“How far is that?” I wanted to know.
“More than seventeen hundred miles. It could take us into July to get there. And that’s not allowing for adverse winds or a storm that could blow us off course.”
I leaned over his shoulder and looked at the course he was pointing to. It was obvious we now had to think of the Atlantic row as a race—a race against an early hurricane season.
We talked again of rowing across the Atlantic as quickly, carefully, and efficiently as possible. We seriously discussed the ways to complete the voyage faster than anyone had ever before rowed across an ocean. It was a tall order. In 1869, Samuelson and Harbo had rowed Richard K. Fox from New York to France in fifty-five days. The closest anyone had come to that record in modern times was the crossing by the Allum cousins from the Canary Islands to St. Lucia in sixty-four days.
“If we can make it to 40 degrees west by next Sunday, May 17, then we will have been at sea for twenty-five days since leaving Hierro. I regard 40 degrees west as being approximately halfway across the Atlantic to the West Indies. We might then have a fighting chance to make Antigua or Barbuda in another twenty-five days,” Curt said, still looking at the chart.
We agreed the new rowing regime was going to be a stepped-up version of what we were doing now. Instead of only seven hours combined rowing, we would each row six hours apiece and a few other hours together. With the good weather from the stationary high west of the Azores, it was possible that we could be halfway across by the following Sunday.
I reached up and turned off the light as Curt put the hatch cover over the navigation hatch. He pulled up the sleeping bag, and settled in for an uneventful sleep. Tomorrow would start early.
CHAPTER 19
The Big Push
Curt’s log: May 8
IT’S 0545. TIME TO RISE and shine.” Kathleen’s voice jarred me awake. It was still dark as I rolled over and looked for my watch. It was 0545 but that was in GMT. It was 0345 local time.
Kathleen was already dressed. She opened the hatch and a cool breeze filled the cabin. I could see by the dim glow of the mast light that she had put on a red sweater and green pants rolled up to the knees. She was barefooted.
I reached in the stuff sack under my head and pulled out a pair of shorts, a T-shirt, and a sweatshirt. I grabbed my white cotton hat as I crawled out after Kathleen.
“It’s pretty chilly at this time of morning,” Kathleen said as she untied her oars with one hand, steadying herself with the other. I couldn’t really manage a reply at this hour.
Settled at the oars, I reached in the cabin and switched off the anchor light before we started rowing. I could see Kathleen’s back in front of me in the stern. She looked over her shoulder and said, “Ready all?”
“Ready.”
Our seats slid forward in unison as the oar handles started forward. The Big Push had begun.
I kept my eyes on the stern cabin door in front of me as we rowed, watching my reflection rolling back and forth, partially mesmerized as I was still half asleep. The hardest part was out of the way: getting out of bed and starting to row. Within a few minutes, the action of rowing and a damp chill had awakened all my senses. The wind was blowing out of the northeast at Force 5, accompanied by rolling, six-foot waves. As the gray dawn spread slowly over the sea, I could see occasional higher-breaking waves, nearly nine feet high.
“These waves are good for rowing. They pick us up and push Excalibur along,” I commented over my left shoulder as the stroke came to an end.
Curt didn’t say anything right away. He seemed to be watching the waves and concentrating on his rowing. A few more minutes passed before he said, “It seems to be the waves more than the wind that helps boost us along.”
Dark clouds raced overhead as rain came down lightly. “I don’t think it’s going to rain much because the clouds are moving quickly. There’s a lot of blue sky.” With that, we both fell silent, drawn into our own private worlds of contemplation.
The cumulus clouds on the rim of the eastern sky began to turn orange. Their colors spread and intensified. The waves rolling toward us from the direction of the rising sun reflected the colors of the sky and took on a three-dimensional quality. The vivid sunrise was over very quickly because in the tropical zones, the sun rises and sets almost perpendicular to the horizon instead of at an angle as it does in the temperate zones.
In a few minutes, the full disc of the sun shone brightly on our faces. Having rowed for an hour now, we took a five-minute break to shed our outer clothing and put on sunglasses and sunscreen. We shared an orange.
After the second hour of rowing, we had a breakfast of cold rice and soy protein pellets that were no longer crunchy, as they had been the night before. Now they were spongy and tasteless. Curt drank hot chocolate while I had pea soup; it was the taste of salt that I craved out here. On land I rarely had instant soup mixes, but at sea, they filled the need for salt and added bulk. Curt craved the hot chocolate out at sea, something he could take or leave on land. It was strange the way our food tastes had changed.
Another hour of rowing brought us up to three hours. A school of flying fish shot out of the water like a fusillade of arrows. More flying fish indicated we were getting farther down into the tropics.
By the time the third hour at the oars was over, it was burning hot in the sun. My lips were bothering me. They were sunburned, chapped, and hot to the touch. I crawled into the bow cabin and found the jar of white moisturizing cream. Sunburn on the lips had been an increasing problem. I had tried ChapStick, but it wasn’t enough. If we were going to spend more time in the sun rowing, we would have to take better care of our lips and skin.
At noon, it was time for a radio contact with the Wilhelms in Rhode Island. We had traveled far enough west that the time of the noon sight in GMT was about 1400 hours, the same time as the radio schedule. We had to do the noon sight and the radio call at the same time. To accomplish this, I stationed myself at the radio with my Morse code key. Between sending and receiving messages, I had to jot down the measurements for the sun sights as Curt called them out from the deck. Since it took time to work out our positions, I could only send an estimate, but I wasn’t sure they had received it because the radio propagation deteriorated and we lost contact as I keyed in the last word.
It was frustrating at times like this. Just when we thought we were going to have a good contact, something would happen to spoil it. I was depressed as Curt put away the sextant.
I lay down on my sleeping pad, feeling dejected. Curt looked concerned, but he went ahead and worked out the noon sights. When he had transferred the noon position to the chart, his face lit up. I knew it was good news.
We’d done fifty-five miles in the last twenty-four hours! My mood improved right away, and we treated ourselves to listening in on the UK Maritime net a few minutes longer.
During the night, the wind picked up and the seas became choppy. The boat lurched from side to side, tossing us back and forth, until Curt woke abruptly with his face pushed up against the cabin wall. He reached over to see if I was awake. “Let’s try to wedge ourselves against each other to stop from moving so much.”
He put one leg out straight over me and propped his foot on the opposite wall. I locked my legs around his bent knee while each of us gripped the other’s arms and tried to keep from sliding around on the cabin floor. This was much better, though it was a strange position to sleep in.
At last, the wind died down and the waves became less choppy. We fell asleep for almost one and a half hours before I woke up and looked at the watch. It was 0500 local time. It was still dark and cool out there. My body wanted more sleep, but my mind knew it was time to get going. We dressed quickly and went out on deck. The sun was not yet up; the horizon remained obscured by dark clouds. The deck was wet from a recent rain shower.
I thought about our fresh water supplies for a minute and then asked Curt how much he thought remained. We had left the Canaries with a h
undred gallons in flexible 2.5- and 5-gallon containers, all stored below deck. We used about one gallon per day between the two of us. It was nearly twenty days since we left Hierro. We had at least eighty gallons left.
The conversation ended and we rowed. Slanting lines of rain moved off in the distance. The cumulus clouds on the horizon turned orange and pink. I commented that sometimes I could see green in the clouds as well.
Curt was feeling obstinate, or maybe he wanted to egg me on. There was no green at sea, he declared. “The only green out here is the green slime growing in your foot well.” We had first noticed the slimy growth in the foot well of the stern rowing station a week ago. It was spreading from the little drain hole to the corners of the foot well. My favorite color was green, but not that shade of slime.
Curt’s log: May 11
The rain was coming closer as we rowed. Kathleen goaded me. “If it starts raining, I’m going in the cabin.”
“You can’t stop rowing just because it’s raining.”
“Oh, yes, I can. There’s no reason why I should have to row in the rain!”
But when the rain caught up with us, I realized that Kathleen was just getting me back for what I had said about the green slime. Without a word, she continued to row. The surface of the swells became rippled by the breeze created by the pressure of the rain on the water. Our bodies became shiny with the fresh rain from the sky. We did not stop and stretch out a sheet of plastic to catch the rain, though we had brought plastic for this purpose. Making progress west and the Big Push seemed more important.
We were rowing again before dawn. The wind had changed from northeast Force 3 to 4 the previous evening to an east wind blowing at Force 3. The waves were only two to three feet high, but they were now coming in different directions. I had learned that we couldn’t cover as many miles without the larger, constant waves to surf along.
At 1130 GMT, we had a radio call scheduled with Norberto in Casablanca. As we rowed farther and farther away from Africa, it was becoming increasingly difficult to contact him. We kept switching to different frequencies to hear each other clearly. A lot of battery power had been used when, finally, he said that he would try again at 1730. We were reluctant to use more battery power for this extra contact, but he had signed off before I had been able to transmit our position and he might have important news for us. The propagation was much better at 1730, and we learned that a friend of his was going to the States the next day and would take news of our progress to families and friends.
When Curt checked the batteries later in the day, they were showing less than three-fourths power, the lowest since leaving Hierro. It was a good idea to curtail our power consumption and even limit our radio schedule. When Curt suggested we even cut it out completely, I protested. Our families would be worried when they didn’t hear from us.
The noon sights were another source of concern. Our mileage was getting slower: we had come only thirty-eight miles in the last twenty-four hours. At this rate, it could take us well into July to arrive at the West Indies. The little choppy waves coming from different directions weren’t helping us at all. As a matter of fact, they were only throwing the balance of the boat off and making it difficult to get an efficient stroke with the oars.
To make matters worse, I wasn’t feeling well. I hadn’t eaten much the last few days and fell asleep almost right after the oars were put away. My stomach hurt, and the top of my foot felt numb. Could I have unknowingly stepped on a loose spine of the blowfish I had caught the other day? I had been sitting on deck, in between rowing sessions, with the hand line trailing behind the boat. I was lost in thought when suddenly the line went taut, startling me out of my reverie. I called to Curt to help me keep the fish in the water until I could get the bucket under him.
As it came out of the water, small with a round stomach and its body covered with spines, the blue and white blowfish started to puff itself up with an ugly hissing noise. Its spines stuck straight up, all around its body. It was hard to get the hook out of its mouth without getting touched by the spines. Every time Curt stuck the knife in its mouth to cut the hook out, the blowfish jumped around on deck and made more hissing sounds. Finally, with the hook extracted, he scooped it up with the bucket and dumped it into the sea. It floated away on its back, looking very dead.
We rowed through much of the afternoon and on into the gray dusk of the early evening. By then, we were in a sort of stupor. We hadn’t eaten much at all. The long workouts were wearing us down.
Suddenly, the fishing pole we always left tied to the stern cabin in the mornings now bent way over. It nearly went overboard, because I had put only one half hitch around it so we’d be able to get at it quickly if there was a fish. I started to reel it in. “It feels like a shark,” I told Curt, though I had never caught one before.
“It does! Let me see the pole,” and he came and took it from me.
I leaned over to get a glimpse of the fish as he drew it closer to the boat in the diminishing light of the day. A sudden jerking motion almost pulled Curt out of the boat. I reached over and put my arms around his waist and leaned against the aft cabin to steady him. “He’s a real fighter,” Curt managed to say, breathing hard and sweating heavily.
I could see, as it came closer to the boat, that it was about four or five feet long. “An eel!” Sure enough, it had a wide, flat mouth and a long, tapering tail. It rode tiredly in the water beside the boat at the end of the hook.
“Is it any good to eat? Did your grandmother teach you any Portuguese eel recipes?” I didn’t know if our specimen was good to eat, but I was going to check the fish book first. As I turned to go into the cabin, Curt stopped me.
“Hey, wait a minute.” He started to lift the line out of the water. The “eel” dangling off the end of the hook was a long, ragged piece of polyethylene plastic! Curt started laughing so hard he had to lean against the back cabin. When I saw what we had caught, I started laughing too, so hard that I began to cry and had to sit down on deck.
CHAPTER 20
A Mid-Ocean Celebration
Mid-May 1981
WE CONTINUED THE BIG PUSH westward, taking advantage of the trade winds and rolling waves. The radio remained silent, and we used only candlelight in the cabin at night. The strong tropical sun did its work too. With the sun shining on the solar panels mounted on the roof of the forward cabin, the batteries built up to near full capacity. On May 14 and 15, we covered sixty-seven and sixty-four miles respectively in the fine surfing conditions.
We were feeling good about our progress, so to celebrate, I made a special lunch of spaghetti with garlic and onion tomato sauce. “We should have brought more Italian food with us,” I commented as we ate.
Curt reminded me of why we had only brought a few cans of tomato sauce. “We thought it was more of a cold-weather food than something we would eat in the tropics.” I remembered the times we would go with Peter Wilhelm to the Old Venice in Warren, Rhode Island, to have a $1.99 spaghetti dinner and warm up after working on the boat in Tony’s drafty old barn in the winter.
“A can of beer would be good too. We should have brought a few with us.”
As we rowed along in the afternoon, the sky became overcast and there were several brief rain showers. But they didn’t bother us, because the fresh-water showers were a pleasant break from the monotony of rowing.
The wind increased to Force 5 out of the east. Occasionally, waves broke over the side of the boat, draining quickly through the scuppers and foot wells. Slimy blades of green grass in my foot well floated back and forth with the boat’s motion. It was obvious I needed to do a little mowing, or I would be sprouting green grass on my soles one of these days.
At 1800 GMT I tuned the radio to the right frequency. The batteries were now showing between three-fourths and fully charged. The new fuses Curt put in on the lines also helped; the batteries were charging more efficiently.
“KA1GIN MM, Excalibur, this is Steve, do you copy?”
<
br /> “This is Excalibur, we copy you loud and clear.”
“Wow! You have a really strong signal; you guys just about knocked me off my seat. We were worried that we didn’t hear from you. How are you doing?”
Curt and I smiled at each other. It was so nice to be back on frequency. I reported we were just fine and had, in fact, been saving battery power. Our position at noon today was 20 degrees 4 minutes north and 36 degrees 57 minutes west. We were moving right along.
“John in Rhode Island says he heard a report that you were halfway across. That’s great!”
We looked at each other in disbelief. Where had that information come from? John, who was on frequency as well, confirmed that a woman had called him, saying that she had been in touch with us the day before via Morse code and I (Kathleen) had told her that we had not used electricity or the radio and that we still had over two hundred miles to go before we reached the halfway point. I responded to John and Steve and told them that we hadn’t been on the radio for a few days and the girl was lying. Having clarified that, I signed off.
Who would do such a thing? It was nothing more than a cruel hoax. And it wasn’t a safe thing to do either. If people got the wrong idea about where we were and something went wrong, they wouldn’t know where to look for us.
At least the hoax gave us something to talk about while we were rowing. First we vented our frustrations by thinking of things to say about the mysterious perpetrator of such falsehoods. Then we began wondering if the information could simply have become garbled as it was passed from person to person. The “what-ifs” went on for a long time. All we knew was that we wanted to get to the halfway point as soon as possible.
Curt’s log: May 17
I was beginning to lose confidence in the latitude calculation of the noon sight. Our southern progress and the sun’s northern march toward the summer solstice were making the sun appear nearly straight overhead at noon. In fact, the highest point it reached in the sky as measured by the sextant at noon, May 17 was 89 degrees 57.7 minutes north! (when corrected for the sun’s semi-diameter). Normally I had to swing the sextant in a short arc to get the sun to just kiss the horizon. Now I had to swing the sextant in a large sweep parallel to the horizon and try to gauge when the rim of the sun touched the horizon in the southern sky. To double-check these by now suspect measurements, we decided to do evening sights as well. At dusk, I shot Jupiter, Sirius, Capella, and Arcturus. These sights showed us to be at 19 degrees 16 minutes north and 39 degrees 5 minutes west. [About ten miles farther south than the imprecise latitude the noon sight had shown.]
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