Rowing After the White Whale

by James Adair

  ‘You look like a thin Oliver Reed in Gladiator, but your moustache is ridiculous, it’s like General Melchett’s from Blackadder.’

  ‘I know, I keep getting food stuck in it; it’s actually growing into my mouth now. As for you, you remind me of the Nazi officer at the end of Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail who ages really fast after he drinks from the Grail.’

  ‘Thanks. So I basically look like a hundred-year-old iconoclastic war criminal. I think you’ll find many other people liken me to Redford in his prime.’

  Day 100 had crept up on us. When we started out, it seemed like an impossibly long time to spend in such a small boat. Given the 2009 pair’s record of 102 days, we’d thought it was possible that we wouldn’t even be at sea for 100 days, although we had brought enough food for 120. Now here we were: Day 100 and over five hundred miles to Mauritius. We still had a long way to go yet.

  57 Longest at Sea

  ‘For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of the sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.’

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  For me, one hundred days sounded longer than it felt. I felt more comfortable at sea after three months than I had after three weeks. It was as if I were rediscovering some dormant, primal symbiosis with the sea. Not many ocean rowers have spent one hundred days at sea. A pair on the popular mid-Atlantic route would expect to cross in around sixty days. However, solo rowers on the South Pacific can expect to spend close to a year in the big blue.

  It’s impossible to tell how a first-time ocean rower will react psychologically to being at sea; statistically, the highest drop-out rate comes in the first week. After this initial period people are less likely to give up, although they still do. As for second-time ocean rowers, there are very few. Only 32 of 519 people who have rowed oceans have done it again. These people have set the records for the longest periods at sea in an ocean rowing boat. The record for the longest single ocean row currently belongs to Erdun Eruc, who spent 312 days on the Pacific in 2007/08. As for the longest combined time spent at sea, the British rower Peter Bird clocked up an astounding 937 days at sea from seven rows, the bulk of which came from two long Pacific voyages. His seventh and final row (an attempt to cross the treacherous North Pacific) ended with his death at sea. The length of time he spent at sea, and his obsessive determination to be the first across many ocean routes, means that Bird in many ways resembles Captain Ahab, and he shares his fate. Clearly, ocean rowers and whalemen are connected by their desire to spend vast stretches of time in the wilds of the sea.

  That’s what struck me about the old whaling fleets of Melville’s day: the sheer amount of time spent at sea. Although they would stop briefly to resupply at whaling stations, located on remote islands dotted around the globe, they were still gone from home for three or four years at a time. The oil they so brutally harvested from the sperm whale was preserved in barrels in the hold and they would keep sailing until the hold was full. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries thousands of men were employed in this trade, each one of them spending years at sea. They were largely from Nantucket and elsewhere in New England, but European countries sent out whaling fleets too, most notably Britain and Holland. Of course, European maritime nations such as the British, French and Dutch also sent their men to sea for trade, war and exploration for years at a time, but few men went for as long as the whalers.

  Moby Dick’s narrator, Ishmael, who has set out on his first whaling voyage, recounts an extraordinary encounter that must have filled so many first-timers with awe and dread. He describes how, having left Nantucket and heading for the Cape of Good Hope, they chanced to cross paths with a returning whaler.

  A wild sight it was to see her long-bearded look-outs at those three mastheads. They seemed clad in the skins of beasts, so torn and bepatched the raiment that had survived nearly four years’ cruising. Standing in iron hoops nailed to the mast, they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea; and though, when the ship slowly glided close under our stern, we six men in the air came so nigh to each other that we might almost have leaped from the mast-heads of one ship to those of the other; yet those forlorn-looking fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to our look-outs.

  Ishmael is amazed at the amount of time at sea the crews in his day endured, especially since these men were not press ganged as they might have been into the Royal Navy but had chosen to go, and for very little financial reward. He’s astounded to see one man join up for another whaling voyage having only been back on land a matter of days.

  I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness at the man, who in midwinter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet.

  On reading this, we realised that there always have been and always will be people addicted to life at sea. Modern-day commercial shipping will rarely afford longer than a month or two at sea, as cargo ships can do a steady 14 knots in most weather. For them the world is a much smaller place than it is for the yachtsmen and women who spend months circumnavigating the world.

  One man who found the lure of the open ocean irresistible was the French sailor Bernard Moitessier. He was leading the field in the final stretch of the first solo round the world yacht race in 1968. However, in his incomparable Gallic way, he made the decision to stop racing towards the finish line and instead head off two-thirds of the way around the world again to Tahiti. He recorded his decision thus: ‘I have set a course for the Pacific again . . . I really felt sick at the thought of getting back to Europe again, back to the snake-pit . . . does it make sense to head for a place knowing you will have to leave your peace behind?’

  The glory and considerable prize money went to the British sailor Robin Knox-Johnson, but Moitessier’s decision won him another three months on the sea he loved so much.

  The record for the longest uninterrupted period at sea is claimed by American yachtsman Reid Stowe, who in 2010 completed an epic 1,152 days at sea without touching land or being resupplied. Yachtsmen like Stowe, along with whalemen and ocean rowers, prepare meticulously for the extended periods they choose to spend at sea. So, perhaps even more impressive are those who find themselves adrift in small boats or fragile life-rafts without having planned or wanted it.

  In 1820, a whaling ship named the Essex was rammed and sunk by an eighty-foot sperm whale in the Pacific. This incident was in part the inspiration for Moby Dick, but the tale of survival afterwards is perhaps even more extraordinary. The crew of the two surviving whaleboats, which are a similar size to an ocean rowing boat, were forced to resort to cannibalism in order to survive their 90-day and 95-day ordeals.

  In the modern era there are many epic tales of survival. In 1972 a group of four adults and two children was cast adrift in a small open boat after their yacht was rammed and sunk by killer whales. Led by Dougal Robertson, they managed to survive 38 days until their rescue by using an array of clever but unpleasant techniques such as sucking the moisture out of fish eyes. In 1982 Steve Callahan survived for 76 days when his yacht sank a week out from the Canary Islands. Crossing the Atlantic with the prevailing winds and currents, he managed to stay alive in his life-raft by catching fish and seabirds. However, a Chinese sailor called Poon Lim is known to have survived for the longest time on a life-raft. He was working on a British merchant ship in the South Atlantic when it was torpedoed by a German U-boat during the Second World War. By collecting rain water and, among other ruses, catching and killing small sharks to drink their blood, Poon Lim managed an extraordinary 133 days at sea before being rescued by Brazilian fishermen.

  These survivors tend to share a
stubborn willpower along with a deep optimism – or at least hope – that they will be rescued. The human body is resilient, but the mind is so often fragile. Stay positive, don’t give up, and take care of each other or, if you’re alone, yourself; this is the mantra for anyone in a survival situation just as it is the key for anyone rowing an ocean.

  The psychology of ocean rowing is, of course, slightly different in that rowers have made the choice to go and at least think themselves prepared for these long periods of time at sea. However, as they lose weight, kit starts to fail and land becomes a distant memory, many rowers find themselves in difficult survival situations. After all, what is an ocean rowing boat but a large, well-equipped life-raft?

  Given the dangers of rowing and the cautionary stories of men such as Peter Bird meeting their death at sea, you may ask, is it worth it? Is it worth giving up your life in pursuit of something so ephemeral? For me the answer has to be yes, always yes. Even though, as some people pointed out, in the years before the row I had established a comfortable life in London with a good job. Did I really want to leave that all behind? Absolutely. Yes. I wouldn’t be happy dying at the end of another three months of standing on the tube and sitting in front of a computer; but after one hundred days of beauty and danger on the wild sea? That would be worth it. I was free, and if you are going to enjoy the absolute freedom of life on the ocean, you have to accept in its entirety the possibility of death.

  58 The Silent Sea

  ‘The silence takes some getting used to but after a while it’s okay, you listen to your heart beating and you listen to yourself breathing and when it rains it sounds deafening.’

  David Shrigley, Let’s Wrestle

  As anyone who has been in a coma knows, it tastes of salt water. The efficient nurses of the intensive care unit clean the respirator, which breathes for you, with a saline solution that tastes like seawater. I remember lying there in 1995 as a fourteen-year-old, unable to move, breathe, see or do anything apart from smell, hear, taste and think. My body stopped and only my brain went on, alone, trudging through the black wilderness of paralysis.

  Our perception of time is an inconstant thing, speeding up gradually throughout our lives only to slow during the few dramatic moments that punctuate our existence. For children time goes slowly, the school year drags, the summer holidays are a halcyon eternity, while the wait for Christmas lasts an exhausting age. One study suggests that in terms of perception of time a person living to the age of eighty will have lived half their life by the time they reach fourteen.2 As adults, we seem to lose months in a blur and then eventually the years themselves slip by.

  Not if you’re in a coma, though. When you can’t move or see your senses are heightened. I remember smelling the autumn leaves on the nurses starting their shifts, feeling the cold glow in their cheeks receding. In the darkness of paralysis, time slows to a near halt until the brain starts to free itself and build palaces in the clouds.3 Try it; close your eyes and lie motionless for ten minutes, it will feel like an hour. Try it for one hour, if you dare. You will not die of starvation or dehydration in an hour, so give it a go and feel the slowness of time and the infinity of your mind. Strange, you may think, and you would be right. I lay there for a month. After this, my time filled and sped up again with months of physiotherapy, tests, sickness, cures, doctors, nurses, patients being discharged or dying, wheelchairs, crutches, books, friends, foes, food and all the glorious chaos of life resuming.

  Upon re-entering the ‘real world’ after my coma I noticed that the time human beings have freed up with modern technology they have in turn filled with other devices that provide constant stimulation: television, computers, radio, mobile phones. People are rarely alone, rarely quiet. There is always the instant gratification of technology there to save you from spending any time alone and, God help you, by yourself. Of course, I got swept up in this and, apart from a few small rebellions, I watched Neighbours with the best of them. The terror and the pain of fighting for my life dissipated, as did the drama. They were replaced with the more mundane, and in many ways harder, struggle to overcome the physical after-effects of the illness. But also gone was the still and silence of that first month, which had been tempered by the rhythmic, mechanical breathing of the iron lung.

  What I was left with, apart from a couple of lifeless feet, was a determination to experience, to live. I got at it, in the partying, travel, sport, books and friendships that followed in the years after. Experiences no different from anyone else’s, but I cautioned myself to enjoy them and never forget where I had been. But I wasn’t likely to forget. When I took up scuba diving the sound of the air being sucked from my tank reminded me of the hospital respirator, but now I was weightless, drifting through the beauty and strangeness of the blue planet. If a shark were to bite my head off while I was diving I really wouldn’t care because I was now swimming, free, through a wild ocean and not lying on a hospital bed in Tooting unable to wipe my own arse. And so it was with the rowing.

  By Day 100 our GPS was broken, our food supplies were running low and the salt sores were agony. Time was slowing. I had no music to listen to, no GPS to look at every minute, no distractions. I was free and in the midst of the most wondrous place I’d ever been. The shock and fear at the start of the row had subsided into a meditative silence. But this time, instead of looking into the blackness of the backs of my eyelids or having them prised open to see a peering doctor behind the bright lights of the ward, now I could watch the immensity of the heavens and the vast blue ocean rolling away. Having known the silence of experiencing nothing, other than my own thoughts, for a month, the last 30 days at sea had been deafening. I felt unbelievably lucky. Was it worth dying for this experience? Absolutely.

  I can’t say if I appreciated spending so much time at sea in a small boat any more or any less than anyone else who has done it. I can’t say if I appreciated it any more or less than the person I would have been if I hadn’t been ill. All I can say is that it felt, at the time and afterwards, like a privilege.

  59 The Beginning of the End

  ‘For they say that, when cruising in an empty ship, if you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at the least.’

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  With over five hundred miles left we would need some help from the weather if we were to get to Mauritius without resorting to some very brutal rationing. Much of the food had spoiled. We had enough for another two weeks, but to finish our journey in this time would mean covering more distance per day than we’d averaged up until this point, as Ben had worked out while I was off in my own little dream world.

  The good news was that strong south-easterlies were forecast; we’d just have to wait a few days for them. Before the trade winds returned we had another calm to sit out, with constantly changing currents too.

  On Day 104 we came to a complete halt as we were treated to what would be our last sight of an absolutely flat sea. Not a ripple broke the surface of the water, which shimmered like sheet-steel reflecting back the hazy white of the motionless clouds. We stopped rowing for the day and organised the boat for the south-easterlies, which would whip up this flat calm into a furnace of tumultuous waves. It felt impossible to connect the two seas to each other, their personalities and faces were so different, but they were one and the same ocean. We also spent the whole day making water so that we wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of doing this in the rough weather. As we did our tasks, I managed to finally film one of the dorados leaping out of the water. Then I filmed an even more extraordinary sight. At first I could barely believe my eyes.

  Leaning over the side to film a dorado swimming in lazy loops underneath us, I noticed what looked like a pond skater skimming around on the surface. It was some sort of spider or insect.4 I couldn’t understand how its delicate frame survived even the smallest wave let alone a storm. How could something that looked as fragile as a daddy-long-legs survive out here?

  A
nother new encounter was with a small shoal of unicorn leatherjackets. These dusty-coloured fish, with their upturned mouths and soft horns, appeared ghost-like out of the deep. They vanished and reappeared throughout the day, seemingly unable to make up their minds if they wanted to follow us or not. These fish, like the dorado, are helplessly attracted to floating objects. Juveniles often associate with jellyfish, while adults follow debris. The leatherjackets that sauntered silently up to us eventually decided not to associate with us. Perhaps we were too strange or maybe they had an existing bond with a nearby log. As it was the first time we’d seen them, I wondered if they might be a sign of land.

  The next day while we were tucking into a breakfast of chilli con carne a ship appeared on the horizon. As it drew nearer we were able to speak to the crew on the radio. Despite her course the ship came close enough that we could see the crew lining the deck to look at us. A rather panicked chief officer came over the crackly radio.

  ‘Are you okay? What assistance do you require?’

  ‘We’re fine thanks; do you know the score of the Test match?’ we asked, knowing that India and England were playing a series and having heard that England were winning.

  ‘No, no, I only follow basketball,’ teased the officer, who we’d assumed was Indian, though he must have known that England were winning.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t require any assistance?’ he asked, sounding concerned again.

  ‘We’re fine, thank you. Where are you bound and what’s your cargo?’

  ‘We’re bound for Japan with a cargo of Brazilian woodchips. And you?’