Rowing After the White Whale

by James Adair

  To make matters worse, we occasionally got stuck in giant circular currents called gyres. These are huge whirlpools in the middle of the ocean where, over time, rubbish collects. We’d realise we were in one because we’d suddenly spot plastic bags and other detritus in the water. It was terrible seeing the pilot fish swallowing tiny bits of plastic and, having grown to think of the ocean as pristine, it was shocking to see so much rubbish.1

  Despite the rubbish, these gyres and countercurrents were difficult to detect without looking at our GPS to see what speed we were doing. I came a cropper one morning when the sun was beating down on a blue sea that undulated calmly beneath a cloudless sky. As I rowed, the little swirls of wake created by the oars disappeared much faster than usual, which I thought meant we must be moving through the water at speed. I looked down into the water and saw the pilot fish swimming hard to keep up with us, jostling playfully for position at the bow of the boat. They seemed to be enjoying themselves and, looking again at how fast the oar wakes were vanishing, I realised that I too was enjoying myself. We were flying along and I was only at the start of my shift. At this rate I’d be able to clock up some impressive miles by the time Ben emerged for his turn in four hours. I decided to keep those miles a surprise so I didn’t get up to look at the GPS, which in the brilliant sun was impossible to read from afar. Four hours later when Ben came out he looked at the GPS and said matter-of-factly, ‘Ah, so we’re going backwards again, are we?’ The current moving against us was so fast that all I had been doing was keeping the boat in a straight line and limiting the damage while the water flooded past, dragging us backwards as the pilot fish swam tirelessly into the current.

  34 Sea Stars

  ‘Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,

  To venture on wilder seas

  Where storms will show Your mastery;

  Where losing sight of land,

  We shall find the stars.’

  From ‘The Prayer of Sir Francis Drake’, 1577

  While nights could be the toughest of times, with dark fearful storms or eerie lightning in the distance, the calm cloudless ones were the best part of the voyage. It was always unsettling to stare into the pale eternal blue of the afternoon sky and know that it was hiding the dizzy stars. It was never long, though, before they were visible again. We spent as much time awake at night as in the daytime, becoming as familiar with the stars as with the sunshine. On dry land you might go out star gazing one summer’s night or you might stay up late indoors, but very rarely are you awake, active and outside during the night on a regular basis.

  With half of our time spent awake during the darkness we felt ourselves becoming creatures of the night. Our night vision would improve dramatically after the first twenty minutes of the shift and, with no light pollution to interfere, I was able to see more stars than I’d ever seen or imagined was possible.

  On starry, moonless nights we were treated to incredible displays of shooting stars. They were so regular that I stopped recording even the most impressive ones in my journal. Before then, I would note down how long their fiery wake would burn its trail across the sky; often four or five seconds.

  Even more impressive was the phenomenon we called ‘exploding stars’. These were the larger meteors which, on entering our atmosphere, seemed to explode in a flash of distant light that reminded me of grainy footage of night bombing. It was very apparent on these clear nights that we are under a constant bombardment from outer space. I reported one particularly bright and low-falling star because it burnt orange like a flare and seemed to touch down in the sea. Tony said he’d informed the Australian coastguard of a similar sight in 2009, and they had replied that it was probably ‘space junk’, an old satellite re-entering the atmosphere and burning up.

  We were over one thousand miles from Australia and hadn’t seen any ships or planes for weeks. Could the falling star have been a meteor that was big enough to get through the atmosphere? Hundreds of small ones do get through, as do larger ones such as the 1908 Tunguska impact in which an asteroid levelled 80 million trees in a remote Siberian forest. While asteroids have intermittently wreaked havoc on Earth for most of its history and probably wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, some scientists argue that they brought life to earth in the first place. We are all made of stardust, as they say. But even a relatively small meteor hitting the ocean would cause a massive tsunami, and I wondered how we’d fare in our rowing boat.

  Behind the array of shooting stars were the real stars, moving slowly through the sky and flickering like distant flames. I recognised constellations such as the Southern Cross, with its two pointer stars, shining reassuringly as it climbed towards the horizon and finally disappeared in the early hours. Then there were other formations of stars that I used to get my bearing, but whose names I didn’t know. With some stars so much brighter than others there was a depth to the sky that meant I felt I could see which were nearer and which more distant. This gave a sense of perspective, as if I could perceive our place in space.

  But dwarfing these petty constellations was the Milky Way in all its mad glory. Curving its way across my right shoulder from the horizon in front to the horizon behind, its density made the rest of the patchy stars look almost desolate. On calm nights the stars would be reflected back off the flat, black sea into the gold-flecked darkness of the sky above. This heightened the impression I often got, floating on the ocean at night, that we were nothing but a minuscule piece of flotsam or perhaps plankton drifting through space itself. I say it was an impression, but of course it’s true. We were on one ocean of our planet, orbiting our sun, which itself is one medium-sized star halfway along one arm of one particular pin-wheel galaxy. When we look at the Milky Way we are looking at the dense centre of this, our galaxy. The Hubble Space Telescope has observed 3,000 galaxies, although NASA’s estimate puts the total number of galaxies at 125 billion. There are those nights when you sit at home, eating dinner, watching telly, thinking about the trivial battles that make up day-to-day existence, but during those nights on the ocean I genuinely felt like an astronaut who had been cast off into the eternity of space. It’s little wonder that, as I lay in the cabin of our isolated boat, gazing out the back hatch at the wheeling stars, I would often say to myself, as the alarm for my shift sounded, ‘Is there really any point bothering to row?’ At which point the cabin door would open and Ben would say, ‘Your go.’

  35 ‘If’

  ‘If you can dream – and not make dreams your master.’

  Rudyard Kipling, ‘If’

  By the time we’d been at sea for six weeks not only had land become a distant memory but the very idea of it seemed strange. The only smell was the salty air which, while refreshing, could also be monotonous. The salty spray was relentless in its corrosion, rusting everything it could and breaking down our very skin. Our boat had a copper-bottomed hull to avoid attracting too much marine growth and we occasionally joked that we should have coppered our own bottoms, such was their continual disintegration. The sea is a harsh environment and sometimes the ideas of land, of people, of the softness of a woman, became almost abstract in their strangeness. I thought a lot about Tory. I had a bundle of letters from her, with one to open every fortnight. After a month at sea I started to measure out the days according to how long I had until I could open the next one. We used the satellite phone, too, to make contact with girlfriends, family or friends once every week or so. Their reactions were often quite funny. We called a friend once when he was in Paddington station. All he could say for the first few minutes was, ‘I’m in Paddington, I’m actually in Paddington,’ and then to someone behind him in the ticket queue, ‘Middle of the Indian Ocean.’

  These brief conversations always lifted our spirits, but life still revolved around our 23-foot-long floating world. Towards the end of the great becalming our watermaker packed in again. We went through the same psychological loop; at first getting increasingly frustrated at our failed attempts to fix it, but l
ater cheering up as we got out the hand pump and started spending more time on deck.

  We came up with games for keeping ourselves entertained. We learnt the poem ‘If’ by heart, then timed ourselves to see who could say it the fastest, or did alternate lines, words and syllables before finally trying to say it backwards and discovering we weren’t that desperate. We played actor tennis, in which one person names an actor and a film they were in to which the other person replies with another actor who was in that film and a film they were in. The problem with this game was, having lived in a container in the Sudan for many years, Ben’s knowledge of 21st-century cinema was limited and he tried to bring everything back to Armageddon. It was easy to ace him, as I did with Morgan Freeman narrating March of the Penguins.

  36 Whale!

  ‘There she blows! There! There! She blows! She blows!’

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  I had to wait until Day 46 to shout, ‘There she blows!’, but it was worth it. Even though we hadn’t yet started reading Moby Dick, whales have always loomed large in my imagination and the prospect of encountering any was hugely exciting. We had up until this point only heard whales blowing at night and had caught snippets of what we thought might be sonar whilst lying in the cabin, but we’d had no clear sightings.

  Then on Day 46, while rowing under a puffy tunnel of clouds, a whale breached barely thirty metres from us. Its sleek, black back arched out of the water as it shot a tall spume of spray from its blowhole. I shouted and Ben was out of the cabin in an instant. Then, as I fumbled for the camera, it breached again, closer this time, showing a tiny dorsal fin on its long back as it cruised past with effortless speed.

  We were elated; the sight of the whale made all the pain and work worthwhile. The next day we saw another and this time it swam right underneath the boat but too quickly for us to get a picture and by the time we jumped in it had gone. It looked like a finback, but at the latitudes we were in it is possible it was one of the finback’s two close cousins; the Bryde’s and the Sei whales.

  The finback whale is big; it is the second largest animal on the planet after the blue whale, but its most striking feature is its speed. It can sustain speeds of just over 20 knots. This made it relatively safe from the whalers in the days of Moby Dick who would give chase in open rowing boats. As Melville writes:

  The Fin Back is not gregarious. He seems a whale-hater, as some men are man-haters. Very shy; always going solitary; unexpectedly rising to the surface in the remotest and most sullen waters; his straight and single lofty jet rising like a tall misanthropic spear upon a barren plane; gifted with such wondrous power and velocity in swimming, as to defy all present pursuit from man; this leviathan seems to be the banished and unconquerable Cain of his race, bearing for his mark that style upon his back.

  We would see more whales again later, but this first encounter was mesmerising. Suddenly it really did feel like we were sharing a home with these noble creatures.

  Finback whales can live up to 140 years, although that doesn’t make them the most long-lived of the cetaceans. Recent tests have put one bowhead whale’s age at 211 years. By far the most amazing fact about whales was that they chose to go back in. The fossil record shows that, having evolved from sea creatures into land animals, akin to squat hippos, whales then went back into the sea to become the majestic circumnavigators we know so little about. This process happened over millions of years, but they still have vestiges of the hands and feet they used on land and, despite diving to unfathomable depths to hunt the primordial squid or braving the severe temperatures of the poles, whales haven’t yet evolved gills so still come up to breathe, just like us. In fact, their closest genetic relatives are mice. It seems that by deciding to go back into the sea whales have chosen the freedom of the boundless ocean, just as we had done. Perhaps this is a fanciful idea, but it appealed to us.

  37 Our Birds

  ‘I have the feeling of having known my birds forever, of being here forever without time passing.’

  Bernard Moitessier, The Long Way

  On Day 52, as we were struggling through another day of slow water, a bird appeared which we had never seen before. Ben was rowing and I was sitting on the gunwale pumping water when out of nowhere a white bird with a long tail appeared. It hovered just above Ben’s head, eyeing him quizzically. It was a white-tailed tropicbird. These birds lay their eggs on land and then spend the rest of their lives out at sea, feeding on small fish and squid. We would see a few more during the trip, and they always seemed surprised to bump into us during their oceanic wanderings.

  The plainer-looking shearwaters were with us every single day. They get their name from the ‘shearing’ technique they use to fly between the waves without ever flapping their wings. Every day we’d see them gliding in and out of the waves, banking steeply in front of us and disappearing within seconds on the strong gusts of wind. We rarely saw the shearwaters flap their wings and only ever spotted them sitting on the water once. On this occasion they sat bobbing incongruously like the most pedestrian of ducks, as if they’d suddenly become bored of their aerial acrobatics. The rest of the time they flew effortlessly by, never getting wet and never seeming to dip their beaks in the water as the storm petrels did, only flying and watching.

  At the beginning of our voyage we kept thinking that any day soon we’d lose sight of the shearwaters but every day they were there, swooping near us, dipping their rigid little wings as they rode the thermals. Every day, without fail, they would come and say hello, sociably circling or playfully dive-bombing us. We didn’t see a plane from the end of the first week to the last day, so the skies belonged to the shearwaters alone.

  38 Shark!

  ‘The un-harming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths.’

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  On Day 53 we were rowing uncomfortably on a beam sea with southerly winds shoving along the waves, which continually hit us from the side. It was in these choppy waves that I saw a blue shark. At first it was a shadow, but as it turned towards the boat its powerful, blue body glimmered in the sunlight. It circled us. With each swim-by we could see its cold black eyes scanning the boat and looking up through the surface at us. It was about eight feet long. Could he jump out of the water and take one of us? I wondered, having often daydreamed about the physics of such an attack. On the shark’s white underbelly I spotted the streaming form of a cleaner wrasse, attached to its host near the concealed jaws.

  There was something deeply disturbing in the constant movement of the shark. It was powerful and lethargic at the same time. I’d learnt that sharks have evolved differently from most fish. The majority of fish have a swim bladder, a sort of in-built buoyancy system. But sharks, lacking the swim bladder, have to keep swimming all the time otherwise they will slowly sink to the bottom. Sharks are one of the oldest species on earth; they were swimming in this lazily murderous way over 350 million years ago, a good 100 million years before the first dinosaurs. That’s not to say they haven’t evolved since then, but there remains something ancient and amoral about them. To have survived and prospered for so long they have had to be efficient, versatile predators.

  The blue shark is thought to be the fastest swimmer of all sharks and it is found in all three major oceans. The few sharks that have been tagged and monitored by scientists have recorded swims of thousands of miles, often across oceans.

  Sharks’ image as pelagic wanderers seemed appropriate when we met our blue in the middle of the ocean. It didn’t stop moving; swimming in its continual eel-like motion around the boat in wide, watchful circles. No wonder they don’t last long in aquariums, I thought, they need all the space in the world no less. I’d read how, when put in an aquarium, a blue shark will only last a month before dying. The longest one has lived for in captivity is seven months, before the shark’s mysterious death. In this regard they remind me of terrible stories of Native American Indians who, having lived a lifetime of freedom on th
e boundless midwestern plains, died within a few days if they were captured and imprisoned.

  I watched the shark for some time before I decided to try and film him. I ducked into the cabin and looked out the camera, but by the time I resurfaced he was gone, disappeared into the veiled waters of the ocean.

  39 Drier than Being Dry

  ‘We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors . . . because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so for a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more.

  ‘But if, like Queequeg and me in bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich.’

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  On Day 54 the wind was ‘clocking’, which means the wind direction slowly moves around in a circle before settling in the more favourable south-easterly direction, which in the Indian Ocean constitutes what mariners call the trade winds. With the wind against us in its sweep of the clock we were in the cabin, playing magnetic Scrabble. Having lost at magnetic chess, Ben would now only play Scrabble. He doesn’t like to lose and had won the first two games of the trip, but here in the third instalment I was about to go massively into the lead. As I announced my word and was halfway through describing how I would cash in on both a triple letter and a double word score, Ben said, ‘Wait, can you feel it changing?’