CHAPTER 36
Through the Coral Sea
July 1985
THESE DAYS ON THE ROWBOAT, life was not easy. I was sure I was pregnant, though we didn’t talk about it much because the possibility that I was not one hundred percent up to the job in this most dangerous part of the expedition was not acceptable. Still, I was in the best shape of my life, and morning sickness no longer bothered me. Unfortunately, I had to go out on deck to pee at all hours of the day and night, and sleeping with my leg pulled up against the cabin wall wasn’t as comfortable as it once was. The days of sleeping on my right side while facing the cabin wall were gone. This meant Curt was also sleeping on just one side, because we were able to sleep in the cabin together only if we interlocked our limbs like parts of a complex puzzle.
Curt’s log: July 9
The weather has been remarkably good up to now until the sky filled in today. Unfortunately, I’ve seen a sun dog or round halo around the sun, which means inclement weather within 24 hours. The wind has been northeast Force 2 or 3 for four days. There’s also a bit more swell from the southeast. I tried to get the weather report from Honolulu but they were off schedule.
One morning, I left Curt to his navigation and went out to set up my oars in the stern rowing station. I noticed more pumice than usual in the foot well, though there had been a fair amount since leaving Samoa six weeks prior. Initially, they were a great novelty, but after a few weeks the little floating stones were no longer so interesting.
I pulled at the oars, stroke after stroke, my arm and back muscles straining with the weight of extra food and water stores bought in Efate. The wind was now more out of the northeast, but the ocean swell was coming out of the southeast. I looked up at the sky, and there it was, a rainbow sun dog encircling the sun that meant bad weather ahead. The week of sunny skies and low rolling seas was about to end.
As we came closer to the Coral Sea, any kind of bad weather made us more apprehensive than ever. Sailors and merchantmen on ships all across the South Pacific had warned us of the unpredictable nature of the weather in this subtropical sea. Violent gales that could pop up out of nowhere were not uncommon, nor were currents that split off and flowed in different directions. As we rowed toward Australia’s east coast, we were in the lower reaches of the west-flowing South Equatorial Current, the current system we had crossed most of the South Pacific on. At approximately 15 degrees south, the South Equatorial Current would merge with the south-flowing East Australia Current. We were coming from Efate Island at latitude 17 degrees 40 minutes south and heading to Cairns, located at 16 degrees 55 minutes south, but the combining of the two major currents took place over a wide region. We were so vulnerable to adverse currents that could push us in the opposite direction or drastically cut down on our forward progress, such as we had encountered at times between the Galápagos and Marquesas, that we worried about the difficulty we would have reaching our destination once we made it into the Coral Sea. We could take comfort only in the fact that, after a year on the rowboat, we were well acquainted with bad weather.
After my rowing stint, I checked the deck hatches for water leakage because the port and starboard hatches of the boat now leaked on a daily basis. The rubber silicon gaskets under the plastic hatch covers that Curt had replaced in Samoa were not doing their job. Most of the canned goods purchased in Samoa were now rusty and slimy from the seawater. When I bent down to take the cans out of the hatches to dry, the stinky whiff of mildew that wafted upward made me feel seasick, something I could no longer control with pills. It wasn’t morning seasickness but the familiar heavy feeling in my eyes, nausea, and the dull headache.
Curt’s log: July 10, 1985
We’re putting more time into the navigation these days. In American Samoa, a sailor who was crewing on a fancy yacht gave me a dog-eared extra copy of the tables for H.O. 211, a complicated navigation method once used by air pilots. I was able to figure it out and in fact it helps me to pass the long days at sea. H.O. 211 basically enables us to solve for stars near the horizon, beneath the cloudbanks, unlike the H.O 249 system that Kathleen, who’s been navigating alongside me since Samoa, uses as a double check.
When it comes time for star sights, usually there are large billowing cumulus or more frightening stratus clouds in the sky. Both of us have to be quick about sighting a star and taking the altitude reading before it goes behind a cloud. Often we have to shoot first and then identify the star later. One of us flips through the star charts while the other checks out the tables to help make an educated guess about its identity. Hopefully when we work out the solutions, the stars can be plotted on the same LOP [line of position] as our course. Most times it does.
Curt and I sat on deck and talked over the impending transit of the sea directly north of the Recife de Cooke. The reef was the first major obstacle to be negotiated as we began to make our way towards the Coral Sea and the Great Barrier Reef, which was littered with a maze of hundreds of coral reefs. The Recife de Cooke is part of the archipelago of the New Caledonia islands and reefs. From his star sights and my sun shots, Curt figured we would pass the reef at a comfortable distance of fifteen miles.
After dinner, though the seas were increasingly choppy, we planned to finish the day with several star sights to confirm our distance from the Recife de Cooke.
“Mark! Just one more in the southern sky.” I wrote the time down and grabbed the navigation tables to start working out the sights. We had developed a healthy competition between us to see who could figure out where we were first.
“Did you end up with the same position I have?” I asked, hoping I was wrong. Curt took the plotting sheet and laid down his fixes. He looked at me, and we both grimaced at the same time. Our navigation showed us to be only five miles from the Recife. Incredibly, there seemed to be a gravitational force in the form of strong south-flowing currents. It was dark outside, with no stars to be seen. The sky had filled in, and the night looked menacing. With memories of the Hormigas off the Peruvian coast still vivid in our minds, though it was a year later, we set up an all-night watch. As I sat on the deck, huddled in a light jacket because the night air was cool, I listened for sounds of surf, though the wind could have carried any noise away.
It was an uneasy night in the choppy waves that were undoubtedly rebounding off the reef. In the early hours of the following morning, the waves lengthened out, and we knew we were past the reef and into the Coral Sea. By noon, the sun sights confirmed that Excalibur Pacific had cleared the reef.
The weather deteriorated, and the wind swung from the northeast to the southeast. The wind strength increased, and Curt put out an extra-heavy sea anchor that I had sewn in Efate. The boat pulled hard on the sea anchor, only to be jerked back with each wave. The weather was so difficult to row in that we spent most of the next two days in the cabin, coming out only when its walls became too confining.
“How’re you doing out there?” Curt shouted from the cabin as I was setting up the bench one morning.
“I’m watching the storm,” I shouted back. Though the sun was shining, the wind was blowing a mean Force 6 and the seas were breaking fast and furious. After two days of sitting cramped together inside, I needed some space to myself. Besides, Curt was in a cooking mood despite the nasty weather, and he had to use my side of bow cabin floor as well as his for the stove, flour, yeast, and tomato sauce. We were only able to cook in crazy conditions like this because we’d been doing it for almost a year now. With legs crossed and the food mixed up before we’d even light the stove, our bodies would sway back and forth easily with the motion of the boat.
While Curt worked on the afternoon’s delicacy, I watched the stormy seas. They were both frightening and intimidating as they formed, dissolved, and reformed their pyramidal shapes, and I was fascinated. At one point, so focused was I on the whitish green waves off the stern that I didn’t see one wave that grew and grew in height beside the boat until it crashed down on my head. I screamed in shock
as gallons of cold seawater poured over me and nearly filled the deck. Inside the bow cabin, Curt protested as I frantically rocked the boat back and forth to empty the deck of the excessive water.
The new, bigger sea anchor was working hard off the stern. After the rough crossing from the Galápagos, we had bought extra cone-shaped ones in Tahiti, and in Efate I had sewn a couple of heavy ones that were bucket-shaped. Thanks to the loan of an extra-heavy grommet riveting kit from a German sailboat in Port Vila, the bucket-shaped anchor was turning out to be very effective at controlling the boat’s drift. But as I watched, the brass swivel Curt had tied between the anchor and retrieval line was not really functioning properly to pivot the anchor and avoid any unraveling on both lines. I was contemplating whether to do anything about it, when I heard a shout from the cabin.
“Hey, Kathleen, it’s done.” I made my way to the bow hatch, holding tightly to the safety lines on the gunwales. I looked inside and saw Curt holding up a mouth-watering tomato cheese pizza in the fry pan. “I hope you like it!” I couldn’t think of anything else that looked so good; Curt’s Coral Sea pizza was simply the most delicious food I could imagine.
The stormy weather continued for another day, and when the sea anchor was pulled in, the retrieval line had completely unraveled and twisted out of shape, and was no longer useful. The power of the sea to destroy a heavy-duty rope like that never failed to impress us.
On the evening of July 11, we heard on Radio Australia that a mine in Auckland harbor had sunk the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior; their Portuguese photographer had been killed. We remembered seeing its crew in Efate working on the ship, which was anchored not far from Excalibur Pacific. We both felt it must have been sabotage. Later, a scandalous plot by the French government was uncovered, revealing the extent to which France was willing to go to censor outside knowledge of what they were doing with their nuclear testing program in the South Pacific.
The nearer we came to northeastern Australia and the end of the voyage, the greater was the danger of crashing onto a reef. The chart showed most of the reefs, but a number of uncharted reefs still existed on the approach to the Coral Sea. As we rowed into yet another reef area one day, the skies, which had been sunny, began filling in with a mixture of clouds. It was at a point in the voyage when we most needed good weather conditions. There were many reefs we had to go south of, and there were others that we had to go north of, to thread our way into the reef corridor that would lead us through the Coral Sea and to the middle of the Great Barrier Reef.
Shortly before we reached the corridor, another low pressure system moved into our area. Gale force winds began blowing out of the south with increasing speed, producing mountainous seas that crashed on and around the boat. The bucket sea anchor went out again as we tried to control our drift in the storm.
Despite the horrible conditions, we still needed to know where we were either through sun or star sights. To grab the sun or a star in those conditions was extremely difficult, because the seas were so rough and breaks in the clouds so fleeting. Curt or I would stagger along the deck clipped to the safety line and make our way to the aft cabin to pull on our waterproof jackets before bracing ourselves against the cabin bulkhead to take a sight, while the other would watch anxiously out the Lexan bow hatch.
In recent weeks, as we had closed in on the Coral Sea, I made regular contact with a couple of ham radio operators in Australia who were now following reports to our yachting friends and maritime nets of the horrendous weather conditions. Because we might need to signal for help as the weather deteriorated, Curt left up the dipole radio antenna, but one night amid strong winds, breaking waves crashed over the bow cabin and tore the radio wires down. From this point on, we were out of touch until we reached land.
We had just come through the corridor of outlying reefs, with dangers on either side, when yet another storm with gale force winds arrived on the heels of the last one. The Great Barrier Reef was less than one hundred miles away now; the wind blew hard, and huge waves thundered toward the boat. Rowing was out of the question. We double-tied everything as the conditions worsened, and I pumped saltwater into all the empty water bottles. The first night of this latest storm, Curt put out a bucket sea anchor to better hold our position. By the second day, it was far too rough to stream the sea anchor, so Curt pulled it in, and we just let the boat go wherever the waves pushed her, hoping it wouldn’t be onto a reef.
Sleeping was impossible in the stormy weather, with the boat in a state of violent motion all the time. In the middle of the night on July 23, we were wedged against the cabin walls and trying to rest when there was the freight train sound of a wave roaring like no other we had heard before. It came closer and closer until it hit Excalibur Pacific with such impact that the boat was thrown onto its side, and in the next second, the wave rolled the boat over. One second we were on the wall, the next we were on the ceiling of the cabin. Excalibur Pacific had capsized.
“Aagghh, get off my elbow!” I screamed. The boat continued to roll, and we were back on the cabin floor in a jumbled heap on each other. She had righted herself. Bravo, Ed Montesi, Excalibur Pacific’s designer! She didn’t roll over again, but the sea continued to throw us around violently. In the cabin, everything was in a state of disarray, though very little water had come in through the air vents. We mopped it up with a towel and flopped down to sleep.
CHAPTER 37
Black Clouds in the Coral Sea
July 1985
BLACK-GRAY WAVES BROKE HARD EVERYWHERE. With each hissing crash, white foam slammed broadside to the boat. Overhead, threatening masses of steel-gray nimbostratus clouds grew steadily in bulk and size. Everywhere I looked, from the water to the sky, a gray cotton cocoon was smothering us with no way out.
The day had begun quietly when Curt went out to row at dawn and I stayed in the cabin to sleep another hour. The boat rocked as he pulled the oars in and out of the water, his hands moving forward and then, with a quick flick of the wrists, dropping his oar blades into the water against the enormous opposing weight. Over and over he rowed the same stroke, the boat making headway, steady as a tortoise moving over bumpy terrain.
In the cabin, sounds from his rowing seat mingled with the popping of millions of tiny bubbles outside cabin walls beside my head. Whoosh, the bubbles rushed by and I could almost feel them, as I lay wedged between the floor and the two-inch hull of the boat. The wall of the cabin was pleasantly cool against my skin.
The sounds and sensations were comforting and flowed into my half-wakeful state. I was suspended between two worlds: one of the illusion that I was floating in air, and the other of reality, where my mind connected what I was hearing to what I really knew. For an all-too-brief moment, I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t feel the fear and anxiety of rowing through the Great Barrier Reef, though another part of me knew it was one of the most treacherous areas of coral reefs in the world. I felt no concern for our safety and no dread for what might come as we navigated through a body of water notorious for sudden gales and high seas. It was completely restful. I rocked back and forth as if in Curt’s hammock during the quiet days after leaving Ua Pou.
And then, bam, a fast-moving wave slammed hard against the port gunwale, and I was jarred awake. On deck, Curt swore as the oar handles dug into his gut and the boat tipped over hard to the starboard gunwales, burying his starboard oar.
“Damn shit fuck,” he screamed, his favorite trio of swear words.
By now, it was no use trying to sleep anymore, because I had come down hard to earth and to the reality of what was outside the cabin. I sat up, reaching for the handholds on the ceiling. Without those yellow woven straps placed directly above our heads to hold on to, many things we did on the rowboat would have been impossible. I stuffed the sleeping bag into the forepeak, under the radio shelf. The foam sleeping pads were crammed on top of the bag. I was ready to make breakfast and coffee on the Camping Gaz stove. My head was still woolly from my deep sleep, but
I took the floor hatch cover up to pull the stove and food items out and started the relaxing ritual of making a meal.
Curt stopped rowing and went to the rudder in the stern. I heard the tiny squeal of the Autohelm as it pushed the tiller back and forth to keep us on course. I imagined our course so much more efficient and safer at this stage of our voyage than if we’d had to tie off the tiller and adjust it only a couple of times a day. Having the Autohelm was like having an automatic 24/7 helmsman on board. By now, we had become so attached to it that we both grew anxious when we couldn’t hear its electric squeal from the bow cabin. It was company for us, part of our carefully constructed world of isolation and self-sufficiency.
The dagger boards banged their muffled, comforting, calm thudding sound back and forth as Curt and I sat eating breakfast on the bench straddling the mid deck. As with the Autohelm, we listened for their rhythm as they banged back and forth in their slots.
I was tired and not much interested in conversation. Getting up at all hours to go out on the deck for bathroom matters was exhausting. The weather in the Coral Sea had proven unlike anything we had seen so far in the South Pacific. The waves were irregular and the wind would pick up with frightening intensity out of nowhere. To help calm our fears of another rollover or a swamping, we had decided to keep adding more weight to the boat by filling empty fresh-water bottles with saltwater. Just the act of hand-pumping gallons of saltwater in the empty bottles made me feel as though I had some control over my environment. Curt was spending most of the day calculating distance and plotting and re-plotting the course to the Australian mainland, which was now only fifty miles away.
This morning we sat in silence as the sun shone brightly, while a brisk breeze ruffled the blue sea slightly. It was as though the demons of the Coral Sea came out only at night, in the darkness when we were left to imagine the chaos they were creating.
Rowing for My Life Page 26