The course into the harbor was shaped like a dogleg and required one of us to steer facing forward and the other to row. I elected to row, as I wasn’t prepared to face the hordes of people waiting on the distant docks. Curt was happy to stand by the aft cabin and hand-steer the rudder. A few small rubber dinghies escorted us as I rowed up to the dock. It was overwhelming seeing so many people cheering and waving as Excalibur pulled up alongside the quay.
Both of us saw our family members at the same time, and that is what saved me from pushing away from the dock and rowing in the opposite direction from the crowds. My father stood there smiling proudly at me, while Curt’s sister clicked away with her camera. Guy, the ham radio operator stepped up and welcomed us. Other people we did not know came forward and congratulated us, but the welcoming experience quickly became an overwhelming blur of visual stimulus and noise from too many voices speaking at once. At one point, a Galley Bay resort representative stepped out of the crowd and handed me a brochure and offered us a free couple of nights. No one from the Explorers Club was there to meet us in Antigua, but weeks after that, when we and Excalibur arrived in Miami by way of a sailboat tow between Antigua and St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, followed by a complimentary Norwegian Cruise Line trip from St. Thomas, a fellow of the Explorers Club welcomed us to his home in Homestead, Florida.
Later, after all the congratulations, hugs, and handshakes dockside, as I walked away from the boat, dazed, unsteady on my feet, and holding on to my father’s arm, I saw a pack of strange-looking dogs. When I pointed them out—“Oh, look at the dogs!”—my father laughed and said they were goats! To him and anyone who had heard me, my observation was amusing evidence of our long time at sea. But to me, it was evidence of how far I had transplanted myself from the experience of being mostly at sea for the eighty-three days of the expedition.
When Curt and I were finally alone in our room at the Galley Bay Resort, where we had gratefully accepted the complimentary room and board for ourselves and my father and Lynn, we lay together in silence with our bodies still feeling the motion of Excalibur. I said to Curt, “Does this feel right? Shouldn’t we go out and check to see if everything is tied down?”
He was quiet for a while. No, he couldn’t do that and neither could I. Before either of us had fully realized what was happening when our boat touched the dock, we had been whisked away to the other side of the island, away from Excalibur, to spend the next two nights in this beautiful resort. We could only hope that Guy, as promised, was watching out for our boat.
The next day I climbed by myself up a trail away from the resort. I settled cross-legged on a grassy promontory high above the sea and overlooking the sugar-white beach and aquamarine waters of Galley Bay. The Atlantic row had ended so quickly dockside, but I knew the experience would be with me for the rest of my life, not only because we had set world records by becoming the first Americans to row from east to west across the Atlantic and because I had become the first woman to row across the Atlantic. There was something more to think about. After the excitement of completing the Atlantic row and meeting new people, I needed solitude, not unlike the isolation of Excalibur at sea, from the overwhelming reentry to civilization, because after nearly fifty days from the Canaries and eighty-three from Casablanca, I had changed. Our adventure had changed me, and I needed to absorb that and understand it. It wasn’t just about being reluctant to embrace the crowd at dockside in English Harbour. Unlike Curt, who reveled in the attention from the local Antigua reporters and was later so eager to share his experiences with the press in Miami that had been set up by the Explorers Club, I was not ready to share. It would feel like an invasion of privacy until I had processed everything I had learned over the past year.
I remembered how much time and effort it had taken us to get to this point of a successful landfall in Antigua, the year we had spent building the boat and preparing for the row as well as the months at sea. We had begun our planning with a wealth of mostly Thoreauvian notions of independence and self-sufficiency and a modest bank account. In our year and a half of marriage from 1979 to March 1981, when we set off in Casablanca, we lived mostly on our income and savings from our New York jobs, as well as Curt’s from before we met, and small monetary gifts from Curt’s parents. Curt had also turned to his good friend and climbing buddy George Van Cochran to learn how to gain membership for himself at the Explorers Club in New York and then how to apply for the travel grant that we eventually received.
The amount of cash we had lived on was small, and much of it went to purchases of boat-building materials, living supplies, and paying a boat builder for a short time in the summer of 1980. Our good friends from the Narragansett Boat Club, including Peter Wilhelm and Ed Montesi who designed Excalibur, often came down to the barn to give of their free time to help with the building. We also spent money on rent for the barn where Excalibur was built, gas for the Pinto station wagon, and the big-ticket item of $600 for the one-way passenger and freight ticket on the Zvir. Since our cash was so limited, we’d tried and found that we could get sponsors for expedition products we would eventually need, like food, bottled water, and foul weather gear. It was possible to mount an expedition like this by living frugally, depending to some degree on supporters, and relying on sponsors to partially fund it.
Though we were successful in obtaining a number of small items from sponsors, we never did manage to interest the National Geographic Society in funding us. People had pushed us to solicit their support, as though that in itself would be a validation. In the end, though, after the Atlantic row, we were glad we hadn’t received any funding from them, because unlike expeditions who had sold their rights and become known as a National Geographic expedition, we retained all rights to our photographs and written materials. But more importantly and truer to our Thoreauvian ideals, we remained independent, without any corporate logos co-opting the hull space of a boat we had built ourselves and the expedition we had carried out ourselves.
My life had changed forever for sure. It wasn’t Antigua’s white sand beaches and lush tropical gardens that were now tempting me. It was the realization that whatever had pushed me to suggest we row a boat across the Atlantic Ocean was still inside me. An intense desire to explore the world and maybe understand what it meant to be human on this planet had been awakened in me and was just as avid as before we had started.
I stared at the blue ocean, whose substance I had intimately known for more than eighty days, since our departure from Morocco. Her various moods had alternately thrilled and scared me. One day I had sat cross-legged on the deck during a meditative fishing session, gazing at the sea in the warmth of the midday sun, lost in thought, when a different sort of sound revealed a whale as it broke the surface. Startled only slightly, for waves had been breaking gently around the boat, the thought came to me that what I was living that day, and every day of the voyage, was the most incredible experience a person could ever have. That realization was almost mystical, as I recognized the uniqueness of my journey in that moment. Perhaps it was there that I first understood what I reaffirmed later on the Antigua promontory, that my journey was only just beginning.
PART III
SOUTH PACIFIC OCEAN
CHAPTER 26
Preparing and Starting the Row
1984
IT WAS IN 1982 ON a rowing and sailing trip along the northern coast of Labrador, the summer after the Atlantic row, that we began thinking about rowing across the Pacific Ocean. Though we didn’t know exactly where we’d begin, we knew it would be some coast facing the South Pacific, an ocean with hundreds of islands across thousands of miles. Curt wanted the challenge of navigating Excalibur across the largest ocean in the world, from the South American continent to Australia. As for me, not only did I love the idea of traveling for a longer period of time, the prospect of visiting remote islands in the middle of an ocean was exhilarating.
Others had tried to row across the Pacific before us. A Swedish-born,
naturalized New Zealand citizen by the name of Anders Svedlund made an unsuccessful attempt in 1974, three years after his successful row across the Indian Ocean. Svedlund had rowed due west from Huasco, Chile, toward the setting sun. He made it as far as the Society Islands, where he picked up new food supplies that ultimately gave him an unrelenting case of chronic colic. He aborted the row at Apia, Western Samoa, in late 1974.
A British couple, John Fairfax and Sylvia Cooke, rowed in the early 1970s from California to Australia, making landfall on an island where they were picked up and brought to the mainland. Peter Bird, another Brit, made two attempts from California. On the first, he lost his boat on a reef in Hawaii, and on the second he made it to the Great Barrier Reef, where his boat was wrecked and he had to be rescued by the Australian Navy.
We wanted to row an even longer distance—10,000 miles across the South Pacific Ocean, a feat that no rower had attempted before—but our motivation was largely fueled by our love of nature and not solely by the desire to achieve a new first and set a record. Anders Svedlund had rowed his oceans with the same intent, to seek the peace of mind one could encounter in the solitude of a vast ocean environment.
What made us think we could do it? A crossing of that distance could last six months or even a year. Though we planned to stop at islands along the way, wasn’t twelve months of sharing Excalibur’s nine-foot deck and sleeping in its six-foot-three-inch cabin, whose widest point was three feet and narrowest six inches, pushing it? Our successful Atlantic row in 1981 proved we could get along for an extended period, though during that row there had been moments of tension and grief as we struggled to cope with life at sea both individually and as a married couple. We loved each other and enjoyed spending time together, but even so, we knew that sharing the confined living and sleeping space for up to twelve months was going to challenge us mentally and physically.
The route we chose, from South America to Australia, a distance more than three times that of our Atlantic row, was a natural one, for the Humboldt Current flowed north and the South Equatorial Current, which we would encounter at the Galápagos Islands, flowed from east to west. We also imagined the weather in this area of the South Pacific to be more stable than what Fairfax, Cook, and Bird had encountered on the West Coast of the United States and later as they crossed the Equator. Besides, the multitude of islands sprinkled across the South Pacific Ocean would offer shelter, rest, and resupply, and were home to cultures we were eager to explore. After leaving South America in July, the winter season, when the Humboldt Current was at its strongest, we planned to stop at the Galápagos Islands, the Marquesas Islands, American Samoa, and then straight on to the east coast of Australia.
To get in shape, we decided to row down the Mississippi River during the summer of 1983. We had seen far-off places in the world but very little of the United States by boat. What better way to see America than drifting down the Mississippi, from its headwaters at Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota to New Orleans, in a rowboat? Besides, rowing the length of this vast river would be excellent physical training for the long row across an expanse far wider than the North Atlantic. The row down the Mississippi River would also give us the opportunity to revisit our boat-building expertise and put our boat-handling skills to the test in the sudden severe weather that, we read, would regularly roll out of the Midwest summer skies.
Because many dams would have to be portaged in the upper river, we decided to build a light river-rowing boat. Curt sketched out a plan for one eighteen feet long with a forty-two-inch beam that would be quick and inexpensive to make, and strong and stable enough to endure the row from the headwaters to the Gulf of Mexico. We built Guinevere, as we christened her, in the backyard of Curt’s parents’ summer house in Morgan, Vermont. After a series of tests on nearby Seymour Lake, we were happy with her stability and speed with two people rowing. She had ample space for all the camping gear we would take and two rowing stations with sliding seats.
Through June and July, we rowed and portaged Guinevere around fourteen dams north of Minneapolis/St. Paul and through twenty-eight locks and dams south to St. Louis, then along the great, wide expanses of the last thousand miles of the Lower Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. We encountered severe line winds and thunderstorms in the upper and middle reaches of the river and Civil War history on the Catfish Front by Vicksburg and Natchez; we shared the Lower Mississippi river channel with tows pushing sixty or more barges in fast-moving currents.
When we returned from New Orleans in late August, we put together our latest educational slide show on the Mississippi row to supplement our other offerings on the Atlantic and Labrador rows. Ever since returning from Antigua in June 1981, we had made a modest living giving one-hour slide lectures at private schools and boat clubs in New England and the Middle Atlantic States as part of an informal, self-managed lecture series. I had learned to enjoy speaking to large audiences with Curt, who reveled in his new role as a celebrity explorer. To supplement the lecture fees, beginning in the fall of 1981, we displayed Excalibur at the Philadelphia and Norwalk boat shows sponsored by the National Marine Manufacturers’ Association and spoke to hundreds of people about our adventures. In between our school lectures and boat show appearances, we accepted the Kalmar Nycel Award, named for the seventeenth-century Dutch trading ship that had successfully crossed the North Atlantic to set up a Swedish colony in present-day Wilmington, Delaware. We returned to the Explorers Club with the flags we’d been given to carry on the Atlantic and Labrador trips and gave lectures at their headquarters.
We restarted our efforts to gain sponsors with the publication of an essay about the Atlantic row in Smithsonian magazine in 1982 and other articles in smaller publications, hoping to develop interest in funding and supplying the upcoming South Pacific expedition. As with the Atlantic sponsors, we offered to acknowledge their equipment donation or free transportation (there were never any cash donations) in our lectures and articles we published. In late fall 1983, we attended the Explorers Club annual dinner made famous by the exotic and unusual delicacies served and then rode the subway to Lower Manhattan to purchase charts of the South Pacific from New York Nautical.
We spent the winter of 1983–84 house-sitting a family friend’s home in Morgan, Vermont. When the weather warmed up enough during the daytime in March to begin re-outfitting Excalibur for the tropical South Pacific environment, we had to dig the boat out of the deep snow in the driveway at the Saville family summer camp, where she had been parked. We began to work intensively for several months preparing for the expedition. We installed tinted ports and extra air vents and gave the interior of the cabins a new coat of white paint. We repainted the hull a bright orange with a neon-yellow stripe at the gunwales, figuring that since we would be out at sea for such a long stretch, we might be in need of a rescue sometime and a bright orange boat would attract attention more easily. We cleaned up the solar panels, and resettled them into fresh beds of silicone gel to protect the connecting wires. We contacted our old ham radio and Narragansett Boat Club friends, Kurt and Peter Wilhelm, for advice on an alternate antenna setup on the boat. Curt had fiberglassed in place a handy little shelf in the bow cabin where the TR-7 transceiver now rested. To make things more efficient with our communications, we wanted a better arrangement than the precarious dipole antenna we had on the Atlantic that had been tied to a sweep oar shaft. The Wilhelms recommended a taller set of whip antennas than we carried on the Atlantic and that screwed into a metal ball bolted into the roof of the bow cabin. The Wilhelms gave us a spare collection.
When the preparations were finished, we rechristened the boat Excalibur Pacific and got ready to ship her and ourselves south to Ecuador, where we had decided to begin the row. Leaving from Guayaquil, Ecuador, at the head of the Gulf of Guayaquil, would make for a straight shot to the Galápagos Islands, our first intended port of call after departure. After a send-off by our friends and families, we boarded the Santa Paula, of the soon-to-be defunct Delta
Steamship Company, for a complimentary passage from Philadelphia to Ecuador. Excalibur Pacific rode below deck in a shipping container while we lived the good life above deck as Santa Paula steamed through the Caribbean islands and transited the Panama Canal. On June 16, 1984, we and our boat were deposited on the docks in the port of Guayaquil, Ecuador. From there, it would be only six hundred miles to the first island stop: San Cristóbal, Galápagos.
Pirates in Gulf of Guayaquil and Points South
Within hours of our arrival, we were informed that leaving from the Gulf of Guayaquil was a bad idea because of serious problems with pirates. A local shipping agent told us that highly organized groups using small motorized speedboats and automatic weapons were preying on unsuspecting boats in the gulf and on the coast.
While we contemplated the possibility that the row could end before it had even begun, the local shipping agent suggested we go into the city and meet with the director of maritime transportation, who might be able to advise us. Part of Captain Naranjo’s remit as the longtime director of maritime transportation was rescue operations between the coast and the Galápagos Islands. The captain advised us to set off instead from Callao, Peru, for a couple of reasons: the piracy problem was not as bad there as in Ecuador, and starting from farther south on a longer trajectory (twelve hundred miles versus six hundred) would put us in a more advantageous position to row with the currents.
“Whatever you do, don’t try to reach the Galápagos from the east,” he said. “You could get caught in a branch of the Humboldt Current that flows north toward Panama. That’s what happened to the balsa raft expedition. They had to be towed so they could reach the Galápagos.”
He pointed to a large chart of the region on the wall of his office and said the Excalibur Pacific would do best to begin the row by going due west from Callao. The current would carry us north, and hopefully we’d arrive at a point south of the Galápagos where we could safely make a final approach to San Cristóbal Island.
Rowing for My Life Page 17