Kathleen woke me so we could go out and row away from the storm now that the wind had stopped. I didn’t want to go out on deck in the rain in the dark. But she pushed me because it was our chance to break out of the low-pressure trough, so we got dressed, clipped on our safety harnesses, and went out on deck.
The night was pitch dark and the rain came down straight in the absence of any wind. The rain had damped down the waves. I untied the oars while Kathleen handed out the rowing seats from the aft cabin. We began rowing but the boat did not surge forward the way she would in following seas. Though there was an absence of any defined direction to the waves or current, the boat plowed through the low waves without a great deal of effort.
Anyone who thinks it is possible to get across an ocean in a rowboat by the flow of the currents alone is mistaken. The currents on the surface are linked to the weather conditions and if we don’t row on a regular basis, we will never reach Australia. The other night we also needed to get out from under that low-pressure trough and back into the area of trade winds and good weather. We both wanted to be rowing in the bright sunshine, surfing the boat on following seas and watching for schools of flying fish.
Our minds were half asleep as we rowed the boat through the rainy night until a light cut across the bow. We stopped rowing and jumped up. It was the moon, which was nearly full and so low in the western sky that it emerged from behind thick black clouds into a line of clear sky along the western horizon.
“See?” I said to Kathleen. “We’ll be out from under these clouds by breakfast time.” She agreed but asked if there was such a thing as a rainbow by moonlight.
I had never heard of a moon bow but when we looked directly off the stern, incredibly, there it was: Much dimmer than a rainbow by sunlight, but plainly visible with the bright moonlight and dark rain clouds. We stood on the deck watching this beautiful sight. Then Kathleen noticed an even more extraordinary sight: below the moon bow, there was a second one showing as a faint shadow below the first.
At the most unexpected times, the sea shows us a rare scene of primitive beauty such as this. We resumed our rowing, our eyes fixed on the double rainbow by moonlight until it faded away in the light of the day. By the time the sun rose, we were rowing out from under the edge of the clouds. When the sun broke above the clouds, we took in the oars and I made pancakes for breakfast.
April 20. Sea calm and swelly. Clouds on the horizon all around us and things are very slow. I estimate if we continue an average of 42 miles a day to Samoa, it will be about two and a half weeks. We have nicknamed the boat “Slow Boat to Madness.”
The Autohelm electronic self-steering device finally gave up the ghost. It had worked so well up to this point of the expedition, but the constant pounding of the waves breaking over it caused the inner electronic components to corrode and stop working. I’ve tried to fix it by taking it apart several times but the corrosion is too advanced.
It is much more difficult to steer a course while rowing without the Autohelm. We have to tie off the rudder, thus steering by watching the compass attached to the aft cabin bulkhead. We have to pay more attention to the course as we come closer to Tutuila Island in the Samoa Islands.
April 21. There is the tremendous thunderstorm sky astern of Excalibur Pacific. Black, deep rumbles, flashes of white lightning, and it is only 4:30 p.m. Kathleen says she is trying to maintain calmness and not give way to extreme feelings of fright. The wind has died out—swallowed up by the thunderstorms to the east, northwest, and southeast for an hour or so. The sky is totally closed down. All the fish have disappeared and there is one bird sitting on the rudder. He just let out a squeak as the thunder rumbled close to the boat.
April 22. The thunderstorm did not come in as bad as predicted. There was rain but it passed to the south of us. Now the sky is completely overcast and the temperatures are cold. Weather report out of Honolulu this morning indicates a low-pressure trough is moving at 15 miles per hour with four-foot waves, while the thunderstorms bothering us are on a line directly crossing route.
It took forty days to reach the natural harbor of Pago Pago in the island of Tutuila—better known as American Samoa—from Ua Pou. During most of the time, the weather was poor and often consisted of great anvil-shaped towering cloud masses that covered the western sky in the front of the boat, creating winds so violently strong that the seas would be flattened around the rowboat for miles. To control the boat, Curt was constantly throwing out the sea anchor so we could ride out the storm until the prevailing east wind and clear skies built back into our region of the South Pacific.
Three weeks at sea, we decided, was the cut-off point when fatigue would set in and we would tire easily. One evening on the last third of the Marquesas-to-Samoa crossing, Curt was on deck and saw a green flare in the distance. He remembered the stars near the flare so he was able to get a bearing. That night, we heard on the ham radio, a warning was being issued for the yacht Sealestial, which we had seen in Tahiti. It was being chartered with a full crew by the journalist William F. Buckley for a book he was writing on sailing in the Pacific. When we learned that Sealestial was overdue from its crossing from Tahiti to Hawaii, Curt plotted the course he imagined it must have taken and discovered that it crossed our course right where we were.
What we did next is an example of how rationality can be eroded on a long voyage in a small boat. For the next two days, we changed course and rowed toward where he had seen the flare. We imagined that Sealestial must have sunk and we would row to it and rescue Buckley and company! We rowed many miles off course before we came to our senses and realized that we had long since gone over the area of the flare, which had probably been a signal from a Japanese tuna fishing boat. Again we changed course and got on route for Samoa. After that, we scrutinized any decisions we made to guarantee we would arrive in Samoa in a couple of weeks.
The detour almost cost us, though. When we pulled into Pago Pago harbor in a rainstorm, the harbormaster told us that a severe low-pressure system was due to move over the Samoan archipelago imminently.
May 1985: American Samoa—Arrival
In the early evening of May 1, we were on deck, resting from a rowing session, when I saw the faint rounded shape on the western horizon.
“I see land, it’s land!” I screamed. “Look, it’s over there!” No matter how many times I’d first seen land after a long passage, I still found the approach by boat exciting. Curt turned quickly to see where I pointed: close to the horizon, in a magenta smudge, there was the dark outline of an island.
“There’s another one!” He pointed north. “These must be the Manua Islands.” The late anthropologist Margaret Mead had done much of her research for Coming of Age in Samoa in the Manua Islands, which lie next to American Samoa.
We rowed throughout the night while Curt fine-tuned his navigation by reducing the moon sights he had taken earlier with the sextant. By daybreak, the last of Tau and Ofu islands in the Manuas were off our stern, and Tutuila Island, American Samoa, was not far off. We rowed into the next morning, as the sky began to darken with ominous dark gray clouds that marched in from the southeast. The green mountainous coast of Tutuila was only five miles off the starboard as we rowed alternately in rain and sunshine.
On the final approach to Tutuila, a motorized catamaran fishing boat came up to us. The man, a Samoan, driving the boat called over, “Hey, you guys okay?”
“We’re fine. We’re just rowing across the Pacific.” Curt replied in a cheery tone.
“Oh …” He frowned and smiled uncertainly. “Good luck then.” The man and his son motored away.
From our rowing seats, we watched a yellow American-style school bus driving along the coastal road of Tutuila. With some trepidation, we passed a wrecked freighter aslant on a nearby reef.
The entrance to Pago Pago slowly appeared between two sloping verdant hills. Red and green navigation buoys guided us into the inner harbor, while fishing trawlers passed by on the way out to se
a for an evening’s work. Finally, the range lights appeared, a pair of light beacons indicating the safest course through the inner harbor, and we lined up Excalibur Pacific by pulling hard on the starboard oars to counteract the current. A long sleek Samoan amatasi (Polynesian rowing boat) glided by us, the coxswain calling for the paddlers to switch sides. Cars sped along the single-lane road that rimmed the inner harbor. As the clouds settled in for the night, we reached an anchorage, glad to be off the ocean after forty days from Ua Pou in the Marquesas Islands.
Early the next morning, Excalibur Pacific strained at her mooring in near gale-force winds. Inside the bow cabin, we snuggled together inside the sleeping bag, thankful we were not at sea in this weather. Later in the morning, though, we reluctantly got dressed and went to check in with customs and immigration. In Pago Pago, we read in the guidebook, officials do not come out to newly arrived boats. One had to notify them by radio and then paddle to shore.
In the strong winds and choppy waves, Curt took out the dinghy from the aft cabin and pumped it up while I held on to it as it flopped madly in the wind. With our passports and papers in a waterproof bag, I rowed the dinghy over to the small boat dock and we went to huddle in a nearby shelter, waiting for the harbor officials. A friendly Samoan who was fishing off the dock’s edge cheerfully informed us the US officials did not like to come out in the rain and would most likely wait until the weather calmed down.
Eventually, we cleared customs and began a month-long stay. There were several jobs we had to accomplish, like renewing my passport. Though it expired in a month and a half, I didn’t want to take any chances arriving in Australia with an out-of-date passport. With a little legwork and red tape, Samoan style, I sent off my passport through the proper offices to Hawaii, where they promptly returned the new passport with the canceled old one in only one week.
CHAPTER 34
Pregnant or Not?
May 1985
I WAS SITTING ON THE WINDY deck of Excalibur Pacific when I made up my mind. I would go to the island hospital and get a pregnancy test. My body was different; for a few weeks it had felt bloated and heavy. I suspected that we had had a little too much fun on the “Slow Boat to Madness” from the Marquesas, perhaps influenced by the child-centered cultures we had encountered throughout French Polynesia. It seemed wherever we traveled, there were children laughing and playing while the adults looked on with indulgent smiles. Sometimes families, our missionary friends Jane and Allan in Tahiti told us, would send a child to live with their grandparents to keep them company and help them with their lives. For the first time, I began to imagine what it might be like to have a child.
Curt, who had plans to work on the Autohelm that had died en route to Samoa, paddled me to shore where I would catch the local bus to the hospital. What would I do if the answer were a positive? Would we continue the row? I put those thoughts aside to climb on board the American-style public bus when it pulled up in front of me. I looked out the windows as we traveled through winding, rain-slick roads that led inland from a promontory and tried to imagine living on Tutuila. It was a lush, overgrown garden of tropical beauty, but we had been told that most of the villages on Tutuila were off-limits to foreigners, including Americans. Without permission from the village headman, you couldn’t even visit a village. Could we, I wondered, even find jobs in this American welfare state?
In the horribly crowded women’s section in the whitewashed hospital, a nurse told me to take off my clothes and wrap myself in the large cotton sheet that she handed me.
“But I’m only here for a pregnancy test!” I protested. Her response was an unsympathetic “Sorry, this is the way we do it.” I undressed and joined a crowd of huge half-naked Samoan women milling around the examination rooms. My turn would come, the nurse told me.
It was noisy and chaotic as I waited, and I began to doubt that I really needed to be there. Perhaps the challenging conditions of living on the rowboat had caused my period to be late. In a few minutes, before I changed my mind, I heard “Kathleen Saville” called over the confusion of Samoan and English. I walked over to the nurse, who asked me why I was there. “A pregnancy test,” I said, and was given a plastic cup with a top to pee in. She didn’t appear to notice that I was wrapped up in a bedsheet just to pee in a cup. In fact, there was a line at the bathroom, so I wasn’t alone in this bizarre ritual of peeing while wrapped in swaths of white sheeting.
I handed the sample to yet another nurse and fled. Outside in the pouring rain, I caught a bus back to the harbor and thought about what I had just been through and what it could mean if I were really pregnant. The idea didn’t hold any reality for me. It was more of a fantasy. At the harbor, I called over to Excalibur Pacific.
Curt popped his head out of the bow cabin, and I waved at him to come get me. He climbed into the little dinghy and paddled over. While I squeezed into the bow cabin and mopped my face from the rain, we had a good laugh over the images I created of myself draped in a bedsheet, jostling for service amid a mob of healthy Samoan women getting gynecological checkups. It was funny in retrospect, though the consequences of the results sat quietly in the back of my mind. Would I continue the row or not? Neither of us talked about it.
In the meantime, we told no one about the private side of our visit to Samoa and went on with boat repairs and yachting parties. The harbor smelled alternately of smoke and sour fish. The smoke drifted from the Sunday umu dinners that Samoan families prepared every weekend. Umus were the meals slow-cooked in a subterranean oven pit, and at our anchorage we were in direct line of the smoke. Years later, visiting my Azorean grandparents’ island of San Miguel, I was reminded of the Samoan umus when I encountered the Azorean specialty of cozido, which was cooked in the steaming vents of the subterranean volcanoes of that island.
The scent of Sunday smoke in Pago Pago was pleasant in comparison to the sour fish smell coming from the north end. A StarKist tuna factory regularly dumped their sewage in the harbor, causing much of the boat anchorage to be filled with a putrid, oily tuna smell. The harbor water was foul, too; the bottom of our dinghy turned a bright purple color that could not be washed off. Little barnacles started growing there within days of our arrival. There was a lot of life in the harbor, and not all of it was pleasant.
In a few days, it was time to call the hospital for the test results. The weather was windy the morning we paddled to shore so I could use the public phone near the marine shop. The dinghy oars were flimsy, but with a series of little short strokes, Curt rowed directly to the dock without too much sideways slippage.
In my backpack, I found a dime and the slip of paper with the number of the lab. I dialed and asked the American who answered for my results. He began laughing because his office was accounts and not the lab. I was in a testy mood and spoke to him sharply, asking him to transfer me. Chastened, he apologized and transferred the call right away, but it took a few minutes for the clerk to find the results. In my mind’s eye, I imagined the hundreds of rumpled slips of pregnancy results he was sifting through to find mine. When he came back, he reported the results as negative.
I thanked him and put down the phone. I walked over to a nearby bench and sat down. I felt curiously deflated, because I knew instinctively that my body was different. If I were pregnant, it would only be about two or two and a half months, and perhaps it was too soon for any signs.
Curt’s log: Pago Pago, May 30, late evening
After 27 days at anchor, we made final plans to leave for the final leg of the journey to Australia. On May 30, I pulled the dinghy out of the water for the final time. When I looked down at the slimy purple bottom that was covered with barnacles, I swore that I would never eat tuna fish again.
Kathleen didn’t want to leave Samoa so soon, and she protested by pointing out the sun dog halo around the sun. I looked up and saw the high choppy cirrus clouds and knew she was right: bad weather was coming in. But I wanted to leave Samoa because we’d lose the momentum of the voyage if we
didn’t go now. And besides, with Kathleen possibly pregnant, we might never finish the row. I told her that the most recent meteorology report said the weather at sea would be good for 48 hours, but she only shook her head.
High tide was approaching and we were ready. Yacht dinghies motored beside us as we rowed toward the harbor entrance. The crew from Iron Butterfly gave us a set of classical tapes they had thoughtfully recorded for us. Annie Laurie blew whistles and shouted good luck. Earlier in the day we had crammed, below deck, a long narrow plastic tube filled with the latest additions to our book collection: Berlin Game by Len Deighton, a couple of murder mysteries by Lawrence Sanders, Stephen King’s Cujo, and a few books by Australian authors Nene Gare (The Fringe Dwellers), Colleen McCullough (The Thorn Birds), and Nevil Shute (A Town Like Alice and On The Beach). Our friend Beth Ruze and her friends waved from Taloa. There was a commotion as Beth was motored up in a dinghy driven by Verne. “Here, these are for you,” She gave me two shell leis. “Good luck!” And at the same time Verne handed us two cold beers and said, “Bon voyage.”
Kathleen and I smiled at everyone but the same thought was going on behind our show of bravado: “I wish that was me on Taloa, watching someone else row out to sea.”
It is getting harder to make these departures into the unknown.
CHAPTER 35
Heavy Weather and Crash Landings
May 30–June 1985
I WISH I WAS DRINKING THAT beer on land,” Curt commented as the beer bottles rolled back and forth on deck while we rowed.
I gave him a dirty look and said, “Well, who was it that wanted to leave before June first?” He ignored me and stared straight ahead as he rowed. The weather was beginning to look uncertain, a fact he didn’t want to discuss.
Excalibur Pacific rolled with the coastal chop. The lights of Tutuila came on in the evening, one speck at a time. It was a beautiful island to watch from a distance. I pulled in my oars. “I think I’ll go lie down.” The motion of the sea was bothering me, as it always did the first week, but now I couldn’t keep down the seasickness pills and I suspected the negative pregnancy test results might have been wrong after all.
Rowing for My Life Page 24