by Roz Savage
WHEN I ARRIVED AT THE FINISH LINE, morning was just starting to lighten the eastern horizon, and the stars were winking out one by one. The water was rough, but I was rowing strongly. The track playing on the CD—by accident rather than design, but it couldn’t have been more appropriate—was Hawai’ian singer Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s version of “Wonderful World” interlaced with “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
His soft, wistful voice filled my ears and my mind. I had dared to live my dream, and although it had become a nightmare for a while the previous year, now it had all come good. I thought back to my departure from the Golden Gate Bridge, nearly 2,500 miles ago, and reflected on the highs and lows since then. This had been a hard crossing, but so much less difficult than the Atlantic. I had spent the years since that voyage assiduously dissecting the experience, the process of giving talks and writing a book allowing me to analyse and assess what had happened and to learn from it. I had taken what the universe provided, determined to grow from it. I had internalized the lessons, incorporating them into the way I operated in the world, and those new life skills had paid dividends on this voyage.
I hadn’t known in advance of the Pacific launch whether I had fully succeeded in this task. It’s easy to believe that you’ve got it all figured out when you’re on dry land, but the ocean has a way of upsetting everything that you thought you knew. After completing the Atlantic voyage, I had been utterly certain that I would continue with my mission to row the world’s “Big Three” oceans—the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian—yet this did not mean that I relished the prospect. Having crossed the Atlantic and hence knowing what I was letting myself in for, the notion of tackling the Pacific had created a tight knot of dread in the centre of my chest every time I thought about it.
So it gave me great gratification to recognise that not only had I succeeded in crossing safely, but also that this voyage had been less miserable than the Atlantic. At times, rowing along and listening to audiobooks, I had even almost enjoyed it. I smiled as I acknowledged to myself that I had matured as a person and as an adventurer. It was indeed a Wonderful World.
AT 5:55 A.M. LOCAL TIME ON 1 SEPTEMBER 2008, I crossed the line of longitude at 157 degrees, 50.550 minutes west. I stopped rowing, whooped in delight, and beamed a huge grin of satisfaction. I had completed the first leg of my solo row across the Pacific in a time of 99 days, 8 hours, and 55 minutes, becoming the first woman to row from California to Hawai’i. I finished it as I had spent most of the previous 99 days—alone.
The last hours had not quite gone according to plan, but in the final analysis it made no difference. I had still done it, and a warm glow of accomplishment filled me as the waters fill the ocean—all the way to the edges.
There was then a bit of a hiatus while the escort boat tried to find me. I had given them my latitude and longitude, but it transpired they didn’t have a GPS on board. We were communicating by VHF marine radio, but they simply weren’t able to see me. When I heard the roar of engines as a jet took off from Honolulu International Airport, inspiration struck. “I’m underneath the airplane … now!” I timed the last word to coincide with the moment when the plane was directly overhead. After two hours of searching, at last they could see my position, and within minutes a little yellow boat with a boxy cabin was zipping across the waves towards me.
They towed me back to Diamond Head, and I did my duties for the TV cameras and press photographers assembled on another, larger motor boat. An underwater cameraman, known locally as Scuba Drew, got some unusual angles by swimming around and beneath my boat. At last the photo call was over, and I was able to head to dry land. By now I was impatient to feel terra firma beneath my feet.
As I paddled into the harbour, a couple of outrigger canoes were there to escort me in. I heard a familiar, Australian-accented voice ring out a greeting across the water, and did a double take when I saw Melinda, not renowned for her athletic prowess, sitting in one of the canoes. I don’t know quite how she’d arranged it, but she had somehow coerced the paddlers to come out and greet me and to bring her along. Aenor was waiting on the dock to fulfill her role as expedition doctor.
The photos of my arrival show a skinny, suntanned figure in black capri pants and a turquoise bikini top stepping ashore to hug her mother. Leis are placed around her neck, and there are more hugs. Then a barrage of microphones and cameras being pointed in her direction, engulfing the tiny figure. Bobbie Jennings, the PR chair of the Waikiki Yacht Club, had done a magnificent job of securing a media turnout. The assembled reporters and photographers nearly sank the pontoon.
A glass of champagne, rather warm in the Hawai’ian sunshine, was pressed into my hand, and I sipped as I spoke. It was only later that I realized it had been a plastic glass, as would be sarcastically reported by a sharp-eyed journalist. Just moments after stepping off my boat, I inadvertently made contact with a single-use plastic item, exactly the kind of object I was campaigning against. I was appalled that I hadn’t noticed at the time, but can only submit in my defence that after so long alone, I was completely overwhelmed by the sensory onslaught of being back on dry land and being surrounded by so many friendly faces.
By the time we moved over to the buffet lunch, I had recovered my senses somewhat and insisted on a ceramic plate rather than the plastic “disposable” ones that were otherwise in use. The incident brought home to me that plastic has become so ubiquitous that, unless we are made aware of it, we don’t even notice how much of it we are using.
After a couple of glasses of champagne, Aenor gently steered me in the direction of the ladies’ room. It was time for my medical exam. We had done this before my departure, and now we went through the familiar drill again. As the Coast Guard medic had done, she made me follow her fingertip with my eyes. After so long without alcohol, the champagne had gone straight to my head and I felt a bit woozy, but I more or less passed the test. Then she asked me to push against her resistance with arms, then legs, to check for injury or weakness. She placed bathroom scales on the floor and I stepped on. I had lost 25 pounds. Later testing would reveal that I was down to 11 percent body fat.
“Drink water!” Aenor ordered me, emphatically. “Or you’ll dehydrate in this heat.”
“’kay,” I slurred. “S’long as it’sh not in a plashtic bottle.”
Glass of iced water in hand, I joined in with the milling throng in the yacht club bar. Marcus and Joel were there among the well-wishers waiting to greet me. I was relieved to see that Joel had shaved off his muttonchop whiskers. He looked almost normal. I was introduced to Marcus’s fiancée, Anna Cummins, who had been acting as their shore manager. Since the voyage of the Junk raft, Marcus and Anna have gone on to found the 5 Gyres Institute to investigate Marcus’s theory that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is in fact just one of five such areas around the world, the others being in the South Pacific, North Atlantic, South Atlantic, and Indian Oceans. They alternate their time between scientific research at sea and outreach and education on dry land. Joel has also remained passionately committed to fighting the plastic peril, founding a nonprofit called Sea of Change to develop ways for citizen scientists to collect plastic pollution data at sea.
AS MUM AND I WERE GIVEN A LIFT from the Yacht Club to my weatherman’s house, I went into a kind of culture shock. The speed of the car seemed unnaturally fast. The skyscrapers of Waikiki seemed dangerously high. And all these people! I felt like a space alien seeing human civilization for the first time. I looked at the shops selling designer clothes, jewelry, and electronics. I was quite perplexed that people would spend so much money on such pointless things. If you couldn’t eat it, drink it, or row with it, then what purpose did it serve? A rower’s needs are very simple—enough food and water and a few miles in the right direction are enough to make it a good day.
Examining my visceral reaction to the blatantly conspicuous consumption all around me, I realized that although I’d been so materialistic in my early adult life, my values had fundam
entally changed. Not only was I not interested in owning much stuff, I was actually repulsed by this flagrant consumerism.
There is still a widespread belief that money can buy happiness, yet this is patently not true. It has been demonstrated scientifically that beyond a certain level of income where our basic needs are taken care of, further wealth delivers very little additional happiness—but it can have a major effect on levels of consumption, and hence on our environment. In fact, in some countries, reported happiness even diminishes as average per capita income continues to rise. Some of the most affluent societies in the world are rife with disease, addictions, and unhappiness. It would be easier to understand our obsession with consumerism—or at least forgive it—if it was making us happier, but in most cases it isn’t.
I realized that over the course of the past three and a half months, far away from the insidious messaging of advertisers and marketers, my happiness had come from much more authentic sources—from the beauty of sunrises and sunsets, from making progress towards a well-defined goal, from enjoying plenty of fresh air and exercise and a healthy diet, and from my relationships with my mother, friends, and blog readers. By any definition it cannot be said that I had enjoyed a high standard of living while at sea, but I had experienced incredible quality of life.
Looking at the crowds of tourist and shoppers, I saw evidence of overconsumption and overeating. I examined their faces, looking for clues to their thoughts, their emotions. I wondered if they stopped to consider the big questions, like Why are we here? What is our life purpose? What makes us happy? The computer revolution was supposed to give us more leisure time, but even the tourists, supposedly relaxing on holiday, seemed busier than ever, caught up in a whirlwind of largely pointless activity. Was all this busy-ness just serving to distract them from uncomfortable questions—and answers?
I felt happy to be free of the burden of stuff—buying stuff, selling stuff, maintaining stuff, fixing stuff, earning the money to buy yet more stuff, all for the greater good of the economy, which in its present incarnation depends on an ever-increasing demand for stuff. We’re encouraged to satisfy our desires rather than our needs in a doomed pursuit of infinite economic growth on a finite planet.
THE FOLLOWING THURSDAY, THE JUNK GUYS and I held a joint press conference on the lawn in front of the Waikiki Aquarium. I had lost so much weight that none of my clothes fit properly any more, and a friend had to lend me a length of sailing rope as a makeshift belt to hold my jeans up. The Junk raft and the Brocade were on display, and the press conference included statements from local groups working to reduce plastic waste, including the O’ahu chapter of Surfrider Foundation, Styrophobia, Jack Johnson’s Kokua Hawai’i Foundation, and the Beach Environmental Awareness Campaign Hawai’i (BEACH).
From the aquarium, we clambered into a minibus and headed with about 25 volunteers to Kahuku Beach on O’ahu’s northeast coast. I was shocked to see the amount of plastic debris on this rarely visited beach. Where I might expect to see lines of seaweed, here instead I saw tidemarks of trash, most of it plastic. Suzanne Frazer from BEACH issued each of us a yellow bucket labeled with the name of a particular kind of commonly found plastic object. I was in charge of oyster spacers. I had never before heard of such a thing, nor had I realized that oysters were in need of spacing, but it turned out that these were plastic rods of various lengths with a hole down the middle, used in oyster farming. It was important that the different types of plastic were kept separate so that the items could be counted, providing useful data on what kind of trash was being found and where it might have come from.
To me it was frustrating to see all this plastic and only be able to pick up a small subset of it. I wanted to clean up the whole lot, to remove it from this once-beautiful beach and restore the site to its pristine state as nature intended. We took away two truckloads of rubbish that day, but there was plenty still left lying on the sand, and an almost endless supply still lurking offshore, in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, waiting to roll in on the next tide, coming back to haunt us in an endless karmic cycle. Truly, we reap what we sow.
CHAPTER FIVE
WE CREATE OUR FUTURE
“Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an action and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.”
— RALPH WALDO EMERSON
I usually love to see wildlife at sea. Although in one way the ocean seascape is infinitely variable—every sunrise, sunset, squall, and cloud formation is a unique event—it can also seem unbearably monotonous, with nothing but sea, sky, and a little silver boat to occupy the eye, day after day. A visit from a sea creature is usually a welcome relief from the monotony—but I felt I might have to make an exception in this present case.
It was May 2009, and I was en route from Hawai’i to Tuvalu on the second stage of the Pacific crossing. I was rowing along, listening to an audiobook, as was my habit, when something caught my eye. I did a double take. A pointed fin was waving at me from the water’s surface.
I’d read reports by sailors of previous centuries of oceans teeming with creatures such as dolphins, whales, sharks, or turtles, but in my experience days could go by with no sighting. This might have been due to my low vantage point, or due to my being in a daze induced by the repetitive motion of rowing, but is also likely to be due to the much-diminished populations of many of these charismatic megafauna of the ocean. So wildlife sightings were rare enough, but to have the wildlife waving to me was rarer still. I moved over to that side of the boat to take a closer look.
It was hideous. Lying on its side while it lazily waved its pectoral fin in the air, the large, disc-shaped creature looked like a truncated version of a fish. Its body went straight from head to tail with nothing in between. The head occupied the front half of its body, and the tail was no more than a frill around the back half. Its appearance deeply disturbed me. Was this mutant a terrible consequence of our pollution of the oceans?
Fortunately not. I mentioned the odd fish in my next blog post, and the social media network provided the answer. It was a sunfish, well known for basking at the surface of the ocean—while waving its fin. I was relieved to find that this was not some unnatural, man-made, genetically modified monster, but actually a rather rare and special fish, made exactly as nature intended it to be: pug ugly.
I hadn’t seen many interesting creatures on the first stage of the Pacific crossing, between San Francisco and Hawai’i—a few dolphins, the occasional whale, and birds almost every day. I had to wait until this second stage to hit the real mother lode of marine wildlife.
TURTLES ARE AMONG MY FAVOURITE creatures. They have an air of benevolence and wisdom that convinces me that they’re old souls returned to Earth to watch over vulnerable seafarers. While I was scuba diving on a wreck in Hawai’i shortly before my departure, I encountered a huge turtle sitting on the deck of the sunken ship. I sat next to her (for some reason I was sure it was a female) and very slowly, so as not to scare her, reached out my hand and gently touched her flipper. A small cloud of algae, disturbed by my touch, puffed up into the water. The turtle turned and blinked at me lugubriously. She didn’t seem to mind, and I felt a momentary bond of kinship with this strange, ancient being.
It makes me sad that they are amongst the creatures most impacted by plastic pollution, especially plastic bags. The turtles mistake them for jellyfish, their favourite food, and eat them. I have seen distressing photographs of dissected turtles, their digestive tracts so bunged full of plastic that they can neither digest nor excrete. It offends me that we expose these peaceful animals to the risk of an unpleasant and lingering death through our carelessness.
I was rather pleased with some underwater video footage I managed to get of a gorgeously patterned turtle as he swam laps of my boat one day, with his little entourage of pilot fish in tow. (For some indefinable reason this one seemed male.) The fish follow turtles around to eat the algae that grow on the animal’s shell.
It’s a mutually beneficial relationship: The fish get dinner, and the turtle gets clean. This fellow spent about ten minutes circling my boat, occasionally popping his head above the water, but mostly swimming purposeful laps, round and round.
SOME OTHER VISITORS WERE LESS welcome. Much as I of course love nature in all its manifestations, booby birds are without a doubt the stupidest, smelliest, most obstinate creatures I have ever encountered … although maybe they are not that stupid, because when three of them spotted my small rowboat heading the same way they were going, they decided it would be a great way to hitchhike across the ocean. Why bother flying if you can take it easy while some dumb human does all the hard work for you? Okay, it might be a bit slow, but these birds were in no hurry. And so they moved in and settled on the roof of the forward cabin.
You might think it would be nice for me to have the company—but not this company. It was like having three incontinent strangers move into your living room, take up residence on the sofa, and spend all day squabbling noisily while pooping all over your upholstery. In a short space of time, my solar panels were liberally pasted with bird shit. The boobies would make their deposit and then step in it and shuffle their feet around, as if deliberately spreading it as far and wide as possible.
Each morning I came outside wondering just how much of a mess my unruly visitors had made overnight. It was actually a relief if I found that they had confined their antisocial activities to the forward cabin. It was a less-than-ideal start to the day if they had strayed into the cockpit and pooped on my rowing seat or on the oar handles. The smell was a powerful blend of ammonia and decomposing fish, and my nose would involuntarily wrinkle as I scrubbed away the evidence of their nocturnal misdemeanours. The stench was sometimes bad enough to make me gag.
I couldn’t easily see them from my rowing position, as their roost on the fore cabin was behind me, but I couldn’t ignore the noise. They jostled with each other for position, pecking and flapping and shrieking as each tried to assert his right to stand on that particular patch of cabin roof. It was like having rowdy teenagers fighting in the back of the car. At times the din drowned out my iPod as I tried to listen to my audiobooks.
