I was sitting on the deck of the rowboat with a cup of Nescafé coffee, looking around the harbor at the extraordinary view of the desert with its cacti and the bottle-green waters of the South Pacific breaking lightly at its edges. It was wonderful. Sylvia Earle once said, “With every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you’re connected to the sea. No matter where on Earth you live.” We were connected to the sea in a way only we could explain. Once a friend said when I told her of our latest plans to row the South Pacific, “Don’t you get bored out there? With nothing to see for miles and miles?”
It wasn’t “boring,” though. “There” had innumerable cloud formations, the different ways waves moved in the wind, and the changing colors, not just with the time of day but through the hours as the sun and clouds shifted positions. In another sense, she was right, because its seeming emptiness took a long time to drag me into it. Sometimes I listened to silence and other times to the rhythmic and constant breaking of waves all around the boat. The irregular lines of waves at sea carried sound all around me.
I was still buoyed in spirits after we had successfully rowed into Puerto Arroyo three days earlier after a mammoth effort of rowing and navigating the treacherous currents of the Galápagos archipelago. The first part of the South Pacific row was completed. All done, twelve hundred miles up the west coast of South America from Peru to Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands. Last night, we sat with neighboring yachties and our Ecuadoran beers, and we began a year-long relationship that would continue through calls on the marine radio and on islands we would later visit.
Five minutes earlier, a reddish-colored marine iguana swished its way past the boat not more than five feet from the deck where I sat. They were common creatures everywhere in the islands, swimming in its nutrient-rich waters to feed on algae-covered rocks. On the other side of the harbor, I saw the morning’s iguana horde lumbering up the face of volcanic rock to bask in the warmth of the rising sun. I hadn’t seen them often in the water, but the first time we went to a harborside restaurant for a meal, there were three or four huge marine iguanas basking in the sun not far from my feet. Though Charles Darwin called them “clumsy disgusting lizards” and “imps of darkness,” I thought their uniqueness, as the only iguana in the world to live and forage from the sea, a true marvel of biology. Their brick-red bodies tufted with spikes welcomed me into the environment of Galápagos marshes and mangroves where we eventually beached our boat for two weeks. Amblyrhynchus cristatus, the marine iguana, reminded me of the exotic and unconventional nature of our decision to row across the South Pacific.
Leaving the Galápagos Islands
The day before our departure, we went to the port captain’s office to officially check out and pay our harbor fees. The Ecuadoran port captain very eloquently told us there would be no fees for us because he admired our courage and bravery to do battle with the sea in such a small boat. We left his office touched by his kindness and sorry to be leaving the Galápagos, whose exquisite beauty we had recorded daily with the camcorder and 35 mm cameras.
Curt’s log: August 17
It was a Friday when we planned to leave, though something felt wrong about this departure date. Maybe it was that we were going against the old sailors’ superstition never to begin a voyage on a Friday. We ignored it and left on Friday because it was simply time to go. It’s late in the season. [Considering how slow we traveled, we expected to be at sea for almost two months. We hoped to be in the Marquesas by early October, the start of the hurricane season.]
The early-morning row out of Academy Bay and into the sea skirted the rock reefs along the Santa Cruz’s south coast and headed in a southerly direction. By daybreak, hopefully we’d clear the headland that overlooked the bay. To the west was the breaking shoal where the boat nearly turned turtle on the approach to Academy Bay two weeks earlier. As we rowed, Excalibur Pacific rolled side-to-side, the rudder and dagger boards banging softly like a padded pendulum arm of a clock. It was a familiar and comforting sound as the current pushed us south and westward.
All day long we rowed into headwinds and choppy waves, the current only a knot strong and the skies overcast. Inquisitive soft-eyed sea lions swam and played just off the tips of our oar blades. Blue-footed boobies and albatrosses flew overheard as Excalibur Pacific began transiting the Canal Pinzon, a twenty-five-mile channel that separates Santa Cruz from Isabella Island. The north-flowing current increased in strength because of a southeast wind and made it hard rowing all day long. To get sucked into the Canal Pinzon would mean exposing the boat to worse dangers of outlying rocks, unlit islands, and the precipitous east coast of Isabella. It meant getting caught in the east-flowing Equatorial Countercurrent north of Isabella and being forced back toward the South American coast.
By the end of the first day, we were still in the middle of Canal Pinzon. A cold guara mist began to fall and darkness settled around us. Together we rowed all night, always pointing the boat south-southwest, the only way to counteract the current and ferry our way across to the south end of Isabella Island and out of the Galápagos.
At moments during the night, I felt like a very small entity in the blackness of space except for an occasional star reflected in the sea or a dim spot of light from a distant shadowy island. We steered by the lights from the village of Santa Maria on Santa Cruz Island. When thick clouds descended over the island, all I saw was a faint glow, and then at midnight the lights went off. After that, we steered by the feel of the wind. When I felt its touch on my left cheek I knew the boat was heading in the right direction.
Every hour I would switch places with Curt, grateful to give up the oars, and crawl into the bow cabin to fall asleep immediately. After a few hours, it wasn’t the rowing we minded the most or even the blisters that burst and stung from the saltwater; it was the interruption of our dreams that was the hardest.
Curt’s log: August 18
As the day began to lighten, I could see that I was rowing close to Islas Hermanos, islets of steep rock off the southeast coast of Isabella. I called to Kathleen and we both began rowing together. We cleared the rocks and by 9 a.m., Excalibur Pacific was off the shore of Tortuga Island. This collapsed crater in the shape of a turtle was the turning point in our row out of the “Galápagos Sea.” We stopped and saw we had entered the west-flowing current. Tortuga Island was slowly slipping by as we traveled west in the current. We tied off the oars and had a hot meal for the first time in two days. Kathleen scrambled fresh eggs with onions, boiled water for coffee, and cut thick slices of Ecuadoran bread. We’ve christened the new bench that Efrien and I had built in Forest Nelson’s workshop by eating breakfast on it and watching Tortuga Island recede to the east. Times like this make it seem all worth the difficulty of ocean rowing. A flock of small black-and-white petrels landed nearby and danced lightly on the surface of the sea, using their delicate feet to attract fish.
Twenty-nine hours after leaving Academy Bay we took a long nap and got up late in the day to row a few more hours. At sunset, Excalibur Pacific was about four miles off the south coast of Isabella, so we took in the oars and allowed the boat to drift. We slept well as the boat bobbed along in a light southeast breeze and clear skies.
The next day, with the rising sun and dissipating sea mist, we felt good and optimistic about the row to the Marquesas Islands. We had successfully navigated our way from Peru to the Galápagos Islands, and now were on our way to French Polynesia. Ahead lay the broadest stretch of ocean on the Pacific Ocean. The distance of 3,500 miles was almost as far as our row across the Atlantic.
The beautiful weather of the first two days after leaving Isabella and the Galápagos put us in a good frame of mind, but it was not to last. When land disappeared over the horizon, the weather settled into overcast skies and intermittent rain squalls. The wind and waves consistently hit the boat broadside and made for rocky conditions. With the relentless motion, we had trouble sleeping at night and woke every twenty minutes to move around and stret
ch our numb limbs.
The weather was surprising because the South Pacific of my imagination was balmy, with steady trade winds. Perhaps it was the time of year, but according to the South Pacific Pilot Chart, which was designed with an overlay of weather-predicting wind roses, we were well within the good-weather season. It could have been that the statistics used to create the pilot charts were recorded by merchant ships whose extreme height above the water’s surface gave a very different perception of the ocean environment compared with our meager six feet above the water.
Curt’s log: August 29
The bananas from Santa Cruz are all going yellow. The huge stalk that once harbored a cricket who jumped off the boat the first week at sea, is tied on top of the roof of the aft cabin. We see yellow bananas while rowing so we’re always taking a break to eat one. Fresh food like this keeps up our strength. The only problem is that they are ripening so fast that we find it hard to keep up. It feels like we are on some kind of banana diet: banana milk, bananas dipped in peanut butter, and banana sourdough bread. Just for variety last night, I put sliced bananas in the frying pan, poured rum on them, and set a match to them. Voilà! Banana flambé.
Even with the fresh food, we often have food dreams that make us hungry. I dreamed we were at a fine French restaurant checking out the menu. I saw all the wonderful entrees to choose from but woke up before I had a chance to order.
On Sunday mornings we make a big breakfast and don’t start rowing until 10 a.m. One Sunday, I made crepes for breakfast with jam rolled up inside and maple syrup on top. But even this breakfast doesn’t make our food dreams go away.
The bulgur from Peru continues to be in our diet. It once fed Callao and now it feeds us. We add it to soup or bread dough or sometimes make a cereal. The bulgur is better than the stale oatmeal we bought in the Galápagos.
September 5. Today we heard the sailboat Blue Goose checking into the ham radio network to report an adverse current. A single-hander named Chuck who owns the sailboat, left the Galápagos for the Marquesas before us. He has encountered an adverse current west of our present position. We’ve been rowing southwest, trying to counteract the south-southeast wind and row around the region of adverse current. It makes for a choppy ride. Mileage is only 15 miles in the last 24 hours. We may have hit the bad current.
We are near the San Francisco-to-Punta Arenas shipping lanes, so have been looking out for ships. Saw a ship this morning at 0530 but couldn’t raise them on the VHF. Strange, because we had the radio checked at Academy Bay and it works perfectly. The ships either aren’t listening or don’t respond.
Getting used to being at sea again with the bad weather and adverse sea conditions took a toll on our bodies and minds. The fresh food was going fast, and we were eating a lot of instant mashed potatoes and drinking sweetened fruit drink for energy. On September 11, we spotted a large dorado near the boat. We pulled in the oars, and Curt went into the water with the spear that we’d been given by the French couple in the Canaries and that Curt had adapted into a spear gun with the aid of a large rubber band. The water was much warmer than it had been in the Humboldt Current and so blue that it was possible to see to a great depth. He swam down to about thirty-five feet for the encounter with the four-foot dorado and fired the spear gun into the side of the fish, but he couldn’t pull it out. The dorado was so large that it pulled him after it for a short distance under the water. Finally, the spear bent enough that it came loose and the dorado sped away. Curt surfaced with the spear gun and a frustrated look on his face.
Later in the day, I was sitting on Benchly (the nickname we gave to the new Galápagos bench) reading when I saw a small grouper and called Curt. He suited up and dove in. This time the spear worked well and we enjoyed a fresh meal of grouper with onions and peppers from Santa Cruz.
CHAPTER 29
Overboard—Navigating Like a Native
September 13, 1984
THUMP. SILENCE. THE BOAT DIDN’T feel right; she felt heavier and yet empty. I tilted my head, listening for Curt’s voice calling out the next altitude measurement of the star Regulus. But there was nothing but the swishing of waves as they broke beside the boat.
All at once it hit me: the boat’s motion felt strange because I was alone. The boat was empty because Curt wasn’t where he was supposed to be: on the aft deck, taking measurements of the morning stars. The realization that I was all alone on the rowboat was like a firecracker going off inside of me. With no thought in my mind but to find him, I charged out of the forward cabin without grabbing my glasses. I stumbled barefooted along the crowded nine-foot deck to where he should have been, a million thoughts going through my mind: I know he’s attached to the safety harness, so he’s probably dragging behind the boat. Does he still have the sextant? Is it on deck? What if I’m too late? What if I’m alone? I scanned both sides of the deck but it wasn’t there.
I looked out at the breaking waves to where Curt was dragging behind the boat. Even without my glasses, I saw his flailing arms, and my ears picked up his screams above the wind.
“Sharks! The sharks are going to get me! Pull me in!”
I looked around the deck again for the sextant and then reached out to the safety line that attached Curt to the boat, the lifeline that connected me to the only other human being in this ocean, and began pulling hard.
He was heavy in his soaked cotton sweats. I braced my right foot on the corner of the starboard gunwale so I wouldn’t go overboard with his weight.
“Stop screaming! There’s no shark out there. Help me to pull you in!” I yelled.
The tautness of the line eased as he tried swimming toward the boat. Hand over hand, I pulled until he was looking up at me from the water, still mumbling nonsensically about the sharks that were coming for him.
“No, it’s okay. There’s no shark. Just help me now!” I reached down to grab his arms while the boat dipped precariously to the water’s edge. “Get your leg on the gunwale. I can’t do it if you don’t help.”
I pulled hard with both hands, hauling his body over the sweep oar that was tied along the side of the gunwale. It was a difficult maneuver with sopping wet cotton sweats. He looked at me, eyes slightly glazed, as he rolled on his back, the hood of his sweatshirt still tied tightly around his white face.
“Where’s the sextant?” he asked.
“It’s not here, it’s not on deck. Did you drop it?”
He thought and shook his head. “I don’t remember … I think I dropped it…. I just remember standing there one minute with the sextant up to my eye and the next … I was flying through the air.”
I looked at him and then turned away. Our solitary, undisturbed world was shattered because the sextant had been lost. The sea now appeared menacing, and the wind blew uncomfortably hard against the boat, pushing us to where we did not know.
I looked back at Curt, who was sitting up, propped against the cabin hatch, in apparent shock from what had just happened. I turned to look out at the ocean waves breaking with a whooshing sound around the rowboat. Though it was another rough day at sea, the implicit dangers of the rowing voyage loomed greater than they ever had before. I looked hard at the water, willing the sextant to float by. For an absurd moment, I imagined that it was there, a gray shape floating easily beside the gunwales, so close I could just reach out and grab it. But it was only my mind already playing a survival game. I blinked and looked again. The grayness became foam from a wave shattering itself on the ocean’s surface. We were rowing a small homemade boat across 3,500 miles of open ocean from the Galápagos Islands to the Marquesas, a small collection of volcanic, mountainous islands. Now with the sextant lost, we had to figure out how to find those islands with only a cheap Casio watch to back up our Rolex Oysters, a ham radio, and navigation tables with star altitudes. We had just thirty days’ worth of water and food.
From the moment we lost the sextant, the sole navigational instrument available to us in 1984, we were lost at sea. It took a while to
comprehend what this meant. But as Lukin Zoran, the Yugoslavian seaman had once taught us, it was better to take remedial action right away than to stop and lose momentum from a major event like the loss of the sextant. To explain what had happened to an audience he imagined would watch this film in the future, Curt got out the camcorder and gave it to me to operate. I sat hunched against the bow hatch and pushed the small Record button, listening to Curt’s recounting of the moment the boat was slammed by a wave and he felt himself cartwheel off the deck into the cold ocean water. When we replayed the recording later with the camera’s battery plugged into the solar panels, Curt sounded dazed and looked shocked by what could have happened to him if he had not been wearing his safety harness.
After Curt worked out the star sights that he had been able to get, we pulled out all the eastern South Pacific charts from below deck and spread them on the cabin floor. Our last known position was 5 degrees, 8 minutes south and 108 degrees, 22 minutes west.
Looking at me with a strained expression, he said, “The chance of anyone finding us out here is nil. We’re nothing but a speck on the ocean. No one is going to find us.”
I stared back, but I was determined not to be discouraged. “What if we built some kind of astrolabe or protractor to try to measure the sun or stars? We could get a general idea of where we are that way, can’t we?”
The greatest danger seemed to be the possibility of missing our destination, the Marquesas Islands. If we were more than a few miles off course, the South Equatorial Current could force us into the sparsely settled Tuamotu atolls, an area of thousands of miles of treacherous currents and low-lying coral reefs. Most recently, the atolls of Mururoa and Fangataufa in the southeastern Tuamotu Archipelago had become infamous as a nuclear testing site for France’s government under then president François Mitterrand. Our food and water could run out if we didn’t land on a populated atoll. The potential dangers mounted as we worked through the possible scenarios.
Rowing for My Life Page 20