Alone

by Gerard d'Aboville

  If I kept religiously to that schedule, that golden rule, it was because I knew that if I were to let up, stray from it for even a few extra minutes, I ran the danger of growing more lax every day and, finally, giving up.

  When I had a good day — and you can translate that quite simply into a day when I made good forward progress — my morale was high and my appetite good. Aside from my canned goods, I fed myself essentially on the dried concentrate that so impressed the Japanese customs officials. It’s not as bad as it sounds: when you add some water and heat it up, it’s really quite palatable. The advantages of the concentrate: it’s extremely nourishing, therefore keeps your weight up; no problem of preservation; reasonably good taste. The disadvantage: after several weeks at sea, it all begins to taste the same. But I told myself that if I had steak every day for four months I’d probably get tired of it, too. Not completely convincing!

  Speaking of steak, the dried steaks I had on board required, after the water had been added, being cooked in a frying pan, for which you needed a bit of cooking fat. Shortly before my departure, I discovered in a store that specialized in camping equipment a kind of fat concentrate, which unfortunately I had not had the time to test It looked like the tiny soap pellets you see in swanky bathrooms, more for decorative than practical purposes. In the frying pan the melted substance looked like ordinary cooking fat. But caveat eater: when it cools, the ersatz matter quickly reverts to its original consistency, which means that unless you eat your steak with considerable speed, you find your jaws slowing with each bite as the waxlike substance takes command. Fortunately, I had brought along with me a number of canned goods, identical to those I had on board the Captain Cook, to supplement my nourishing but wearisome concentrates. Among them was tuna fish packed in olive oil. I guarded the olive oil preciously: it made all the difference in cooking my steaks!

  A key element for my survival were the desalination pumps. Eleven years ago when I crossed the Atlantic, there were no such pumps; I had to carry with me no less than three hundred liters of liquid, including water and wine. The liquid weighed more than the boat itself. For the Pacific, I would have had to take on at least five hundred liters. Fortunately, over the intervening years, compact pumps were invented, whereby seawater could be turned into drinking water using a system of filters. Some pumps, which have been tested aboard sailing ships around the world, are electric and can purify considerable quantities of water a day. Other models, intended primarily for lifeboats, are manually operated.

  My pump weighed a scant eight-and-a-half pounds, and in twelve minutes I could produce about a liter of water. Since I consumed no more than a liter and a half a day, that pump more than sufficed my needs, but for safety’s sake I had another, identical model on board, plus an additional pump, which worked on a slightly different principle. A submersible pump, it utilized the pressure of the water itself to operate the piston forcing water into the filter. Since its output was less than that of the other two, I used it rarely, but just having it on board provided me with a certain comfort.

  One of my brilliant, energy-saving ideas when the boat was being rigged was to utilize the movement of the rowing seat to activate the desalination pumps as I rowed. Though it was my idea, it was Bruno who had the technical ability to translate it into reality by installing a simple mechanism under the seat linking pump and seat. But once again harsh reality took its toll: in order to activate the pump, I found I had to row at a pace faster than I was comfortable with, and in the long run it wore me out. Another factor was that on bad days, when I couldn’t row at all, the system was useless. So I quickly reverted to the hand-pump.

  Though in crossing the Atlantic I had taken on board a fair amount of wine — as any Frenchman worthy of the name would have done — I did so on the reasonably sound theory that the more wine I took the less water would be needed, since liter for liter they weighed the same. But with my desalination pumps, I had had a real battle with my conscience: one liter of wine was roughly two pounds’ additional weight. After wrestling with my soul, I did include twelve liters of wine among my provisions, judging that minimal quantity absolutely essential to my morale. A half-glass of wine with every meal made all the difference in the world, especially when it was consumed in a proper wine glass, another slight indulgence. I coddled that goblet as though it were the family jewels, but despite all my efforts I ultimately lost it to the elements. The victim of one of the many times the boat capsized, it shattered into a thousand pieces.

  August 18

  This morning, a sobering realization. I have only covered one fourth of my route! And it has taken me 38 days… . At that rate, the whole crossing will take a little more than five months… . All of which leaves me pensive, and my morale sagging. I will have to consider rationing my food even further.

  At 0500 I climbed into the cockpit, took up the oars, and tried to head northwest. Compass. Speed log. Always the same old story. The same metronomelike cadence. The shoulder, the arm, the hand, the oar form one single, homogenous member, perfectly adapted to its function. My nerves begin at the tip of the blades. In the heavy swells and crosscurrents, those members control the strokes: lift and lose a stroke to keep the oar from breaking, correct the angle of the oar striking the water, pull a trifle harder on the starboard oar to correct the bow’s heading by three or four degrees.

  The body functions like a machine and the mind like a calculator. Averages … number of days …? keeping accounts. I constantly tried to estimate my time of crossing, reassessing and recalculating, examining all the probabilities, forever extrapolating. On good days, I tried to make forty nautical miles, which is one degree of longitude. That was my point of reference. My mind was filled with figures; figures filled my notebooks, columns of figures that a strong gust of wind could wipe out in a second.

  For hours on end as I rowed, I would concentrate on my secret calculations. My projections were that, at best, I would reach land between November 10 and 15. At worst, December 15.

  The moment I most looked forward to every day was when I plotted my exact position. My instruments told me precisely where I was in relation to the stars and the satellites, I found a certain fascination, almost a giddiness, in measuring my infinitesimal progress thanks to these cosmic beacons. My feet were firmly planted in my miniscule cockpit, but through the lens of my sextant, my head was in the stars, and the scope of my mind expanded then to universal dimensions

  And yet, what did my mind really focus on, sometimes to the point of obsession: things of human dimension — sounds, smells, familiar places.

  What a paradox!

  My penury helped me to rediscover the importance of everything one no longer sees, because I was so close to it.

  6

  And If All This Were Really Pointless

  August 19

  This ocean is pitiless, by its size alone. If this were the Atlantic, and I had already covered the same distance, I would already be halfway across. Here, when I look at my map, I’m still so damnably close to Japan… .

  I try not to count in days any longer but count in weeks, even in months. Alas, when I’m rowing, though, I count in hours, in quarter hours, sometimes in minutes. I have such a double concept of time: one that concerns my crossing, where I count in weeks — the other my day, where I count in minutes.

  Glued to my seat, dazed and deadened by this automaton’s toil, I tried not to look at my watch too often. In keeping with the rules I had laid down for myself, I allowed myself five minutes respite every hour, every full hour. So I watched the minute hand crawl slowly on its appointed rounds, ever so slowly, as though it were stuck. Time seemed to slow down with every successive stroke of the oars, and the upcoming stroke seemed ever so much harder than the one before. Each minute lasted an hour, each hour a day. Six hours of rowing and only five knots on the speed log wasn’t much forward progress. But I felt so much better in the cockpit than bored to death back in the cabin. I was obsessed by the passing of the season.
It was terrible, this sword of Damocles constantly hanging over my head, moving ever closer as the weather conditions worsened and as, inexorably, the storms became more frequent, longer, and more dangerous.

  August 20

  Ideal weather, after a long period of dull days. The nights were clear, but the days dragged on in endless successions of pale gray, which meant that my telex was out, since the solar panels were generating no electricity. With the sun out again, my batteries were recharging, and I could at long last send some messages.

  I heard a number of transmissions on my ham radio wavelengths, from Pacific Net, a network out of Hawaii, and tonight, for the first time, I also picked up a ham radio out of San Jose, California. Now that made me feel as if I were actually closing the gap.

  I was in an area of high pressure systems. Foul winds, which created crosscurrents. I needed to move north, into higher latitudes. And there, I knew, bad weather awaited me. What a terrible paradox: go where the bad weather is, because there you can make better progress!

  Several transpacific jets, arcing high overhead. Doubtless they were following the jet streams, those tailwinds you pick up at altitudes of between 25,000 and 40,000 feet, which for the pilots meant cutting a good twenty minutes off their flight times. When I thought of that other world, so near and yet so far and different, of those passengers comfortably ensconced in their seats directly over my head, I had a very strange feeling. A combination of envy and indifference.

  The Pacific is incredibly empty. In the course of more than a month I only encountered two ships. One was the car carrier Nissan, which looked like an enormous, floating parking lot, filled to capacity with brand-new cars. They are the ugliest boats I’ve ever seem only by really examining them closely can you tell which end is the stern and which the bow. The second encounter was a Chinese ship — with which I established brief radio contact — on its way to the Columbia River estuary in Oregon.

  What a contrast with the “little” Atlantic, which is so much busier when it comes to traffic. During my earlier trip I had run into a German passenger liner — which I actually boarded, having accepted the captain’s invitation for coffee — but I had also crossed paths with a Russian trawler, a Norwegian freighter, the French weather ship France II, a tuna fishing vessel, and a number of others. Here in the Pacific, fellow mariners were scarce as hen’s teeth.

  I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of sunny days I’d had since I set out. I was voyaging through a lugubrious, monochrome world. And where oh where were the fish? The only signs of animal life to date: a mosquito, a fly, and a few dolphins who came and took shelter next to my hull. Plus, one suspicious-looking fin and, on another occasion, the back of a whale. The whale’s appearance was so brief that by the time I got my camera, in the hope of recording its presence, it was already gone.

  Then all of a sudden, I saw another whale. Sector cleared the decks for action! The cetacean seemed huge, a full thirty-plus feet from snout to dorsal fin, as far as I could judge from my position. The creature was swimming about one hundred yards directly in front of Sector’s bow. Feverishly, I got out my camera to record the rare event in this endless seascape. The whale was too far away to get a meaningful picture. I slapped the water with the blade of my oar, since I had always been told that that makes them come. Nothing. The whale was ignoring me completely. Irritated, I took to the oars and tried to overtake it, to no avail; it turned its back and sounded, with a movement of its tail that was both majestic and disdainful. Later — this was unquestionably my day for social calls — a band of dolphins appeared to starboard, and I was delighted to receive them. It reminded me of the times when I used to sail with Cornelia on the Lady Maud, when dolphins would appear by the dozens and play and frolic in the wake of our boat. Their northern Pacific brethren apparently had no desire to waste their time with a playmate as slow and clumsy as Sector, I felt like shouting to them, “Hey, guys! I exist, too, you know!”

  August 23

  A close call — no, a hair’s breadth from death. I had been standing on the deck trying to screw back in the upper part of the antenna when it broke off at the point part way up where it screws into the base, causing me to lose my balance, I did not have my safety harness on, and almost fell overboard. I grabbed hold for dear life, and came out of the fall with no more than a black-and-blue bruise and an awful scare. The boat was drifting rapidly; had I fallen, there would have been no way I could ever have caught up with it.

  One bad reflex, and it could have been all over.

  August 24

  A terrible day.

  This morning, at 0630, while I was still in the cabin, a huge wave hit Sector broadside and capsized it

  For an hour I had worked to right the boat, without success. I tried every combination I could think of; emptying and filling the various ballast tanks, shifting my weight from one side of the hull to the other … nothing worked.

  I was sweating like a pig, and I also knew I was running out of air. I had more and more trouble breathing, and I could feel my heart beating crazily, uncontrollably. It was a downward cycle: the more upset I became, the harder it was to breathe and the faster my heart beat. I unhooked the speedometer screw, to create a tiny opening in the hull above me and, I hoped, let in a little air. Water trickled in and I could feel a tiny bit of air as well, but not enough to do me much good. The atmosphere in the cabin was still stifling. I had no other choice but to leave the cabin. It was a desperate move, because once the cabin was flooded I had no idea whether I would ever be able to turn the craft back over from the outside. I ran through the exercise in my mind, over and over again. I prepared to send up my distress signal, which was strapped to my thigh. To emerge from the cabin backward would be especially difficult, since I would end up in the cockpit of a capsized boat that was being battered by the waves, a boat bobbing about in every direction. Even the very thought terrified me. But I was more frustrated at the thought of being trapped in the cabin. .. .

  A miracle. About 0815, the boat finally turned back over.

  I had been in the capsized cabin for an hour and forty-five minutes. For the next two hours I lay on my bunk in a state of complete collapse, trying to get my wits about me again but incapable of doing anything whatsoever.

  I set off rowing. The ocean was still raging, and I managed to ride the waves at speeds of up to twelve knots. It was sheer folly — and very dangerous — to row in this weather, but I was overcome with an irresistible need to banish the terrible claustrophobia I had gone through earlier in the day.

  Suddenly the boat capsized again. I was caught in the cockpit, all tangled up in my safety harness. I fought like a tiger to get loose. As the boat bobbed about, I was able to get my head out of water, on one side or the other, and breathe in a lungful or two of air, then go under again. I had also swallowed a great deal of water. The boat was bouncing about, and I was being struck every time it moved. A nightmare. In the midst of the welter of white water and foam, I kept struggling to unbuckle my safety harness. But I could feel my strength fading, second by second. I could see the end. Then, just as I was about to give up, I managed to wrench myself free. I was near the end of my strength. I knew I still had to drag myself to the stern post, holding on to the rigging… . Sector was drifting at high speed. If my fingers ever lost their grip, there was no way I would ever get back to the boat. Hanging on to the rudder, I hoisted myself up onto the hull with the last bit of energy I could muster. There, straddling the hull, which was as slippery as it was unstable, I managed to make my way to the middle. The anchor rope, attached to the deck beneath me, was floating in the waves, and I latched on to it with my toes, pulled it in with all my remaining strength, and finally managed to turn Sector back over again. Except that now it was right on top of me. I didn’t have the strength to climb back on board, I kept hold of the anchor rope, meanwhile trying to fill my lungs with air and my body, I hoped, with renewed strength. I hoisted one foot into the cockpit, then a full leg
, then the rest of me. I collapsed there, unable to move, and threw up.

  1730: I’m completely exhausted, and very demoralized… . I know that wisdom and common sense are both telling me to throw in the towel, I also know that I can’t bring myself to take that step until I am compelled to. And when that happens, will I still have time to make the choice? I am well aware that earlier today I was at death’s door,

  August 25

  Ate almost nothing yesterday or all day today. Last night I didn’t sleep a wink, still under the effect of the day’s traumatic events. Found myself gasping for breath a number of times. I had battened down everything for obvious reasons, and when I had trouble breathing I took a quick tour outside and the problem ceased immediately. Probably the foul air of the cabin.

  A feeling of not being able to breathe. The first time the boat capsized was more traumatizing than the second, when I had to do something, and do it fast. But yesterday morning, when Pd suddenly found myself imprisoned underneath the boat, caught in my safety harness, almost asphyxiated, my heart pounding uncontrollably, I was like an animal caught in a trap.

  The greatest danger was to feel sorry for yourself: a moment of weakness. It was not even a question of being tempted to give up, of sending up the distress signal and being picked up by a ship, but a matter of letting yourself die, of saying to yourself: “It’s just too hard, Pve capsized one more time, one time too many. I’m giving up and letting go.” Stupidly. Because at some given moment it would be easier to throw in the towel than continue fighting.