Rowing After the White Whale
Page 5
17 Surf’s Up!
‘The boat going with such madness through the water that the lee oars could scarcely be worked rapidly enough to escape being torn from the row-locks.’
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
It was with dread that I opened the cabin hatch on the morning of Day 9. We’d been stuck in the vortex for three days, getting smashed around by the steep seas, while being pushed slowly backwards through an international shipping lane.
But from Ben’s face I knew there’d been a change.
‘We’re surfing!’ he shouted.
The sky was heavy with black rain clouds, but the sea was behind us now. The currents and winds were pushing us west with such force that we were surfing down the waves. It’s hard to describe the sheer exhilaration of surfing down big waves in a tiny rowing boat. When the waves first appear they seem as if they will swamp and possibly even roll the boat. But if we kept the boat lined up to the wave then they would pick us up and shoot us along with a loud whoosh. In these conditions we didn’t stop for any meals but instead took it in turns to eat so that one person was always lining the boat up to the next wave and rowing through the troughs.
Every time a rain cloud passed overhead it unloaded a brief, refreshing torrent. Beneath us the sea was rolling steeply like a series of valleys, so that we couldn’t see very far beyond the next few waves coming to pick us up. Back in the vortex we had fallen into a kind of damp lethargy, but now the adrenaline was pumping as we were suddenly flying along at three to four knots. We clearly had very strong currents beneath us as well as waves to surf – we were maintaining two knots even in the troughs of the waves. In four hours we rowed eighteen miles. We were on a high, enjoying the surfing so much that instead of resting in the cabin we’d sit out on deck to experience the rush of skidding wildly down the curving waves.
Then in the afternoon a small, yellow plane appeared. It flew low over us, then banked and flew past again. What did it mean? Had the coastguard found out about our watermaker failing and come to insist on rescuing us? Would they say it was too dangerous to continue through the endless valleys of waves? Had the police told them about my unpaid driving fine? My heart sank; somehow I thought it was all over. I rushed into the cabin and switched on the VHF radio.
‘Aeroplane, aeroplane, aeroplane, this is Indian Runner, Indian Runner, Indian Runner, is there a problem, over?’
‘Indian Runner, this is the West Australian Coastguard, please advise your home port and route, over.’
‘Our home port is London and our route is Geraldton to Port Louis, Mauritius, over.’
‘Mauritius! Good on ya. Well, this is just a routine exercise so good luck, boys.’
It was a false alarm; we were fine to carry on.
Although we didn’t stop to eat our meals together in the surfing conditions, we still sat out on deck, chatting and, in the evening, we drank some whisky and smoked a cigarette each. By the end of the day we’d covered a record fifty-three miles. We assumed our new-found speed was partly because we had made it off the shelf, but it would be another forty-five days before we rowed that far in a day again.
The evening of Day 9 was particularly tough. We both struggled, in our own ways, with the steering of the boat. Ben has always had unbelievably poor eyesight and has always refused to wear glasses. In daylight he could never quite make out the compass, so during the night he really struggled to see where we were going as the compass was illuminated only by a very dim red light. I had issues with the foot-steering system, which was simply two ropes connecting the rudder to a moveable footplate. Every time a strong wave knocked into the rudder it yanked the footplate down because my foot wasn’t able to hold it in one position and we were consequently thrown off course. It was deeply frustrating, like being slapped constantly in the face. Each time it happened I had to lean forward and pull the footplate back in line with my hands and then row like a maniac with one oar to line us up again. It was tiring, as well as humiliating, but whenever these kinds of conditions conspired to highlight my physical problems they made me all the more determined to keep going so as to prove a point, prove that I could do it. The inspiration to do the rowing had always been to have a great adventure, but the motivation to carry it through when things got tough was to prove people wrong, to make a statement about my abilities.
So there we were, on the morning of Day 10, one of us too blind to see the compass and the other unable to steer the boat in rough seas. We made a right pair. We needed a solution and the one I came up with was for me to steer with hand-lines instead of the footplate. So I sat in the rowing position and pulled on two pieces of rope as necessary to line up the boat. We still seemed to be going fast enough and because I wasn’t rowing I had the energy to do it all day. It was unbelievable fun, like being in a chariot – after surfing each wave I would whip the ropes as if they were reins before the next wave catapulted us forward with a whoosh. The only problem was that the currents had by now deserted us and while we were making good speed in the waves we were stationary in the troughs. By the end of the day we had only done twenty-one miles, so we realised, with some regret, that we wouldn’t be able to hand steer the whole way and would have to row across the ocean after all.
18 ‘Water’
‘Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.’
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The next few days were hard going, with the large swells that travel up unhindered from the Southern Ocean making for an uncomfortable ride. However, we still managed to average thirty-five miles a day. On the night of Day 11 we had a close call with a Chinese cargo ship that only changed its course after a fraught radio conversation.
With more items breaking on the boat we were developing a long ‘to do’ list, waiting for a calm day to mend everything. Foremost of these was, of course, the watermaker. With the watermaker down we were relying on the plastic bottles of ballast water which, after we’d drunk from them, we filled with sea water, marked and put back in the hold.
On Day 13 we tried to repressurise the watermaker, as Tony had shown us in Geraldton. It didn’t work, and we went into the night shift dejected at the thought of having to use the hand pump. I was especially down at the prospect of having to manually pump our drinking water for the next three months. That night we were thrown around by violent seas and were forced to clip on for safety after one breaking wave spun us around more than 180 degrees.
The next day we tried again to repressurise, but again we failed to produce any water. Ben was being relentlessly positive about using the hand pump. ‘It’ll be fine,’ he kept saying. ‘We’ll just do two hours’ pumping each. Come on, nothing is going to stop us.’ I couldn’t help but think he wasn’t imagining what it would really be like. I was full of dread at the prospect of using all that time and energy to produce some drinking water every single day for the next few months.
That night was calmer and cloudless; the night sky was breathtaking. I rowed my first shift under a canopy of stars that spun slowly through the sky. Shooting stars flashed across the night while satellites cruised methodically in and out of my vision. I thought about the reality of pumping, of an extra two hours’ physical labour, which also meant two hours’ less rest. But I decided Ben was right, nothing was going to stop us; the harder the row, the more wondrous finishing it would be. The beauty of this night, this was why we had come, and we couldn’t turn back now. When Ben came out for his shift I reported my change of heart and the next day we started pumping.
Our situation felt immediately better now that we had a plan and had taken action. It was far worse to drink the ballast water each day while thinking about and dreading the pumping. When we actually started, it felt like we had a whole new purpose, a solution to what had seemed a near-intractable problem.
The physical act of pumping was tiring but not
, as some people had suggested, worse than rowing. Two hours gives you about five litres so you have to pump for four hours to get the same amount that the electric machine would yield in two. However, there was an upside to the pumping. We had, up until this point, mainly rested in the cabin if we weren’t rowing. This meant that you were nearly always on your own, either rowing or sleeping. We would normally have a quick chat about what the weather or boat was doing, much like in cricket when an incoming batsman will pause to talk with the outgoing batsman about the bowling or wicket. Apart from this, there was little in the way of conversation as the tired rower made a dash for the cabin. We were like ships passing in the night. But doing the pumping outside meant we would spend four hours on deck together chatting.
These water-pumping sessions became one of the highlights of the trip. One day we’d mind-map St Andrews, stopping to reminisce about each pub or discuss each shop. How did the Christmas Shop on Market Street survive in the summer? This was one of the great questions that we debated. We also argued about films. Ben always championed big budget American blockbusters with apocalyptic scenarios while I spoke up for pretentious art-house films with subtitles. Then we spent hours picking our fantasy rugby teams. Categories included sides for ocean rowers, British politicians, actors, musicians and dictators. This provided endless hours of entertainment as we compared the relative scrummaging pedigrees of, say, Brian Blessed for the Actors against John Prescott for the Politicians. A number of theoretical problems would arise; for example, would Hitler, as captain of the Dictators, be able to see beyond his prejudice to select Idi Amin as a number 8? Of course, we also briefly discussed serious matters: life, love, careers, navigation and all that stuff . . . but mainly we talked rubbish.
19 On Our Way
‘Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its un-shored, harbourless immensities.’
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
We woke up on Day 15 to news that Osama bin Laden had been shot and buried at sea in the Indian Ocean. Incidentally, Bin Laden had controversially been included as a full-back for the Dictators XV despite his status as an actual dictator being in dispute. It was strange receiving texts on our satellite phone with such major international news. Each day we would receive a weather update from Tony, along with messages from our girlfriends and other friends. Hearing about events like Bin Laden’s death made us feel far away from the ‘real world’, as if the world we were in was somehow very unreal. As time went on this perception changed, and our world felt more real and more important, or at least just as important and meaningful as the one we’d left behind.
Time, we came to realise, is a very different phenomenon at sea. Now we spent as much time awake at night as we spent sleeping and the idea of conventional patterns to the day lost its meaning. Typically we would row two hours on then two hours off during the day and three hours on/off at night. On dry land you become used to sleeping at night and working during the day, which means that the distinction between the two becomes very marked. After the regular routines of dry land, our seafaring routine served to make the days feel short and the nights long. If it was a majestic, calm night this was a new and beautiful discovery but if it was a rough, starless night it was an ordeal. In the end it became irrelevant what time it was; the only thing that mattered was what the weather was like. If the weather was good, time disappeared and days flew by, but in rough, adverse conditions a three-hour shift could feel like a day.
As for sleeping, it was never a problem nodding off because we were so tired from the rowing. We quickly got used to sleeping for only a few hours at a time because we would be sleeping more than once throughout each 24-hour period. There were occasions, though, when one person would oversleep. At first we were polite, so you might hear a voice in the darkness saying, ‘Err, mate, I think it’s your turn now because it’s, umm, five minutes past.’ As our journey advanced, this gave way to, ‘Your go!’ and, eventually, ‘Get out here now, you lazy bastard!’
We were now two weeks in and land had become a distant memory as we adjusted to our new, watery world. We had strong south-easterlies blowing us along but, wary of going too far north, we were forced to row on a beam sea, which meant we were constantly being hit by waves from the side. In hindsight, it might have been better to ride the weather north in more comfort and in the knowledge that the currents and winds from the north would take us back on course in the second half. But we didn’t have this knowledge and were reliant on Tony for information. He, in turn, only had the 2009 crossings to go on, and our course was already diverging from theirs.
Our bodies were deteriorating at this stage. The claw hand was with us at the beginning of every shift, although the pain would go away after about ten minutes. Our bums were in agony, too. The constant damp kept the skin soft while the endless rowing wore it down. Salt sores were becoming a problem and they marked those parts of the body where the sun doesn’t shine (unless you were to employ some of Ben’s more experimental stretching techniques). We would take it in turns to stand up by the cabin door while the other person was rowing, pull down our cycling shorts and enquire, ‘How does it look today?’ To which the rower, narrowing his eyes and wincing, would reply in as convincing a manner as possible, ‘Much better than yesterday, buddy,’ or some such lie. Sitting down at the start of a shift was very painful and rowing on a beam sea even worse. Every time the boat rocked from side to side our weight would shift its entirety onto each buttock, prompting bouts of shout-out-loud swearing. These were our standard afflictions, but we also had other problems – athlete’s foot, constipation, diarrhoea – you name it, we had it.
Two weeks in and it took all our energies to keep up with the still unfamiliar routine. We really needed our food and consequently we were really enjoying it. There were still meals that we couldn’t stomach and they went back into the storage holds below the deck, but we had by then identified some clear favourites. One of these was lamb pilaf. Our love of this lamb dish and our bodily exhaustion led to the infamous ‘Lamb Pilaf Incident’. Ben was on deck and had just finished boiling the water for his lunch, a prized sachet of delicious freeze-dried lamb pilaf. Just as he added the water his claw hand seized and he dropped the meal, scalding his foot and spilling half of it on deck. In a rage he flung the remainder of the meal overboard, straight into the strong south-easterly wind, which in turn blew it in my direction, caking my face in pilaf. Not wanting to further antagonise him, I wordlessly wiped the food off my face, but thereafter I’d often ask him if we were about to have another lamb pilaf moment.
20 Swim
‘Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practiced swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! Who can tell it?’
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
On Day 17 the swell died down and at noon, under blue skies, we were able to have our first swim. Ben went first and I filmed the moment on one of our cameras. The sun cast shafts of light deep into the blue. It was surreal watching Ben pause on the side of the boat and then jump in wearing nothing but a mask.
‘It’s amazing!’ he shouted. ‘It’s so refreshing.’
I passed him some of our saltwater washing liquid and he washed his hair. Clouds of white shampoo drifted down, billowing slowly into the depths.
Then it was my turn. By this stage we were four hundred miles out to sea and we knew from our charts that we were in over five thousand metres of water. I’ve always loved swimming in the sea but there was something unnerving, almost unnatural, about jumping into water this deep. I plunged in wearing the mask and sank deep into the cavernous ocean. Tumbling down, I had a strange sense of vertigo as if my body instinctually knew the awesome depth of this sea.
I’d dived in many countries but I’d never had visibility like this before; the rays of sunlight illuminated the deep in an eerie, e
ndless way. It was the blue of eternity, like looking at the sky. Inspecting the hull of the boat, I saw we already had a build-up of marine growth and, darting in and around the hull, boisterously swimming up to me, were five tiny pilot fish.
Pilot fish are so called because they accompany ships on long passages, seemingly piloting them across oceans. They have black and white stripes and are amazingly tame; they would often swim up and nibble on my hand as I dipped it into the water. We decided to name the larger ones after our girlfriends and I knew it would please Tory to have her aquatic namesake joining us across the Indian Ocean. That day we spoke on the satellite phone and it was a real boost to hear her voice and hear her enthusiasm for the latest developments in our floating world.
That night we had a swig of Calvados and a ciggie and were treated to another stunning evening with the sky so clear the shooting stars appeared to explode as they hit the atmosphere, trailing long wakes like lightning.
At dawn I opened the hatch at the back of the aft cabin and stood there, taking a pee into a sea gold with the most incredible sunrise. In the sky clouds hung motionless, on fire with the red of the rising sun, which was just now showing its glowing crescent.
‘You still here?’ I shouted, not turning round. I could hear the rhythmic dip and pull of the oars behind me.
‘Yup,’ Ben replied.
‘Amazing, isn’t it?’
‘Best one yet.’
We were starting to get into the rhythm of life at sea. We were in pain but more and more we were able to take in and appreciate our surroundings. My body was getting used to the routine and I felt as if I was coming round after the madness of the last few weeks and waking up in the most beautiful place imaginable.