I told Kathleen that we’d made more progress than I thought and she asked if that could be right. She seemed to be tired from the long hours of rowing. The new position meant we were close to the New-York-to-Cape-Town shipping lane. I pulled out the Great Circle chart. I gave one end to Kathleen to hold while I tried to find out where the shipping lane would intersect our course.
The chart filled the entire cabin. Only Kathleen’s eyes, the top of her head, and her fingers showed above her end of the chart. I took the dividers and located our position on the chart. I saw Kathleen’s eyes widen as she told me to be careful of points of the dividers because her leg was right under the paper. She was remembering the time on the Moroccan coast when the dividers had slipped out of my hand and stuck into my foot. When I finished taking a few measurements, we folded up the Great Circle chart. With the numbers I had gotten, I marked the shipping lane on the North Atlantic Ocean Southern Sheet where I was plotting our course. We were only twenty-seven miles from the shipping lane; it looked like we might enter it during the night before dawn.
During the night, we took turns sitting out on deck watching for ships. We thought it would be better than leaving on the anchor light and would save electric power. At about 0500 GMT by my watch, I thought I saw a light on the horizon in front of us. The air was cool and fresh, a relief from the stuffiness of the cabin. The full moon hanging low in the western sky had floated in and out from behind the trade-wind clouds during the long night.
When Curt came out on deck with the boat light to signal the ship, he had his doubts that the light was really a ship. Maybe it was a star setting, though it would have set in the time we had been watching it. He got out the VHF and called, but to no avail. How disappointing! Didn’t they monitor Channel 16 as all ships are supposed to do?
Dawn of May 18 brought us into the New-York-to-Cape-Town shipping lane, which was the halfway point of our row across the Atlantic Ocean, according to Curt’s calculations. We were now at 39 degrees 39 minutes west, a few miles east of the midway point of 40 degrees. It looked like it was going to take us more than twenty-six days to finish the first half, giving us a good chance of beating Samuelson and Harbo’s record of fifty-five days.
There was also a good chance that we could complete the row by June 15 if we were lucky, not hit by storms, stayed healthy, and kept up the rowing. With those thoughts in mind, we returned to the deck and rowed for another hour, eager as we were to reach the middle of the ocean.
We saw more and more sargassum, the floating sea plant that was yellowish in color with irregular thin branches and berry-like balls. Large clumps, some as big as basketballs, drifted by the boat’s gunwales. Our school of pilot fish swam out to investigate, always interested in any new diversion. They had to hurry to catch up with us as we rowed along.
The Sargasso Sea was hundreds of miles to the northwest of us, but somehow the plants had drifted over to where we were. The sargassum clumps formed breeding grounds for the flying fish and even for some kinds of eels that swim up the rivers into freshwater lakes in the United States.
At noonday the sun grew so hot we had to go into the cabin to cool off. The sargassum was forgotten for the moment.
Food was becoming monotonous and repetitive. We searched for ways to spice it up. For lunch, we ate macaroni and cheese with chopped-up garlic and onion. Then we found, by accident, part of a cracker in the tea bag. I had thought all of the crackers had been eaten up weeks ago. We had quite a ceremony of dividing this delicacy. Its damp and flexible shape cut nicely into two half-inch squares with the knife.
These days we were reading Jack London’s Sea Wolf, with Humphrey van Weyden entertaining us with his exploits in dealing with Wolf Larsen while we lounged on the sleeping bag. I could relate to van Weyden and the Wolf in their trials and tribulations. The sea required a person to be tough, but one had to know what they were doing as well. Sea Wolf was like a seaman’s bible to us as we traveled along the ocean’s waves.
In the evening, after Curt had shot the stars at nautical twilight and calculated them out, we found that we had reached the middle of the ocean. We were halfway toward our goal of rowing the Atlantic Ocean. If we had had a telephone on board, we would have called our families to share in our excitement. Instead, we planned the celebrations for the next morning since we were exhausted after a full day’s rowing.
On May 19 we gave ourselves a modified rowing schedule, with a few hours in the morning amid choppy waves and a brisk wind taking care of our rowing obligations. The sun was shining, and we were feeling very happy.
As we rowed, we planned the meal. Long conversations about food were popular on Excalibur, especially when we had something exciting to celebrate. Curt suggested we open the can of Spanish pork that Fritz and Kerrie had given us. I agreed and added that potatoes fried up with rosemary would go along splendidly. A can of pineapples would round off the menu with the bottle of champagne given to us by Narragansett Boat Club friends.
While I was cooking, Curt raised all our flags on the mast. At the top was the Stars and Stripes, which we always flew. Then came the Moroccan flag, the Explorers Club flag, and the Société Nautique de Casablanca pennant.
Before leaving Rhode Island, Peter Wilhelm had humorously given us an empty bottle to use as an auxiliary communication device in case all other systems failed. His written instructions with the bottle read: “1). remove cork 2). remove paper 3). remove writing utensil 4). write message 5). replace cork and toss into the sea.” We wrote our messages in English and Spanish and threw the bottle into the sea with colorful streamers attached. Our messages were the same in both languages: “This is the ocean rowboat Excalibur crossing the Atlantic Ocean from Casablanca, Morocco to Antigua. Today, May 19, 1981 we are at the half-way point in our row.” Though we offered a reward for the return of the bottle, we never saw it again.
It was time for the radio call to the Wilhelms. The contact was the best yet. We told them of our celebration, the different species of flying fish we had seen, and that we hoped to arrive in Antigua before the middle of June. They wished us luck for the rest of the voyage and reminded us to continue taking lots of photographs.
“Are you ready for the champagne?” Curt asked after we switched off the radio and prepared to eat. He had attempted to chill the bottle by putting it into a bucket of cool seawater and draping it with a damp white towel. As he started to untwist the wire cap, I positioned myself in the cabin hatch with the camera. The cork exploded outward in a fountain of bubbly champagne. Nearly a quarter of the bottle sprayed over Excalibur and the sea before we could get our cups under it. It was appropriate, though, that the sea and Excalibur should join in the festivities, having safely delivered us to the middle of the Atlantic.
“To Excalibur!” Curt yelled, raising his cup.
“To the sea!”
CHAPTER 21
A Navigation Mystery
May 20, 1981
I LOOKED UP FROM MY BREAKFAST bowl of oatmeal and leftover Spanish pork. “I’m sorry you don’t like the combination, but we have to use up the pork before it goes bad.”
Curt was complaining about breakfast. I didn’t see the problem. Oatmeal was one of the few nutritious foods we had an abundance of in the storage areas.
“We could have had it with grits. Pork and oatmeal?? Come onnn.”
I was irritated. From the adventure books I had read before our row, it seemed people always complained about expedition food, but here there wasn’t much choice. We had to eat what was available on the boat and that included a lot of affordable starches like rice, potato flakes, and oatmeal. Occasionally we were lucky to supplement the diet with canned meats or fresh fish.
We were coming down from the high of having made it halfway. We had as far to go again, and whether the food lasted was not the only concern. There were hurricanes and the problem of making it to land.
Curt changed the subject abruptly. “That was a good session with the Wilhelms yesterday, wa
sn’t it? Except for all those other hams trying to break in.”
I had to agree—the people trying to break in so that they could say they had contacted a rowboat in the middle of the Atlantic were really annoying. I thought my ear for Morse code must be improving, though, as I had little trouble picking out the Wilhelms’ touches at the key among all the interlopers.
The dawn of May 21 brought rough sea conditions. Excalibur was riding wildly up and down. Curt said he couldn’t sleep and went out to row. I wasn’t sure how practical it was to row in these conditions, so I decided to stay in the cabin for a while. I handed Curt his safety harness before he left the cabin.
The sky was beginning to lighten. Waves were breaking frequently into the deck area, forcing Curt to wait until it was safe to open the hatch door. When the waves slowed down for a few minutes, he crawled out quickly and reached back to shut the hatch behind him.
I lay in the cabin and looked out the plexiglass cabin window. Curt was standing in the stern part of the deck, holding onto safety lines along both sides of the boat. He was watching the waves coming toward us from the stern. He would brace himself when one was about to break over the back cabin. The breaking waves caused seawater to flow over the cabin top and his legs. Between the waves, he reached down and began untying the oars. But he kept glancing astern to watch for other big waves.
It took him about ten minutes to get to his oars and to get the rowing seat out of the stern cabin. He had taken a few strokes when another wave splashed over the port side of the back cabin, causing the boat to tip over to the top of the gunwale. His whole oar, including the handle, was submerged in the foaming wave. I was glad that I had decided to remain in the cabin.
I reached across the cabin and took the blue felt pen stored in the plastic cup mounted on the cabin wall and marked the date on the wall, as I did every morning. Otherwise, I was sure we would forget the date. If the radio pooped out, we would have nothing to tell us what day we were living.
As I wrote 5/21, I realized that we had been at sea for a month since leaving Hierro and we had not seen another person in all that time. Zoran Lukin had warned us that in the latter half of the sea voyage, we could have problems, as May could be a bad month at sea. He told us that it was possible that we could be at our lowest point mentally and physically. We had to be careful not to relax our guard.
I heard another wave crash on the deck. I looked out and saw that Curt had been totally pushed off his seat. He was looking back at me, grinning. I couldn’t be in the cabin any longer and just watch. I dug out my harness and went on deck to try my hand at rowing in these conditions.
“You know, I wouldn’t be out here if this were the first part of the trip.” I yelled so he could hear me above the wind and boiling sea while carefully putting my oars out in between the breaking waves. Curt nodded his head, not wanting to break his concentration. If we could master these wave conditions, they could give us a huge boost that would translate into a lot of mileage.
It was hell to keep our oars from getting fouled when the waves broke on the boat. Just when we had a good rhythm going, the waves would throw us off. If the oar handles happened to be passing over our legs when the boat was suddenly jerked to one side, we were in for a painful jab when the scull hit a knee or shin.
Learning to pause at the end of the stroke and push the oars away quickly was a skill to master. Curt was rowing in the stern because he had come out first. It was hard for me to keep an eye on the waves and Curt at the same time. When he decided to pause at the end of a stroke for a wave he didn’t like, I sometimes hit him in the back with the oar because I hadn’t paused in time. We started rowing again, and then I had an idea that would result in a less painful situation for him. “Why don’t you say, ‘Weigh enough!’ when you want to stop for a wave?”
“Weigh enough!” and we stopped rowing to let a wave foam by. This was much better. It gave us more coordination in what we were attempting to do. To get the hull speed going with an oncoming wave, we would row quickly and then surf with it. It was exhilarating.
When we stopped for lunch, the big waves were still rolling out of the east-northeast. In the bow cabin, I dried myself off and handed the towel to Curt when he came in. “I found five or six little flying fish this morning on the back deck. They were too little to eat so I put them in the bait can.”
“That’s great,” I told him. “With all these waves splashing over the boat, we’re bound to get a lot of them.”
“If that were the case, Kathleen, we would have seen more of them when we stopped rowing. They’re attracted by the candlelight at night.”
“Then how come we only see them when the waves are rough?” I thought I had him with that rebuttal, but he only shook his head.
In the calming seas of the afternoon, I went on deck to fish from my favorite spot. Curt joined me to shoot the sun and handed me the notebook to record the sights. He had hoped the sun had gone far enough north to be able to get an accurate sight by measuring its altitude above the horizon in that direction instead of the south. But he grew frustrated with the waves and the angle of the sun, which was still almost straight overhead.
“Damn shit,” he said in disgust. “It’s no damn good.” He opened the hatch and threw the sextant into the cabin. I watched with some alarm because we had only one sextant. When I asked what his problem was, he turned around and went into the cabin. I turned the other way and went back to my fishing.
Curt’s log: May 21
I sat in the cabin with my head in my hands. Nothing frustrated me more than trying to do something and not being able to do it. There must be some way to get a noon sight when the sun is straight overhead. I couldn’t figure how to do it. I would have to just keep doing evening star and planet sights until the sun moved far enough north to get an accurate measurement above the horizon. I hated to do that because it wasted electric power at night when I worked out the sights.
I looked over to where the sextant lay. I picked it up and examined it carefully. We would be in trouble if it broke. Though an extra sextant was on the supply list, I had left it out at the last minute to save space. Fortunately, the Davis sextant was a plastic one and it was perfectly fine. I pushed the button on the handle. The electric LED still worked. It was certainly a durable instrument.
“Hey, Curt, I’ve got something!!” There was a hard tug on the fishing line. I pulled it in, and there was a nine-inch fish beside the gunwales. Curt was standing there ready to scoop up the silver-yellow pompano dolphin with the net. It glowed in the sunlight. Though it was smallish, it would make a good dinner.
A little while later, Curt returned with the camera and Davis handheld wind gauge. He thought the windy conditions made it a good time to document its use at sea. I held up the wind gauge, with the wind whipping around me, and saw that the gauge registered a twenty-mile-per-hour gust. Earlier in the row, I would have been anxious about a wind that strong, but now it felt commonplace.
I stood by the stern cabin while Curt tried to compose the photograph in the viewfinder. He took his hand off the safety line to steady the camera. Suddenly, the image in the viewfinder swung up to the sky as a wave hit the boat. As he started to fall backward, he reached out to grab anything and only succeeded in grabbing a clump of my hair from the back of my head. I screamed as he went down on the rowing tracks. He had made sure to hold the camera against his stomach to protect it, but he came down hard on his elbow on one of the tracks.
Rubbing the sore spot where he had pulled out my hair, I put out a hand to help him up. I saw that he still had a few hairs in his hand, while it was obvious his elbow pained him.
The waves were choppy the next day. The wind had shifted to east-southeast, but there were still remnants of the northeast waves. As we sat finishing breakfast, we would occasionally look out the hatch windows.
The wave’s roar at the last minute warned us. The wave rose above the port side of the boat, arched over the deck, and threw hundreds of
gallons of cold seawater into the deck area and over the top of the entire boat. Both of us were thrown onto the wall on my side of the cabin. The stove went flying, though fortunately it had been turned off. When the wave had passed, I looked over at Curt; his eyes were wide open in amazement.
“It’s not even rough out there today.”
In the afternoon, after lunch, when we both lay crammed in the bow cabin, we had a conversation about our lives after the Atlantic row. There was never any doubt that we would be successful, but our concern, or mine, was about the future. What would we do next?
The conversation began lightly with jokes about becoming famous celebrities, and then it took a dark turn. According to Curt, I would have to become more outgoing than I was because something was “lacking in my personality.” It wasn’t enough for me to have rowed across the Atlantic. When we finished, I would have to learn to speak up and share our experiences publicly, like Curt, who was at ease with speaking in front of a crowd.
I looked at him, only inches from away from me as we lay propped up on our elbows facing each other. Where was this coming from? I wondered out loud. “Why are you telling me this?” I started to feel uncomfortable with the vibe of criticism I was getting from him.
“Like I said, you need to learn how to get along with others. It’s not enough to just row this boat. Do you understand?”
Rowing for My Life Page 13