Rowing After the White Whale

by James Adair

  ‘We’re bound for Mauritius with a cargo of facial hair and dreams.’

  ‘Are you sure we can’t help?’

  ‘No, thank you, we’ve come a long way, from Australia, and if we accept any help it won’t count as an official ocean row.’

  ‘Okay, sir. We wish you good luck.’

  ‘And to you; good luck and a safe passage.’

  For lunch we both ate another chilli con carne. We were not only bored with the meals but also desperate for something sweet as our bodies had gone for weeks without sugar. For days Ben had been eyeing up the rubbish hatches where we were keeping the empty food packets. He was convinced there were some chocolate bars at the bottom. Over the last few days he had checked all but one, the smelliest.

  ‘I’m going in,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t do it to yourself, it’s not good in there. Anyway, you’ve already said there’s nothing in there.’

  ‘I’ve got to check. I’m going in.’

  He span the circular hatch cover open and immediately a pungent smell of rotting eggs poisoned the air.

  ‘Ah, it’s disgusting!’ he cried, holding his nose with one hand as he started fishing out the festering months-old food packets. Then he screamed with joy. ‘There’s something in here! A Boost!’

  Sitting at the bottom of the hatch was indeed a Boost bar. We had spent many long hours comparing the relative merits of Mars, Snickers and other chocolate bars, but nothing had come close to the Boost. As an all-round chocolate bar, the Boost is unassailable and we would often compose letters of praise to the food scientists who had developed it. We’d taken two hundred bars of chocolate in total, which was nowhere near enough. If we were to do it again we agreed that we would take enough for five per person per day. It had been a struggle to make our chocolate last until Day 85, and now it had been twenty days since we had eaten any. We washed the wrapper and went into the cabin. I cut, Ben chose. Then, over the next twenty minutes, we nibbled off the smallest segments and crumbs possible, letting each bit disintegrate on our tongues so as to get the most out of it. The chocolate was dense, milky, rich, complex – utterly mind-blowing.

  ‘Do you know some Indians say you can spot a Westerner by the way they eat an orange?’ said Ben.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Because as we’re chewing on one segment we’re already peeling off the next one and putting it in our mouths.’

  ‘Very true. So tell me, would you still make the mistake of melting your Boost into your porridge or would you enjoy it on its own?’

  ‘Absolutely, the first breakfast I have in Mauritius I’ll be asking the waiter to melt two Boosts into my porridge.’

  ‘Yes, and refuse to eat it with anything but the “spife”.’

  Now that we were entering the final stretch all conversational roads led to Mauritius. What we’d eat and drink, whether we’d shower or bath first. In the end it was everything – we’d lie in the bath with the shower on, eating Boosts and drinking grog.

  I was really looking forward to sleeping in a bed and eating a cooked breakfast, but what I was most looking forward to was seeing Tory. More than anything, her letters and messages and the very thought of her made the voyage so enjoyable. Mauritius on its own is just another tropical paradise, but the thing which made it so alluring for me was that Tory would be there. And I’d asked her to bring a fair few Boosts with her.

  60 Second Storm

  ‘“Avast Stubb,” cried Starbuck, “let the Typhoon sing, and strike his harp here in our rigging; but if thou art a brave man thou will hold thy peace.”

  “But I am not a brave man; never said I was a brave man; I am a coward; and I sing to keep up my spirits. And I tell you what it is Mr Starbuck, there’s no way to stop my singing in this world but to cut my throat.”’

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  When the weather finally came on Day 106 there was too much of it. The wind was too strong and the swell too hostile to make any serious progress. In the daytime the wind was around 30 to 35 knots and gusting stronger. At night it seemed to pick up further. Huge waves hit the boat and flung her off course, and the wind did the rest, pushing the boat onto the beam for us to be swamped by the next wave. The seas were as steep as we’d ever seen them. We were now wearing our lifejackets and clipping on all the time. Around teatime I was lying in the cabin when I felt the whole boat being picked up from the stern so steeply that I slid down to the cabin door. I heard Ben shouting and I opened the hatch. The deck was full of water slowly draining through the scuppers.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘That was unbelievable, we nearly pitchpoled! Shit that was big.’

  To pitchpole is to go head over heels. Only massive following seas can pitchpole a boat.

  We were determined to make the best of this monumental weather, which we had been anticipating so keenly, and so we pushed on, silently enduring each increasingly scary shift at the oars. At dusk we switched on the handheld GPS. We discovered that we hadn’t gone far and amazingly, despite pointing the boat in a north-westerly direction with southerly winds and swell behind us, we had still managed to slip south. The relentless currents seemed to be conspiring against us. We tried not to take it personally, but this weather seemed to possess a malevolent cruelty. As night fell we carried on, moonlight helping us to see the viscous, broiling seas around us. We both took to singing during these night shifts. The ocean was too loud to hear the other person singing, but the next day we told each other how we had sung to keep up our spirits amid the steep seas. I had plumped for hymns, ‘For those in Peril on the Sea’, ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’, that sort of thing, while Ben opted for popular musicals, madly chanting, ‘A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down,’ over and over again. With the sea bigger than we had ever experienced, we decided to put in a drogue for the first time. A drogue is like a small, more aqua-dynamic parachute anchor which, when deployed off the bow, keeps the boat in line with the following seas. It slows you down but lessens the risk of ending up on the beam and capsizing.

  That night we both thought – not at all unreasonably – that we could have died. Luckily the boat hadn’t rolled but it had come close, and recovering from a capsize in such violent seas would have been dangerous. We were therefore quite annoyed when we got a message from Tony asking why we were going south again and asking if we’d ‘enjoyed our night in the cabin’. After putting the drogue in, we had retreated to the cabin and stayed there for the five or so hours until dawn. Was he bantering with us or was he being serious? Either way we were irritated; he was just looking at wind arrows on a screen, studying computer models, he had no idea what it was really like rowing on this beam sea and there was no way he could see what the currents were doing either. He had our best interests at heart, but we started deleting his messages instead of reading them to each other. We were losing our sense of perspective and our sense of humour.

  Small things, which we might have found funny before, were now a source of major sense of humour failure. Going to the loo in big seas was always a precarious affair and whoever was sitting on the bucket was liable to be unceremoniously thrown off mid poo. On the morning of Day 107 I had to go. I watched the big seas nervously, waiting for the waves to abate. Is it getting calmer? I asked myself. Probably not, but a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. I made a dash for it, positioned the bucket, pulled all my warm, dry waterproofs down and sat. A big wave hurtled along and slapped the cabin from the side, pushing the boat onto the beam. Oh dear, I’d better be quick. Too late, another wave was coming, a breaking wave, oh no . . . smash.

  I screamed in rage. The wave had soaked me, drenching my foul weather gear, filling it with water.

  The sea was rough all day and if it had a personality it wasn’t a friendly one. The weather didn’t let up over the next three days. We were continually wet and tired with the sheer effort of rowing in such violent seas. At night there was no moon or stars, only bouts of torrential rain. We decided to
have the navigation light on. It didn’t particularly help the person rowing to see anything, but the person in the cabin could see that the rower was there which, in such treacherous conditions, was some comfort. As I lay in the cabin at night I watched the mad, demonic shapes cast by Ben’s shadow as he got thrown about outside.

  As we were getting nearer to our destination we started turning on the handheld GPS every two hours. We only had two hundred miles to go. The days seemed to be getting hotter, land felt close, but there were still no signs such as birds, other boats or planes.

  But the handheld was now telling us that we were being pushed south, away from Mauritius.

  61 Pilot Whales

  ‘[The pilot whale’s] voracity is well known, and from the circumstance that the inner angles of his lips are curved upwards, he carries an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on his face.’

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  On the morning of Day 111 the sun was shining in between the quick-moving white clouds. Drying and warming in the sun after another night of monsoon rains was like being born again. We’d eaten our breakfast of shepherd’s pie in good humour and I was now rowing the first shift.

  At first I could hear it only faintly. It sounded like a radio being tuned. I looked at the GPS wondering whether it had suddenly come to life. Ben opened the cabin door looking befuddled from his ten minutes of sleep.

  ‘What’s that noise? Is the GPS working?’

  By now the noise had grown to a crescendo, so that by the time the whales arrived we were already looking out for them. A pod of pilot whales, about ten strong. Within no time they were all around us, the clicks, booms and whines of their sonar ringing in our ears. One breached next to the boat, its pitch black skin smooth and unblemished. Another big one, about fifteen feet long, came up for breath, its large blowhole letting out a deep, guttural exhalation. They were fast, moving around the boat like torpedoes. There was something ominous in their speed, their obvious strength and the way they surrounded us. There was nothing slow and ponderous about them; they moved like wolves or killer whales, fast and in a pack. I leant over the side and thrust the camera in, capturing one swimming right next to us. Then I spotted a small one, surely a baby, under the rudder, standing up on his tail, staring at us through the clear blue. I put the camera on deck and started stripping off but before I got my foulies off they had gone. These brief but beautiful encounters made all the pain worthwhile. They had arrived and disappeared so quickly, leaving us to our fate, but by now I didn’t feel like we were imposters in their world; we were part of it, too.

  62 Lunar Rainbow

  ‘Somewhere over the rainbow,

  Skies are blue,

  And the dreams that you dare to dream,

  Really do come true.’

  E. Y. Harburg, ‘Over the Rainbow’

  By Day 112 the only freeze-dried meals we had left were soup. So it was soup three times a day. At least there was still some choice, although chicken with vegetable won over potato and leek every time. We had also run out of toilet paper and I couldn’t help but bring up the whole leaving-behind-the-big-pack-of-toilet-roll-in-Geraldton-for-no-apparent-reason thing with Ben. His ingenious solution was to cut up bandages from the medical kit into small sections. I tested them out at dawn as the sunrise was painting the wispy clouds in fiery hues of red, yellow and orange.

  ‘I’ve got to hand it to you, they really work; they’re soft, efficient, biodegradable. I think you could give Andrex a run for their money with these,’ I conceded.

  ‘See, I told you so.’

  Although the weather had calmed down during the day it was still rough at night. Our biggest problem now seemed to be the rain. Dense clouds would unload relentless downpours on us and the wind and swell would always pick up for the duration. Some of these downpours were so heavy that whoever was rowing would have to stop and clamber to the bilge pump to empty out the water. It appeared that we were finishing our row in the African rainy season.

  During the night of Day 113 we were rowing through these rain showers. One minute the bright, nearly full moon was casting a silvery light over the choppy waters; the next it had been blotted out by an immense rain cloud that unleashed a watery broadside for half an hour before passing on. In the middle of this process I saw an amazing sight, something I didn’t know could happen. Having just weathered one drenching I pushed back my hood for some fresh air and there off our stern was a vast, milky arc glowing hazily in the moist night sky. Could it be that the moon’s light was strong enough to illuminate a rainbow at night, could this be a ‘moonbow’? Staring up at that eerie sight I was transfixed. I was sure I could see it, but I wondered if fatigue and hunger were inducing hallucinations. I later discovered that there is a phenomenon called the moonbow or lunar rainbow, which was first documented by Aristotle in 350 BC. But I didn’t know this at the time, so the sight seemed like a mirage full of uncertain meaning. The next rain cloud to hit us was so heavy it thundered on the surface of the sea, calming the waves as the force of the falling rain beat down the swell. At these times we rowed valiantly on, but it felt like rowing through cement and it was virtually impossible to keep our eyes open. Lying in the cabin, listening to the drumming of the rain on the boat, was to lie in the comfort of knowing you weren’t out there, at least not for a few more hours.

  63 Nearing

  ‘These warm Trade Winds, at least, that in the clear heavens blow straight on . . . however the baser currents of the sea may tack and turn.’

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  As the sun came up on the morning of Day 114 there were signs of land all around and the sea seemed to be teeming with life. Large clumps of seaweed floated through the blue. There were flocks of small, white birds that were either terns or tropicbirds. They hunted the silvery baitfish that exploded out of the water, driven up by whales, dolphins or sharks. It was hard to tell which; we only caught occasional glimpses of fins and dark shadows under the water. The dorado joined in the feeding, leaping out of the water to give chase to fleeing fish. Our most loyal companions were reminding us that they were still around.

  With fewer than one hundred miles to go to Mauritius, the current had come behind us at last and we were making good progress north. We needed to get to the northern tip of the island and, with easterlies forecast, I said we should head up and get on the same latitude as the finishing line. After some debate Ben agreed and we rowed with a more northerly course. But we were soon admonished by Tony who was afraid we would overshoot the northern tip of the island. He said our course left us with ‘diminishing angles’ and that it made no sense to go north then west, we should instead head a steady north-west. In a yacht perhaps, but we’d been rowing for long enough now to know that it’s easier to maintain a latitude than to try and reach one against a current. Still, we bowed to his greater experience; after all, approaching land in an ocean rowing boat with limited ability to manoeuvre is dangerous and we’d never done it before. Had we trusted our instincts, though, we might not have got into the trouble we did when, inevitably, the current turned against us.

  This happened during the night of Day 114. The easterly wind picked up, the current started pushing us south and we were back in the washing machine, only instead of having three thousand miles to play with we now only had about fifty; now every mile mattered. Physically it was the hardest night rowing we did. I rowed the entire night with one oar. That’s two hands pulling on one oar for six hours just to try and keep the boat on course for Mauritius.

  When daylight arrived on Day 115 we were both knackered. We had run out of fresh water and, unsurprisingly, the watermaker had packed in again. We got out the handheld pump and started pumping enough water to hydrate our breakfast soup. Only potato and leek left now, but we didn’t care; we knew how close we were and were hoping that if we rowed together maybe we could punch through the current and get to the safe port at the north of the island. That’s where our loved ones were, waiting with Boosts and
beers.

  I knew that Tory had arrived the night before; she was now only forty-odd miles away. It’s not hard to imagine how this thought motivated me through the hardships of those last few days. Since she was on the same time zone I decided to call her after breakfast to check she’d got in safely. She picked up straight away.

  ‘Hi, darling, are you okay?’

  ‘Yeah, we’re fine, not far to go now. Did you remember the Boosts?’

  ‘Of course, but are you alright out there? The wind is really strong here, the palm trees are getting blown flat; it must be a nightmare out there.’

  ‘It’s not too bad. Really, it’s fine.’

  Ben raised his eyebrows at me and I shrugged as if to say, ‘What else can I say?’ As I said goodbye I felt the excitement of being reunited with Tory. I had imagined it so many times and now it was just around the corner. We really were on the home straight, with only another day or two to go.

  We tried rowing together through the daylight hours of Day 115. Rowing without breaks was tiring, but we were making little headway north and had worked our way halfway up the coast of the island, although it remained out of sight.

  During the afternoon a car carrier passed by less than half a mile away. We could see the foaming white of the bow wave it made. We were definitely close to land now and we could see for the first time in months the white trails of planes slanting across the blue sky.

  At night we decided to revert to our usual shift patterns so that we could rest before the final push north. That night was another tough one, with the currents preventing us moving north. For every mile we went north we would go three west. We were fast running out of space in which to manoeuvre the boat towards the island’s northerly port.

  At dawn on Day 116 we had sixteen miles left to get to the north of the island but only about twenty left before the strong easterlies pushed us onto the treacherous coral reefs that line the eastern coast of Mauritius.