The raft with its load of precious provisions was about a hundred yards upwind from Excalibur. We could see it as it floated to the top of the waves, and frantically rowed toward it, though the boat was being blown downwind much more rapidly than the raft. Even with the tiller hard over and rowing with all our strength, it was impossible to head directly into the wind in the rough conditions. After five minutes, we were about three hundred yards from the raft and almost even with it relative to the wind. We came about by backing the oars on one side and rowing forward on the other. Some headway was lost in the maneuver, but cutting across on the other tack brought us much closer to the raft. Curt was certain we could reach the raft, but I wasn’t so sure.
We were on the verge of making our turn when Atlántico altered course and came straight for us. Apparently they thought the rowers would not be able to reach the raft without some assistance, so they joined in the chase. Within seconds, our rowboat was directly below the hulk of the freighter’s bow. We needed no further encouragement to row faster. The freighter’s bulb-shaped bow came closer, rising out of the water like a torpedo. We hung on tightly to the safety lines as the oars became ineffectual with the rowboat’s precarious list to port.
Now in the lee of the freighter, we were completely cut off from the wind, a strange feeling after so many weeks of constant wind on our bodies. We could hear Atlántico’s seamen above us talking excitedly. They threw lines down to us. Their engines were turned off as Atlántico rolled silently in the waves. Curt grabbed one of the ropes and called up in Spanish, “What are we going to do?”
“Tie the rope to your stern.”
As he tried to find an end in the tangled rope on our deck, we both saw the mess of our deck with the eyes of strangers, all of whom were avidly watching us from high above. Loose rope lay in a jumble by the aft cabin with a torn sea anchor tossed on top. These were the ropes used to tie off the sea anchor or the rubber inner tube that we had used for taking photos away from the boat, but when we looked at them anew, it was a shock to see the boat’s deck in such disarray. Finally, Curt found a rope end and tied it to the Atlántico’s rope.
Still ten feet from Atlántico, the near miss fresh in our minds, we wondered what their next move was going to be. Within seconds the ship, rolling broadside to the wind and waves, drifted down to Excalibur. I rowed hard to keep us a safe distance away, but the freighter drifted closer and my oar blades caught between the two hulls. I jumped to my feet and joined in pushing against the steel hull that rose and fell in the waves besides us. We pushed with our hands, feet, and the boat hook, with all our strength. Even so, the freighter rolled down against Excalibur. There was a terrible crunch of fiberglass against steel.
A confusion of Spanish and wild gesticulation broke out above. Pulling on the rope, the seamen began dragging the rowboat toward Atlántico’s stern. They planned to tow us to the raft. Near the stern, the curvature of the hull arched above our heads, rolling down onto the oar mast, bending the navigation light to one side. I screamed and waved my arms. We crouched down in the boat and held our hands on the steep and slimy hull to protect ourselves.
Astern was the gigantic steel propeller rising slowly out of the water. Foamy white water poured off it with the sound of a waterfall. For an instant, the huge prop blade paused in the air above the water like an old rusting guillotine.
With a burst of sudden clarity, we saw how stupid it was to let the Atlántico’s sailors pull us toward the stern. There was no way we could avoid being chopped to bits by the sharp blades of the prop.
“No! Stop! Muy peligroso!” I screamed, raising my voice in a way I hadn’t in weeks. We were almost at the end of our row across the Atlantic, and here, at this moment, we were about to lose it all: the boat and maybe our lives.
“No, stop! Stop!” we screamed in unison, and at this sound, the Spaniards focused on our faces and realized we were not waving in agreement. We were scared to death of what was about to happen.
Excalibur stopped moving and tension on the rope lessened enough for Curt to reach over and untie it quickly before the sailors regained their enthusiasm for towing us to the raft. Together, we pulled ourselves along the hull, back to midship, where the ship’s bilge suddenly began spewing gray water onto the deck of Excalibur. Can it get any worse? I thought. Would this ever end? Another oar in the bow station caught between the hull and the gunwales of Excalibur and cracked bit by bit. The broken pieces sank into the ocean.
There was a shout from above, and we looked up from fending off the ship. A seaman had a plank in his hands that he wanted to send down to us as an aid. I started yelling, “No, no!” when he reached over to drop it to us horizontally. Fortunately, another seaman told him to lower it down to us in a vertical position so we could grab it safely. As we rose to the top of a wave, Curt grabbed the plank and used it to lever our boat away.
High above on the bridge, the captain could see it was impossible to tow us to the raft. I watched him as he called down through cupped hands, “Un momento, I’ll send a new package to you.”
“Gracias, gracias, Captain.” Still shaking from the close encounter with the stern of Atlántico, we waited. On the lee side of the ship, the full force of the tropical heat surrounded us. Sweat poured down our faces.
In a few minutes, the seamen lowered another large plastic-covered box of stores. Curt reached up and carefully guided it to the deck. We waved our thanks and I began putting the newly acquired stores into the bow cabin.
We pushed ourselves along the hull with wet hands toward the bow, where we would break loose from the suction created between the Excalibur and Atlántico. The infamous bulb-shaped bow, riding up and down in the waves, nearly hoisted us out of the sea. With one final lunge, Curt pushed the boat away with the plank, slipping and falling on the deck. I dug in deeply with the oars and rowed hard to clear us of the freighter.
After we were a safe distance from the Atlántico, with trembling hands, I passed Curt the VHF. With equally shaking hands, he held the radio and thanked Captain Platensuelo and the crew for their kindness and generosity. We stood on the deck and waved goodbye as the Atlántico disappeared over the horizon.
Then, eagerly and without further ado, we reached into the cabin to inspect our hard-earned cache. I cut open the obscenely large package. It was full of fresh food, including four liters of fresh milk still cold from the refrigerator. We split one on the spot. There were also cans of fruit juices, pineapples in syrup, jams, and dozens of Valencia oranges. There were several pounds of white sugar, presumably to fill my request for sweets. A bottle of Johnny Walker Red, two cartons of American cigarettes, fresh salad materials, and a dozen bottles of spring water from Andorra rounded out our package.
After an elegant dinner that night that included a large salad of lettuce and tomato for each of us, with white asparagus tips, we sat on deck resting. We were not only feeling revived from the meal’s fresh vitamins, but we were still jazzed up from the encounter with Atlántico’s crew. It had been a traumatic day, one that we had been lucky to survive. For the next few days, I continued to feel unsettled, though I couldn’t tell if this was due to the impending landfall or our encounter with Atlántico.
At the same time, the food and human contact from Atlántico had recharged us, pulling us out of the lethargy that had settled over the expedition. Perhaps it had come from the monotonous diet of dried foods or the daily routine of rowing hour after hour. Now we awoke each day feeling refreshed and renewed, and we began doing some of the chores we had neglected.
The food supplies in the bow cabin needed reorganizing. With more space in the compartments below deck, it was now possible to move the flour and canned goods from the stern cabin, above deck, to the hatches below deck in the bow cabin. The boat rode noticeably better with more weight below deck.
Curt worked on the boat lines by the aft cabin that had caused us such embarrassment with their general disarray. It was hard to believe the degree of neglect of the
ropes. Curt decided to break out a new sea anchor from the supply of extra odds and ends in the back cabin. The old one was torn around the grommet holes, causing it to stream behind the boat unevenly. He stuffed it below deck in the back cabin.
Curt’s log: June 4
I looked in the aft cabin hatches to check for water. There was a little water in the bottom of the side compartment. The bilge pump could not suck up the last drops so I used a sponge to wipe out the last of the water. I found the plastic container with the medicines and the major medical supply. It was full of seawater from the flooded aft cabin that had occurred the day we had met the Atlántico. I dumped the water out and wiped off each medicine bottle carefully.
The wind had been increasing steadily all morning. I didn’t like the look of the seas. Waves were now coming along and pushing us off course, allowing other waves to hit us broadside. It looked like the wind and waves could push us too far north. Rather than wait, I decided to put out the new sea anchor to slow the adverse drift. With the parachute-shaped sea anchor deployed off the stern, I went to the bow and pulled up the forward dagger board so we could ride more smoothly on the waves. Right away Kathleen opened the hatch and looked out when the motion of the boat changed. She saw that the dagger board had been pulled up and the slot situated in front of the hatch opening was open to the sea. “Look!” She pointed to the slot. “There are little fish in there.” Five or six little goldfish-sized fish were riding up and down in the slot, the suction created by the rolling waves transporting them. “Oh, man, they make me sick, watching them go up and down like that.”
I put the dagger board back in and we put out the oars.
A curious element had entered our seemingly timeless days of life at sea. As the boat was drawing closer to land, the idea of schedules and organizing life with other people in mind was hard to imagine. Out here, we decided who to interact with, and when. Excalibur had become our private world. We weren’t sure we were ready for re-entry to “earth” proper.
A radio call with Peter Wilhelm was equally frustrating. The signal kept fading in and out as I copied something about, “TV … QTH … parents … to come … Antigua but Lynn …” We were eager to know who was coming to Antigua to see us arrive, so Curt suggested I send a list of names and ask him to answer yes or no after each one. I thought that was a good idea and sent the message. I ended with “Are these people coming to Antigua, C or N?” (In Morse code shorthand, C means yes and N means no.)
But Peter did not understand I was using shorthand. His last message before he faded for good was, “Corn??”
We looked at each other and started laughing. Peter’s last contact with the rowboat at sea was a simple word with no apparent meaning. I could imagine him telling the local TV people who were at his QTH (home) what our last exchange was as we dropped out for good. “Corn?” the television journalist would ask in consternation. “Is that code for ‘See you later’?”
The noon sights showed us rowing closer to Antigua. The wave directions were changing all the time. We practiced rowing at various angles to them, something we figured would be useful as we came closer to landfall in Antigua and English Harbour.
We had been thinking about the clothes we would wear on land, a seemingly unimportant area of concern. But it wasn’t. It was actually an example of the anxiety we were beginning to feel as land approached. We were looking forward to seeing our families and friends, and to being on land, but what lay ahead for us after the row was uncertain.
We had come to a point where, with every stroke, we expected to see land. But with the thick haze spreading over all of the sky, it was doubtful land would be visible from a distance. By local noon, the sky above was blue, but the thick haze still hung over the water. When Curt worked out the noon sight, he saw that we were only seventy-eight miles from Antigua.
Curt’s log: June 8
After I told Kathleen that we were 78 miles from land, I readjusted the autopilot to put us on a course of 271 degrees true.
I did not tell her I was concerned about our latitude. Getting a precise measurement in the haze was difficult, but looking back over the last few sights, I thought I detected a gradual southward drift. We were already off course, and about two miles south of the latitude of the island.
That evening when we tuned in to the UK net, we thought it might be our last contact. We took the opportunity to thank Steve, John, and other hams on the net who had worked hard to keep track of us during the voyage. They had added a measure of safety and companionship to our lives at sea.
They relayed another message to us. A representative from the Explorers Club would be meeting us in English Harbour. His name was supposedly Colonel Byrd. “I guess you know that’s quite an honor. Congratulations.” We thanked them and sent our best 73s and signed off.
“Who’s Colonel Byrd?” I asked Kathleen. We had never heard of such an individual and doubted he even existed since his grandfather would have had to be the famous Antarctica explorer Robert Byrd. We guessed someone had gotten the name wrong.
We went out to row later in the evening. As the sun set in the western sky, the haze became a rose-colored smudge across the horizon. We peered intently for signs of land, lights or dark mounds on the distant horizon, but there was nothing, nothing yet.
CHAPTER 25
Landfall—Antigua
June 10, 1981
DURING THE NIGHT OF JUNE 8, we kept a close lookout for land. Perhaps the haze would lift enough to let us see lights from the shore as we approached, but the gray cloud cover and haze remained dense.
Early the next morning, Curt woke me up for “Norberto time.” It would be our last contact with the French Moroccan. I pulled out my notebook and pencil, ready to record any last-minute information he might have for us.
Soon Norberto’s cheerful tones were on frequency: “KA1GIN MM, hello Excalibur, this is CN8 Atlantico Pacifico in Casablanca. Me copia? Cambio.”
“Si, si, Norberto, buenas días. We copy you loud and clear. I think we will reach land today. Cambio.” And so it went with Norberto until we ended our last transmission with, “Excalibur sending best 73s and signing off.”
“73s, ciao, ciao, Excalibur.”
Though we tried, we could not fall asleep again, so intense was our anticipation about seeing land. I made a breakfast of oranges, hot chocolate, and fruit juices, with a packet of instant soup for myself. Afterward, we went out to row as the sun rose and the remaining clouds blew away to the southwest. Four-foot ocean swells rolled along with the northeast wind, broken by choppy waves that were an indication of the proximity of land. By 8:00 a. m. local time, Curt thought it would be possible to get a sun sight. I went into the cabin, handed out the sextant, and took out my notebook and pen so I could record the sights.
Later, as he worked out the three measurements of the sun, I rested quietly on my side of the cabin reading Willa Cather’s My Ántonia for the third time. I was timing it so that I would finish just as we completed the row. I thought it was a wonderful book, with its highly visual imagery of life in the early-twentieth-century American Midwest.
“We’re less than fifty miles from land. But I can only guess at the latitude.” I looked at Curt and out my port window. We were close, but we couldn’t be entirely certain that Antigua was over the horizon.
The sun was very hot on my back and shoulders when I went out to row on June 9. For the first time in weeks, I put on a shirt. The fishing had fallen off in the last week, but I still hoped to hook one last pompano as the end of the Atlantic row drew near. I baited the hook and dropped it over the gunwale of the boat. The pilot fish swam up to investigate and then darted back under the boat. Did they sense we were approaching land?
The sound of voices drifted over to me and I wondered who was talking. Was it Curt? I looked over at the bow cabin and saw he was gesticulating madly for me to come in. He had turned the radio on and found someone who was calling for Excalibur.
Guy was an American ham ra
dio operator living on Antigua. Lynn, Curt’s sister, who was a professional photographer from New York City, was with Guy as he transmitted his message to us.
“Lynn wants to fly out in a plane and take photographs of you guys as you row into English Harbour. What’s your present QTH?” I couldn’t give them an exact position because it was now time for the noon sight. Curt was pointing to his watch and already had the sextant in his hand. I promised Guy and Lynn that we’d have a position check for them in a few hours.
“I can’t believe it! We’ve been blown way off course!” Curt had a shocked look on his face. Then he said, “What time is it?” When I told him it was 1450 GMT and not local time, he looked sheepish. We had gotten the times mixed up. There was still another hour before it was time to do the noon sight. “I guess we’re getting a little jumpy about approaching land.”
The hams on the UK net were discussing our arrival and Lynn’s airplane ride when we tuned in later in the morning. We broke in to give our updated position, and the information was relayed to the pilot of Lynn’s plane, which was already in the air.
It was time to dress up and put on our special arrival-to-Antigua clothes we had discussed only last week. The prospect of people flying overhead was exhilarating and overwhelming at the same time. Curt kept the flare gun and sighting compass with its mirror beside him as we rowed. At the first sign of the plane, he fired the flare gun’s red meteor flare into the sky.
As I watched, a strange feeling came over me. The ocean was not ours anymore, I thought, and I doubted our lives would ever be the same.
The sound of a plane drifted into our world. Curt took the mirror and flashed it around, but the plane had disappeared. The only effect the flashing mirror had was to attract a large school of fish. I grabbed the Nikonos and stuck it below the water to photograph them. Later, when the film was developed, I saw that the school was filled with dorado.
We rowed on to the Pillars of Hercules, Antigua the entrance to English Harbour.
Rowing for My Life Page 16