by Roz Savage
With the satphone, I eventually resorted to option 3, when the problem escalated from difficult to impossible.
I had spent a whole morning on the phone to Rob at Remote Satellite Systems, who was incredibly generous with his time, especially as it was a Sunday, and we tried to solve the problem. My whole cabin was strewn with bits of computer, satellite phones, and cables, as we tried every possible permutation to find a combination that worked. We failed, and as the morning wore on, I got crankier and crankier at being cramped in my hot, stuffy cabin while rowing conditions outside were relatively cool and pleasant. Rowing 12 hours a day isn’t necessarily at the top of my list of favourite things to do, but it’s all relative, and for once I was impatient to get back to the oars and away from delinquent technology.
EVENTUALLY I HAD HAD ENOUGH. MORE THAN enough. Keeping meticulous notes in my Rite in the Rain waterproof notebook, I had tried every possible option. Sometimes I had come tantalizingly close to succeeding, only to fail at the last gasp. It was with an enormous sense of relief that I finally declared the system to be beyond hope. I simply could not stand to waste another moment on a project that I was convinced had no chance of success. I hope that, given the scale of the projects I pursue, you know I am not a quitter. But now it was time to abandon the technology and move on.
I felt the need to purge my living quarters of evidence of the techno fiasco, so I gathered up every last bit of defunct kit from my sleeping cabin, shoved it disgustedly into whatever waterproof receptacles I could find, and relegated it to the forward storage cabin. It left my control panel looking strangely denuded, but I couldn’t stand having all that stuff lying around being useless. Now it was out of the way and I could forget about it. There was nothing to be done about it until I got back to dry land.
It could be worse, I reflected. On the Atlantic I’d had no communications at all for the last 24 days, when my one and only satphone had broken. My transponder had still been working, so my progress was visible on the online map, but I was totally incommunicado apart from one occasion when I had managed to make radio contact with a passing ship to let my mother know I was okay. I had actually been more than content in my glorious isolation for those precious few weeks. I’d felt it to be a rare privilege to be truly alone in this day and age, when on one level we have so much communication, but on another level so little connection, so much information but so little understanding.
Now, on the Pacific, Mum and I devised a workaround. I would type blog posts on the laptop, then use the satphone to call a special voicemail account that my mother had set up. I would dictate the blog post, inserting notes on spelling and punctuation where necessary, and hang up. My mother would receive the message as an mp3 file in her e-mail. The big advantage of this over normal voicemail was that she could pause, fast forward, or rewind the message. She would transcribe it and post it to my website via the WordPress interface. Not for the first time, I was grateful to have such a technologically competent mother, especially impressive as she was already over 70 years old, and many of her contemporaries barely knew what a blog was. Yet again she helped keep the show on the road—or the row on the show.
In many ways I preferred this streamlined version of blogging. It was a shame, but not the end of the world, that I was no longer able to post photographs from the ocean. And there was much during this crossing to keep me cheerful. I was making unexpectedly fast progress westwards. Despite having wasted so much time on the phone, conditions that Sunday conspired to give me my best day’s mileage ever—around 60 nautical miles closer to my target, including some good progress south.
“Praise be to the weather gods, and long may it continue,” I dictated for my blog.
In addition to my speedy progress, I had a new friend. There was a little spider that had been with me since I left Tarawa. I couldn’t figure out what he was finding to eat, but he seemed pretty full of energy. He moved so fast that it was hard to catch him on camera, but I managed to grab a blurry photo or two of Alf the Spider. I hoped my little stowaway would manage to survive the voyage. I enjoyed the company. The conversations weren’t great, but on a solo rowboat, you make the most of what you have.
SADLY, ONE OF THE MOST NOTABLE THINGS about this stage of the row was the amount of plastic trash I saw littering the ocean. Between San Francisco and Hawai’i I’d seen many small fragments, distributed throughout the water column, but here, closer to land, I saw many pieces of litter that were still all too recognisable.
On one particular day, I saw about 30 individual recognisable pieces—drinks bottles, yogurt pots, bits of packaging. There was something upsetting about seeing a beautiful blue ocean, glinting in the sunshine, marred by a plastic bottle bobbing along on its surface.
Appalled by the ugliness of the sight, I shared in my blog:
I would love to see a ban on all plastic drinks bottles. It’s easy enough to avoid using plastic water bottles—just buy a Brita water filter and keep refilling your own reusable water bottle. But what about the other drinks, even health drinks like smoothies, that come in plastic bottles? I hate the hypocrisy of selling a drink that is supposedly good for your body, packaged in a substance that is so bad for the planet.
For decades—centuries, even—we used glass bottles. They can be returned for a deposit, or recycled, and even if they end up in landfill or the ocean they are at least inert and don’t leach out nasty chemicals into the environment. I don’t know the cost/benefit analysis of glass versus plastic, but if you factor in the REAL cost of plastic—environmental as well as financial—I’m fairly certain this would swing the argument.
After all, beer still comes in glass bottles. So why can’t everything else? Maybe we should boycott all other drinks, and just drink beer and wine. Think this could catch on as a campaign? SAVE THE WORLD. DRINK BEER.
A waggish commentator on my blog suggested an even better slogan: “Save the whale. Drink more ale.” When my mother told me about it, I had to laugh. Sometimes you have to laugh, or else you’d cry.
GIVEN MY DEEP-ROOTED AVERSION to marine debris, it was ironic that this final stage of the row would also become notable for objects going overboard. The first harbinger of the trend was the electric kettle. Although electric kettles are not an efficient use of solar energy—anything involving light or heat gobbles up electricity at a phenomenal rate—by this point I had simplified my technological setup so much, and had such a plentiful supply of sunshine, that I had more than enough solar energy to spare. It took the kettle about 20 minutes to reach a boil, but I was in no hurry. I wasn’t going anywhere.
On the evening of Day 13, I was bringing the kettle out on deck, ready to rehydrate my dinner. A sudden wave lurched the boat, and I grabbed hold of the starboard guardrail with the same hand that was holding the kettle. The kettle toppled out of its stand and dropped into the water.
I didn’t even stop to think. Even if I had, I’d have done the same thing. It wasn’t the kettle that mattered (I had a spare); it was the fact that I couldn’t possibly drop plastic in the ocean and just leave it there. So with barely time for a quick expletive, I followed my kettle into the water, sun hat and all.
This was not the time I would have chosen to go for a swim. It had been stormy and chilly most of the day, and the ocean waters had been sullied by a long windrow of plastic shreds in the ocean, accompanied by small, slimy green blobs and occasional jellyfish. It was a nasty, dirty, polluted bit of ocean and the last place I wanted to go for a dip. But it had to be done.
I retrieved the kettle and, trying not to think about jellyfish, to which I have a lifelong aversion, I splashed my way cack-handedly back to the boat. I don’t suppose that many people have tried to swim with an electric kettle in one hand, so take it from me—it isn’t easy.
Unsurprisingly, the kettle no longer worked too well. The light came on to show it was receiving power, but it wouldn’t heat up—which rather defeats the point of the thing. So I had to resort to the spare, but hoped
that Kettle 1 might recover when it had had a chance to dry out. Meanwhile, Kettle 2 did a grand job, and after my unscheduled swim, I was soon looking forward to some nice hot rehydrated fish pie, extra welcome on such a dank, gloomy day.
THE NEXT TIME I WENT OVERBOARD after a stray object, the outcome was nearly a lot more disastrous than a ruined kettle. 15 May 2010 was nearly the last day of my life. I was so embarrassed by my own stupidity that it took me a couple of days before I decided to share the story on my blog, and even then I felt the need to defend myself first.
It is confession time, and please, before you are tempted to wag your finger at me, bear in mind that I didn’t have to tell you this. I could have kept it quiet, and you would have been none the wiser. So please resist the urge to tell me what I already know, that I shouldn’t have done it.
You’d think that a near-death experience would be many things, but embarrassing would probably not be near the top of relevant adjectives. Yet that was my overriding emotion, because my premature demise would have been entirely my own stupid fault.
When I embarked on the Atlantic crossing, my first time alone at sea, my foremost fear had been that I would do something terminally stupid. Back then I had been constantly conscious of the need to be very, very careful, because solo seafarers get no second chances. But as time had gone on, I had relaxed my guard, even become a little complacent, and it was nearly my undoing. The motives for my act of consummate stupidity were good, but that would have been scant consolation to either me or my mother as my head disappeared beneath the waves for the last time.
On this final stage of my row across the Pacific, I nearly got separated from my boat.
TO PROTECT MYSELF FROM THE INTENSE afternoon sun once its arc had moved beyond the slender protection of my triangular sun canopy (which had been dubbed the “G-string” due to its resemblance to a certain item of underwear), I had improvised an extension to the shelter involving a sarong and the telescopic boat hook. Normally I kept everything on deck attached to the boat with lanyards, but not on this occasion—the first link in the chain towards potential disaster.
As I was rowing along, listening to my iPod, the boathook slipped from its mounting and dropped overboard. The sudden movement, rather than the faint splash, caught my attention. My first instinct was to go after it, just as I had gone after the electric kettle. I briefly considered that I could manage without it, especially as I had a spare boathook in the fore cabin, but it just wouldn’t do to leave a manmade, non-biodegradable object floating around in the ocean.
By the time I had removed sun hat, rowing gloves, iPod earbuds, and sunglasses, the boathook was starting to look rather distant. That crucial delay was the second link in the chain of disaster. I mentally measured the growing distance from the boat to the boathook. Not good, but I couldn’t just leave it there. So I jumped in and started swimming.
As I swam out, I was already starting to have misgivings. I felt very vulnerable being so far from my boat.
I got to the boathook, picked it up, and started to head back towards the boat, but swimming with the rod in one hand was no easier than swimming with the kettle. I didn’t seem to be making any headway at all. It rapidly became apparent that I couldn’t possibly make it if I held on to the boathook.
So, reluctantly, I abandoned the hook to its fate, hoping that a fisherman from a nearby island might pick it up and put it to good use before it drifted out to the deep ocean beyond. But even without the hook in hand, I struggled to narrow the distance between me and my fast-drifting boat. I am not a speedy swimmer. I can plod slowly along for a long time, but sprinting is not my style. Yet right now a sprint was what I needed. My life depended on it.
I could feel my body starting to tire. My fingers were already stiff from grasping the oars, and now they weren’t strong enough to pull through the water effectively. I was trying to cup my hands, to more effectively grab and draw the water past me, but my fingers trembled and I could feel the water slipping between them. Every few strokes I glanced frantically towards the boat, but it didn’t seem to be getting any closer.
I struggled on, feeling my heart pounding a desperate drumbeat of exertion and rising panic. The boat was my everything, my life-support capsule, my only refuge in this massive ocean wilderness. The nearest land, Bougainville Island, although relatively close in Pacific terms, was still dozens of miles away—much farther than I could swim. Unless I could get back to my boat, I would eventually become exhausted and slip beneath the waves to my death.
My strength was starting to fail when a memory rose up in my panic-numbed brain. A few months before, my mother had told me she’d had a nightmare in which they had found my boat empty and abandoned, with nobody on board. She had been distraught when they told her the news, for she knew it meant I had been lost at sea. Even as she told me about the nightmare some time later, she had almost been crying at the traumatic memory. I had hugged her and promised her that I would never let it come true.
Was I now going to keep that promise? Or would I leave my mother to mourn for her elder daughter, lost at sea in an accident that she had foreseen? I couldn’t do that to her. I owed it to her, if not to myself, to come back safely.
I dug deep, found an extra ounce of strength, and at last the boat began to get perceptibly closer. With an overwhelming sense of relief, I felt my outstretched fingers finally touch the black rope grab line. I had probably been in the water no more than 15 minutes, but it had been the longest 15 minutes of my life, and almost the last.
I COLLAPSED ONTO THE DECK, MY CHEST HEAVING, and felt the fear ebb away to be replaced by a powerful realisation of my own foolishness. Of all the things I had said I would never do, this was the most obvious. Don’t leave the boat! And to be sure, I never would again. If I had been in danger of being complacent or blasé, this was the wake-up call that I needed.
As I felt the reassuring solidity of the warm deck against my back, I reflected that in the context of expeditions, nature rarely kills. It is much more likely to be human error—a poor choice of equipment, underestimating the conditions, or a bad judgment call. Robert Falcon Scott, Sir John Franklin, and George Mallory were all in very hostile environments, but ones in which others had survived. It only takes a single mistake at a key moment, or a series of minor mistakes that combine to create a catastrophe, to make the difference between life and death. Dropping a boathook is not in itself a disaster, but crucial moments had been lost while I shed garments and earbuds, and even the decision to try and salvage the hook was arguably a poor one, although my motives had been worthy.
The American novelist and newspaper editor Edgar Watson Howe once said: “A good scare is worth more to a man than good advice.” I was inclined to agree. I had scared myself silly but the lesson had been well learned. As I vowed at the end of my confessional blog post, “From now on, no matter what goes overboard, I don’t.”
THAT NIGHT I HAD A DREAM. I WAS in the waves and could see my boat in the distance. I was trying to get back to it, but it was too far away. I was swimming and swimming, but to no avail.
Then there were millions of people in the water with me. We were all swimming as hard as we could, trying to get to my boat, except that now she was no longer my boat. She was a blue and green Earth, spinning gently on the waves like an enormous inflatable beach ball. The waves darkened, and sparkling stars of phosphorescence appeared.
Then we were swimming through space, our arms thrashing vainly in the vacuum. We had drifted away from our Earth, and now we were trying to return, but it was too late. We had become separated from our only life-support capsule, our solitary life raft in the big black vastness of the universe. Now we realised that we needed it, that without it we were lost and would die. But we had drifted too far, become too distant, and there was no way back. We were doomed.
I woke up with a jolt as the sound of a dying wave reverberated around the cabin. I felt sick and clammy and stuck my head out of the cabin hatch to get some fresh
air. I looked up at the Milky Way and prayed that we would rediscover our connection to the Earth while there was still time.
CHAPTER NINE
ACHIEVEMENT
“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement.
Nothing can be done without hope.”
— HELEN KELLER
Having been fully prepared to spend the usual 100 or so days at sea, I was rather taken aback to find that I was clearly on track for a much faster crossing. By the time I was halfway through the third week, it looked like it might be just another two or three weeks before I made landfall. I would soon be entering the Solomon Sea, so in one sense the crossing of the Pacific Ocean proper would already be over, and from there it would not be far to Papua New Guinea.
I recorded in my blog:
Given the unpredictability of where I would end up, let alone when, we have all been taken rather by surprise. For the last few days my mother and I have started to discuss arrival logistics, but there is a lot to do and a rapidly diminishing window of time in which to do it.
I had long since given up on my original goal of Cairns in Australia. I had known from the moment that I finally decided to head for Tarawa rather than Tuvalu that it would be all but impossible to make it to Queensland. Even supposing I was fortunate enough to make it into the Coral Sea, which lay between the Pacific and the eastern coast of Australia, the winds and currents in that stretch would all be coming out of the southeast and pushing me north while I was trying to get south. Even though, on a map of the world, Cairns may appear to be just around the corner from Papua New Guinea, not all ocean miles are created equal. Winds and currents can conspire against a slow-moving craft in such a way that, as my new weatherman, Lee Bruce, put it, “you can’t get there from here.”
So I had decided to follow in the footsteps, or wake, of Erden Eruç, and to aim instead for Papua New Guinea. This turned out to be a good plan. The currents in the western Pacific were astonishingly powerful. This was later explained to me by an oceanographer as follows: As the world spins, the currents bunch up on the western side of any major body of water. Waves work the same way; the greater the “fetch,” or distance over which a wave gathers momentum, the larger it grows. It is like a rolling snowball, gaining more mass as it goes. The result of this was that the currents on this third and final stage of the Pacific were propelling me rapidly westwards.
