by Roz Savage
There was a second reason that I was very open to the possibility of landing in Papua New Guinea. During one of my many conversations with Jean-Michel Cousteau at TED Mission Blue, we had discussed my final Pacific destination. “Oh, don’t go to Australia. Eez boring!” he had declared in his charming French accent, which was so beguiling that nobody—not even an Australian—could possibly take offence at his words. “Madang eez very interesting. I spent a lot of time zere wiz my father”—meaning, of course, the legendary Jacques Cousteau. Jean-Michel had a way of saying things with such an air of authority that it allowed little scope for doubt or debate. If he said Madang was interesting, then interesting it must be, and there I would go.
AND, ULTIMATELY, I HAD LITTLE CHOICE. THE CURRENTS were so strong that I eventually covered the 2,248 miles in just 46 days, at an average rate of 49 miles a day. To put this in perspective, my previous personal best mileage for a single day had been a mere 42 miles.
On the one hand, this was very good news. I would be back on dry land much sooner than expected and would have time to enjoy the reward I had promised myself on completion of the Pacific project—a few weeks traveling in southeast Asia. The not-so-good news was I had been fully confident of losing the usual 20 to 30 pounds during my voyage, so I had cheerfully chowed down plenty of food to build up my bodily reserves before I set out. As I approached land, I still had plenty of bodily reserves remaining. I doubted I could fit back into my jeans. That’s oceans for you—just when you think you’ve got them all figured out, they find a way to surprise you.
As I contemplated this unexpectedly early end to my row, I confided in my blog:
It’s quite exciting to think that I could be sipping sundowners in Madang around the end of the month, but it has its downsides too. Tonight, as I sat eating my dinner and watching one of the more spectacular sunsets to grace the skies during this crossing, I couldn’t help but feel a little melancholy at the thought of arriving in Madang. I doubt that there will be any familiar faces there to greet me. Nicole has important commitments in Hawai’i. Mum isn’t up to taking the long flight from the UK.
So instead of a grand welcoming party, it could just be me pootling up to a dock, getting my passport stamped, and having a solitary beer in a yacht club bar. And then trying to rope in some local manpower to help me clean and prep the Brocade for her next voyage (the Indian Ocean).
After a four-year, eight-thousand-mile adventure, this would be, well, a bit on the anticlimactic side. But I suppose that’s the price I pay for landing up half a world away from most of my friends. I’ll look at it this way—it will be a great opportunity for me to get to know new friends I haven’t met yet.
WITH THESE THOUGHTS OF ARRIVAL, I WAS in danger of getting ahead of myself. The ocean had a few challenges in store for me yet. Day 26 did not get off to a good start. When I checked my GPS at about 4:30 A.M., I was in for a nasty surprise. I had gone to bed happy with my good west-by-southwest course. This would have got me safely past Cape Henpan at the northern tip of Bougainville Island, which marked the boundary between the Pacific Ocean and the Solomon Sea. But during the few hours between my bedtime and 4:30 A.M., the current had changed, and now the cape and I were on a collision course. Clearly the cape wasn’t going to get out of my way, so I would have to get out of the cape’s. Out I went into the deep darkness of the new-moon night to row my way out of potential disaster. It was not a very relaxed start to the day.
It didn’t get much better. By lunchtime I had managed to break the arm off my one and only pair of sunglasses—one of the few things for which I had no spare—and my watermaker had droned to a halt for no apparent reason and refused to restart. I had no idea what the problem might be. Battery? Motor? But I didn’t have time to investigate—I was still rowing strenuously west to try and avoid land.
As the current dragged me closer, I could see cliffs, dense trees, and white sandy beaches. It all looked lovely in a picture-postcard kind of way, but it held no appeal for me. There was nothing to be gained by attempting to land on the beach, and potentially much to be lost, including my rudder.
My mind flickered back to a conversation I’d had with Captain Vince of the White Holly. He, Nicole, and I had been standing on the bridge of his ship in Sausalito some time after our emergency mission to salvage the Brocade, chatting about the Pacific crossing. He had been rifling through the drawers of his chart cabinet to see if he had any maps of the Pacific that he could give me. He had found a chart that spanned the entire ocean from California to Australia. It had been printed in the 1950s, according to the legend in the bottom right-hand corner, so it was rather out of date but better than nothing. The future Republic of Kiribati was still labeled as the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, Phoenix Islands, and Line Islands.
As we discussed my options for landfalls en route, Captain Vince pointed to an island on the left side of the chart. “You don’t want to land there,” he’d said. “They still eat people.” He jabbed his finger at a couple of other island groups. “Or there, or there.”
Nicole had looked up from the chart to stare at me, her eyes as big as saucers. “Really?” she had asked. “Oh Lordy.”
I HADN’T BEEN SURE IF CAPTAIN VINCE was telling the truth or if he was just teasing. At the time it hadn’t seemed to matter much either way, as I was planning to aim for Australia, well to the south and, to the best of my knowledge, mostly cannibal-free. But now the conversation came back to haunt me. Where had those islands been? Weren’t they around here somewhere? Could it really be true that cannibals still existed?
It was just then that I saw three small boats heading across the water towards me. I started to move the oars just a little faster. I was sure I was being ridiculous. Surely cannibalism had died out centuries ago. But I didn’t want to find out the hard way that I was wrong.
I was about a half mile offshore when the men reached me. They were in dugout canoes with outriggers, using large carved wooden paddles. The first man to approach wore a faded red T-shirt with “Digicel” emblazoned across his chest and a baseball cap bearing the legend “USA.” The next to arrive had dreadlocks and a pair of sunglasses propped on his forehead. He was stripped to the waist to reveal a well-muscled torso. The third kept his distance.
Mr. Digicel bared his teeth at me. They were stained dark red. Cannibal!
Or, to put it another way, when I came to my senses and banished Captain Vince’s disturbing words from my mind:
Mr. Digicel smiled at me. He had been chewing betel nut. Friend!
The betel nut is the round green nut, or to be more botanically correct, the drupe, of the areca tree. When chewed, usually with lime, it has a mildly stimulant effect. Like tobacco chewers, betel chewers tend to spit frequently, and I would later see gobbets of red liquid staining the roads of Madang. To the uninitiated, the visible effects of betel-nut chewing are rather alarming, as the nut permanently stains the teeth a dark crimson.
During a trip to India a few years previously, I had seen streaks of betel-nut juice, usually misdirected in the general vicinity of litter bins, so I knew enough to realize that Mr. Digicel had probably been chewing on the fruit of the areca rather than on human bones. The sight of a spool of fishing line and a collection of lumps of coral to use as weights in the bottom of his dugout canoe reassured me that he was much more interested in eating fish than small female ocean rowers.
Digicel and Dreadlocks grasped hold of the gunwales of my boat and said something to me. They didn’t seem hostile, so I assumed that it was some form of greeting, and greeted them in return.
This initial exchange of pleasantries over, our conversation stalled.
I cast around for a way to show my friendly intentions. I pulled out the chart from my sleeping cabin, and tried showing them where I had come from, relative to where we were now. Digicel took hold of the chart and peered closely at it as I pointed at the relevant outlines of islands, but I didn’t see any flash of recognition. It may well have been the fi
rst chart that he had ever seen. I didn’t suppose they had much need for them. Their world probably consisted of their village, the coastline, and a few choice fishing spots. I wondered if he even understood the concept of a chart.
I do not in any way intend to cast aspersions on his intelligence. I have no doubt at all that if it came to a fishing competition, he would beat me hands down. I simply mean that charts are, when you think about it, not completely intuitive. If you had lived completely in a three-dimensional world of forest, beach, and ocean, then what would these random two-dimensional squiggles on a yellowing sheet of paper mean to you?
As conversation flagged once again, challenged beyond survival by the lack of a common language or even a common frame of reference, I resorted to the international language of food. I offered them each a Lärabar, which seemed to please them. I wasn’t sure what they would make of the chewy, fruity, nutty bars, but I felt that at least I had shown an appropriate degree of hospitality.
Having completely exhausted my repertoire of non-language-based gestures of friendship, I unshipped my oars and departed, giving them a cheery wave. I watched, slightly nervously, as I rowed away, wondering if they would follow, but they obviously had more important matters to attend to and headed in the opposite direction. I have no idea what they made of me and my strange craft and my odd piece of paper with strange shapes on it.
I pondered the contrast between our lives. I had lived in places such as Cambridge, Oxford, London, New York, and San Francisco, while they lived in thatched huts on Bougainville Island in the Solomon archipelago. I ate in restaurants and bought my food from supermarkets. They picked coconuts and caught fish. Until recently I had never heard of Bougainville Island. And maybe they had never heard of London, somewhere on the opposite side of the globe. We were literally worlds apart. Neither was better or worse, but they were undeniably different. I was as anomalous in their world as they would have been in mine. I knew that there were places in Papua New Guinea where first contact between white men and indigenous people had taken place within living memory. Globalisation is in every sense a foreign concept here. In some ways this planet feels like a small and ever-shrinking world, while in other ways still mind-bogglingly diverse.
AS THE NEXT FEW DAYS PASSED and I continued into the Solomon Sea, I became increasingly concerned by the number of vessels I was seeing. No dugout canoes, these, but enormous container ships. Compared with the second stage of the row, when I had seen only one ship in 104 days, there were times on the Solomon Sea when I could see 5 at one time. It felt very crowded, and it made me nervous.
Although I have always told myself—and my mother—that the bow wave of a container ship would probably push my little boat to one side like a cork on the water, I am not completely convinced of this and sincerely hope never to put it to the test. I kept my Sea-me radar target enhancer turned on at all times. The Sea-me (which, as Boro Lucic of the MTC had proudly told me, was made in Montenegro, just like him) is a white pole, about two feet high, fixed to the top of my sleeping cabin. It is designed to make my boat look much larger than its actual size on the radar of any nearby vessels. It connects to a unit inside my sleeping cabin that flashes a red light and sounds an alarm when it detects a ship’s radar scanner. This is not conducive to a good night’s sleep, but is preferable to being run over in the dark.
Most nights I would be awakened from my shallow sleep by the alarm, and responding groggily to its urgent beeping, I would stick my head out of the cabin to take a look. Sometimes I could see nothing at first and would have to clamber right out of the cabin to get a 360-degree view. Even then, sometimes there would be only a distant dot that would soon disappear over the horizon. The Sea-me is an invaluable piece of safety equipment, but I often wished that those industrious Montenegrins had devised a way to make the alarm indicate the proximity of the radar-emitting vessel, either in the loudness or the frequency of the beep. It might have resulted in fewer false alarms and more sleep.
Feeling extremely vulnerable, I would have liked a lot more lights on my boat. Usually I prefer to be stealthy, not seeking out contact with other vessels nor wishing to attract their attention. But at this point I would have preferred to be lit up like a Christmas tree. I improvised an all-round white light from the refractive plastic casing of one of my solar-powered rail lights, fitted over an LED light that was a relic from an old video-camera system. A few cable ties held the casing in place. When I plugged the LED light into the 12-volt socket to give it power, it looked like a very miniature, and very homemade, version of a lighthouse. It wasn’t especially elegant, but it worked and at least gave me the happy delusion that I was marginally more visible to any passing ships.
ONE DAY I WAS, IF ANYTHING, TOO visible. I turned around at the end of a rowing shift to see a small container vessel a few hundred yards away. As usual, I was rowing naked, so I quickly dived into the cabin to put on shorts and a sports top. There was no point in trying to hide, because there was absolutely no doubt that they had seen me and were coming over to take a closer look. So once I was decent, I picked up the VHF radio to make contact.
The voice on the radio was friendly and asked if I needed food or water, or if I wanted them to pass on a message. I thanked them and said I had more than enough provisions and adequate communications. I was tempted to ask if they had any ice cold drinks—I wouldn’t really mind what it was, so long as it was cold and didn’t come in a plastic bottle—but I resisted the impulse.
They called back a minute later to confirm the spelling of Brocade. They said they wanted to report my position. I was none too happy about this, but couldn’t think of any valid reason for asking them not to. So I reluctantly spelled out my boat’s name for them.
As I rowed on, I could just imagine what they might be saying. “Hey guys, you’ll never guess what we just saw. There’s this crazy naked Englishwoman rowing across the ocean. Check it out!”
The next thing that happened was that my post-lunch siesta was interrupted by a loud droning noise. I lifted the sunhat off my face and scanned the sky. A helicopter was rapidly approaching. I hardly had time to dive back into the cabin and scramble into my clothes again before they were about 50 yards away, hovering just feet above the water. We had a vague kind of exchange over the VHF radio, but it was mostly drowned out in the din of their engine. After about five minutes they roared off into the blue sky, leaving behind one distinctly discombobulated ocean rower. Even though I was now drawing close to land, I had got very used to having the ocean all to myself and my pelagic friends, and I did not at all welcome these human intrusions.
In fact, I was starting to feel like an exhibit at a zoo. I hadn’t realized I was within helicopter range of land. But surely that had to be the end of unwanted attentions for the day. So I went back to my usual ocean outfit of sun hat, rowing gloves, and iPod, and carried on rowing. I had my earbuds in, listening to the excellent audiobook of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, so I didn’t hear the next helicopter until it was too late. When I finally noticed, it was hovering about 30 yards away, the crew waving to me from the open door of the cockpit. With a girly shriek I let go of the oars and tried to cover as much of my nakedness as a wide-brimmed sun hat could be made to conceal—which was nowhere near enough.
I kept my clothes on for the rest of the day, so of course nobody else turned up. I grumpily supposed that I would have to keep myself clad for the remainder of my voyage. It would be terribly inconvenient. Clothes get sweaty and smelly and are less easily washed than skin. And in the future I had also best check the horizon and skies before I used my open-air bathroom.
All in all, I simply felt that I had not had my full quota of me-time for the year. Although on dry land I am gregarious enough and can happily go out every night for months on end, I appreciate my social life all the more for its contrast with the decidedly unsocial part of my year spent at sea. I can enjoy each extreme because I know it is only a matter of time before I find myself back
at the other end of the spectrum. If I get too much of one or not enough of the other over a 12-month period, I feel decidedly out of balance.
It wasn’t as if I were lonely. I was getting really rather fond of the little entourage of yellow fish that had gathered beneath my boat and kept me company for many hundreds of miles as I rowed across the ocean. When I paused and they didn’t have to swim to keep up, it was fun to watch them taking time out to squiggle around, flipping and flopping at the water’s surface. They were loyal little fellows, and I wondered what they would do when I was finished.
BUT LAND WAS COMING UP FAST, READY or not. Now that I had entered the Solomon Sea, I had to loop to the south. The currents in the Solomon swirl in a clockwise direction. I had entered this rotary system at its two o’clock position, and wanted to exit it at ten o’clock. To try and take the shortcut there by going anticlockwise, via twelve o’clock, was impossible. I would be going head to head with the current, and it would win. So I would have to go the long way around the system clockwise, via the bottom of the dial, instead.
After narrowly avoiding bumping into Woodlark Island lying at seven o’clock, I continued clockwise towards the Vitiaz Strait at ten o’clock. The strait is an 18-mile-wide corridor between the main island of New Guinea, the second largest island in the world, and the smaller island of New Britain, which together with a few more islands comprise the nation of Papua New Guinea. Overall, the land area of the country is slightly larger than California, or twice the size of Britain. The Vitiaz Strait represented the final stage of my journey to Madang.
