I looked back at him, completely understanding what was going on, but feeling threatened at the same time. He was more than ready for, and in fact craved, fame as a successful explorer. He just wasn’t sure about me and if I would want to go down the same path as him, I thought. I decided now was a good time for my afternoon row, because it was clear that more physical space between us was needed.
I thought about our talk as I pulled hard at the oars for a couple of hours. I rolled my seat up and down the tracks and relived a conversation we had had in 1978, the year before we got married and I graduated from college. We were visiting his parents in northern Vermont, where I would meet relatives and family friends for the first time. I asked him to go for a hike in the woods surrounding his parents’ summer camp, so I could show him the primitive tables I’d artfully constructed earlier in the day with small sticks and twine, following the simple directions from a 1960s woodcraft book I’d found in a bookcase. We stood looking at one while I told him how nervous I was to be meeting all these new people for the first time. He told me not to worry and that I would do fine. But he added something I never really understood for a long time. “Just remember,” he said, “that when you become successful in anything you do, don’t forget me or your family, the people who helped you get ahead.”
At the time I was flattered that he, a guy ten years older than me, thought I had a chance to become famous. I couldn’t imagine what my success would come from, since I was an average student with a low GPA because rowing was more important to me than my studies.
I thought back to that moment and wondered if there was some connection to our conversation in the bow cabin. Did Curt suspect I might have other ideas for how we should live our lives after the row? After all, we had to think about making a living again, since we had no savings left. Was he afraid that, as someone ten years younger, I would no longer want to pursue a life of exploration with him?
It was a lot to figure out, and rowing in choppy seas and having stressful conversations made me extra tired. But I also realized that the fatigue wasn’t just from the weather or Curt but also the incessant rocking motion of the boat. To hold on or even to move about took a lot of energy.
I went into the cabin, where Curt glanced at me briefly with a small smile and said he was switching on the radio for our schedule with the UK net people. I knew the power was getting low, but I also looked forward to this evening’s visit. However, Curt had no more than given our position when the transmitter went dead.
“Roger, roger. I have copied your position and understand you are saving power, Excalibur. Hope everything is going well. Do we have anyone else to check for the net?”
“Damn it, how come they always assume we’re saving power when the transmitter goes dead? What is it? The wires?”
Curt was feeling too tired to check into those things, so we sat back and listened for other people to check into the net.
“Well, we have pretty bad weather up here, too. We have gales blowing along the coast. It’s wet and miserable,” our friend Steve replied to a ham in Barbados. Soon they signed off, the business of the maritime net concluded.
The wind blew hard during the night, with rain showers and building seas. I awoke abruptly at about 0300 local time when I heard Curt yell, “Quick! Water’s coming in!” I switched on the light and saw Curt screwing shut the port windows, which had been left open for ventilation.
“Here’s a towel, let’s try to mop up.” Afterward, we threw the wet towels into one of the hatches below and settled back for the rest of the night. It was hot and stifling lying on the cabin floor, our sleeping pads wet from the water that had come in. The skin on our backs made a wet sucking sound as we were jostled back and forth on the floor and against the cabin walls.
“I’ve been having pains in my hip joints lately,” I complained, as we lay in the darkness, unable to sleep. “I think it’s from the rowing seats. We sit down too much and we haven’t been able to walk in weeks.”
Curt agreed. His hips had been bothering him as well. But he changed the subject, realizing it didn’t do us any good to dwell on our discomforts. “The rain on the roof sounds like it does on the roof of a cabin in Vermont, doesn’t it?” It did sound like that.
That night Curt shot six stars to fix our position. The star sight calculations showed us to be a full degree farther west than we expected to be. Every way he worked it out, the new position showed us at 46 degrees 10 minutes west instead of 45 degrees 10 minutes. It was impossible for us to have covered that much distance. The only explanation seemed to be a time error, though the watches we used to record the sights were not off by four minutes, a whole degree of 60 minutes. We always set the watches by the radio time signals.
I turned on the radio—whose wires Curt and Fritz had repaired in the Canaries and yet had subsequently needed even more electrical tape to secure them against the saltwater—and tuned in the time signal. We watched the luminescent hands on our Rolex Oyster watches closely as the ticking of the time signal approached the hour. The announcer gave the time. The watches were accurate.
Curt went over all the calculations again. But every way he worked them, the numbers showed us to be farther west than 46 degrees. He could find no explanation to account for the missing degree.
CHAPTER 22
Knee Injury
May 24, 1981
TO SATISFY HIMSELF THAT WE had not been carried an extra sixty miles west by a freak current or anomaly of compass deviation resulting from the relative closeness of the Sargasso Sea, Curt shot the sun on the morning of the 24th to get another longitude check. It showed that we had a ways to go to reach 46 degrees. We were still east of where the star sights of the night before had indicated. It was unnerving to have a problem like that creep into the navigation. We would have to be sure of where we were in order to steer an accurate course to Antigua, our intended ending point for the Atlantic row.
We were rowing in the middle of the morning in choppy seas when the hand line tied to a block of oak suddenly jerked. It was pulled from under a spare set of oars and would have gone overboard had I not grabbed it.
Curt leaned over the gunwale and scooped up the fish as I pulled it in. “This is the biggest one yet,” he said as he put it on deck. It was another pompano, sixteen inches long. I put another flying fish from the bait can on the hook, and trolled the line again. Soon we caught another one, but not as large. There seemed to be a whole school of pompanos following us. They were clever and soon learned how to get the bait off the hook. They would attack the bait the second it hit the water in a wild frenzy of splashing. One of them grabbed the bait so hard he took the hook right off. The book had been right when it said: “a prized fighting fish, pompanos are known to race at the hook and put up a fight.”
The fish had stolen all the bait before lunch, so I cooked what we had already caught. I fried one fish and made a New England–style milk chowder with the other one. There had been so many of them beside the boat, it was a pity we couldn’t have caught more to sun dry and salt. We had brought a container of rock salt to preserve some of the fish we caught. At the rate we were catching them, though, I doubted we would even need it.
Early in the evening, when we had finished rowing for the day, we went into the cabin to have dinner. I turned on the radio, hoping the retaped wires would hold, to see if there was any interesting news on the UK net. The first we heard was a ship calling in weather information: “and the barometer has been falling sharply. It’s gone down 12 millibars in the last hour.”
Curt, who had been slumped in the corner of the cabin, looked over at me with eyes wide. “Where is that guy?” he asked.
I adjusted the dial so that I could hear more clearly. The ship mentioned the Balearic Islands. Breathing a sigh of relief, I said to Curt, “The Med.” Our nerves were on edge because of our concerns about the weather. We tended to assume the worst whenever we heard anything on the radio or observed something unusual about the clouds, win
d, or waves.
The next morning, May 25, I sat out on the deck in the sun. It was a beautiful day, with a moderate breeze. I was reading Henry David Thoreau’s account of his first visit to Cape Cod in 1849. On his way there, he heard the news of a frigate, St John, from Galway, Ireland, having wrecked outside of Cohasset Harbor, Massachusetts. He and his companion went to investigate, along with hundreds of other curious New Englanders.
A wave splashed over the page and I wiped it off with my hand. Thoreau’s conclusion was that the dead people were going to as fine a port as the one they were bound for on Cape Cod. Another wave splashed over the page. I put the book in the cabin.
I couldn’t say I agreed with Thoreau, being on the sea and hoping to make landfall myself. But I thought about land and whether it really was preferable to sea. My convictions all along had been that land was the place I wanted to be the most. But what of it? We listened to the news about the hunger strikes in Ireland, terrorist activities, and the hostile accusations flying between countries. There was very little peace anywhere in the world now.
Some people thought we were foolish to undertake the task of putting together the expedition and building a boat so we could attempt to investigate on our own the wilderness and vastness of an ocean. But I knew there were a lot of people out there who wanted to do the same. Rowing an ocean was not an exercise in living close to the edge, in taking unreasonable chances with one’s life. That was only a shallow interpretation. It was an exercise in complex problem-solving that required we carefully consider every decision before it was implemented.
I thought about our conversation of a few days ago and wondered if there had been something I had missed over the days. Was there anything I had said to Curt and forgotten about in the monotony of our lives that made him doubt my commitment to our marriage? I decided to let it go. In a space as small as Excalibur, neither of us could afford to stay mad at each other for long. Besides, we had long ago agreed it was better not to be alone on the rowboat at sea.
Later in the afternoon, we went back to rowing. The wind was blowing at about Force 5 out of the east-northeast but the waves were not consistent. Some of them came out of the northeast and others out of the southeast. The result was many choppy, pointed waves that made rowing tiring and surfing practically impossible. I watched the waves come rolling by and break along the gunwales. They were ceaseless, no end to them, to the booming, the hills and valleys and the white foam that accompanied it all. Day after day, week after week. It was a long time to be living so close to the ocean’s surface. There was no escape or diversion from the sound and motion of the waves.
Curt’s log: May 26
The day began humid and hot. It was particularly stuffy in the cabin because we had closed all of the ports during the night. I had not slept well. A stickiness of salt and sweat covered my whole body. The salt sores I was afraid would plague us had appeared. There was a rash of red sores along my lower back that constantly itched. Scratching didn’t do any good; it only made the sores worse. I had to get out of the cabin.
I crawled out onto the deck and untied the yellow plastic bucket. I put the little green ball, our pet, into the foot well. Some of the crustaceans had dried and fallen off. The crab had long since died and been used as bait. There was still some slime on the ball, but the slime seemed to have migrated to the foot wells, where it was growing and thriving.
I threw a bucket of seawater over my body to cool off. Then I took out a pair of oars and began rowing. For over an hour, I sat there, pulling the oars through the water, not thinking about much of anything. Except about how hot it had gotten to be, and the unpleasant sensation of my heels slipping on the slime in the foot well. Our heels would wear holes in it but the slime would still grow back.
When Kathleen called to say breakfast was ready, it was already oppressively hot in the sun even though it had been up for less than two hours.
I sat in the corner of the cabin, my skin sticking against the wall. Kathleen passed me a bowl containing my breakfast. I looked down into the shiny black mass. “Pudding for breakfast?” I asked incredulously.
“Curt, you’re lucky I make breakfast for you,” she said, with an edge to her voice.
“Oh, you’re so nice to go to the trouble of making instant pudding.” I couldn’t resist egging her on. Instant pudding for breakfast was the end-all.
Kathleen didn’t say anything. I watched her take a couple of bites of her pudding. I could tell she thought it left something to be desired, because she reached down into the hatch and came up with a Ziploc bag with a green paper bag containing the last of the almonds and walnuts we had bought in Casablanca. She reached in and pulled out a small handful of nuts. I watched as she went through them carefully, sorting out the black bugs. These she crushed between her thumb and forefinger and wiped on her gym shorts. Then she crushed the nuts and put them in her pudding. She stirred the pudding and started eating again.
“Well, are you going to give me any?” I asked her.
“Bugs or nuts?”
“Nuts to you,” I said grabbing the bag. I repeated the same process. I was never sure if the bugs in the nuts came from the flowers or the souk in Casablanca.
Kathleen turned on the radio for the weekly schedule with the Wilhelms after breakfast, but she didn’t have much luck. She would pick up a signal that sounded like them, but then it would fade out. After spending a quarter of an hour on the 10-meter band, she switched to the 15-meter band that was part of the backup plan if the first band failed. Again and again she called but could not pick them up. I sat beside her, waiting for the contact. When it didn’t come, I felt very depressed. Our expectations for this high point of the day were shattered. I put the sextant that I had used earlier away in its box as Kathleen reached over to turn the radio off.
But before she switched it off, we heard a signal coming in loud and clear. KA1GIN MM de W2BXA k (k = over to you).
Since the guy was coming in really strong, I told her to answer him. Not a good idea because she said since it was not the Wilhelms, we couldn’t afford the power, and turned off the radio.
“Wait!” I said, “They may be in touch with the Wilhelms.” The ham repeated his call to Excalibur. “Hurry up and answer them!” I insisted.
I was pushing my luck and being obnoxious but I wanted to make that contact. “I can’t believe you, they could help us.”
“Shut up! I’m the radio operator, not you!” She was mad.
I banged the sextant box down on the floor and stormed out of the cabin. It made me so mad. Since I was captain of the boat, I should be able to say whom we made contact with. I stood holding the hand straps on the cabin top, trying to cool down in the breeze.
Curt’s presumptive attitude had really irritated me. Who did he think he was? We were both running this boat, making decisions about how we would live our lives on board. I thought about the ham who was still trying to reach me. What IF he had something important to tell us?
I answered him and was glad I did. I called Curt in after W2BXA and I finished our chat. He looked a little contrite, but mostly he was interested in the substance of my contact. W2BXA was a friend of his Uncle Charlie’s in New Jersey, I told him. Charlie had wanted to contact us himself, but his rig couldn’t put out a strong enough signal to reach us. I sent our position and said we hoped to reach Antigua before June 15. Ben, W2BXA, responded with a promise to pass the information along to Charlie and our families. He added that he would be listening in on a regular basis and would help us in any way he could.
Curt’s cranky mood improved. The new contact helped him forget about his salt sores and strange breakfasts. It made us friends again.
That evening when he went out on deck to shoot the stars, he was plagued by the choppy waves that kept splashing over the sides and making the deck wet. He leaned against the forward cabin, trying to brace himself. But when it came time to bring the star down on the horizon, he had to have both hands on the sextant.
In the middle of taking the last sight, he slipped and fell to the deck. The sextant was not damaged, but his right knee banged into one of the rowing tracks. He knew he had hit it hard when he tried to stand and a pain shot through his kneecap.
The next morning when he woke and tried to crawl out on deck, it bothered him. I looked over from my sleeping spot and saw that his knee had swollen up. He could hardly bend it, never mind crawl on it. Until this happened, neither of us realized how important knees were for getting around Excalibur. When going into the cabin from the deck especially, the technique was to put both hands through the hatch onto the cabin floor, which was three inches below deck, then swing the right leg in and put the knee on the floor. The left leg couldn’t go in that way since the hatch hinges were on that side. Since Curt couldn’t put pressure on his right knee, he had to press his head to the cabin floor for support. For some reason, I found this very funny. Whenever Curt came in the cabin, half standing on his head, I started giggling. At least there was some comic relief, albeit at Curt’s expense!
If I didn’t give him much sympathy, I did have an idea of how to treat the injury. “You need an ice pack from the Norton medical kit that Ed gave us.” I went to the back cabin and rummaged around for a cold pack. Curt watched with interest as I pulled out the compress and activated it by squeezing it with both hands and shaking up its contents. I strapped it on his knee by wrapping a roll of gauze bandage around the compress and knee. It was a perfect substitute for ice, the nearest supply of which was hundreds of miles away as we floated on the tropical sea.
As I rowed in the late-morning sun while Curt rested in the cabin, I thought of how serious a major injury could be on a voyage like this. Though we had a copy of the special DH MEDICO code for emergency medical advice by radio, we were very much on our own.
Rowing for My Life Page 14