CHAPTER 7
Lights under the Water
March 18, 1981
I SAT HUNCHED ON THE ROWING seat, pressing my lips tightly together to keep from vomiting all over the deck. The minute we left the calm of Casablanca harbor heading into the heavy swells of coastal Morocco, Excalibur had started a horrible seesaw motion, throwing my body back and forth like a limp rag doll. My stomach heaved, and I could barely keep my eyes open. “This is nothing like Narragansett Bay!” I gasped, leaping for the gunwales. The worst sea conditions I had experienced on the rowboat were on the relatively shallow waters of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay. To move anywhere on the boat, I had to hold tightly to the safety lines strung between the fore and aft cabins. Now I leaned over the side of the boat, hanging on to a safety line for dear life, offering my breakfast to the waves.
Later, although the lights along the Moroccan coastline twinkled dimly through the ocean haze, the weather deteriorated. The change began deceptively, with a light breeze out of the southeast, but within an hour, conditions were so bad that we could barely wrench our oars in and out of the building waves.
Crack! There was a terrifying noise above my head, and, as I twisted around to look up, the overburdened oar-shaft mast supporting the radio antenna, flags, radar reflector, and navigation lights tilted perilously in my direction.
“Look out!” Curt screamed, and I threw out my hand as the mast came down, barely missing both our heads as it crashed onto the starboard gunwale, nearly splitting in half, and then dropped into the sea. For a few nightmare moments, the green and red lights blinked eerily below the ocean’s surface. I scrambled to my knees to grab the wires and mast before the waves pulled them away from the boat, then carefully got onto the cabin top, fighting to keep the mast upright again while Curt retied it using ropes in place of the broken wire cables.
Huge storm waves built all night, their white crests breaking thunderously in foaming masses that rushed toward the boat. I had never felt so vulnerable in my life.
By the second day, the mast had landed twice more on deck, each time barely missing whoever was rowing. Each time it came down, the wires for the radio antenna were torn apart and we had to retwist the wires and wrap them again with electrical tape. Our three-times-a-day schedule with Norbeto, the Moroccan ham radio operator arranged by the US consul’s office, was not off to a good start either, because we were so busy just trying to survive our first few days at sea that we were late for some call-ins. When Curt calculated our position in relation to Casablanca harbor with his new plastic Davis sextant, he found that the boat had been blown back over most of the distance we had rowed that first day. Worse yet, Excalibur was less than five miles from the pounding surf of the shoreline that was just over the eastern horizon.
Stomach clenched with fear, I turned to him and said, “My God, we’re going to end up crash landing on the coastline! We’re going to be rolled over and dumped on the shore!”
In a barely controlled state of panic, I crawled back into the cabin and dug through my clothes bag, to find heavy cotton long underwear and a sweat suit to protect my body from being raked over the rocky beach that guarded the Moroccan coast.
“Do you want your sweats? It’s safer with them on!” I yelled out the bow hatch door. Curt’s mouth moved, but all I could hear was the wind.
“Here! Put them on!” I handed out his sweats while he grabbed our life jackets from the stern cabin. If the boat tipped over, we didn’t want to be caught locked in the cabin, so we huddled together on deck with our backs to the cabin hatch door. For hours, we watched the seas slam hard against the boat—until I remembered something.
“What about the sea anchors?” I said, wiping the spray from my glasses.
We carried at least three of the pointed, parachute-like devices with holes at the end. Each curling wave pushed us along with what felt like the energy of a freight train, but by using a sea anchor to control the boat’s speed, there was a chance the drift could be slowed.
“I don’t know. I’ve never used them before … but I’ll try it. Anything is better than this out-of-control ride.” Curt got up carefully, grabbing the safety lines, and, walking like an old man, his shoulders hunched high, went to the aft cabin where the sea anchors were stored. Within minutes of him setting a brand-new sea anchor off the stern, Excalibur began drifting northward rather than toward the shore. The Autohelm, the electronic self-steering device that was attached to the tiller of the rudder and ran off batteries powered by the solar panels on top of the bow cabin, was adjusted so that our course was even more northward along the coast rather than toward the northeast, where the wind was pushing us.
During lulls in the wind, Curt took in the sea anchor, and we rowed to gain distance from the shore. But the boat was still in danger. Louder than the wind was the steady beat of a ship’s engine from the constant stream of maritime traffic that plied the Moroccan coast. From time to time one of us would sound the Freon foghorn to signal our presence, and we left the navigation lights on all night.
CHAPTER 8
Birthday on the Barbary Coast
March 22, 1981
I SAT IN THE BOW CABIN alone, fingering the delicately wrought gold pendant in the shape of the hand of Fatima, wife of Muhammad, that Curt had just given me for my birthday. Thank you, I’d said, and leaned over to give him a kiss. He smiled and reached below deck on his side to pull out the SLR camera for a couple of photos. Twenty-five years old and at sea, rowing across the Atlantic Ocean. I slipped it on the braided gold chain with the St. Christopher’s medal that Curt’s sister Lynn had given me before we left the United States. With Fatima and Christopher together, I hoped we’d be lucky.
Each morning, after putting away the one sleeping bag we used since the cabin was so small, and firing up the Optimus stove for coffee and bowls of instant oatmeal, I would take a marker, lean over to Curt’s side of the cabin, and write the month and day under year 1981: 3/18, 3/19, 3/20, 3/21, and 3/22, my birthday. The space was so small in the cabin that I could reach over and write on the wall with my left hand while holding on to the handle of the pot with the other. For a few minutes it seemed to me, the day held still as I printed the numbers.
I thought about this new life to be marked by the most alone time with another person I had ever experienced. Apart from the limited daily contact we had had with Norberto and the ceaseless rocking movement of the rowboat, the most significant aspect of the trip so far was the solitude of our community of two. For the past two and a half years, we had shared a common fascination with Thoreau’s writings on nature and the solitary life. I had read Walden, On Walking, and A Week on the Concord and the Merrimack Rivers out loud as we rowed, hiked, and lived together. Thoreau’s transcendental flirtations intrigued me, and I felt that his words spoke to me. It was how I wanted to live my life: through the challenge of being self-sufficient in nature.
By the day of my birthday, with the foul weather finally moderating five days after leaving Casablanca, I had lost my seasickness and had gotten my sea legs well enough to sit on deck again and appreciate the ocean environment. Curt, it had seemed to me, was not as bothered by seasickness as I was, though I imagined how hard it must have been for him, even somewhat nauseous, to keep up with the navigation and read the tiny print of the Nautical Almanac he used in his calculations.
Later, when I rowed, I saw long-tailed black cormorants swooping low around the boat, diving for the small fish hiding in the shade cast by the boat’s bottom. These cormorants, Phalacrocorax africanus, I read in the Pilot Guide to the Atlantic Ocean, were seabirds found along the African coast, especially south of the Sahara. I rowed for a while and then pulled in my oars to watch glistening black-and-white short-beaked Atlantic dolphins jumping in front of the boat, flinging white necklaces of water droplets into the air. Sighting these graceful creatures was like a birthday gift.
A few days later, Curt wrote in his logbook:
March 25 We have to be extr
emely careful of Cape Beduza, a large rocky promontory of land that extends out into the sea between Casablanca and the Canary Islands. We’ve been putting in long hours at the oars. When I crawl back into the cabin afterward, I have only to close my eyes when vivid, dream-like scenes flash before me. I’m not quite asleep but I’ve seen scenes from my childhood, though I haven’t really been thinking about them.
On March 27, the dawn began with a soft rose tint in the eastern skies and barely a breeze in the air. The sea was calm and silent. We took advantage of the conditions to swim and wash clothes. But by afternoon, the wind had found its strength again and was soon pushing three-to-five-foot breaking waves hard against the boat. It became too choppy to row and the boat’s yawing motion was so rough that Curt put out a sea anchor again. It was too scary to go on deck, and we spent the next couple of days in the bow cabin reading to each other, writing up terse entries in our journals, and looking nervously out of the hatch while the weather worsened.
One morning when I went out to pee, the waves looked more threatening than ever. All around me as I perched on the edge of the port gunwale, bottom extended and my back pushed against the safety line, were heavy, lime-green waves that roared by the boat and broke with a nasty hissing sound. I finished and hastily stuffed the zip lock bag with toilet paper behind the tied down oars and scuttled back into cabin where Curt waited with a dry towel. Starting the first night, we’d gotten into the habit of drying each other off when we came into the cabin when conditions were stormy.
When the wind veered to the northwest on the 29th, the troughs between waves started looking like mountain valleys. The sea anchor off the stern was causing too much resistance against the prodigious force of the waves. With each wave, the boat would go forward only to be quickly jerked backward by the anchor’s pull. It would struggle to the top, then be yanked back and forced into an almost sideways motion.
Finally, Curt said, “I’m going out. I’ve got to do something,” and began to fasten on his safety harness.
I sat up, exhausted from the lethargy of days of rotten weather with no rowing, and said, “Wait! Why do you have to do that? It’s crazy out there. Just let the boat drift.”
“I can’t just sit here and let the boat be jerked around. Besides, I’m sick of being in this cabin.”
I understood his deadly boredom with the enforced inactivity. The sea anchor had to be taken in. I flopped back on my pillow after he went out and tried to imagine myself out on deck trying to set the sea anchor myself, but it scared me too much. So I waited and watched out the cabin door.
In the pitch dark of night, with his safety harness tied around his waist, Curt went to the stern deck where the sea anchor was tied off. Bracing his feet on the aft deck, he pulled laboriously, hand over hand. The wind was blowing hard, and ten-foot waves towered above the boat. When they broke some distance away, the boat rode easily, but when they broke right beside us, it created a foaming surge. I could see Curt cringing as gallons of cold seawater broke over him.
The storm went on for four more miserable days before Curt could go on the stern deck to take sights of a few stars that poked out from the clouds with the Davis sextant. As he caught each star in the mirror of the sextant’s viewfinder, he called out “Mark” and I recorded the time from my wind-up Oyster watch that had been donated by Rolex, one of our sponsors from a contact at the Explorers Club. Later, in the cramped bow cabin, he worked out his calculations while I rowed: Excalibur had drifted two hundred miles off course. The boat was now south of Sidi Ifni and only a few miles off the African coast and Cape Juby. The American consulate in Casablanca had explicitly warned us to stay clear of the area south of Sidi Ifni because of the ongoing war between Morocco and Mauritania that extended into this region of the coast. The storm had blown us into a war zone.
Huddled together in the bow cabin, we looked at the vector drawings that Lukin Zoran, the first mate on Zvir, had made. With these, Curt could calculate the direction and length of time we would have to row in order to counteract the wind and current and make it safely out of this war zone. If we continued to drift in the southerly direction we were going, we would crash-land on the African coast north of Cape Juby in about thirty-six hours.
Curt looked up from his calculations and said, “We have to row northwest for about twelve hours if we are going to get out of here.” I nodded unhappily, and we stowed the chart and went out on deck to row.
The new danger of the war zone after two serious storms put us on edge. Thoreau, our prophet for the wilderness, had not given us advice for dealing with fear and physical discomfort in such trying circumstances. In the nearly two weeks that we had been at sea, we’d been able to set up a fairly regular schedule of rowing both alone and together about eight to ten hours daily to keep the boat going in the right direction. But with the potential for problems in this remote area of the Moroccan coast, we were going to have to put in more hours at the oars. Curt began to complain of salt sores on his bottom from sitting on his wet rowing seat for so long, and my leg and arm muscles were achy all the time. Both of us had blisters from the first days at sea, but now we were developing new ones that stung badly in the salty living conditions. As much as I loved the beautiful lines of Excalibur that made her so easy to row, it seemed her extreme tenderness in the waves at sea was causing us to develop muscles in places we didn’t know we had. In time, I would develop a dull pain in my hips from rocking back and forth in the bow cabin at night that only went away when we got off the boat.
One night in the dampness of the tiny forward cabin after a tedious day of rowing, we sat, feeling cramped and barely able to sit up straight with the low ceiling, eating another boring meal of macaroni and cheese; both of us were lost in our own thoughts. I scraped the last of the orange cheese sauce from my bowl, asked, “You finished?” and reached for his bowl.
“No, give me a few more minutes.”
“Well, you can wash your own bowl,” I snapped and opened the cabin hatch. Behind me, I could hear him muttering, “What’s the difference? You never wash the dishes after dinner anyhow.”
“Oh, shut up,” I said, and slammed the hatch behind me. He was right: I never washed the pot or dishes after dinner, but then, he wasn’t the one sticking his hands into a black sea in the dark. How did I know what was down there, as food bits drifted into the water at night? I had visions of fierce sharks leaping out of the dark to bite off my hands.
As evening descended, there was a violent splashing near the boat. I looked around and saw a large school of yellow fin tuna breaking the surface of the sea in the moonlight. It was a fantastic display, enormous tuna jumping completely clear of the water.
The wind died down and the seas subsided. Being blown onto the shores of Cape Juby was no longer an immediate threat because of the long hours and days we had spent rowing, but getting clear of the war zone and Moroccan coast was still important.
CHAPTER 9
Approaching the Canary Islands
Late March 1981
FUETEVENTURA, THE EASTERNMOST ISLAND OF the Canary Islands, slowly came into view under clear skies dotted with fair weather cumulus clouds. We had read in the Planning Guide for the North Atlantic that the terrain of this island was similar to the Sahara Desert, which was only sixty miles away on the West African coast. After three weeks at sea, the sight of land mesmerized us. As we rowed closer, the dry barren hills and a group of fishing villages came into sight.
“Let’s get something to eat,” I said, putting down my oars.
Both of us were feeling tired and out of sorts as we put away the oars. I opened one of the round Beckson deck hatches to look for a can of Underwood luncheon meat, and when I put my hand down below, I touched liquid. There was a significant amount of water in the hatch with the food stores, sloshing back and forth. I pulled up a plastic bag with cans that I had protected with marine varnish while Excalibur sat on deck of Zvir on the Atlantic crossing, and saw they were rusty and the bag filled
with saltwater. I looked over to Curt and at that same moment it occurred to both of us that the other hatches could be waterlogged as well. We began opening all the deck hatches, and indeed they all had at least three to four inches of saltwater sloshing around. We took turns pumping out the six deck hatches and leaving them open to dry in the afternoon sun.
Soon it was time for our regular radio contact with Casablanca. The battery, below deck in the stern cabin and wired to the solar panels on the bow cabin, had run down and never recharged more than halfway because of our initial, three-time-a-day schedule with Norberto, so we had reduced communications with him to once a day. We also wanted to maintain a schedule with a newly found ham radio maritime net out of the UK.
“CN8AP, CN8AP Casablanca, this is Excalibur KA1GIN, over.” While we were building our boat, I had earned a Novice amateur radio license that allowed me to transmit in Morse code and receive in code and voice. I wasn’t very good at it, though, as I translated each message into code and then slowly tapped it onto the 1960s-era Morse code key that our friend Peter Wilhelm’s father had given to us.
“KA1GIN, hello Excalibur! Your signal is very faint. What’s the problem?” Norberto, CN8AP, responded in voice.
I leaned out the cabin hatch to call to Curt and gestured impatiently back at the TR-7 radio transmitter wrapped in white padding and tied to the cabin ceiling. It had been making scratchy sounds for a few days, and now green lights were flittering unevenly across its front panel as I tried to answer Norberto.
When he couldn’t hear my response, he guessed the saltwater might have eroded the wires of our electrical system because we were so near the water. He made a suggestion in Spanish that was to become one of our favorite mantras: Pone en el sol! Put it in the sun!
Rowing for My Life Page 5