Rowing After the White Whale

by James Adair

  ‘What, out there on the ogin?’ he said, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘Good on ya.’

  We got the same reaction from most of the Aussies we met. We were just another couple of mad Poms heading out into the ogin, never to be seen again. We stayed in Perth for a week with friends of Ben’s. Perth got its name as the ‘City of Light’ when, on 20 February 1962, residents all turned on their houselights, car lights, street lights and any other lights they could lay their hands on so that American astronaut John Glenn would be able to see the city when he passed over during his orbit of the earth on Friendship 7. They repeated this treat for Glenn when he passed overhead again in 1998 on the Discovery, when he became the oldest man to go into space at the age of 77.

  During our time in Perth we cleared our boat through customs with the help of an agent, the unfortunately named but highly efficient Peter Sutcliffe. We then got a lift 400 kilometres up the west coast with family friends who lived in Geraldton, our starting point. As we sped through the Australian outback, dodging kangaroos in the dying light, it was hard to imagine exactly what it would be like putting to sea in our little boat. The ocean off Perth had seemed so serene. But it would surely be rough; the statistics for ocean rowing boats spoke for themselves.

  8 A Brief Note on the Indian Ocean Rowing Statistics

  ‘The Indian Ocean, the most savage of the three.’

  Bernard Moitessier, The Long Way

  When we set off in April 2011 the statistics for rowing a boat from Australia across the Indian Ocean did not help calm our nerves. The success rate was low and the stories that accompanied each failure were frightening.

  Only eight pairs had ever attempted the Indian, of which only two had made it across. Those two pairs both did so in the 2009 Woodvale race, with a support yacht following them. The six pairs who didn’t make it were spread out from 2002 to 2009. Looking at the stats we had to ask ourselves, was it just that the 2009 pairs got lucky? A 25 per cent success rate was troubling indeed, especially given that 18 of the 20 pairs who started Woodvale’s 2009 Atlantic race finished.

  The two pairs who finished the Indian did it in 102 and 103 days respectively. There were diverse reasons for the other pairs not finishing. In 2002 Simon Chalk and a friend attempted to be the first pair to cross but, according to Simon, they were holed by either a stray container or the periscope of a submarine. They had to cling to the upturned hull all night until they were rescued the following day. Another British pair was rescued after a storm battered them for 72 hours, resulting in injury and broken equipment. They had been at sea for 46 days. A Russian pair managed 24 days before their watermaker broke. Roger Haines, who gave us lots of help before we left, and his fellow rower had to abandon their attempt when Roger broke a vertebra just one day in (he went on to complete the Atlantic solo after recovering from injury, crossing in 93 days in 2010). The same year another pair called a halt when steering problems prevented them getting off the shelf after an 11-day battle.

  The solos had a 50 per cent success rate, with three managing to cross from six attempts, while the bigger crews of four or more fared better, with four crossings and one failure.

  SOLOS

  PAIRS

  FOURS

  source: www.oceanrowing.com

  These statistics were sobering, especially when compared to those for the Atlantic. Of the 169 pairs to attempt the mid-Atlantic route over the years, 145 have been successful with only 24 coming a cropper. Apart from being 600 miles shorter than the Indian crossing, the Canaries to Caribbean row is blessed by more dependable trade winds and generally more favourable currents. When rowers leave from the Canary Islands they are in deep water straight away and don’t have to contend with the shallow continental shelf which stretches away from Western Australia for hundreds of miles. Looking at the statistics before we left we could see that all the pairs had either been rescued or had spent over a hundred days at sea. Whatever happened to us we could see that there would be drama. It was finally happening.

  9 The Shortest Possible Description of the Lead-up to Our Departure, Including a Brief Portrait of the Incomparable Simon Chalk

  ‘Good humoured, easy and careless, he presided over his whale-boat as if the deadliest encounters were but a dinner, and his crew all invited guests.’

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  We waited in Geraldton for Simon Chalk and our boat, two fairly important parts of our row, which were supposedly coming together. The four-man team was all the while deeply concerned about Woodvale and Simon. He had built their boat and they needed various bits of equipment from him. They were getting quite stressed about the situation having set out very publicly, with some high-profile sponsors like B&Q, to beat the Indian Ocean four’s record of 68 days. The days went by without Simon or the boat arriving. It felt like everything was descending into farce.

  In the end Simon turned up – with his impish grin and full of bold stories and jovial advice – but without the boats. The next day we bumped into the four-man crew on the beach and they had bad news. Simon had disappeared again. He had driven down to Perth and, just before boarding a plane, had sent them an email explaining how he had to fly to Barbados to meet a pair who were finishing the Atlantic.

  We now started to realise that we were completely on our own and might have to set off by ourselves without any shore support. We decided to stop speaking to anyone back in the UK because we were finding it difficult to lie and say everything was going fine. We paid to have the boats hauled up to Geraldton from Fremantle and started on our last-minute preparations.

  At this point Rob Eustace, the independent solo, turned up with his boat. Tony Humphreys, his weather router and safety officer, was with him. He had been the safety officer on Woodvale’s big Atlantic races in the past, but had fallen out with Simon and left. Unless you asked Simon, in which case he’d been sacked for incompetence. Ocean rowing, we were discovering, was a small world with plenty of politics and clashing personalities.

  In the end Simon turned up in Geraldton again. Having initially tiptoed around each other like spurned lovers, Simon and Tony were soon getting on famously and, burying the hatchet, they quickly came to an arrangement that Tony would be our safety officer. In payment, Simon would apparently give him some old boat he had back in the UK. By then this sort of carry-on seemed almost normal, so we all agreed. Still, Simon knocked around in Australia until we left, helping out, drinking whisky on our boat with us and mouthing the answers to key safety questions behind Tony’s back so that we could pass the final sign-off.

  Simon did give us some good advice. ‘Stay positive, take care of each other and enjoy it’ was his philosophy in a nutshell. He also fervently believed that, apart from serious injury, the only reason people stopped rowing was because they had given up psychologically. Broken kit, minor ailments, leaks – these were all excuses. There was a way of getting around every problem, he argued, and stubbornness would always prevail. This approach made us even more determined not to quit for any reason, no matter the danger. Our mindset would get us through.

  Simon dominated our conversations when he wasn’t there, too. He seemed to us essentially like a modern-day corsair: affable, charming, amusing, interesting and relentlessly positive, but a pirate nonetheless. If you were on a rowing boat with him you’d never run out of conversation and you could absolutely trust him with your life but, as with any pirate, you wouldn’t leave him in charge of your accounts or your harem. We liked him.

  10 Australia

  ‘Having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.’

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  All the shenanigans that led to Tony becoming our safety officer didn’t help instil confidence, although we remained outwardly gung-ho. The main problem was that neither Ben nor I really knew what we were doing. This manifested itself in different ways. Ben would act quickly and wi
thout thinking, so I would come back and find him drilling random holes or sticking things on the boat without any real idea of what he was trying to achieve. I, on the other hand, would act painfully slowly, insisting on discussing, analysing and agreeing every move. Despite these differences, we always got on very well and were able to laugh about everything in the end.

  As we got closer to our departure date, Ben was impatient to be gone while I was still dithering, saying we needed more time to get this, that or the other. Most of it probably wasn’t important, but I still maintain we should have taken toilet paper, which Ben insisted wasn’t important. He thought we could use the wet wipes we had on board, which were actually intended to remove the salt from our bodies. I wasn’t happy and said he’d have to come up with an alternative if we ran out, even it meant cutting his clothing into strips. This was fine by him as long as we could get the hell out of Geraldton as soon as possible. We were both bored of the small town and had run out of money.

  Added motivation to leave Geraldton came one morning when on the way to the hardware store in our hire car I answered my mobile and immediately saw flashing blue lights. I pulled over on the quiet street.

  ‘Do you know why I’ve pulled you over, mate?’ scolded the policeman.

  ‘Oh dear, don’t tell me it’s against the law here to talk on a mobile phone while driving?’

  ‘Too right it is and it’s a fifty dollar fine. Can I see your licence?’

  ‘Absolutely, officer.’

  ‘This licence expired three months ago. You need a new one and a new photo, mate; you don’t look like that any more.’

  ‘I honestly had no idea about the licence and I’m still coming to terms with the face.’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid driving without a licence is a court summons. When and how are you planning to leave Australia?’

  ‘On Friday, by ocean rowing boat.’

  ‘Oh Jeez, you’re one of these bloody Poms from down the yacht club. Well, it’s your responsibility to pay the fine and arrange a court hearing before you leave.’

  Contrary to what everyone says maybe you can over-prepare for an ocean row. So Ben and I agreed to head off on the Thursday.

  When we finally put the boat in the water she sat very low with the weight of 120 days’ worth of provisions. Worryingly, water flooded onto the deck through the scuppers. Was this normal? We had no idea; we’d never rowed her before. Our first row, around to the marina, was a disaster. We put the oars in the rowlocks the wrong way round, as someone kindly pointed out to us, and then we nearly washed onto some rocks because we couldn’t work out how to use the foot-steering system.

  Another concern was our watermaker. Powered by solar panels, the watermaker is key to the success of any ocean row as it is impossible to carry enough fresh water for the crew. We had an old model, mounted somewhat incorrectly, but we had got it serviced in England and Simon said he thought it looked okay. Tony showed us how to repressurise it if we ran into trouble and we then trialled it in the marina. A slow trickle of fresh water came out. In an hour we made five litres. We were overjoyed that it worked.

  ‘How many litres did you make?’ asked James Kayll, the captain of the four-man team, who had sauntered down the pontoon to where we were tied up.

  ‘Five litres!’ replied Ben excitedly.

  ‘Oh, we’ve just made five litres in ten minutes with our one.’

  Ben and I exchanged a look. It never does to compare yourself to other people in life. We had water and five litres an hour would be enough for us, as long as the watermaker held up. Anyway, if the electric one failed we had a backup hand pump and, regardless of how hard people said it was to pump for two hours a day, we were determined to use it to get across if we had to.

  A few days before we were due to leave we went to wave Rob off in his solo boat. It was strange to see him heading out into the ocean. We watched as he diminished into a tiny speck on the horizon and then we turned back to our preparations. Two days later he was back. He had got bad food poisoning and some issues on the home front had come up. He wouldn’t be going back out again. He was fit, highly organised and had previously rowed the Atlantic, so this development further heightened our anxiety. As did his comment in the pub: ‘I don’t want to scare you guys but very soon someone will die rowing an ocean.’ This didn’t scare us; it terrified us. If anyone was going to die it would surely be us, complete novices who had only practised for a grand total of three hours.

  What’s more, we knew we would have a baptism of fire on ‘the shelf’.

  11 The Shelf

  ‘Now then, I thought, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost.’

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  Western Australia is seen by most seafarers as the hardest coast to get away from in a rowing boat. This is one of the main reasons why the Indian Ocean is so much harder to row across than the Atlantic. A quick glance at a navigational chart shows a large continental shelf off the west coast of Australia that extends hundreds of miles into the ocean. It ends quite abruptly and the depth of the sea above it goes from 50 metres to 5,000 metres in no time at all. The shallowness created by the shelf creates very short, sharp seas. Swells travel over thousands of miles of open ocean and don’t break until they hit the shelf, which means big waves.

  Conditions are made worse by the wind. As the Australian desert heats during the day the air expands and travels out to sea where it cools and creates an on-shore breeze. So every night the winds conspire to blow you back towards the Australian coast. Thus, this localised weather tries to suck you back towards land each night over the choppy seas of the shelf.

  In the 2009 Indian race, two pairs, one solo and one four-man team all fell victim to the shelf. The teams who managed to get out to deep water had to spend the first ten days battling to reach it.

  We knew all this about the winds, the currents, the depth of the sea; we had met Roger Haines, who had to stop in 2009 after breaking one of his vertebrae on the shelf after being thrown off his rowing seat by a wave. We had heard other stories, too, and they all contributed to our fear.

  What had started off all those years ago as a vague dream was now about to become a reality. What exact reality we were letting ourselves in for, though, we had little idea.

  PART TWO

  All at Sea

  12 The First Day

  ‘After all the years of training, now there is reality, a chance to be fulfilled and make one joyous leap clear of time and the pettiness of life.’

  John Ridgeway (on starting his row across the North Atlantic)

  We set off at dawn on Thursday 21 April. It was a calm morning and as the amber glow of sunrise started to light up the quiet little marina we untied and pushed off.

  We’d had a quick look at the weather on Tony’s computer. The plan we’d agreed was a vague one: head fifty miles north-west to a small group of islands called the Abrolhos and, after clearing the northernmost island, push west into deeper water. After that we were to row west while trying not to be pushed too far north too quickly by the prevailing weather, which tends to come from the south in the Indian Ocean. A quick round of handshakes with Simon and the four-man team and we were off.

  ‘The clock’s ticking,’ joked Tony as we pushed off and took our first few strokes.

  As we slowly made our way out of the marina I tried to ignore the butterflies in my stomach. This is what you wanted, I said to myself, this is what you asked for and now it’s happening.

  We left rowing together, Ben in the bow position on the foot steering, while I sat in front. Every so often I got up and changed the position of our small film camera, moving the shot from us to the shoreline where the giant grain silos of the port were now illuminated in the golden light of dawn.

  It took what felt like an inordinate amount of time to row out of the marina.

  ‘Come on, mate, row a bit harder; this
is embarrassing.’

  ‘Do you want to do some rowing as well?’

  ‘I can’t, I’m steering.’

  ‘Can’t you do both at once?’

  ‘Actually, it’s quite hard.’

  ‘Careful of that yacht.’

  ‘Shhh, let’s stop arguing; the others are watching.’

  We eventually made it out, but it felt peculiar to row out of the marina and into open water, knowing that we were about to spend months at sea. It felt like psyching yourself up to do a bungee jump: you know there’s a safety rope attached to you but it’s against basic human nature to jump off a bridge. After all the years of saving and all the long months of preparation here we were, heading out to sea.

  Warren, a family friend based in Geraldton, and his daughter had come to see us off on a jet ski. They circled us for twenty minutes or so as we navigated our way slowly out of Geraldton. Before they left Warren threw a toy kangaroo into the boat, a present for a friend of his in Mauritius, and then with a loud rev of the engine they were gone. As the noise of the jet ski dwindled, our new world seemed suddenly quiet. Nothing but the tap-lap of the water on the side of the boat and the creaking dip of the oars.

  ‘I can’t believe we’re actually doing this,’ I said.

  ‘Woohoo!’ screamed Ben at the top of his voice.

  ‘Whatever happens we can’t turn back.’

  ‘Definitely. There’s no way we’re going back to Geraldton.’

  We had entered a number of waypoints into our GPS to help see us through the queues of cargo ships waiting to load grain or iron ore at the port. The steel ships loomed large as we neared but we cruised safely past them at a nice rate of about two knots. This is easy, I thought. Apart from the fact that rowing together was proving a bit awkward as we kept clashing oars.