Rowing After the White Whale

by James Adair

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  We’d been at sea for over two months and I now saw our tiny floating world as just as real and busy and complex as the world we’d left behind. At the start of the trip I still felt like we were missing out; when we heard of Bin Laden’s death or the royal wedding it was as if we were hearing second-hand of something that we would otherwise have been directly involved in. This is, of course, the illusion created by rolling news, air travel, the internet and all the other facets of the 21st-century global village, which combine to make you feel connected to every celebrity and part of every major event.

  But when, a couple of months in, we received a message telling us that the stock market was crashing again it meant nothing to us. The only thing that could have roused our interest was news of an approaching hurricane. The rise and fall of banks meant nothing; we only worried about the direction or strength of the wind. In the middle of the vast ocean, under the infinity of the sky, it didn’t matter what the FTSE 100 or the housing market was doing, and neither did we have to hear about it. The very solitude was lulling me into a trancelike state.

  When you’re rowing as a pair you spend nearly all your time alone. When you take over from the other person you share a brief joke, an observation or perhaps some advice. Then, as you sit down in the rowing seat, the cabin door closes, your rowing partner retires and all is silence. Once again you are alone.

  I was never bored while rowing. I watched the sea and sky in their constant change or followed the dorado surfing in the wave behind or the shearwaters wheeling in the sky above. The beauty and rhythm of this environment lulled me into meditative thoughts. I would sort through the past, admonishing myself where necessary, but also forgiving myself. The human mind in this situation is prone, though, to obsession and there were subjects and people who kept cropping up, even though I thought I had dealt with them. When there was nothing new to think about or analyse I would ban these subjects from my mind and forbid myself from going over them again. But mainly I would think about the future, planning everything I wanted to do with Tory and how best I could get back on the ocean again, only next time in more comfort. I debated whether or not I should go back to my old job and weighed up my other options. Should I buy that pub in the Scilly Isles, or become a teacher? Sail round the world or fulfil my lifelong ambition of writing a book? I dreamt up children’s stories and then pitched them to Ben as he sleepily emerged from the cabin.

  ‘So, there’s this octopus right, but he’s also an inspector, who investigates underwater mysteries.’

  ‘Okay, what’s he called?’

  ‘Inspoctopus.’

  ‘I’m worried about you, mate.’

  I also spent a fair amount of time going carefully through each step of what I’d do if I won the Lottery. Occasionally I’d go down more unusual avenues such as hosting an imaginary drinks party for all the bit-part players in my life. I’d wander through the room introducing people I hadn’t seen since primary school to obscure clients I’d only ever spoken to on the phone or setting up second cousins with friends’ ex-girlfriends.

  Did I ever get bored? Never. Did I talk to myself? Absolutely, but then people talk to themselves all the time, the only difference being that on dry land they keep getting interrupted.

  46 The Fire Ship

  ‘By midnight the works were in full operation . . . the wild ocean darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed.’

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  By Day 73 we had a following sea again. Although the wind was favourable it could be dangerous when it got up to 25 knots and above. The wind would catch the side of the boat and spin it out onto the beam where it was vulnerable to oncoming waves.

  So, in the night of Day 73, I paused during my first shift to eat some rice pudding. I’d been looking forward to it for the previous two hours but when I stopped rowing and opened the packet the wind pushed us round and we were caught by a breaking wave. I was completely drenched, the deck swamped and the packet of rice pudding full to the brim with seawater. I would have to go hungry and be more careful in future.

  Earlier in the day our sailing family friend, Nick Eyles, had called. We questioned him about countercurrents, trying to find out if they would persist for the rest of the voyage. Surprisingly he said, ‘There aren’t many people who have spent as long as you have on the Indian Ocean, so you probably know as well as anyone else.’ This should have worried us, because we didn’t really have a clue what governed the mercurial currents. Instead I swelled with pride. Yes, very few people had spent this amount of time on the Indian, barely a few feet above the waterline and this must mean that we were very able, possibly very brilliant, seamen. Such was my pride that, in its customary manner, the sea would soon dish up a fall for me.

  Before that, though, there was time for some more pride, just to make the fall worse. We had just passed the two thousand miles from Australia mark and were not far from entering our final one thousand miles. We received some generous messages, such as one from Roger Haines saying that we’d come a long way since he had taught us to row at the Skiff Club five months previously. Teddington did indeed seem a long way away.

  On Day 74 we were still making good headway and rowed a fifty-mile day in a sea that now seemed to be brimming with life. As large clouds passed overhead a cloud of flying fish, the size of goldfish, leapt out of the water right next to us in flight from a dorado.

  That night we were treated to an unholy sight. Out of the murky horizon appeared a ship, Methane Nile Eagle. As this ship neared we could see from her superstructure that she was a liquefied natural gas tanker. Instead of the usual navigational lights on the bow, bridge and stern that we had seen on the dry bulk ships, this vessel seemed to be decked in gold light. Passing less than a mile away from us, her demonic bulk, which was nearly 300m long, gleamed. In contrast to the pitch black of the night, she seemed as if from another world. We spoke to the master on the VHF radio. He sounded Greek and, once again, was totally disinterested in us. We were keen for at least a short conversation, but he wasn’t playing ball and said, no, he hadn’t seen the white whale. Still, we agreed, he was missing out on the real thing. How could you truly experience the ocean from the high, warm bridge of a steel ship doing a steady 14 knots no matter the conditions?

  As quickly as it had appeared the ghostly fire ship started to recede back into the darkness. Soon we could only see a flickering light between the waves before she was engulfed in the black night. We were alone, again.

  47 The Great Independence Day Wave

  ‘There we sat up to our knees in the sea, the water covering every rib and plank, so that to our downward gazing eyes the suspended craft seemed a coral boat grown up to us as from the bottom of the ocean.’

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  I woke up on the morning of Day 75 to find that the wind had picked up so much as to make it virtually impossible to keep the boat lined up with the waves. It had been building through the night and, as I opened the cabin door at dawn, Ben gave a shrug as if to say, ‘What can we do in this?’

  ‘It’s impossible to stay lined up, I haven’t been able to row for the last twenty minutes,’ said Ben, who was wrapped up in his waterproofs with his hood zipped up to hide everything but his eyes.

  The waves were big but not breaking, so we rose and fell without any splashes. ‘I’ll make breakfast,’ I said.

  Over our porridge we discussed what a tough night it had been. The wind was moving north of east and rowing on the beam was awkward and painful. Our bodies were weakening and we still had a long way to go. After breakfast I switched on the satellite phone and read the messages as Ben rowed with one oar to prevent us sitting too square to the waves. The only message was from Tony, who had
just arrived in Mauritius to see in the four-man team who were less than a hundred miles from the island.

  ‘He says it’s a tropical paradise and we should hurry up.’

  ‘He can be really annoying when he tries to banter with us; doesn’t he know we only respond to praise?’

  ‘I think he’s trying to motivate us.’

  ‘Weird.’

  ‘It is a bit. He says he’s organising their arrival party.’

  ‘That’s great. They’re all going to be drinking beer in a couple of days, eating steak, having showers, not waking up all through the night to row.’

  ‘Yeah, but we’ll still be out here, having an adventure. I mean, would you rather be drinking cocktails and playing beach volleyball with a load of bikini-clad French chicks, and the girlfriends of course, or . . . be out here?’

  ‘Arrgh, we need to get there!’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose I should come and pull on those long plank things for a few hours, let me put on my foulies and I’ll be out in a sec.’

  ‘Alright. It’s pretty much impossible to row, so pass me the logbook and I’ll take our position down before we swap.’

  I passed out the logbook and Ben clambered forward to where the GPS was mounted on the bulkhead and started jotting down our co-ordinates, which was part of our daily ritual. I lay back in the cabin pulling on my foul weather gear, swearing gently under my breath. When I was ready I opened the cabin door, put one leg out and immediately saw the large, cresting wave careering towards us. It seemed to come out of nowhere, far bigger and quicker than the others. For a second I was transfixed, a rabbit in headlights, as I said, ‘Wow, shit.’ It was going break on us. Immediately I was trying to get my leg back in and close the cabin door, but the wave was already upon us and with an almighty crash it hit us flush on the port stern.

  We were sent sprawling onto the side and, although we didn’t capsize, so much of the boat seemed to be underwater that we appeared to be sinking. Ben was standing in the footwell up to his waist in water. Where had the boat gone? It was listing so heavily to the side that it was half submerged. Everything on deck had washed off and was floating away.

  ‘Quick, the water tanks!’ I shouted, but I immediately had to slam the cabin door shut because we were so far over that the sea was flooding into the cabin. I sat down and had to watch Ben’s blurred figure as he fearlessly lunged over the side to grab the two tanks we used to store our fresh water, which were drifting away on the frothing white aftermath of the wave. The foaming water was carrying off everything else from the deck that wasn’t secured – our digital compass and the cushions we used to take the sting out of sitting on the hard wooden rowing seat. Having lugged the tanks back into the boat, Ben grabbed a bucket and started bailing out the water until the boat gradually started to reappear.

  Trapped in the cabin, I assessed the damage inside. Everything was soaked. The footwell was full of water, the electrics were wet, the mattress sodden and everything that hadn’t been in a dry bag was ruined. Luckily the satellite phone was safe, but the cabin lights weren’t working nor were the iPods and shortwave radio.

  When the boat was sitting up again I opened the cabin door and helped Ben bail out the water.

  ‘Bloody hell, that was close. Are you okay?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, fine. Where the hell did that come from?’

  ‘That was definitely a freak wave. The cabin is buggered; everything is soaked, the mattress is waterlogged, which will make sleeping interesting.’

  ‘I can’t believe it. I thought that was it for a minute.’

  ‘Yeah, my heart’s still going like crazy. That was unbelievable.’

  I started laughing, the nervous but relieved laughter of a close call.

  Crouching down in the newly bailed footwell, Ben shook his head slowly in wonderment. ‘That was really close,’ he said, half to himself.

  ‘Here, chuck us the camera and I’ll get the aftermath of the Great Wave of day seventy-five,’ I said, gesturing to the camera, which was secure in the side netting.

  ‘What, right now?’ he replied, dismissively. ‘It’s a bit much isn’t it?’

  He clearly thought I was mad to want to turn a camera on.

  ‘My heart’s still pumping; come on, that was pretty dramatic,’ I said.

  ‘Battery’s gone,’ he replied.

  ‘Pass it here.’

  He passed it and I switched it on, started describing what had happened and tried to get a comment out of Ben, but he gave me a withering look. Clearly I’d annoyed him. I suddenly had a flashback to being a journalist in Alderney. I hadn’t been remotely over-zealous or pushy in getting people to speak, but if I thought something would make a good story I could get carried away, could get into trouble, like with the story about the guy in Guernsey who was caught having sex with a horse. I shouldn’t have run that, not in a family paper and not accompanied with a fact box of other incidents of bestiality from around the world. Bad idea. Was I getting carried away again trying to film the aftermath of the wave before we’d even caught our breaths? Probably.

  ‘Well, I guess I better get rowing. See you in a couple,’ I said.

  It was the fourth of July and we came to call this, our second worst disaster, the ‘Independence Day Wave’.

  48 From Bad to Worse

  ‘One of those isolated waves which come from a great distance, strike with great force and, when they have moved on, leave behind an impression of comparative calm.’

  Bernard Moitessier, Sailing to the Reefs

  After a couple of hours to calm down and reflect we agreed, during the next change-over, that we’d been pretty lucky to get away as lightly as we had and we managed to have a laugh about it.

  ‘More or less dangerous than Ginga?’ asked Ben, referring to the time we crashed a car into the Nile.

  ‘Pretty close I think. That wave came out of nowhere and was so much bigger than the others.’

  ‘Shame about the cabin light.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s going to make the nights interesting. Looks like we’ll dressing by torchlight.’

  ‘I know you like to look your best for the night shifts.’

  ‘It’s all about looking the part.’

  ‘Right, I’ll get rowing. I’m actually looking forward to the rowing now, with the cabin as wet as it is you can’t get any sleep.’

  I went into the cabin and lay down on the mattress. Soaking. Everything was wet and, with the overcast skies and choppy seas, it wouldn’t be possible to dry anything out yet. I lay down, wetter than I had been while rowing. This was going to prove very uncomfortable. I closed my eyes and drifted in and out of sleep.

  A couple of hours later I woke up to the sound of Ben swearing loudly. Then there was a sharp bang on the cabin door as a bungee cord was thrown at it, followed by more swearing. I put my head out of the door.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘The GPS is fucked, it’s completely broken.’

  The screen, whose comforting glow had formerly told us everything we needed to know about our position, speed and bearing, was a lifeless black. We tried everything, but having run through the electrics with the multi-meter it was clear that the unit had perished, no doubt as a result of being fully submerged earlier. Ben looked devastated. From the beginning he had loved the GPS and had been responsible for plugging in the waypoints we aimed for every hundred or so miles. I cast my mind back to Geraldton where he had said, ‘As long as the GPS works we’ll be okay.’

  We found the small, handheld GPS we had brought along. Although it didn’t give you as much information, it did give latitude and longitude, which we could plot on our charts. But there was more bad news. The stash of spare batteries we had in a supposedly waterproof bag was spoilt. We would have to rely on the batteries in the unit, which meant we could only turn it on once or twice a day. Although we would be able to find out where we were, we would have to row for twelve hours without knowing how fast we were going or exactly what effect
the current was having on us. Also, we wouldn’t have any warning of approaching ships.

  In some ways it wasn’t the end of the world. We would be rowing west as hard as we could and not knowing our position every minute of the day shouldn’t make too much difference to our progress. But psychologically it was a real blow because we had spent 75 days looking at the GPS while we rowed, looking at our drift off course and making small adjustments to our bearing in response or gamefully setting down a target in one shift for the other person to beat in the next. As with so much technology, we had come to rely on it and now it was gone we were disorientated and unsure how effective the alternatives would be.

  ‘Ah well,’ I said, trying to be positive. ‘The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, how hard can it be?’

  But Ben was inconsolable and silently retreated to the cabin for his rest. As I rowed on I found I kept looking at the dead screen of the GPS every minute or so out of habit. It was annoying, but I wasn’t that bothered. Why? I wondered. Was it out of relief that we were both unharmed or was it because I’ve always disliked computers anyway? Or was I reacting to Ben’s gloom with a necessary amount of optimism? Had we become like some old married couple who manipulate their emotions to maintain a balance, just as seamen shift weight around a boat to find the perfect trim?

  As night fell we fumbled with the two still-working torches to change over in the dark. After the drama of the day I was exhausted and kept falling asleep at the oars. Now that the adrenaline had worn off every muscle ached and, with the wet cabin making it impossible to sleep, we were both at a low ebb physically. Ben was sick in his last night shift and, at first light on Day 76, we realised it would be another overcast day and there’d be no drying out of the mattress or anything else from the cabin.