Rowing After the White Whale

by James Adair

  With Ben out, I approached a number of friends about doing the row but for one reason or another it wasn’t possible or affordable for any of them. I therefore resolved to do it solo. My parents were deeply against the whole idea of me rowing an ocean, convinced that I would die or be seriously injured. I argued that, having felt for so many years like a prisoner inside my own body, it made sense to seek the absolute freedom of being at sea – even if that freedom resulted in death. But these arguments never wash with parents, who have a vested interest in keeping their children alive. With my family against and my friends disinterested the only wholehearted believer I had at this time was my girlfriend, Tory. Naturally, she was concerned but at the same time she could see how important it was to me. Perhaps, too, she suspected what a nightmare I’d be if I never did the row, and she was right – I would have been.

  I knew that it would be very hard to get the project off the ground as an independent solo. The rowing fund had halved since Ben pulled out and the prospect of organising everything by myself, as a first timer, was daunting. I therefore turned to a company called Woodvale Challenge, which organises a race across the Atlantic every two years. They’d put on the races which Cracknell and Fogle and most Atlantic rowers had taken part in. For a fee they would oversee the safety and logistics of the race, offer training support and, vitally, lay on a safety yacht to come and rescue or resupply anyone who got into trouble.

  With the Atlantic a well-worn route, I was still keen to do something else, something bigger and wilder – and so they offered this. They were gearing up to run a race across the Indian Ocean in April 2011. They had run an Indian race from Geraldton in Western Australia to Port Louis, Mauritius in 2009, in which only half the boats had made it. It sounded perfect. The Indian was longer and tougher than the Atlantic and virtually nobody had rowed it. There were around eight teams signed up, a mixture of fours, pairs and solos. I signed up as a solo.

  Not long after this, Ben came back on board. An organised event like the Woodvale Indian race meant a safer, shorter trip and he and his girlfriend were keen to move back to the UK. We were back on! We would row an ocean together after all, and while it would be a different ocean than the one we originally planned, it would certainly be as much of an adventure. More people had walked on the moon than had rowed successfully across the Indian Ocean. We would be attempting something not far from unique and, going by the statistics, something very dangerous. But I would be doing it with Ben, as we’d always planned.

  5 A Bosom Friend: Ben Stenning

  ‘He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead to mine, clasped me around the waist, and henceforth we were married; meaning in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me if needs should be.’

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  Ben and I became friends immediately on meeting in the first week of university. By the end of our first conversation we were planning a drive from Cairo to Cape Town. By the end of the first term, when we discovered that we were being two-timed by the same girl, we were already good enough friends to laugh the whole thing off.

  Ben and I often joked that with our boarding school educations, gap years and 2:1s from St Andrews, blond hair, blue eyes and instinctual familiarity with the Home Counties we were straight off the middle-class conveyor belt. But this was perhaps unfair as we had both seen a different side of life even before we pursued our unusual ‘career’ paths.

  After moving to Kenya with his parents, Ben, at the age of seven, stepped on a stonefish. The year was 1987 and the location was a remote beach near the Tanzanian border. The stonefish is the most venomous fish in the world and, if untreated, people often die from the sting. So when Ben limped along to the local doctor with his mother it was not surprising that the medical advice was immediate amputation. Ben’s mum refused the offer and managed to get him onto a British Airways flight to London the same day. He was admitted to the Centre for Tropical Diseases where they managed to save his life, but complications with the infection meant that he remained there for a further two years while the doctors cut away at the tissue of his foot in an effort to save the limb.

  Two years later and with one foot a few sizes smaller than the other, he was discharged and immediately set about taking up as many dangerous pastimes as possible. He later attributed his prodigious sidestep in rugby to having different-sized feet. In 1992, back in Kenya, he captained his school cricket team to the worst defeat in their history in which they managed to post only nine runs in total against Pembroke College, with Ben their top scorer on three.

  Then it was back to the UK for secondary school and, after a gap year in Tonga, Ben headed to St Andrews, where we met. What happened over the next four years we would spend many hours trying to piece together while we were at sea; suffice to say we became friends and had lots of fun.

  Then Ben moved into a flat in Brixton with me, which is where the dreams of ocean rowing were born. Bizarrely, for an English graduate who wrote his dissertation on post-colonial literature with particular reference to the works of V. S. Naipaul, Ben took a job selling accounting software. His heart wasn’t in it and before the year was out he had quit. After a brief stint working at the World Cheese Awards he went back to Africa and took a job in logistics.

  Initially he was based in Uganda, where his recklessness was able to flourish with regular white-water rafting trips and frequent forays into the war-torn north. On one occasion he was imprisoned in the Congo on suspicion of spying, but managed to bribe his way out. Growing bored with Uganda, he got a posting to the Sudan where he lived in a container and had further accident-prone adventures, including having to be airlifted out with the dual afflictions of amoebic dysentery and Nairobi eye. My favourite of his misadventures was the time one of the company’s trucks broke down in a massive swamp the size of Belgium called the Sudd. Unable to bear the heat in the front cabin, Ben and the Indian driver were forced out onto the uncovered carriage. However, the mosquitoes were so thick that they blotted out the moon and the stars and they were soon feasting on Ben and the driver. Cursing his penchant for short shorts and sleeveless shirts he formulated a plan with his colleague. They decided to strip naked and cover themselves in diesel. They spent the rest of the night smoking and exchanging life stories in the nude.

  After Sudan, Ben moved to Ghana, which was more civilised if less interesting. Three years later, Ben handed in his notice and came back to the UK to prepare for the row.

  I never formally assessed Ben as a potential partner in our rowing enterprise. He’d always been my friend and we’d always planned to do it together as mates. Of course he was accident prone, reckless and had no sea experience whatsoever, but then I had exactly the same credentials. Both as bad as each other, we always seemed to compound the trouble that one or the other got into. But being as bad as each other can be an advantage – it assures parity. Also, these seeming negatives were far outweighed by Ben’s many qualities: his great sense of humour, his impulsive generosity, his polymath interests. Spending months at sea with a friend who didn’t take himself too seriously was far more important than setting off with someone who had all the right qualifications . . . even if the friend in question was insisting on bringing a pair of salmon pink short shorts.

  6 Preparations

  ‘Why did I do it? Because at the end of my days, I’m going to be lying in my bed looking at my toes, and I’m going to ask my toes questions like “Have I really enjoyed life? Have I done everything I’ve wanted to do?” And if the answer is no, I’m going to be really pissed off.’

  Chay Blyth

  One summer’s evening at Gallions Reach Marina in east London we inspected a second hand boat which had crossed the Atlantic twice. Despite being a sturdy twenty-three-foot boat she looked impossibly small and slightly surreal sat, as she was, on a rusty old trailer in this forgotten part of London. Sitting on the sliding rowing s
eat, gazing at the glistening towers of Canary Wharf to the west, I found it hard to imagine what life at sea on her might be like. But we needed a boat and she was cheap and according to the owners she floated. We provisionally named her Brixton Dreamer and set about planning many modifications.

  A friend, Christian, with an upmarket web design company called Marmalade on Toast, drunkenly agreed to do our website in the early hours at a wedding and so we were the proud owners of a swish new site. We chose charities to raise money for. Ben picked a Kenyan orphanage, Tumani Homes, while I went with the GBS Support Group. Training at the gym had begun in earnest and we were both getting stronger, building up to either a two-hour row on the machine or a two-hour swim in the pool six days a week. We agreed with my friend Adam, a producer, to make a film about the trip and started filming our training and preparations. We also managed to get a title sponsor, Baxter Healthcare UK, which gave our dwindling bank account a much-needed boost. They also ran a competition for naming our boat with the winner choosing Indian Runner, after the flightless ducks. Everything was looking good.

  Then, around this time, I met up with two people planning on rowing the Indian in the same race as us. Ollie Wells was part of the four-man campaign aiming to break the four’s record and Rob Eustace was a solo who had rowed the Atlantic with Woodvale in 2007 as a pair. They had bad news. There were questions over Woodvale, and in particular over the feasibility of the 2011 Indian race. Rob said he had decided to do the race as an independent and he didn’t think any of the teams listed on Woodvale’s website would do it, apart from us. Ollie had read that Woodvale’s boss, a serial ocean rower named Simon Chalk, had been declared bankrupt. We had unthinkingly been paying our hard-saved money to Woodvale in instalments and had never questioned their viability as a company. I immediately emailed Simon to ask him how many people were taking part and if the race was definitely going ahead. Up until this point he had been quite elusive but he gave a long reply outlining the situation in response to my email. The only two teams definitely in the race were the four and ourselves. The event could go ahead, he said, but it wasn’t workable to have a support yacht. For a reduced fee Woodvale would still run an unsupported row. We were guaranteed a podium place, as long as we could finish. We agreed immediately, while the four-man team called a meeting with Simon and their families to discuss the proposal.

  The meeting was held the day after the Four’s fundraising ball. It was a glittering affair in the Hurlingham Club. Everyone seemed to be there: friends of mine, ocean rowers, even the guys who’d sold us our boat. I called Ben in Africa halfway through the party to say that we needed to do more to promote ourselves. ‘Friends keep asking me why I’m here. I don’t think anyone has any idea we’re the only other team rowing across the Indian Ocean next year,’ I said. In the end we never did very well on that front. Anyway, I went to the meeting the next day with Tory and there we met Simon. He was shorter and fatter than you might imagine for someone who had rowed across four oceans, including the Indian, solo. But he was clearly experienced and had a softly spoken affability and calmness. He was a fascinating character. Every time one of the Four’s parents expressed a concern about the lack of a safety yacht, the organisation of the row or his finances Simon would allay it with calm confidence. But then, as they were nodding in relieved understanding, he’d follow up these reassurances with a story about a shark which followed him on the Indian for 50 days, or about the time he capsized during his 2002 attempt and had to sit on the upturned hull for a night while awaiting rescue. He’d then sit back with a mischievous grin, revelling in the new uncertainty, and wait for the next question. He advised everyone to not bother with the gym but to make sure instead that our boats were ready. He gave the impression that everything was under control for our Indian row and, after all the knowledge he’d shared, I was as sold as the Four, who now also agreed to go it alone without the safety yacht. I even phoned Ben again in Africa to say something along the lines of, ‘Don’t worry, we’re in good hands.’

  We met Simon one more time in the UK, before leaving for Australia. Ben was back in December for our navigation course and we’d arranged for Simon to come and have a look at our boat. He turned up six hours late but stayed into the early hours. He gave us a slightly veiled piece of advice along the lines of, ‘Get cracking, you won’t have any help.’ We didn’t think to ask more, but then a week or so later we discovered online that Simon was about to set off and lead a crew of twelve pay-per-place rowers across the Atlantic. It would be his fifth ocean row. The secretary at Woodvale told us that Simon would see us in Australia three weeks before we set off for the safety checks and that was that. We’d signed up to Woodvale because of the promise of the safety net and logistical help, but we now found there was no support boat and that we were organising everything, such as the shipping, ourselves. We had arrived back at the independent row we were originally planning on, only with less money.

  Ben came back to England for good in January 2011 and, having finished our jobs, we started a manic month’s work on the boat. We were storing the boat on a farm in Winchester, where a boat builder called Neil was constructing a forty-foot yacht. He had tools and experience. Patiently he explained the difference between bolts and screws and showed us how to do one thing or another before deciding that it would be quicker to do it himself. We must have bamboozled him somewhat; two massively impractical, office-working humanities graduates about to set off across the Indian Ocean with no relevant experience whatsoever. Still, we managed to get the boat finished in time to load it into a container in Southampton at the start of February, and booked our flights to Australia to coincide with her arrival in Fremantle. We would ship her across the Indian Ocean in a container and then row her straight back.

  With the boat gone, we reverted to the more familiar territory of shopping and drinking. Sitting in the pub we’d enthuse about the voyage and agree that we were just aiming to make it across and have a great experience rather than break any records. The shopping was a necessary evil. One trip that stands out was a visit to Boots. We had been told by a watermaker expert to buy some condoms to cover a part of our desalinator. We decided to buy them in Boots along with some other essentials. We got to the checkout with ten bottles of sun cream, two tubs of Vaseline and a packet of condoms. The checkout girl looked at our basket and then at us and said, ‘Going on holiday?’ When we explained that we were going to sea together she seemed to understand.

  I was quite stressed during this period: making lists, worrying, planning. Ben was a lot more relaxed about everything and always insisted on taking his afternoon siesta. This could be a comfort but aware that Ben knew as little as I did about boats and navigation it was also slightly concerning.

  In March we had our leaving party. I was touched by the presence of our friends and family, who were there to help us fulfil our dream. Although, in among the games, which included Indian leg wrestling, I still managed to worry. In short, I was afraid of failure. All of our friends had sponsored us, had come to our party and it would be a disaster, I thought, if we were to only last a few days at sea for whatever reason. Having spent months planning and nearly every last penny on getting the boat out to Australia the idea of failure terrified me.

  It was clear to me then that I had learnt, no doubt at school, one of life’s worst pieces of habitual thought, namely that effort is vulgar and that it’s better to make a mockery of something than to be seen to try and fail. I knew I would have to unpick this psychological knot eventually, but in the meantime I commanded myself to not bore anyone else with these worries.

  7 ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’

  ‘Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though chequered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.’

  Theodore Roosevelt, ‘The Strenuous Life’

  My sister and her husband drove us
to Heathrow on a cold March night. Saying goodbye to Tory was hard, especially with my brother-in-law filming us, but we had talked everything through and she’d selflessly told me to go, enjoy the adventure and not to think too much about home.

  ‘One last thing, if you’re ever in a dangerous situation in which you really have to fight to stay alive, promise me that you will, that you’ll never give up.’

  ‘I promise. Everything will be fine. I’m very hard to kill,’ I said, trying to make light of her fears.

  For as long as we’d been together I’d talked about the rowing, so none of this was a surprise to her; she’d been a massive help at every step of the way. For years she’d enthused about the rowing and shared in the dream, and in a hundred practical ways she’d helped us, from painting the boat to helping us pack the food into the holds. I felt bad to be leaving her for so many months and no matter how much I played it down I knew there was a risk. I thought about Tory all the way to Dubai, but by the time we were flying down to Perth I was caught up in the excitement of it all again and intent on following her advice to enjoy the experience.

  ‘Where are you boys off to then?’ asked the customs official in Perth, eyeing our team jackets. We had a couple of very fancy sailing jackets sponsored by Quba Sails, which made us look a lot more professional than we really were.

  ‘We’re going to row from Geraldton to Mauritius,’ I said.