That was over two months ago, but the memory remained strong.
Neither of us slept well that night, with the jerking motion of the boat on the sea anchor. By 6:00 a.m. we couldn’t take it any longer, and Curt crawled out on deck. He considered pulling in the sea anchor and rowing. But which way would he row?
Curt’s log: October 19
Which way would I row? It was a terrifying question. Instead, I set up the bench that I had made in the Galápagos with Efrien, and sat down and watched the seas. There was a thick haze across the horizon, making it impossible to time the sunrise for longitude. I sat on the bench and watched the waves and sky. When the haze burned off, I still couldn’t see land. I sat thinking about the situation, trying to keep down an overwhelming sense of dread.
Suddenly, a scent cut like an arrow through my entire psyche. I jumped up and sniffed the air. There it was again! That unforgettable smell: sweet and herbal. It was land. I called to Kathleen to come out.
She joined me on deck and sniffed the air. No, she didn’t smell anything. She looked at me as though I had been imagining things and said, “It must be your athlete’s foot medicine you were smelling.” With that, she turned around and crawled back into the cabin. “Do you want some breakfast?” she called over her shoulder. It was only going to be oatmeal and coffee, since after sixty-four days our food stores had become extremely limited. We had been eating the buggy Ecuadoran oatmeal for over 2 months now.
While Kathleen was making breakfast, I grabbed my tube of athlete’s foot medicine and compared the smells. It wasn’t the same! It was distinctly different. I had smelled land.
CHAPTER 31
The Color of Life
October 19, 1984
WE SAT ON DECK EATING oatmeal and sipping watery coffee. Occasionally, one of us would pick out a bug from the oatmeal, flick it into the wind, and continue eating. Curt looked preoccupied, and when we finished, he came out with his plan.
“The wind is coming out of the northeast,” he began. “I’m sure I smelled land on the wind this morning, and if I’m right, I smelled Hiva Oa and we missed it by going too far south.”
“That sounds logical,” I said. So powerful was our need to believe that land was somewhere nearby, it seemed perfectly plausible that we had just missed it by aiming for the smudge on the horizon two days ago. We had neglected to remember the adversity of inter-island currents from our island miss in the Galápagos.
He continued, “We must be somewhere southwest of Hiva Oa, but we could never reach it because we can’t row against this current and wind.” I nodded. “But Nuka Hiva and Ua Pou islands lie to the northwest of Hiva Oa, and if I’ve got it right, they lie to the north of our present position. If we row due north, we may just possibly be able to see one of those islands before the current carries us too far to the west. We could get a compass bearing from an island we could identify and radio to the sailboats in the island. One of them could come out and bring us a sextant, food, and water, or maybe tow us to the harbor,” He paused for a breath. “What do you think?”
I leaned over to rinse the cups and said, “Well, we did row south for half a day, and I think there’s a good chance that land lies north of our present course. Okay, let’s do it. Let’s row north. There’s nothing to lose at this point, right?”
“That’s right. It’s this or we’re heading for the Tuamotus, I figure.” I looked at him and nodded again.
Curt pulled in the sea anchor and changed the course to due north by adjusting the rudder and the compass-driven Autohelm. We sat down in our seats and rowed together all that day in a blur of bright sunshine, brisk wind, and spray. Throughout the night we rowed, taking turns to sleep and eat. In the early hours of the morning, we took a break to observe the meridian transit of kappa Orionis and got the impression we were still south of the star, and so still south of Hiva Oa or the more southern Marquesan island of Fatu Hiva.
At dawn we put out the sea anchor and once again ate a meager breakfast of buggy oatmeal in the cabin. We would give up the Marquesas after twenty-four hours if we could not see land.
Curt’s log: October 20
I stood on deck and looked out at the sea, striving to see some sign of land. A sickish feeling in my gut warned me that we might be very far from any land. I took compass bearings from clouds far off on the horizon to see if it made any sense for land to be under those clouds. But these clumps of cumulus clouds, sometimes an indication of land, were at random bearings.
I studied the waves, hoping to get information from them. The wind was blowing stronger now out of the east-northeast. There were four- to six-foot waves coming from the direction of the wind. As they rolled by the boat, I noticed two other types of waves, much smaller and subtler in nature. The wave patterns came from the southeast and northeast. Something instinctively told me that these were land waves caused by the bigger waves echoing off the islands. We had been at sea long enough to recognize the differences between ocean waves and land waves, and these waves were different from anything we had seen since leaving the region of the Galápagos more than two months ago. It seemed very clear to me that one group of waves was coming from the direction of Fatu Hiva and the other from Hiva Oa.
When Curt came back into the cabin, we talked about our current situation. We decided to continue rowing north, though it would be difficult after the long hours we put in the previous day and night. The wind, however, was becoming in our favor, as it blew briskly out of the east. Our course was northeast and we regained some of the lost longitude.
By sunset of the 20th, the skies were still clear, but there was no sign of land on the horizon. I was discouraged and very tired. We both retreated into silence and only spoke to each other briefly when we took our shifts at the oars. Fear was beginning to fill us individually as we rowed and struggled with thoughts of the consequences of missing the Marquesas. Images of my family flashed in my mind, and the idea of never seeing them again made me want to cry. I thought of my mother, and all of a sudden I found myself praying to her to help me. It had been many years since, as a little girl, I had asked my mother to help me. In the midst of this horrible situation, it was my mother I asked to come to my aid.
On the morning of the 21st, three days since missing land, Curt went out early to time the sunrise for a longitude check. We would at least know how far we had slipped beyond the Marquesas. He left the cabin as the dawn was breaking over the sea, the same as it had done for sixty-seven days since we had left the Galápagos.
He stood on deck and turned to look over the bow. And there it was, the most beautiful sight ever. “Land! Land!” I heard Curt yell and pushed the hatch open to see. It was Ua Pou! Its great basalt spires rose with incredible steepness out of the sea. I stood mesmerized by its beauty and what it meant to us. We turned to each other and hugged tightly. We were saved, it seemed. Ua Pou was only about thirty miles away, and that meant we could reach land the same day, on our own. I reached into the cabin and pulled out the cameras, and we both recorded our first real sight of land in months.
It took another fourteen hours of rowing to reach the island. In the final approach, we rowed a slightly eastward course to compensate for the west-flowing current. When the island was only five miles away, a strange splashing sound startled us.
“What’s that?”
I looked over my shoulder in time to see the tail of a whale disappear below the surface less than fifty feet from the boat. We left the oars trailing in the water and jumped up to get a better view. It was exhilarating to see whales close but a little frightening as well. There must have been fifteen minkes in the pod, all breaching and splashing their tails against the water for food.
By late afternoon, the land was quite close. We started pulling harder at the oars so we could be at anchor by dark. At sunset, we were rowing between Ua Pou and Motu Oa, a sixty-five-foot rock spire off the south coast. Thousands of nesting birds flew above our heads, some of them dipping down to the boat. For a few mi
nutes, we stopped rowing and let the current carry us west and gazed up at the greenery that covered the rock spires of Ua Pou. Never had land been so impressive. In a few minutes it was dark, and we were rowing in the shadow of the great obelisk of Motu Takahe. Its imposing presence silhouetted against the stars of the night acted as a signpost to turn north toward the lee shore of Ua Pou.
By 8 p.m., we were rowing along a quiet dark coastline. In the near distance, a dim cluster of lights appeared. We pointed the boat toward the lights and rowed on. As we rowed the boat closer to shore, there was the sound of hard-breaking surf. Would we be able to anchor here? Curt reached into the bow cabin and grabbed the foghorn from its place above my pillow. He brought the flare gun out for good measure, and while I rowed Excalibur Pacific closer, he fired flares and beeped the foghorn. The light from the flares illuminated a steep rocky shoreline lined with coconut palm trees. Flying fish attracted to the light flew into the gunwales of the boat. With all the noise we were making, someone woke up and paddled out of the darkness to greet us with a shy smile but saying nothing. Curt dredged up his high-school French mixed with English and said, “Nous sommes de la mer. Où ist possible ancler le bateau?”
The Marquesan seemed to understand and gestured that it would be fine to anchor the boat right where we were. Before we left, he said in French, “I will return tomorrow morning when it is light.”
Curt lowered the anchor, and I pulled hard on the oars one more time to set it. For the first time in more than two months, the boat was finally still. Curt sat on the bench, and I leaned against the bow cabin as we absorbed the sweet rich smell of land. We smiled at each other. Curt reached out his hand to me, and I came over and wrapped my arms around him in pure happiness.
Arrival in Ua Pou
As we lay in the cabin of the rowboat early in the morning of the first day, the enticing smell of wood smoke drifted into the port windows. We could hear the little village of Hakatau wake up with the sounds of children calling to each other, dogs barking, and roosters crowing. After two months at sea, it was as though our ears were more acutely attuned to the sounds of life on land than they had ever been before. When Curt crawled out on deck and I followed, the view from the rowboat, at anchor, was fantastically surreal. Everywhere we looked onshore, it was green. Green mountains, green palm trees, and green tropical fruit trees. Ua Pou, shaped like a diamond covering forty-one square miles, is the third largest of the six Marquesan islands. At the center of the island, the volcanic rock spires of Oave, Pouke, and Matahenua rose to more than four thousand feet above sea level behind the village.
Off the starboard bow, we spotted a dugout canoe with an outrigger heading our way. It was the man we had met the night before. He introduced himself as Charles, the local policeman. There were no French administrators in Hakatau, but he had informed the gendarmes in the small capital of Hakahau by radio of our arrival.
“The gendarmes are on their way down to check you in,” he said in French. “They said you are not to leave your boat until they arrive, but since they are coming by motorboat, and won’t be here for a few hours, would you like to come to shore and join us for a meal?”
Curt and I smiled and nodded our acceptance of his invitation. We were dying to get off the boat. Carefully, we lowered ourselves into Charles’s fifteen-foot canoe with Curt clutching a camera around his neck. Though it was made from a single hollowed-out log and rode close to the water, it was surprisingly stable because of the single outrigger. Charles paddled easily to shore, and when the boat crunched onto the boulder-strewn beach, we jumped out and turned back to help him pull his canoe ashore. Almost at the same time, Curt and I started to keel over from the odd sensation of being on land, a stable surface we weren’t used to anymore. Charles quickly reached out to both of us. He held us by our elbows as we stumbled with him up the beach. When we stopped, I sat down to hold my head, as the sensation of being on land was too much after being at sea for so long. Curt couldn’t focus his eyes on objects in the middle distance; the idea of a stationary object being fifty feet away seemed dimensionally impossible.
Charles came over to me and gave me his arm again as Curt staggered after us. We became aware of a crowd of Marquesan men dressed in shorts and women in brilliantly printed pareaus, a two-meter cloth, staring at us. I smiled at them, but it was difficult to tell what they were saying to me. The problem wasn’t the French some were speaking; rather, it was hard to separate out individual voices in a crowd because we had become so accustomed to our own on the rowboat and the tinny voices from the ham radio.
When it seemed as if things were becoming too overwhelming, Charles gestured toward a path that led to his house. We shakily made our way along it, taking in the sights as we walked. Curt snapped photos of the red and yellow bougainvillea bushes lining the way, of the skinny chickens running helter-skelter in front of us, and of the fat pigs resting under a mango tree chomping on dried coconut rinds. I felt as though I was moving through an extremely vivid scene from a 1960s Technicolor film set in the South Pacific. Charles reached up to pick a lime from a tree in his yard and handed it to Curt, who inhaled its citrus fragrance with a look of sensual pleasure. When we reached the porch of Charles’s house, a windowless blue prefab structure with a tin roof, Curt asked for a knife. He sliced open the lime and began eating it yellow-green peel and all. Mary Josephine, Charles’s wife came out the front door and graciously offered us a breakfast of mangos and crusty baguettes that she had baked in the village beehive oven behind their house.
As Curt ate his lime, I looked around, savoring the new sights and smells of a foreign culture I had never been in before. The village of Hakatau was charming with its bustle of life. From the rowboat, we had been unable to see much of the village because coconut palms and a mountain range obscured it from view. But as we waved goodbye to Mary Josephine and followed Charles back to the main stone pathway, the village unfolded in front of us, extending far into a verdant cleft between steep-sided mountains.
After a short time, we found ourselves tired and overwhelmed by all the new sights and sounds of the village. Curt asked Charles to take us back to the boat. As we sat on the deck of Excalibur Pacific, a flotilla of outrigger canoes returned from their morning’s fishing. A few of them paddled up to our gunwales and generously gave us gifts of green coconuts, bread, and fish.
In the afternoon, a motorboat arrived with two French gendarmes dressed in their neatly pressed khaki uniforms. While the Marquesan driving the boat held on to our gunwales, the gendarmes handed over arrival forms for us to fill out. When we handed them back, completed and signed with our scratchy signatures, they requested our passports to take back to Hakahau, Ua Pou’s capital, for the official stamp for entering their territory of French Polynesia. They then told us that the Marquesas Islands were poorly stocked with the kinds of supplies we would need to continue the row. We should consider going to Tahiti, they advised, to obtain fiberglass and resin to repair the boat and the oar that Curt had broken a week ago. In the well-stocked port of Papeete, we would find wheels and axles to repair a couple of the rowing seats that had also broken in the weeks before we reached the Marquesas.
Considering that the hurricane season had already begun in the western South Pacific, we revised our plans to leave within a few weeks and decided to stay in French Polynesia for at least five months until the good-weather season returned.
CHAPTER 32
Hiking in the Marquesas
November 1984
A MONTH AFTER DROPPING ANCHOR AND meeting up with yachting friends from the Galápagos Islands, we went for a hike into the lush interior of Ua Pou Island for an overnight camping trip. We walked along a dry streambed and climbed over huge volcanic boulders to reach higher into the verdant river valley. With dusk coming on, we made camp in a shallow cave on the banks of the streambed. The depth and height of our niche were perfect: it was easy to crawl into and lay out the sleeping pads, and it was protected from the evening’s light
drizzle. With raindrops pattering on the broad canopy of pandanus trees outside the cave and the rich scent of wet vegetation, I felt like an explorer deep in the tropical rainforest.
As early evening turned into darkness, we lay on our pads with a solitary candle flickering along the musty interior. We ate our usual Laughing Cow cheese with a shared baguette. Outside, the drizzle continued. We talked expedition matters, our favorite topic, speaking softly and then a little more forcefully as the drizzle came down harder.
“What’s that?” I asked. “Can you speak a little louder?”
“I said, we need to plan where to put Excalibur …” His voice disappeared. I felt dampness around my feet and saw a thin trickle of water seeping around the edges of the floor.
“Look, there’s water coming in here. Where do you think … from?” My voice faded in and out against a deeper sound above us, above the cave, and it wasn’t rain. All at once I knew what it was. We had to evacuate the cave right away because the stream was filling and a flash flood was starting. We grabbed our pads, stuck the snuffed-out candle and food into the backpacks, and scrambled out into the darkness. We had to climb very fast up the valley walls, as far upward through the vegetation as possible.
We climbed blindly upward, hand over hand. Our leather boat shoes made it even more difficult because they had no traction in the slippery mud. We grabbed tree branches, slippery leaves, whatever came to hand. The sound of rushing water came closer, but still we kept going in the dark, until finally there was a niche high enough above the now raging torrent.
For the rest of the night, we sat wedged behind a couple of skinny trees, like a pair of embattled seabirds in a teeming rainstorm. As the stream roared below us, Curt pulled our sleeping pads over us and we huddled closer for warmth. Neither of us could see the stream or even the trees we were wedged behind, it was so dark in the valley. Curt marveled over and over how close we had come to being drowned in the flash flood. And I marveled at our ignorance in setting up camp in a dry streambed, in monsoon weather. It seemed in the short time we had been on land that we’d forgotten to apply our hard-won survival skills learned at sea.
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