Later in the day, I saw one of the reddish-purple creatures sail by. My first thought was, “Forget it, we can’t get it.” But Curt and I were rowing, and the conditions had calmed down considerably.
We backed oars hard on the starboard, and after a couple of minutes of intense rowing, we managed to get upwind of it. Curt stopped rowing and went to the tiller to grab the dip net. As I pulled hard on starboard, he pushed the tiller over and we closed in on the creature. I stopped rowing as Curt reached over and scooped it up.
We had finally gotten one. I took the net from Curt while he reattached the autopilot to put us back on course. I carefully lowered the net into the bucket that Curt had filled halfway with saltwater. Looking closely at it, we realized that it was a Portuguese man o’ war jellyfish whose long purple tentacles were highly poisonous. It was fascinating to watch as it tried to get out of the bucket by twisting itself over the rim.
“I knew it had the ability to sail, but I didn’t know it could climb,” Curt remarked. The sail was actually the fin part of its jellylike mass. It was an amazing creature to examine close up; it was so well adapted to life in the trade wind belt of the Atlantic Ocean. By twisting its sail-fin, it could move from place to place, taking advantage of the ever-present wind.
Gingerly, Curt put it into one of the sample bottles with formalin to take back to the University of Rhode Island oceanography program. The bright sail slowly turned a darker purple, like the deepening colors of the evening sky. I recorded the date and location for our records.
Curt’s log: May 3
Tired from the motion of the boat of the night before, I did not feel like going out to row when I woke up at 0800 GMT. I lay there under the sleeping bag for another hour, dozing. Images of my childhood flitted through my half-asleep mind. The smell of breakfast cooking in the kitchen. The sound of dishes and silverware clattering. The muted voices as the family began to stir. Hurrying to the bathroom for a quick shower before breakfast. That feeling of fresh water splashing over my body. Now, that was a nice memory. That would sure feel good now.
Kathleen was still asleep when I went out to row. The sky was clear and the wind was coming out of the east-northeast at Force 3. The temperature was a pleasant 27 degrees centigrade. But I felt tired. The pain in my back from the other day when I fell on deck was still nagging me. There was also the pain that ran from the left shoulder up the left side of my neck. That one had started on the Moroccan coast. There was something wrong in my right elbow. It hurt when I bent my arms too soon at the end of a stroke. As I rowed, I watched the clouds come in from the east. They were not heavy clouds but high clouds that blanketed the sky and covered the sun, turning the water from a warm blue into a steel gray.
There was not a single person, not another boat, just the ocean, the rolling waves, and an occasional peek at the horizon from the top of a wave. The sky met the sea in a flat circle that formed a ring around our boat. Beyond that, we couldn’t see anything. It felt as though we just rowed in place, the center of a circle.
I heard a sound, like the voice of another person. I stopped rowing and scanned the horizon, the circle that was our world. But there was no one, not a ship, not another person. Then I heard the sound again. I turned. The sound was Kathleen.
Later, as we rowed together, I said, “Why don’t you go in and have some lunch? I’ll row for a while.” Curt was tired today, and without protest, he stood up and moved past me to change places.
Where are the flying fish? I wondered as I pulled at the oars. Curt had seen them as they flew through the air, dodging in and out of the waves. The only one I had seen was the eight-incher that we ate on May 1. I wished another one would land on board or that I could catch one from the hand line I left out every day now. Normally, on land, I could take or leave fish, but out here I had developed a taste for them. Our fresh food supply was getting low, and fish was becoming something I increasingly craved, maybe because of a vitamin deficiency.
The day was perfect for a bath. For both of us. I stopped rowing, tied the oars across the deck, and stripped down. I filled the bucket with the cool seawater and got out the saltwater soap.
As I leaned back to splash more water on my body, I could see Curt watching. I gestured for him to come out: I needed him to pour water down my back and maybe his. As we splashed double handfuls of seawater over our bodies, the water on deck ran in little eddies, back and forth in the gentle rolling of the boat, seeking the scuppers and drains where it flowed back into the sea.
We stood on deck, holding on to the safety lines, letting the wind dry the seawater from our naked bodies. It was a perfect moment with the lightest of touches from the warm ocean air.
By early afternoon, the wind had lessened to Force 2 from the east. Only slow-rolling, three-foot waves passed under Excalibur. We had just finished a lunch of potato flakes mixed with beef bouillon and freeze-dried peas and carrots in the cabin when I turned to him and said, “You know, it’s time to change your hair style.”
He frowned. “What’s wrong with my hair?”
“Well,” I told him, “it’s gotten entirely too long for life at sea. I’m going to give you a haircut. It’ll be fun, you’ll like it!”
Curt didn’t look convinced.
“No, really, don’t worry. I won’t cut it too short. It’ll be out of your eyes.”
The scissors I found in the compartment below my pillow were covered with grease and dried fruit that had fallen out of an old plastic bag. I cleaned them off with toilet paper dampened with rubbing alcohol. When I started to comb his hair in preparation for his haircut, he said I would get hair all over the cabin and led the way onto the deck.
“Hey, I have my doubts about how even the lines will be,” I told him on deck. “I don’t guarantee anything with your straight hair and the wind blowing.” He rolled his eyes. Even in the calming seas, there was still considerable motion on the boat.
From the back cabin, he retrieved one of the inner tubes we brought to use as flotation in case of damage to the boat. He blew it up and settled himself on it as I braced my feet on the deck and stood over him with the scissors. Soon, snippets of his blond hair were blowing away in the wind. “Be careful of the points.” he kept saying, worried that the boat might make a sudden motion. I was finding the experience increasingly funny, though I tried hard to not laugh out loud. He was being such a good sport, and my spirits were lifting by the minute.
As I was cutting, a green ball floated by some forty feet off the port side. Curt watched it for a second and then decided he wanted it. “Look, there’s a ball, I want it!”
We watched the ball drifting away. I wondered what it was and where it had come from.
“Look, it has things growing on it,” he said, pointing. I stopped snipping and focused on the little green object now amidships. He was right; there was a little world floating by our boat and we had to go after it. I went for the tiller. He untied the oars and began rowing. I kept an eye on the ball, telling him which side to row harder on. There it was, on the port side.
He let go of the oars and grabbed the dip net to scoop the ball up. A school of purple black-striped pilot fish following it looked momentarily disoriented when the ball rose high into the sky, disappearing from their sight. Curt later claimed that he saw the pilot fish from our boat swim out to the new pilot fish and guide them back under Excalibur. It did seem as though our contingent of pilot fish beneath the boat was growing larger.
Our attention now turned to the green ball that was swinging in the air in the dip net. I filled the bucket for the second time that day and put the ball, with its tiny crab, sea urchins, barnacles, and a slimy fungus-like growth, into it. While Curt photographed the ball from all angles, I tapped it lightly and found it was hollow. Crustaceans had formed wiggly lines all over the surface, and the barnacles had formed conical houses. The green ball looked just like the little planet in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince.
I peered hard at the
raised printing on both sides: PLASTICOS 800 ML MORELL. Not much to go on, but it might have come from a fishing net and was originally made in Spain. I decided to keep the green ball, and watch its creatures as pets.
My attention turned back to the haircut; it was only half done, though from Curt’s point of view we were finished. When it was over, I gave him the two-inch-by-two-inch mirror on the sighting compass: he had to admit it looked different. It was shorter and definitely was not in his eyes anymore.
Curt’s log: May 3
With the conditions improving, I wanted to look at the bottom of the boat for barnacles. In tropical seas, barnacles have a remarkable ability to grow in short time spans. I also wanted to see how the rubber pieces we had jammed in the rudder trunk back in Puerto de la Estaca were faring. Were they still there? I asked Kathleen if she wanted to go for a swim.
She wasn’t interested and I didn’t blame her because she had quite a scare off Fueteventura when she and Kerrie had gone for a swim from Jangada. They were a short distance from the boat when two brown sharks appeared. Fritz and I yelled to them to come in quickly, but they had been oblivious to the proximity of the sharks. With only two of us on the boat now, it was a good idea for one of us to remain on board and keep a lookout.
I took my sleeveless wet suit out of the back cabin and got suited up. In the hatch below the bow rowing station, I found my mask, snorkel, and fins. Kathleen had tied a rope to the inner tube I had used while she was cutting my hair. I was to grab it if she needed to pull me in quickly.
With the mask on, I dipped my head in the water from the deck to check for sharks. There weren’t any, so I slipped into the sea beside the boat.
The water was alive with all kinds of sea creatures. Small jelly masses floated by, held in suspension by the blue ocean water. On closer inspection, they looked like colonies of many one-cell organisms, some of them the size of a dime, others no larger than the end of a pencil eraser.
I did a surface dive and swam deep beneath the boat. As I turned to look up, I was startled for a moment when I saw the shape of the sea anchor out of the corner of my eye, trailing behind Excalibur. We had put it out to further slow the boat down while I was in the water. It was shaped like a conical coffee filter with a hole in the end.
Under the boat, the school of pilot fish came right up to my diving mask and looked me curiously in the eyes. The oxygen in my lungs was running out so I shot up to the surface to get another breath. The pilot fish, startled by the sudden movement, scurried away to hide behind one of the dagger boards.
On the surface, I told Kathleen what I had seen. She was curious to know if it were possible to catch one of the pilot fish for dinner. Sure, I’d give it a try. François in the Canaries had said they were good eating. On my second dive down, I grabbed for the biggest one. He must have been able to read my mind because he darted away as my hand came toward him. He stopped about six feet away and looked back at me. Was that a reproachful look I detected?
I swam over and examined the hull of the boat. It was clean except for a few tiny barnacles. I tried to pull them off but they were stuck fast. I could have scraped them off with the knife but I was afraid the anti-fouling paint would come off with it. Then we would have more barnacles, most likely bigger ones.
I swam over to the stern of the boat and looked at the rudder. I could see one of the rubber inner tubes partially hanging below the rudder slot by the string Kathleen and I had tied it to. I cut the string with my knife because I didn’t want any drag.
The next morning the seas continued to calm down. With the cabin hatch open and the cool morning air drifting over us in gentle wisps, we languished in bed, reluctant to get up. The sun was rising, and there is something truly inspiring about a sunrise—or sunset—at sea. I got up and went on deck with Curt close behind. We settled ourselves against the bow cabin wall, and watched the sun, holding the promise of bright heat that would spread quickly, rise above the tropical sea. The reflection of the rising sun slowly turned the surface of the water from a diffused soft pink to silver white.
CHAPTER 17
A Calming Sea
May 5, 1981
AFTER BREAKFAST A COUPLE OF days later, I washed the dishes off the side of the deck and then sat down to row. Curt stayed in the cabin, enjoying his chance to stretch out and rest after his stint at the oars. I heard the stove start up and knew he was making a cup of coffee to go along with his navigation work.
I thought of how rowing day after day could be a very tiring business. The weight of the boat and its supplies required a pulling action by both the arms and back compared to a racing shell where the legs drove the boat. Long hours were required to make any sort of distance. The increasing heat of the day as we moved farther south in the tropics was having an effect on us as well. Blisters suffered early in the voyage had now healed, and we had tough calluses on our hands. But I wondered if the strengthening process of our muscles would reach a point where our bodies could build no further and then weariness would take over. It would become a battle to keep the boat going day in and out.
Late in the morning, Curt came out on deck. “I want to get some shots of us rowing while the conditions are calming down.” He showed me a contraption he had designed for taking remote photographs while we rowed.
He had taken one of the rectangular plastic containers we had brought along to store odds and ends and cut a hole in the bottom for the camera lens, shutter release, and a nylon cord. I was skeptical about its working.
“I’m going to pull it to the top of the mast where the flag and radio wires are. As we row, I’ll pull on this string, the clothespin will come out, and the elastic will pull on this lever and depress the shutter release.” I stopped rowing so Curt could rig his pulley system.
After a couple of minutes, he sat down and we began rowing. On the second stroke, he pulled the string to take the picture. When he brought the camera down to advance the film, he said, looking happy, “It works!” I had to hand it to him: it was an ingenious technique for taking self-portraits. After a few shots, we went in the cabin to get out of the sun. The wind had died down to almost calm, making the air hotter than ever.
The noonday sights showed us to be at 22 degrees 32 minutes north and 28 degrees 38 minutes west. We were getting close to the Norfolk (Virginia) to Dakar (Senegal) shipping lane; it was only about seventy miles away on the calming seas.
Rowing in the late afternoon seas was pleasurable. With the sun at a lower angle in the sky and the barest whisper of a breeze, the boat glided smoothly along. From the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of silver in the water. We stopped rowing and leaned over the side. Down deep, under the boat’s bottom, was a school of pompano dolphin fish. One of them would make a fine addition to the evening’s meal.
Curt went to the aft cabin and got out his wet suit while I pulled the oars in and lashed them crosswise over the deck. As Curt leaned against the aft cabin while putting on his wet suit, I considered going in the water too—I was so hungry for fresh fish. But when I looked down into the sea, its blue depth limitless and so clear, I reconsidered. Though we were in a calm, I didn’t like the idea of both of us swimming in the water at the same time. What if one of us suddenly needed help? When I caught sight of the school again, they appeared very small; they were at least thirty feet below the boat now.
Curt climbed overboard while I dropped the sea anchor off the stern to keep the boat stationary, though it seemed unnecessary because the sea was now completely calm and the boat barely moving.
Curt’s log: May 5
While Kathleen spotted for sharks from above, I dropped over the side into the beautiful other dimension that surrounded Excalibur. It seemed to stretch indefinitely below. For years before the voyage, I had wondered what it would be like to swim far out at sea. I dove down as far as I could until my eardrums could take no more pressure. I stared into the deep blue depths of the sea. Somewhere far below was the ocean floor, locked in perpetual nigh
t. The water was more than eighteen thousand feet deep. I tried to imagine the Great Abyssal Plain stretching for hundreds of miles like a great desert under the prodigious pressure of the ocean.
I turned and glided toward the surface. Excalibur looked small; the hull was like a racing shell as it floated silhouetted against the sky. There was no sign of the silver fish. I must have scared them away. I decided to take pictures instead with the Nikonos.
With the camera that Kathleen had given me from the bow cabin, I swam away from the boat to get an overall view of Kathleen and Excalibur. Under the water, I saw the pilot fish that were again following me. When I stopped swimming about forty feet from the boat to take photographs, the pilot fish stopped too. They seemed disappointed that I wasn’t going any farther—they must have thought I was leading them on a great expedition. After taking several photos, I decided to play a game with the fish. Turning abruptly, I swam quickly away from them. Looking back, I saw they had followed faithfully. It was impossible to get away from them! Even when I swam after them, they would dart away and hide behind the rudder. If I looked quickly around the rudder, they would swim off to hide behind the dagger board. But if I floated motionlessly in the water, they peeked out from their hiding place and then swam cautiously up and peered at me through my diving mask.
It was great fun playing with the pilot fish but presently my attention was diverted to the pompano dolphin fish that had returned. Ten of them were circling the boat. Some of them were a foot or more and a couple were nearly sixteen inches long. Slowly I swam over to the boat and asked Kathleen for François’s spear.
“Go get ’em, buster,” she said, and I saluted as I returned to the sea on my mission. I adjusted the piece of nylon cord that attached the spear to my wrist and tested the rubber strip that would propel the spear into the dolphin. Now I was ready.
The pompano dolphins were coming closer. I floated motionlessly on the surface, breathing through the snorkel. As the school passed about ten feet below me, I dove down and released the spear in the direction of one of the larger ones. But I had fired too soon. Startled and scared, the whole school swam away.
Rowing for My Life Page 10