine many prospects more unattractive than a nudist colony, but when alone and safely away from prying eyes, it actually feels rather pleasant to row as nature intended—if, indeed, nature ever intended us to row, naked or otherwise.
I considered whether it made sense to continue growing bean sprouts, my only source of fresh vegetables. I decided that, on balance, it did. If I was really careful it took only a tiny amount of water to rinse and water them twice a day, and the benefits to my nutrition and morale more than justified the extravagance.
The container that had once supplied water for a day I now eked out to last half a week. It occurred to me one day as I rowed along, my eyes resting idly on the jerrycan in the footwell in front of me, that it was roughly the same size as a toilet cistern. How many times in my life had I flushed the loo, never considering once the extravagant waste of precious fresh water? How many people on dry land still did so, with not a thought for where the water came from—or where the waste went to? This experience was certainly making me uncomfortably aware of my bodily inputs and outputs in a way that I never had been before. Even on the Atlantic, I hadn’t needed to be so careful, as my watermaker had chugged away reliably, the only major piece of equipment that had not broken on that crossing.
The one thing that I didn’t intentionally stint on was drinking water. And yet, no matter how much I tried to follow the needs of my body, I couldn’t help it—I was instinctively drinking less than usual, aware that I now had a finite water supply. I have never been a naturally thirsty person and always find it a chore to drink as much water as doctors recommend. If I had felt in any danger of dehydration, I would have stepped up my intake, but I just didn’t feel the need.
My expedition doctor, Aenor, became the self-appointed “pee police.” I would get e-mails from her asking rather personal questions about my water intake and excretion: How much pee? What colour? Probably not since I had been potty trained had my bodily functions come under such scrutiny, and I felt it rather an intrusion on my privacy. It seemed to me that this was strictly a matter between myself and my bedpan, and I fobbed Aenor off with answers that were engineered more to stop her worrying than to provide accurate information. Does anybody actually tell their doctor the truth? I wondered, to reassure myself.
At the back of my mind lurked the ocean rowers’ horror story of Don Allum having to drink his own urine when he ran out of drinkable water after the water tanks on his boat became contaminated with seawater. This had been in the days before watermakers were invented, so he had had to take all his water with him at the start of the voyage. As his urine was recycled at ever more concentrated levels, it had taken its toll on his health, and in later life his kidneys failed several times, eventually leading to a fatal heart attack. Although I knew at least one health fanatic who believed in the benefits of drinking a glass a day of one’s own urine, my general philosophy was that it was better out than in. If my body had chosen to get rid of it, I wasn’t going to override that decision. I would stick with unrecycled water for as long as I could.
Besides, I had a feeling that a solution was going to turn up. And sure enough, it did.
ONE DAY DURING OUR CONVERSATION on the satphone, my mother told me that one of my online followers had posted a comment on my blog to say that the Junk raft was slowly converging on my position.
I had heard of the Junk raft. Two men from the California-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation had wanted to stage a stunt to raise awareness of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. They had hit on the idea of making a raft entirely from trash and sailing it from Long Beach, California, to Hawai’i. Some months earlier, someone had suggested that I should make contact with them, given that our goals were virtually identical, to figure out how we could collaborate. I had managed to get Dr. Marcus Eriksen on the phone one day, and he had seemed open to the possibility of collaboration, but in the final hectic preparations for our respective expeditions we had never quite got around to figuring out just what form that collaboration might take. Now it looked like circumstances were conspiring to make that collaboration happen, in a way so perfect that we couldn’t have come up with anything better if we had tried.
A loyal follower of my blog, John Herrick from Florida, had been tracking the progress of both our voyages and realized we were on a similar latitude and that the Junk was gaining on me. Not knowing just how vital a mid-ocean rendezvous might be in my present circumstances, he suggested that we try to meet. My
prayers were answered. This was much better than trying to arrange a resupply from a passing container ship.
My mother made contact with the Junk raft’s support team by sending a message via their website, and she received an e-mail reply from their shore manager, Anna Cummins. Having established contact, she obtained a satphone number for the Junk and passed it along to me. But the number didn’t work. I tried several times over the next couple of days, wondering if it was due to lack of a satellite connection or if their phone was temporarily out of order, but I had no success.
Mum went back to the shore team to check the number. It transpired that they had never needed to call this number, as the crew (or the Hunks on the Junk, as they had been dubbed by the press) had always called to shore rather than vice versa. We then had to wait for the Junk to check in again, so it was a couple more days before I finally obtained the correct number, and the raft was given due warning to expect an incoming call at a particular time.
At last, in the late afternoon on 8 August and about six weeks after my watermaker had broken, I made contact and spoke to both Marcus Eriksen and Joel Paschal, the Junk’s navigator. By this point I had less than 30 litres of water left, equivalent to about ten days’ supply on short rations. While still not confiding why this rendezvous was so important, my blog post for that day records:
Today we compared latitudes, longitudes, courses and daily average mileage, and it appears that we are on converging routes. The JUNK is gaining on me steadily. We are going to try to rendezvous—most likely in three or four days time—but this is going to be VERY tricky. We are two small, not very manoeuvrable craft, trying to meet up amidst towering waves on a very large ocean.
If we succeed, theirs will be the first human faces I have seen since I passed the Farallon Islands on 26th May. I am now rather thinner, browner, and considerably saltier than I was back then. Time to dig out some clothes and try and make myself presentable!
IT WAS, AS PREDICTED, CHALLENGING to rendezvous with another slow-moving vessel in mid-ocean. We checked in with each other on a regular basis over the next few days to find out how the other boat was progressing. They told me that their voyage was taking much longer than they had expected. This was at least partly due to the design of their raft. Made from 15,000 empty water bottles, lashed together into pontoons with cargo netting, they had not got very far from Long Beach when the lids of the bottles started to unscrew and the raft started to sink. They had had to make an unscheduled stop-off at Catalina Island just a few days into the voyage to tighten the lids before setting off again. But even with everything securely in place, they were not going much faster than I was. Ultimately their crossing would take 88 days compared with my 99—exceptionally slow for a sailboat, but maybe not so surprising for a sailboat made out of rubbish.
The upshot of this slow progress was that they were running out of food, and although they were not in imminent danger of starvation, they were extremely bored of surviving on peanut butter and granola. They had been supplementing their diet with fish, but this was an unreliable source of nourishment, as days would sometimes pass with no catch. So I was delighted to be in a position to offer them a resupply of food. I had plenty, and it would be better for my self-respect as an adventurer that we would be able to make an exchange of goodies rather than accepting a one-way donation from them to me.
After I spoke to them on 9 August and heard of their predicament, I spent a while rummaging around in lockers to put together a care package and turned up a few buried treasures. It has never ceased to amaze me how things can disappear on such a small boat, to be found later hiding away in far corners of lockers. I found a solitary remaining boil-in-the-bag MRE (meal ready to eat) and had it for my dinner. It was a real treat to have proper satisfying chunks of food to chew on rather than the little pieces of freeze-dried rubble that make up a typical dehydrated expedition meal.
I also found some more tamari sunflower seeds. I mix them in with bean sprouts, tamari almonds, nama shoyu sauce, and tahini to make a delicious and nutritious lunch. And there were some dried apple slices—very welcome variations to my larder.
I put together a generous stack of expedition meals, Lärabars, and jerky to give to the Junk crew. I would have been happy to give them some of my dehydrated flax crackers, too, but I suspected that no matter how short on variety they were, they might not share my more extreme whole-food tastes.
I put it all into biodegradable trash bags, ready to hand over when we finally met. The bags were ideal for this purpose, although I had found out the hard way that they biodegraded in less than three months when mixed with seawater, and my small trash stash in the locker beneath the rowing seat now consisted of a mess of food wrappers and sun-lotion tubes surrounded by a few pointless shreds of disintegrating green plastic.
10 August came and went. So did 11 August. We were speaking every day and adjusting our respective courses to stay on track for a rendezvous. I was continuing to row, expecting that they would soon catch up with me, but the winds had subsided, and even with a sail the Junk was barely gaining ground. I was starting to get impatient. The scheduled phone calls were interfering with my usual routine, but there was also a more pressing motivation for wanting to meet sooner rather than later, and it was nothing to do with my waning water supplies.
Each time we spoke, Joel would promise me a fresh fish supper when we finally got together, and I was really looking forward to it. I don’t fish when I’m at sea. I am rather squeamish about having to bash a fish’s brains out, and the process of gutting and cleaning would make a horrible mess of my deck. But I was more than happy for someone else to do the hard work, and I was almost salivating at the idea of a nice fresh catch for dinner.
12 AUGUST WAS A CLEAR, CALM, SUNNY DAY, the ocean still and glossy. It was very beautiful, but not conducive to fast progress in a sailboat. After an early afternoon conversation with Joel, we agreed that I would have to stop rowing if they were going to catch up with me. So I stowed my oars and made the most of my idle time by posting early on my blog:
It would be amusing to watch the progress of our two vessels from above. Their top speed is about 2.8 kts [knots], mine about 2 kts. We are two very slow-moving objects converging on each other ever so slowly, like two garden snails about to mate (do snails mate?!).
After hanging around for an hour waiting for them to catch up, I spoke again to Joel on the Junk, who came up with a highly pertinent point. He had been tracking their progress relative to mine, watching the small blip on their radar that represented my boat. Over the last few days, he’d found that the wind tended to die down during the afternoon, and they would lose ground relative to my position. The wind would then pick up again overnight, and they would regain the lost ground and more. According to his calculations, they were unlikely to catch up with me before nightfall, and if the wind followed the usual pattern, they would probably overtake me during the hours of darkness. We would be, quite literally, two ships passing in the night, and my chance of a fresh fish supper—not to mention life-saving water supplies—would pass me by.
That did it. There was only one thing for it. I would have to turn around and row back towards them.
This caused me some considerable discombobulation. After nearly three months of heading west, west, always west, and rowing in the same direction across the Atlantic a couple of years previously, it felt totally unnatural to turn the Brocade’s bows deliberately to point east, watching the compass needle swing through 180 degrees, and to deliberately undo precious progress made. But the prospect of our upcoming dinner party helped me overcome my momentary sense of disorientation and any slight resentment at the loss of miles.
East I rowed, towards their last reported position. I had to keep craning to glance over my shoulder. Usually it was no problem that rowers face towards the stern of the boat, as for the last few months there had been nothing but sea and sky no matter which way I looked, but on this occasion it was rather inconvenient. Luckily
it was a calm day, and I was relieved to finally see a bright dot on the horizon, which gradually resolved itself into a square white sail. Supper was in sight.
I got on the satphone again. “I can see you!” I called. “I’m over here. Look to the west!”
Joel had been watching my boat on the radar and now clambered up the mast to assume a lookout position. Even though he was about 20 feet above the water, he couldn’t see me until I was about 200 yards away. When he told me this later, it really brought it home how invisible I was on this vast ocean, even to someone who knew exactly where to look.
At last we were within a few dozen yards of each other, but actually docking my boat against theirs proved to be more difficult than anticipated. They tried to throw a line to me, but it fell short. My boat drifted farther away again. The problem was that I couldn’t row to keep my boat on course and be ready to catch a line at the same time. I simply didn’t have enough hands.
Eventually Marcus jumped into the water and swam over with a thin line so that we could connect the two vessels. After so many months of no human contact, it was a most welcome sight to see a face pop up over the gunwale of my boat—especially as it was an exceptionally good-looking, suntanned face pierced with striking blue eyes. Hello, Sailor! I thought, and the moniker “Hunks on the Junk” suddenly made sense.
Marcus handed me the line, and I tied it to a makeshift cleat that I had fashioned to help pull in the sea anchor, then used the line to bring the Brocade close enough for me to jump aboard their vessel.
And what a vessel she was. A raft supported by thousands of plastic bottles lashed together with cargo nets, a deck made out of an open grid of yacht masts, the fuselage of a Cessna aircraft as a cabin, and a plush-pile bucket seat from a car as a captain’s chair. The Junk was very homemade and looked like she should never have been allowed out of port, but no doubt stranger ships have made it across oceans.
