“If the sights are right, we are at 26 degrees 54 minutes north, 18 degrees 40 minutes west. I think we’re rowing at about three knots or a little over three miles per hour.”
It was another uncomfortable night amid the increasingly building seas.
On April 24, Curt got up at 0700 to start rowing. He remarked on how sick he felt and that his stomach hurt. He thought the fresh air would do him some good because he probably had the same bug I had had. I was feeling fine now that my stomachache and seasickness was gone.
After breakfast, I told Curt that he should rest and I would go out to row. It wasn’t really too hard to adjust to life back out at sea. Though the waves had gotten bigger, I felt challenged by them as I worked at adapting my style to the rolling waves.
With the skies overcast, the wind had shifted to the northeast. A black-and-white petrel flew by in the near distance, and I called to Curt to come and see it, but when he emerged from the cabin, I saw that he was drawn and tired-looking. As long as he was up, he said, he would try shooting the sun through the clouds to get an estimated position (EP) from a line of position (LOP). By combining the observed angle of the sun that he got using the sextant with the exact time of day, he could produce an LOP that told us we were somewhere along that line. In a few more hours with the sun’s angle changed, he could do another one to get a “running fix.” The most accurate way to determine our position, however, was with the stars and planets to obtain more than one LOP that would accurately fix our position where the lines crossed. Navigation like this was complicated, and Curt was getting better at it all the time.
Later in the afternoon, we rowed together for a couple of hours. Sometimes we had to pause in the rowing strokes to let a large roller go by. The shifting wind was making the waves more confused and blowing cold spray that drenched both of us. By early evening, the sky was gray and dismal.
Curt’s log: April 25.
I awoke at first light and saw that Kathleen was still sleeping. She had rowed more than I had the day before and needed the rest. I dressed quietly and crawled past her onto the deck. I clipped my harness onto the safety line since conditions were far too rough to risk going without it. Right away I could see why we were rolling so much. Most of the waves were at least ten feet high. Even as I stood bracing myself against the forward cabin structure, the top of a wave broke over the side of the boat and partially filled the open deck area. I watched as the water drained out through the square scupper openings at the edges of the deck and through the drainpipes in the foot wells at the center of the rowing stations. Cold seawater sloshed back and forth on deck.
I was concerned about the autopilot because it was mounted above the aft cabin structure and exposed to all the elements. Attached to the tiller, it had been running continuously since we had left Hierro. As we rolled around in the waves, I could hear its little electric motor inside the housing, whirring first one way, then the other, as it tried to compensate for the motion. I did not want the motor to overheat and burn out because of heavy use this early in the voyage. Perhaps it needed to take a rest and cool off.
I unlashed a pair of oars at the stern rowing station and switched off the autopilot and tied off the tiller. Then I quickly sat down and began rowing. I would try to keep us on course by rowing and watching the compass. The waves were much larger than anything I had ever rowed in before. Another breaking wave came along, rolled over the gunwale, and landed in my lap. I had to stop rowing for a moment because the water felt so cold that I was shivering. I started rowing again but the boat had drifted off course. I pulled harder on the starboard oar to get us back on course again, but the wind and waves had caught the side of the boat and we continued to drift broadside to the waves. I pulled hard on the starboard oar but I could not point the bow downwind.
Then I saw the wave coming but could not do anything about it. We were broadside to the waves now, as a greenish wave built beside me, arching upward and splashing over my head, filling the deck area with foaming turbulent water. It tasted very salty.
I heard a scream from the cabin.
“I’m trying to row without the autopilot,” Curt shouted toward the bow cabin where I was sleeping. “It’s not working too well.” An understatement, I thought. Though the boat had remained relatively stable and the deck area drained well, it was better to put the autopilot back on. Within a few minutes, with the autopilot reattached to the tiller, the boat was back on course. Curt continued rowing on the more optimal downwind course.
After lunch, I came out and joined him. We seemed to be making good time rowing in the waves. Off in the distance, Curt spied a large fishing boat that appeared to have a crane on deck. We stopped rowing and stood up to get a better look.
“I bet they’re going to the Endeavor Bank,” Curt said.
This was a good sign, because he had calculated our position to be a mere few miles from the great mountain peaks on the ocean floor that made for excellent fishing. Though the water was probably about twelve thousand feet deep where we were floating, the Endeavor, Echo, and Papp Seamounts rose thousands of feet from the ocean floor. At the Endeavor Bank, the depth is less than six hundred feet.
By late afternoon, we were feeling so tired from rowing in the rough conditions that we took in the oars and went into the shelter of the forward cabin. Soaking wet and yet exhilarated from the row, we dried each other off with the threadbare “Pone en el sol!” towel and put on dry clothes. We crammed our wet clothes through the hand straps on the ceiling and hoped they would dry.
After dinner, Curt turned on the radio so we could listen to the weather report. Colin of the UK Net came on with the forecast that he had just picked up from the BBC weather service. We listened closely for the various regions, beginning in England and working down the European coast to Africa. Then it came to our part of the world.
“Force 4 to 5, increasing to 6 to 7, winds veering to the northwest, choppy seas, increasing to very heavy seas, repeat: very heavy seas …” He continued to give weather for other regions.
I switched off the radio, and we sat staring at each other for a long moment. The famous Beaufort wind force scale that the BBC used to announce the weather went from the calm of a Force 1 all the way up to the hurricane-force wind of Force 12. According to Colin’s weather forecast, in our region of the Atlantic Ocean this coming week, we could experience a moderate breeze of Force 4 or as much as a moderate gale of Force 7. Either way, Excalibur and her crew were about to be tested again.
CHAPTER 14
Adjusting to Life at Sea
Curt’s log: April 26
I THOUGHT AGAIN OF THE FIRST mate of Zvir. When conditions grew bad, it helped to think of him.
It was dark out there and I did not want to go on deck. I was tired and it was comfortable inside the cabin. Besides, the wind outside was steadily increasing in force; I could tell by the sound it made in the guy lines surrounding the oar shaft mast. What had been a low moaning sound was now a high pitched whistling.
I told Kathleen I was going on deck. I asked her to turn on the deck light when I crawled out, blowing spray greeting me as I emerged.
At the back cabin, I checked the compass and autopilot settings. Then I checked the lashings that secured the autopilot to its mounting, and the tiller in case it had become loose. The oars were the next order of business. I was thinking that it was a good thing I was checking these things because we didn’t tie all of these ropes when we finished rowing. I was concentrating so hard on the knot I was tying when … bam … a wave crashed against the boat, throwing me off balance. I fell on the deck and the cold water rushed over me. Shit!!!
I wiped the saltwater from my eyes and tried to get up while grabbing hold of the safety lines. I went back to the oars and finished tying them in. Through the cabin hatch window at the opposite end of the deck, I could see Kathleen sitting in the corner holding on to the straps on the ceiling. When I came in, she quickly reached over and closed the door behind me. I took
the towel she handed me and dried off. “You poor boy, let’s get you dried,” she said.
Curt began peeling off his wet clothes. Though we were approaching the Tropic of Cancer, it didn’t take much to get cold on a stormy night like this. We decided to call it quits for the night and get under the sleeping bag. I reached up and turned off the cabin light.
“What’s it like out there?” I wanted to know. The waves sounded ominous.
“It’s pretty dark, and you can’t see much except for a white blur from the waves that are breaking near the boat. There’re streaks of bioluminescence in the waves. I think they’re pyrosoma.”
“Really? The same ones we’ve been seeing since Casablanca?”
Boom!!! Another wave broke against the boat. Instantly, Curt was thrown to the opposite side of the cabin against me as Excalibur heeled to a precarious angle. Whoosh!!! The foam of the breaking wave gushed around the boat, creating a cacophony of water bubbles popping against the hull.
“Aaghh!” I screamed. “Get off my arm!” He had landed with his elbow digging into my forearm. The sleeping pads, sleeping bag, and everything else in the cabin seemed to be in a jumble. I reached up and flicked on the cabin light. In the violent lurching of the storm, we did our best to straighten things up, wishing for the umpteenth time that we had some sort of seatbelt to strap ourselves down in bad weather.
“Do you think everything is all right out there?” I asked and switched on the anchor light. I pushed aside the rose-colored canvas curtains that Kerrie had made for our bow hatch to cut down on glare from the sun and we peered through the Plexiglas hatch window into the darkness, not wanting to open it for fear of flooding the cabin. Through the maelstrom outside the hatch, we could see the autopilot dripping wet but still moving the tiller back and forth as it steered through the waves. Once again we switched off the lights and braced ourselves.
Then in the distance we heard a sound of a freight train above the roar of other waves. It grew louder and came closer, crashing over the top of the boat with a harsh kussssh sound. We were both thrown across the cabin, and water streamed in the ceiling ventilator above our heads. Curt reached up and shut the vent with a quick twisting motion. Water was now sloshing around inside the cabin. Water was also coming in the hatch cover through a slot by my head where the radio antenna went out.
“Quick! Stuff something in the slot!” Curt fumbled for the light switch, and I grabbed the towel and rammed it in the slot. We surveyed the shambles in the cabin. Everything was soaking wet, ourselves included.
“That must have been a rogue wave.” Curt looked at me. He was exhausted. I’m sure there were dark circles of fatigue under my eyes as well.
Once again we switched off the cabin light and held each other under the sleeping bag, our feet piled on each other at the narrow tip of the cabin. It was a terrible night.
I was sound asleep when Curt crawled out on deck, clipping the safety harness. It was starting to get light. The seas were still very choppy, but the fury of the storm was gone. He leaned against the forward cabin and looked toward the gray skies and gray-white seas. A flapping sound above drew his attention to the American flag at the top of the mast. Though now a little tattered, she looked majestic.
Feeling a little groggy and dazed from the night’s activities, Curt had thought rowing might clear his head. He put out a pair of oars, retrieved a rowing seat from the aft cabin, and started rowing. He wasn’t really thinking as he rowed; minutes seemed like hours. How long he was out there, he later told me, he did not know. He felt like a zombie, mindlessly pulling the oars through the water.
Anatomy of a Rowing Stroke
Kathleen’s log: April 26.
I awoke to see Curt coming back in the cabin. I didn’t even know he was gone. When I asked him how he felt, he said that I shouldn’t ask and he needed to get some rest.
I put the sleeping bag over him and went out on deck, where there were high clouds moving out of the northwest. Lower cumulus clouds were coming out of the east-northeast with the surface winds and most of the waves.
I rowed for two hours. It was easier to row for a longer period of time when I didn’t wear my watch and keep looking at it. I started talking to myself as I rowed. I imagined the tiller of the rudder on the aft cabin in front of me as a microphone. I wanted to explain what it was like to row out here. “We usually scan the horizon, perhaps from the habit of looking for ships on the Moroccan coast. We know there aren’t any shipping lanes here but we keep looking. Maybe we’ll see a sailboat.
“The rowing style is not the best but you have to do what you can do given the conditions. The waves are not regular—you have to watch them, they come in threes. You see one sometimes that catches your eye and it goes up and up. You wonder if it will go over the boat. You’re lucky when it doesn’t break where you are. When you’re lucky, the stern will rise and the whole boat will glide over the wave. Then the second wave is sharper, most encompassing. It is usually the one that will manage to get you wet. It has more force packed behind it. The third wave is a shadow of the first two, a follow-up that spits.
“The waves also come in different directions. Mostly they come from the direction of the wind, but some come from other directions. You watch them, feel them and the motion of the boat. You can’t pull through evenly. One oar has to come through before the other. I’ve learned not to put out my thumbs on the ends of the oar handles, having been bumped a few times in the waves. It’s important to follow through at the end of the stroke too. Even if the oar blades don’t come out of the water at the same time, they will move back toward the catch together.”
Here I concluded my analysis of the rowing stroke used in ocean rowing.
Curt’s log: April 26.
Kathleen finished her stint at the oars and came to the door of the cabin. I was awake now and feeling better than when she left me a few hours before. “How about some breakfast?” I asked her, pushing the sleeping pads aside so I could get to the food hatch below. I fished out the granola and got some Moroccan nuts to sprinkle on top. While water was heating on the stove for hot chocolate, I worked on my logbook that I had hardly written in since leaving the Canaries.
After breakfast, I announced I was going to “hygienize” myself. This was my code word for washing up. We had agreed early in the expedition that we would keep ourselves as clean and tidy as possible. Not only would this make us healthier, but also it would probably improve our mental outlook. I took a bar of pumice soap and a tube of Suave shampoo and went out on deck.
Early in the afternoon we rowed together for a few hours. It was about 72 degrees F but it felt cooler with the north wind. We wore sweatpants rolled up to the knees and long cotton shirts. I still wore my socks and sneakers on deck despite their being soaking wet from last night’s weather. I knew Kathleen thought I was crazy to be wearing them out here because she often commented on how uncomfortable they must be, since most of our clothing items were in a constant state of dampness.
Before going into the cabin after our row, I needed to check on the fifteen-meter whip antenna for the ham radio because Kathleen had been unable to make contact with the Wilhelms in Rhode Island at the scheduled time. Maybe there was another problem with the antenna. I unscrewed it from the round aluminum base and examined the threads, and to my dismay I saw that many of them were eaten away from the corrosion of the saltwater. I cleaned off the white powder with sandpaper and applied Vaseline to the remaining threads, hoping for the best. With an old crampon strap left over from my climbing days, I secured the antenna further with a few climbing knots.
Just as I put the tools back in the aft cabin, Kathleen asked what I wanted to drink and I told her that some Johnny Walker with spring water would be good though she didn’t plan to have any with her stomach occasionally sensitive from the boat’s motion.
After dinner, Kathleen switched on the radio and tuned in to the fifteen-meter band. She sent out a series of CQs [Morse code for “Calling any st
ation”] for anyone to respond, for a few minutes but no one responded. We were about to turn off the radio and settle in for a quiet night when we heard, “KA1GIN MM, this is G4AYO in England.”
Kathleen transmitted back and forth with Mike, a ham radio operator she had met while we were rowing on the Moroccan coast, for a few minutes, ascertaining that our signal was good. When she told him we were in a boat rowing across the Atlantic, he seemed to have his doubts as to whom he was really responding to. We later found out he went to the trouble to look up Kathleen’s call sign and correspond with her mother, who confirmed we were, indeed, crossing the Atlantic in a rowboat.
CHAPTER 15
Red Sails in the Morning
Late April
I AWOKE FEELING STIFF AND CRAMPED. “I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck!” I said, turning over.
“What’s the problem?” Curt mumbled, half asleep.
“I have bruises on my shins from the oar handles bouncing off them, and my knuckles have scratches from my nails from when I pull through at the end of the stroke.” Curt stuck his hands out from the sleeping bag in response. They looked the same as mine.
This morning it was too hard to go out and row right away, so I decided we would have a leisurely breakfast. I opened the cabin hatch and reached for the hand pump that was attached to the front of the cabin by the door. Every morning one of us would pump a couple of gallons of fresh water into the flexible Nalgene plastic container by the hatch door. The cooking water was from the supply we picked up in the Canaries and could only be used for cooking because, without boiling it, we would have stomach problems. Our bottled drinking water supply was in liter bottles.
While I cooked up a pot of mushroom soup with pork and beans, Curt worked out the star and planet sights he had taken the evening before. They were tedious to work out, but we needed to know our position before the noon sun sights. So far, it looked as though we had logged sixty miles from the previous day.
Rowing for My Life Page 8