By 8:30 p.m., the boat was off the island airport and on the outer fringes of the barrier reef surrounding Tutuila. To a certain extent, we counted on the coastal currents to push us away from land, but rowing was necessary to guide the boat in the right direction. The wind speed picked up.
At 10 p.m., we were in a full gale with winds from the northwest. The wind had completely veered to the opposite direction and we were in danger of crashing onto the reefs. With a safety harness on, Curt went out on deck to put out the sea anchor. The height of the sea had risen to twenty feet in just a short time. The wind blew so hard the tops of the waves were pure spray. Hopefully the sea anchor would slow our progress north.
Throughout the night we took turns looking out the Lexan port to sight for fishing trawlers. The wind switched briefly to the west and then came back to the north and the northeast. We had learned on the Marquesas-to-Samoa row to expect bad weather when the wind blew from the northeast.
In the early hours of June 1, I woke Curt to say conditions had calmed down. The wind was a mere Force 3 from the east. It was still overcast, but the seas were rowable. As I made a light breakfast, Curt rowed with the rudder set in a westerly direction. From bearings taken off of distant Tutuila, we gathered that a north-flowing current was affecting Excalibur Pacific. The news was both good and bad. To the north lay Western Samoa, and in between Tutuila and Western Samoa was a channel with a strong north-setting current.
By noon of the next day, Western Samoa was twenty miles off our starboard. We thought of Beth, who had said she would visit Western Samoa at this time. Later she told us of a moderately strong earthquake that hit Samoa the night we had the gale-force winds. We had experienced the earthquake in the form of heavy weather as we rowed hard to pull Excalibur Pacific away from the gravitational force generated by the north flowing tide of the channel.
In the early evening, as I sat on the bench peeling a taro root and carrots for a stew, I saw a strange east–west shelf cloud, outlined against the completely overcast sky, passing almost directly above the boat. It was too quiet for the ocean, I thought. A slight breeze blew. I called to Curt, who came out with the cameras and photographed the phenomenon. The western South Pacific, we were quickly figuring out, had a very different weather system from the eastern side.
Curt’s log: June 4
Overcast and very windy today. Force 5 to 6 and winds out of the south-southeast. Too many squalls with the wind right on the beam making the boat rock back and forth heavily.
We are 190 miles from Tutuila as the crow flies. Nearest land is 75 miles south-southeast. Tonga Islands? Perhaps this is why the waves are so miserable and hard hitting. It’s like having a freight train racing at the boat and bam! When it hits, it hits hard. The small dagger board in the bow [built with Efrien in the Galápagos] is helping to maintain our course.
The new Autohelm ordered in Samoa appeared to be in trouble this morning but I checked the power supply and found loose connections. It’s okay now.
Our diet is pretty good with cucumbers, onions, potatoes, and taro. The taro was good with tomato sauce last night but it was heavy and gave us a stomachache.
The wind of a couple of nights ago came from the northwest, which isn’t good. These winds last for hours and blow very hard with tremendous downfalls. The amount of rain that comes down is astonishing.
We had been at sea for a miserable week after leaving American Samoa. The sky was a relentless shade of dark gray and rough seas whipped up by high winds constantly blew cold spray into our faces as we rowed. One night, after Curt threw out the sea anchor again to slow the boat’s drift to the south, he confessed he was depressed about the dangerous weather conditions. I looked up from my book, the words swimming on the page with the rocking and rolling of the boat. “What? What’s the matter?”
“I said this weather is getting me down. I wonder if we should keep going with this expedition.”
I looked at him, surprised. Though I knew he wasn’t happy with the lousy conditions, I didn’t think he wanted to quit. Then I realized we had done a reversal of roles from the beginning of the South Pacific row when I was depressed about leaving South America. Though nowadays, I wasn’t happy with the weather either, and most likely being pregnant on the rowboat was making my life uncomfortable, I was all for continuing the row to the end. I didn’t want to give up at this point, but a part of me knew that I really didn’t want to leave Curt on his own. He was tired and run-down, and he wanted to be done with the trip. Or maybe he was feeling guilty for pushing to leave Samoa with the possibility of pregnancy hanging over the expedition. It might not be just the two of us on the boat anymore.
“What are the possibilities for finishing this trip?” he asked another day as Excalibur Pacific rolled around. The boat felt like a marine version of a Bobo doll with the waves pushing us this way and that way all day long. I looked closely at him and asked, “Do you mean stopping at an island in the Fijis?” He nodded. The Fijis consist of hundreds of islands and atolls. They were approximately a hundred miles south of our present course.
“Well,” I said, and reached for the Sailing Directions for the Pacific Islands Planning Guide. “There are quite a few islands listed in this book. Are you thinking of a deserted island?” I sounded like a tourist agent: “Need an island to crash-land on? Let’s see what we can find.”
“It depends on whether there are inhabited ones nearby.”
I scanned the descriptions closely. After spending several months on sparsely populated Polynesian islands, we had a fair idea of what life on an island was like.
“Remember Ahe and Rangiroa in the Tuamotus?” I asked. We had spent a rainy week trudging from one end of Rangiroa to the other, fighting flies and a sense of claustrophobia. It was odd we felt that way on land when our rowboat was only twenty-five feet long. Curt’s enthusiasm for an island hideaway dwindled for the day, and we went out to row.
A couple of days later we took up the conversation about quitting again. “How would we land at one of these islands?” I asked. Figuring out how to land on an island was a fun exercise in strategizing, something we enjoyed doing together. Our conversations now considered what it meant to quit the expedition when we were more than two-thirds of the way across the South Pacific. We considered how we would lose face if we just rowed into any port announcing the end of the row because we wanted to be done with it. Or was a possible pregnancy a good excuse?
“We could crash-land unless we navigate into a lagoon at slack water.” Time was passing and, despite the bad weather, the Fijis were slipping behind us. One Sunday we had awakened to the alluring smell of smoke from a distant cook fire. At once we were reminded of the Samoas, and knew the Fiji Islands were not far off.
“A crash-landing’s dangerous, and we’ll need the boat to get off the island at a later point.” Already there were reasons not to quit.
“What about Futuna or Wallis Island? They’re not too far west of our course.” I grabbed the Sailing Directions and thumbed the pages to find both islands.
“It says they’re a territory of France, though they’re on the western fringes of French Polynesia…. Wallis is surrounded by a barrier reef with an opening about at 176 degrees west. We’d have to negotiate a pretty tricky tidal flow to get in there.” I looked up at Curt, who nodded. “Futuna hasn’t got the barrier reef like Wallis, but the best ports are in the south and west, and you have to negotiate a narrow passage between it and Alofi Island.”
“That sounds like a lot of effort to get into those islands.”
“Yeah, I agree. It’s a lot of effort, in this boat, to get into any port.”
For the rest of the week, as the Fijis slipped by, we talked of one scenario after another until we compromised and plotted a course to Efate Island in the western Melanesian archipelago of Vanuatu. Port Vila, Efate would be a good stopover to reassess how I was feeling and buy last-minute fresh food supplies before going into the Coral Sea and through the Great Barrier
Reef, though it was risky for us to stop at any island. In Samoa, we had bought enough supplies to last until Australia, to avoid having to stop. After all, when we rowed from Peru to the Galápagos, we hadn’t been successful in reaching San Cristóbal. Adverse currents and winds caused us to miss the island and instead land at Santa Cruz. On the second leg to the Marquesas, our original port of call was Hiva Oa and not Ua Pou. As a matter of fact, Pago Pago was the first island we reached as initially planned.
Role-playing worst-case scenarios had been good for us psychologically, besides giving us a cheap form of entertainment as we imagined challenging crash landings on remote Fijian atolls. In our ham radio contacts with yachts we’d met earlier in the row and maritime nets, we never shared our thoughts about quitting. But just figuring out how we could quit the row, oddly enough, made us stronger in our resolve to follow the expedition to the end.
Sea Snakes and Pumice
Curt’s log: June 25
According to my calculations, we are approximately 100 miles from Efate. It’s important to approach the island properly because of the numerous islands and outlying reefs in the Vanuatu archipelago.
The other night we were sitting on deck eating a spaghetti dinner as the seas continued to flatten out. The silence was eerie. The north wind had died down to a whisper. All of a sudden we heard “Swishhh, swishhhh,” and I said, “What’s that?” Both of us turned in unison at the sound.
“There it is!” Kathleen pointed off the aft cabin, at a large yellow sea snake swimming on the surface of the water. It was so quiet that we could hear the movement of its tail swishing back and forth as it moved along away from the boat. Kathleen recalled reading that a bite from such a sea snake could mean death. I wondered out loud why the snake had suddenly appeared off the stern. And then we realized the snake had probably been on the boat! [According to the Sailing Directions for the Pacific Planning Guide, sea snakes are mostly found in coastal areas and rarely far out at sea.]
A few days later, we heard a tinkling sound against the hull when we woke in the early morning. The sound wasn’t coming from under the hull but beside the boat, at the waterline. There wasn’t anything out there until one afternoon, when I was rowing, I saw a gray skein of floating rocks nearby. I looked closer and saw it was pumice: small irregular lumps of gray pumice shot full of holes from the submarine volcano that had spewed them into the seawater. I felt my skin prickling when I recognized them. When we looked at the samples that I had scooped from the sea beside Excalibur Pacific, we felt a sense of awe for what was happening in the ocean below us. It was frightening to think that, beneath Excalibur Pacific, somewhere on the ocean’s bottom, there could be an active volcano.
As we drew closer to the archipelago of Vanuatu and the island of Efate, the wind blew in stronger gusts from the north and then the northwest. The sky to the west took on a menacing look, becoming darker than the oncoming night. Thunder rumbled around the boat, and lightning flashed intermittently off in the distance. One day I took down the dipole radio antenna that we had been using to supplement the whip antennas, disconnected the radio wires, and stuffed them into a plastic bag behind the starboard oars. We tried to sleep, but by 2 a.m., the wind and waves were too strong to ignore.
“How are the sea anchors?” Curt asked. The day before, I had spent the afternoon untangling the ropes that led from the swivel to the grommet holes in the sea anchors. Though the swivel was supposed to prevent fouling of the lines, the boat’s jerky motion and hard thrust from the waves caused the ropes to twist around each other and sometimes even unravel their braid.
“They’re okay,” I answered. “But I’m not sure you should put on your safety harness in this lightning when you go on deck.” The metal clips on the front of the harness worried me.
Curt agreed and tied a plain rope around his waist instead. Thunder and lightning are the most frightening occurrences imaginable in a small boat. In our minds, lightning was apt to strike metal anywhere, including the safety harness.
The motion of the boat smoothed out noticeably with the sea anchor deployed from the stern. Excalibur Pacific slowed her southeast drift, and we were able to sleep easier. But in the morning Curt found the sea anchor had torn and was dangling by two ropes, side by side. I wondered how far south the boat had gone overnight. With Efate so near, what if we missed it and went into the Coral Sea?
One evening, as Excalibur Pacific drifted in calm seas, we were suddenly awakened by the sound of thousands of tiny pumice stones hitting the boat. It was startling, and we both fought for the chance to get out of the cabin first to see this phenomenon. For as far as the eye could see, a gray blanket of pumice floated on the nearly flat surface of the sea. It was an eerie scene, as we floated in the middle of it all in our orange rowboat. I fell back to sleep that night listening to the tinkling sounds of pumice as the boat drifted along.
June 27, 1985: A Quick Turnaround in Efate Island, Vanuatu
Groggily, I opened my eyes after a fitful night’s sleep. Something was different; the boat wasn’t doing its usual back-and-forth dance through the waves. Curt got up on his knees and pushed the hatch door open. “Shit! Kathleen, get up! We’ve got to row!”
I pushed my way past him and saw to the northwest, less than a couple of miles away, the wooded shores of an island, which we assumed was Efate. Without a word, I knew what had to be done. Curt stumbled over the rowing stations to the rudder, while I shoved out a set of oars and began to row, pulling the bow of the boat around and pointing toward the island. Excalibur Pacific had drifted past the southeastern corner of the island and was headed in a southwesterly direction, away from Efate. Curt joined in the rowing, and within a short time we were headed in the direction of Port Vila, the island’s capital. I pulled in my oars after a while and went into the cabin to make a snack.
“Hey, do you realize how close we came to Efate? How close we came to crash-landing on a reef?” I called out to him as I cut up the Australian canned cheddar cheese. I handed out a couple of sandwiches and poured two cups of hot coffee.
“Yeah, very lucky, the navigation was almost too accurate,” he agreed. It was frightening to consider how we had very nearly carried out our post-Samoa fantasy to end the crossing
The row along the Efate coast was pleasant as we took turns rowing and reading. We were reading a book apiece and one Lawrence Sanders murder mystery together. I rowed while Curt read out loud about the vicious Sanders’ murderer and her victims. Sometimes I would ask to have a passage repeated, and then he had to almost shout above the banging of the dagger boards as they knocked about. Once we heard an engine, and I looked over to see a large, ungainly motorboat coming our way. From the deck, a small group of Melanesian fishermen gestured with ropes in their hands, offering to tow us to shore. On the nearby reefs, locals waved a handkerchief, frantically cautioning us of the dangers. We refused the tow and headed away from the reef with a friendly wave and smile, though if I had rechecked the Sailing Directions and saw that the coast around Efate still contained pockets of mines from World War II, as I later did in port, we might not have been so blasé about our welfare.
“These people are very nice,” I commented. “Come on, it’s my turn to read.”
Eventually, the range lights of Port Vila appeared, and we lined up Excalibur Pacific to row into port on the east side of Mele Bay without further trouble in the early evening light. Melanesia, in the western South Pacific, was different enough from Polynesia that we looked forward to a stay here. In port, we found international sailboats, including Greenpeace’s anti-nuclear testing ship Rainbow Warrior that was later bombed and sunk in Auckland, New Zealand by the French government. On shore were the remnants of a joint British and French condominium, which was a curious mix of Anglo–Franco rule. The indigenous Vanuatuans spoke a pidgin English in addition to the many dialects of their own languages. The result was an extremely diverse independent nation of hundreds of islands.
Efate was rainy and windy
the week we were in port. When news of high pressure and calm seas came from the weather bureau, Curt pushed to leave right away, though I wanted to spend more time in port. We bickered over the departure date, but with the boat restocked with fresh eggs, potatoes, and fruit, Curt reasoned it was important to leave on the same day we had begun the row from Callao the previous year. I didn’t see the connection in the same way he did.
So it was on July 4, 1985, exactly one year after the voyage began at Callao, Peru, that we paddled the dinghy out to Excalibur Pacific after a farewell meal at the local restaurant. Though we were still at odds over the quick turnaround on Efate, Curt insisted we film ourselves getting ready to leave and waving goodbye. I hated when he pushed me around like that, but it was easier to put on a public show of collegiality than refuse to be filmed. I sat down to row, imagining Curt breathing a sigh of relief that he was not going out alone. He pulled up the anchor, and we began rowing with the last of the incoming tide, as the plan was to be partway out of Mele Bay by high tide, so that during the night the outgoing tide could carry us safely clear of Devil’s Point, a low wooded promontory located on the west end of Mele Bay. A large French container ship, Capitane Cooke, was leaving Port Vila, and when it came abreast of us, there were three loud farewell blasts from the ship. At the same time, the French flag on her stern dipped three times in salute and the sailors lined the gunwales, waving.
Not since leaving Callao had I felt so apprehensive, though at the same time I was confident in my ability to complete the row. We said little to each other as we pulled at the oars, each of us already in another world. This was the last leg of the voyage and its crux: the Coral Sea, the Great Barrier Reef, and Cairns, Australia.
Rowing for My Life Page 25