It was a memorable suggestion that we would repeat when our clothes and sleeping bag grew damp and wouldn’t dry in the cabin. Sometimes we were laughing our heads off from the more inventive things to “pone en el sol,” like a bowl of moldy oatmeal or the old threadbare towels scavenged from Curt’s family’s summer camp and especially chosen for their light weight.
Meanwhile, Norberto was still trying to reach us and repeating his “Pone en el sol!” suggestion when the green lights of the radio flickered once, twice, and then disappeared for good.
“Hold on,” Curt said from the door of the cabin. “I’ll go check the batteries.”
He turned and went to the aft cabin to find the batteries were nearly dead and not charging. He came back to where I sat, and traced the problem to the wires leading from the solar panels mounted on the roof above. It must have been the pounding of the waves from the storms combined with the salt in the water that had corroded the wires. There was nothing to do but try to repair the connection.
I turned off the radio and reached behind it to unscrew the coaxial wire. I crawled out of the bow cabin, and together we began taking apart the wiring of the solar panels above our living quarters. After all of the eight panels had been unscrewed from their mounts, dried in the sun like strips of meat jerky, the wires replaced, and the panels remounted, I pulled out my trusty Morse code key and contacted Norberto once again. He was obviously so pleased that his suggestion had worked well that we couldn’t help but smile at the excitement in his voice.
The wind and waves had been in our favor during the emergency maintenance session, for the deck had remained dry. That day, though, I was reminded how fragile our lives were at sea, and how tenuous our connections to the outer world.
CHAPTER 10
Near Miss
Early April 1981
[Letter to Kathleen’s parents and siblings that was never mailed.]
Dear Family,
Looks like I might get this letter mailed on Fueteventura, Canaries. I’m actually 19 miles south of Fueteventura but we are hoping to go ashore tonight or tomorrow. We’re finding out through our radio ham contacts what towns we are looking at and also we’re trying to clear our way through customs on the islands before we get there. Our luck in Casablanca was tremendous, we made very good friends who bought food for us, drove us around to do our chores and fed us for a week straight.
When we arrived in Casablanca, we were met by the American consul, Charles Sten, and two members of the Casablanca Rowing Club. Each of the two rowers, about 40–50 years old, took turns having us for dinner. There was so much they wanted to do with us that sometimes we had to plead tiredness. The American consulate was very helpful: through them we met a ham radio operator who wanted to be our contact. We said OK but we didn’t have the voice [capacity] so Norberto, CN8AP came down to the boat and set up a dipole antenna and fixed up a microphone! We have been on schedule with him every day at 11:30 am GMT.
During the first few days we were in touch three times a day! That cost us a lot in power so we cut it to once a day at 14,250 MHz at 1130 GMT, I believe 0530 GMT for you. Of course, once we discovered voice, we had to talk to someone else, since Norberto speaks no English; contacts [with him] are made by Curt in Spanish. We quickly found out one day during a three-day storm when all you can do is stay inside the cabin and rest (??) about the British Maritime Net at 0800 and 1800 GMT and at 14, 303 KC on the dial. It was a lot of fun checking in with them.
They all have English accents and are so polite. I tell you it’s addictive this radio. QSOing. I enjoy it a lot but the dumb thing is I haven’t said a word to Norberto or the UK net yet! Curt does the talking, I send the code. But I’m getting my courage up because this morning when Ernie, British net head, called us, I responded in code. So with all these hams listening to the Kat and Curt story, we can’t be off the air too many days without people getting worried. Every day we give our position to the British net.
Well, anyways back to business at hand. We are doing fine. I’ve found my sea legs more or less. I did get seasick within two hours of leaving Casablanca and had problems for a few days afterwards. I thought I had strengthened my stomach after going thru the gale on the Zvir but that was not the case. I’m much better now; in fact, these last two days have been so calm I’ve felt a bit of motion dizziness being so still!
I have finally come to accept my cooking job as 1st cook (chef) with a reasonable amount of responsibility. Even though my menus are best suited for one without teeth, lots of potato flakes, soups, meat spreads, the crew of the Excalibur is not in danger of scurvy or starvation. In fact, I made a very good French onion soup seven days ago: Spanish onions fried in Moroccan olive oil, two cups of beef bouillon topped with slices of Edam cheese. My fish chowder made with canned sardines was an excellent fare of those who trod the decks of Excalibur.
My only reservation about cooking I have is the washing of the dishes at night. We see lots and lots of pinpoints of bioluminescence in the water at night. I suppose the same creatures are around during the day but I don’t know what’s out there besides that at night!
The fishing detail has not been so successful yet. Almost every day we cast lines. On Monday, we spotted a solitary fish swimming under the boat as I washed the breakfast dishes. I got so excited. I named him Harold and we set about trying to catch him. The bait was a can of Underwood liverwurst spread. He came so close we decided to try to get him with the dip net.
The routine was: I would drop liverwurst in the H2O and as the wind carried it away, Curt placed the dip net in its path. The fish was supposed to go for it, which he did but later figured it was better to wait for the morsel to float past the range of the net and go for it then. Curt said, “He’s eating it, he’s eating it all.” And I laughed so hard.
We stopped the handouts and tried to catch him ‘legitimately’ as Curt put it. Two lines and five hours later, Harold was still swimming beneath our hull and nibbling at the hook ever so delicately. Before I gave up, I tried smearing liverwurst on the side of the boat right at the water level. I almost got him but …
The next day all stops were pulled out as Curt fashioned a spear from the boat hook. I even got out his wet suit so he might go below to confront the bugger himself. Unfortunately, Harold did not show up; perhaps he thought better of it.
This morning, however, Harold is back, but we are preoccupied with getting to the Canaries so we are giving him a break.
I’ll keep in touch via Wilhelm or telex from Casablanca [through Norberto]. I started to say the American consulate is very helpful, they will send telegrams for us anytime. They have notified many people along the way of our row. Mr. Charles Sten is Consul in Casablanca but it is his assistant, Mr. Hadi who is helping us quite a bit. Mr. Hadi is a Moroccan and he is very good friends with Norberto. This Norberto was the radio contact for the Ra Expedition with Thor Heyerdahl.
Got to go now. It’s raining!
Love, Kathleen XXOO
Our latest navigational challenge was to pass between the African coast and Fueteventura south of the Canaries and straight into the Atlantic Ocean, but one night a German ham radio operator, Fritz, whom we had met on the air through the British Maritime Net, told us that a low-pressure system was building over the entire Canaries archipelago. I looked at Curt in dread as Fritz described the predicted large seas and high winds.
“What about the hatches below deck?” I asked Curt, remembering the mold and seawater I had found earlier. “I think we might have a problem in another storm.” Fritz, hearing my question, responded with an offer to help re-outfit the boat but at his home base in Tenerife, where he lived on a yacht with his girlfriend. When I hesitated, he said they would sail out to meet us in two days, after the storm, and tow Excalibur to his port. We agreed, but it meant that we had to maintain our position for a couple of days offshore from Fueteventura, not going any further south where the worst of the storm was predicted to hit.
Late into th
e night, we rowed out away from Fueteventura and into the wind. A line of bobbing lights appeared in the distance, growing brighter and brighter until a single spotlight seemed to be bearing straight down on us.
“Hey, they’re going to run us down!” I dropped my oars and grabbed the foghorn attached to the wall above my bunk. Curt threw open the bow cabin door and plugged in the spotlight. He waved the light up and down and sideways—anything to get the attention of the ferry.
“Watch out! We’re here!” I knew they couldn’t hear us, but it was impossible not to scream. At the last minute, the ferry’s lights veered away to port. We narrowly escaped being run over. In the surreal blue-white lights of the ferry, we could see human figures and rows of trucks lining the decks.
The next day, Fritz reported that conditions in Tenerife were still too stormy. “It’s just too rough for us to leave port and cross over to Fueteventura. You have to hold on another night.”
I turned to Curt, who was listening intently. “I hope we don’t run into a ferry again.” But in the evening, it seemed that the very same ferry was threatening to run us down once more.
When it was time to change rowers and I replaced Curt in the middle of the night, I asked him, “Do you know where we are? How long do we have to keep rowing to be safe?” He pointed to a single solitary light that was Punta Lantilla on the southeast shore of Fueteventura.
“We have to keep rowing to clear that point because if we stop, we’ll end up on shore with this south wind. You don’t want to crash on the rocks, do you?” He spoke with what sounded like condescension, and when I gave him a dirty look, he muttered, “Sorry,” and slunk into the bow cabin.
A cold rain carrying sand particles from the Sahara began to fall, and I pulled the hood of my rain gear tightly over my head. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw to the port side a long trail of greenish bioluminescence moving back and forth beneath the boat. This wasn’t any small school of fish causing the glow; it looked like a very large fish—maybe a shark—longer than Excalibur’s twenty-five feet, swimming directly below us. I tightened my grip on the oar handles and looked straight ahead into the darkness.
Curt’s log: April 7, 1981
Kathleen crawled into the cabin to sleep after her two-hour stint at the oars. She passed out a bottle of brandy, which I sipped to keep warm. As I rowed, a mass of green bioluminescence appeared beneath the boat. We were vulnerable, so close to the sea. I had the impression there was a very large fish, larger than Excalibur, swimming directly below the two dagger boards of the boat.
When I woke Kathleen to take over again, I did not want to alarm her, so I said, “You might see a big school of little fish exciting the bioluminescence beneath the boat. If you see them, wake me up, okay?” But she said that she had seen them too.
On April 8, Fritz on Jangada radioed that they were finally on their way, and on the 9th we rendezvoused by waving and flashing a mirror. At the last minute, with Jangada still way off in the distance, I decided to wash my hair. After three weeks at sea with only one person to see me, I was afraid of how wild I might look. I whipped off my T-shirt and lathered up my salt-stiffened hair with a sweet-smelling bar of saltwater soap. Though it was guaranteed to work like soap in fresh water, our clothes and bodies never quite felt as clean or soft as the advertisement predicted. Later, when I looked at Fritz’s photographs of our first meeting, I wasn’t surprised to see that both of us had hair that stood up stiffly around our tanned faces.
Jangada sailed smoothly up to us and put down rubber bumpers so Excalibur’s red hull wouldn’t mar the sky-blue gel coat of their boat. When we climbed aboard, both of us could hardly stand up straight after so long on rocking-and-rolling Excalibur. Fritz and Kerrie, who was from New Zealand, presented me with a large bouquet of orange birds of paradise that I relished for its ambrosial scents of land.
For an hour, the four of us sat in the cockpit and talked—or rather, Curt and I talked, because we found there was so much to say to new people after twenty-one days at sea. Fritz and Kerrie listened in polite silence, smiling pleasantly, and then Kerrie invited me to go below deck to chat with her while she made a delicious lunch of rosemary spiced potatoes and fried minute steaks. Fritz went on board Excalibur with Curt to check the electrical wiring, where they found the damage was extensive. Fritz once again invited us to come back to Tenerife to make repairs and replenish the damaged food supply. We agreed, and after lunch and a quick swim we began the bumpy overnight tow to Puerto de Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
CHAPTER 11
Tenerife and Hierro
April 1981
OUR WEEK-LONG SOJOURN SPENT BUYING supplies and exploring Tenerife ended all too soon. One day Curt and I had taken a break from working on the boat to hike in the forests surrounding Pico del Tiede, a 3,718-meter volcano in the interior of the island. The trail wove its way through a cedar-scented forest that reminded us of the woods around Curt’s parents’ summer house in northern Vermont. For a short time, we were tempted to extend our visit, but the hurricane season was approaching and we had to be on our way.
We left Tenerife for Hierro Island in mid-April, with Jangada towing us once again. Between Fritz and Jangada’s owner, who was visiting from Brazil, and ourselves, we had come to the conclusion that Hierro, the smallest of the Canary Islands and in the most southwestern quadrant of the archipelago, would be the best jumping-off point to resume the row across the Atlantic Ocean.
A few hours later, after anchoring in Puerto de la Estaca, with the bright sun wafting streams of hot air over us, Kerrie and I walked along the dirt road that led from the port to Val Verde, Hierro’s capital city high above the ocean. Though we chatted about mundane things as we carried our empty string shopping bags, I couldn’t help but think how something as normal as walking and chatting with a friend was an activity that I was going to have to treasure for those times at sea when the confined life on Excalibur’s nine-foot-long deck became too limiting. Higher and higher we climbed as Puerto de la Estaca steadily diminished in size, until it was only a small bite out of land where Excalibur and Jangada were anchored.
“Hey, that’s your rowboat, isn’t it?” Kerrie said, pointing to a red dot in the blue water.
“Yeah, I think so,” I said, and thought how nice it was to be on this dirt path in the hot sunshine with the astringent scent of acacia bushes in the air. Just before we reached Val Verde, small cement houses appeared, and young men working the rugged hillside gardens looked up at us and hooted as we passed. We were both wearing T-shirts without bras and short shorts, but there wasn’t anything to hoot about, we thought. Kerrie looked at me and shrugged, and I shook my head as if to say, “Guys—what can you expect?”
In Val Verde, I pulled out my scribbled list of last-minute food items for the ocean row while Kerrie took out her list for the return sail to Tenerife. We stopped at all the open-air market stalls and filled our string bags with vegetables, fruit, and the special red wine that Hierro Island was known for throughout the Canaries. Before siesta hour when all the businesses shut down until 4:00 p.m., I bought one last ball of the local white cheese, and we began the winding downhill walk to the port and our boats.
Before starting the crossing on the morning of April 21, we needed to wedge pieces of rubber tubing between the extremely heavy rudder and its fiberglass housing that ran from the top of the aft cabin to the bottom of the boat. From the beginning when we left Casablanca, the rudder had banged back and forth in most conditions at sea. It was a problem we worried about, because the weight of the rudder might crack its half-inch fiberglass housing and cause a leak in the aft cabin. I remembered how much work the rudder and its housing had been to make in the barn in Touisset. When we had finished the repairs, we were better prepared than we had been in Casablanca.
I looked up as we completed our work and saw a French couple, François and Corinne, motoring in our direction in their inflatable dinghy. “I’ve brought something for you!” François called out, and
he handed Curt a spear. “I think this will be interesting for you because when you see a fish, you can kill him and eat him. Sharks are good to eat, too, and their teeth are valuable.”
There was a loud whistle from the quay above, and the harbormaster waved cheerfully as he held out a huge bouquet of orange bird of paradise flowers for me along with our stamped departure papers. I looked at him and the flowers, a happy smile plastered on my face, though I hesitated to reach out and take them. Accepting the flowers meant the beginning of the row was coming closer and our time on land was ending. It had been exhausting rowing down the Moroccan coast because of the adverse weather and the constant threat of being run down by the relentless stream of shipping traffic. Sometimes the ceaseless motion of the boat threatened to toss us off the deck or drive us crazy with its lack of stillness. Now, almost a month after leaving Casablanca, on this warm, serene, and sunny April morning, I was in our homemade rowboat at the edge the open Atlantic, ready to row out into the unknown again. This must be what exploration and adventure are all about, I thought.
I looked over at the harbormaster.
“Muchas gracias, señor,” I said, and took his bouquet.
Presently, Fritz came over and gestured to the ocean beyond the breakwater. It was time to get moving. We waved goodbye to people on the quay as François and Corinne cast off Jangada. Fritz started the engines while Kerrie, Curt, and I hauled in the two anchors. We were underway! Jangada would tow us to a safe point south of, but within the longitude of, Hierro, where the row would recommence.
Excalibur was still tied alongside Jangada, the two hulls protected by rubber bumpers. Curt and I kept looking over the gunwales of Jangada to make sure Excalibur was riding well. As we motored out of the fishing village at Puerto de la Estaca, François and Corinne ran along the breakwater, keeping pace as long as they could. “Bonne chance! Bon voyage!” they shouted. The harbormaster stood nearby waving farewell.
Rowing for My Life Page 6