“I’m going to work on the morning sights and see where we are now,” said Curt. I nodded and reached for his bowl to wash with mine. I planned to row for a few hours and then sit on deck to read or think.
Curt’s log: July 25, 1985
It was during one of the brief periods of sleep last night that I had the same dream I’d had before on Aconcagua. I was walking up the meadow on the hillside. Trees were sparse as I gained altitude. This time I didn’t wake up before I reached the top of the mountain. The summit was the most perfect, idyllic setting. The meadow was beautiful; the trees around the large clearing were perfectly formed. There was a wall around the grounds of what seemed to be a monastery. From the gate, a man dressed in white walked toward me and shook my hand and pointed the way to the pass.
Now it is clear, southeast wind Force 4 to 5. We are approaching the reef by Noggin Pass where we’ll transit the Great Barrier Reef. We should be there by tomorrow.
After rowing, I sat on deck lost in daydreams. In my mind, I was not on the boat. The ocean surrounded me, but I was not here. In physical form, I was sitting on the boat bench, legs stretched out in front of me, ankles crossed. My back was propped against the sweep oars with a pillow to cushion the hardness of the carbon fiber oars. My baseball cap lessened the brightness of the Australian sun while a light wind blew gently over me.
First, I went into past memories and visualized them in my mind. I began to see what I was remembering and I was becoming different people so that those memories had a multitude of variations. In each one, I was someone different, even though the events were the same.
Hours passed in this game of mental charades. The environment no longer affected me because I was somewhere else now. I was in Ecuador, on the dockside, the day we were told it was a bad idea to row out of Guayaquil. I remembered my stomach tightening as the shipping agent told us that squads of speedboats tracked down people in small boats to kill and rob them throughout the Gulf of Guayaquil. All we needed to do was row out of this port in our big orange rowboat with all our gear on deck, and we were instant targets. These pirates knew we had money and valuable equipment on the boat.
I visualized again the drive into Guayaquil, sharing the back of the shipping agent’s truck bed with young kids who had stowed away on Santa Paula, the freighter we had traveled on for the past three weeks. It was the second or third time for these Ecuadorans to flee their country for America. Presumably, they would survive in the shipping container for the month or so it would take to reach Philadelphia. I imagined myself as one of those stowaways and wondered how to stay alive in a twenty-foot metal box deep in the bowels of a freighter.
In my mind’s eye, I saw again the shocking poverty along the road into Guayaquil, where people lived in cardboard huts with rusted sheet-metal roofs. The garbage scattered along the road and throughout the shantytowns boggled the mind. How could any government official drive by these slums and ignore their existence while living in fancy villas with maids and air conditioning? How could they hold their heads up?
My thoughts moved to what we were doing: rowing across an ocean. Doing something that was entirely hedonistic. Something that would not benefit anyone but ourselves. I stopped before my thoughts went too far in that direction, and I fast-forwarded to memories of Strider Fearless, the feeder ship that took us south to Callao, Peru, for a safer departure point. I focused in on the captain and first mate of the ship and my mood began to lift.
I saw myself walking about the ship in my little red shorts and red T-shirt. Everyone seemed to be crazy about me, and my mood lifted even more. “Kathy, Kathy!” the Philippine crew and British officers called when we walked down the gangplank after arriving in Callao.
“Good-bye, everyone!” I called back, waving my hand like a movie star. Intuitively then, I knew I had gathered enough fantasy memories to last me for months on the ocean crossing. I knew because I had been a great daydreamer for years, and all good daydreamers know they always need a cache of juicy memories to review and dissect at any moment. Especially at the moment when it’s time to slip away from the “madding crowd.”
Except this time there was no crowd to escape from. There was only one other person on this boat, and he was in the cabin at the moment. My daydreaming at sea may not have been the same as on land, but the intention was similar. I wanted to go somewhere else for a while in my mind.
Now I was in the captain’s quarters with Curt, drinking shots of Johnny Walker Red and laughing hysterically with everyone at the sight of our newly purchased bottles of Johnny Walker Black sliding back and forth on the captain’s desk with the ship’s movement in the rolling seas. I turned to say something silly to the captain and saw a dark, almost black cloud in the porthole behind his head.
I blinked, and the Strider memory was gone. I looked hard at the real blackness spreading on the horizon in front of me. I was back on the rowboat in the Coral Sea, and the skies were no longer filled with pretty white clouds. A gray blanket covered the sky and was reflected in the waves, which had sharp, breaking peaks.
I sat up straighter and dropped my legs on either side of the bench. The wind had increased noticeably, and I resettled the baseball cap on my head. My stomach began to tighten, as it had for days since we left Efate.
The blackness was coming closer, and the waves were growing. I jumped up and grabbed the cabin hatch and yanked it open.
“Curt, you should see this weather coming at us. Close the ports on your side.”
He looked up startled from his reading but reached, without a word, for the knobs on the ports to batten them down. I backed away from the hatch, but I had to hold tight to the safety lines that ran alongside the gunwales. The wind was now blowing a Force 6, near gale-force strength.
Curt came out and turned his head toward the nightmare that was coming our way. He headed directly for the stern cabin, clutching the safety lines hard.
“I’m going to put out the sea anchor!” he yelled in the rising wind. His words were torn from his mouth, but I saw what he was doing despite the diminishing light.
“Okay, I’m going to tie down the bench and stuff on deck,” I yelled above the keen of the rising wind and tried to balance myself on the heaving deck. I looked over my shoulder and saw with horror that the blackness was almost upon us.
“Get in the cabin!” Curt yelled as he gave me a hand with the last knots. I reached for the hatch, and the wind practically tore it out of my hand. I dove headfirst into the cabin and did a quick turnabout so Curt wouldn’t crash into me. We held on to the ceiling straps for another wild ride in the Coral Sea.
CHAPTER 38
The Great Barrier Reef and Landfall
July 1985
I WAS SCANNING THE HORIZON FOR a sign of Hedley Reef when a mass of coral heads below the boat caught my gaze through the emerald-tinted waters. My eyes widened as fear struck. Had we rowed unknowingly onto Hedley Reef? The very idea of it only a few feet below the boat was enormously frightening.
Earlier in the day Curt had plotted a course to Hedley, which was at the entrance to Noggin Passage. Between the many reefs that make up the Great Barrier Reef are navigation channels of varying lengths that usually go in a north-to-south direction. As the wind and current generally flow north, we had chosen Noggin Passage because it went from a northeast-to-southwest direction, making it easier for us to row sideways to the wind instead of directly into it.
The plan was that if we reached Hedley Reef in daylight, we would enter Noggin Passage. But now, it seemed clear that Excalibur Pacific had floated onto an entirely different reef, because we had been rowing for only two hours and could not have reached Hedley so soon—unless Curt was off in his calculations.
Curt grabbed the chart and guessed that we were in an area of uncharted reefs that were approximately fifteen miles south of Hedley Reef. I wondered out loud if we would reach it before dark.
He sat down in the bow seat and began rowing while I stood at the stern cabin, stee
ring in and out of reefs as the water alternated between dark blue and emerald. The wind gusted occasionally, and ripples on the water’s surface indicated a shallow area.
“What’s that?” We listened and turned toward the sound off the port side. In the distance, breakers crashed down on a reef barely visible above the water.
The afternoon was drawing to a close, and we had been anxious to be away from the reefs by now. I set the course due east and sat down to row with Curt for another hour. Hedley Reef was still distant by four o’clock, so we decided to put out a sea anchor to slow the boat’s drift in the night. Tired and uncertain about what was to come, I crawled into the cabin and fished out a package of Kraft processed cheese to have with crackers, while Curt cut up citrons to mix with sugar cane left over from Tahiti for a fruit drink we liked very much.
A light tinkling interrupted our thoughts. It was vaguely familiar, like tiny pieces of broken glass falling slowly to a hard surface. We both froze. The sound was notorious in our memories. It was the sound of the shoal wave in the Galápagos. We rushed out on deck and in the waning light of the moon, I saw that the reef was there under the boat. The incoming tide had pulled us onto yet another reef, but one that was shallower than the others.
“Should we drop the anchor and stop this drifting?”
We knew very well the risks of such an action. The chart was explicit:
“CAUTION: Former mined areas exist in the Barrier Reef. [The mines dated from World War Two] Trinity Opening, Flora Pass, and Noggin Passage have been swept and opened to surface navigation only. They are not safe for anchoring, trawling or bottom travel by submarine owing to mines.”
“It’s a risk, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, but I think it’s a good idea. We might already be on Hedley Reef. Besides, we can’t take a chance floating around here at night with the extreme tides.”
Curt was convinced anchoring for the night was better than floating freely. Another factor was also at work, unfortunately, because the sun’s and moon’s declinations were unusually high and were creating extra-high spring and extra-low neap tides. An extreme tide could carry us anywhere throughout the Great Barrier Reef in the night.
With fingers crossed, Curt let go the anchor while paying out two hundred feet of line that was connected to a couple of feet of chain directly attached to the anchor. It held, and the movement of the boat stopped. In the pale moonlight, in the middle of the Coral Sea, I looked around at the strange beauty of the largest coral barrier in the world that was surrounding the boat as it tugged lightly at its anchor line. The water covering the reefs was calm, and the air was quiet, though it felt charged with energy, with the gentle sound of waves raking backward and forward over shallows. It was one of those moments, as I had encountered so many times on the South Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, when I knew I was experiencing something about the planet that no one could ever teach me. Later, when I went back on deck to wash up that night, I surveyed the moonlit sea covering the Great Barrier Reef only a few feet below the boat and wondered what the next day would bring.
The sound of heavy surf and bright sunshine welcomed us in the morning of July 29. At first I didn’t know where we were; my mind was disconnected from the boat as I lay there, wedged on my side of the cabin. The boat rocked lightly side to side, and with my eyelids shut, I didn’t want to come to the surface of full consciousness. I didn’t really want to open my eyes to face another day in the Coral Sea.
Curt looked out the hatch and saw that the heavy surf was breaking only two hundred feet off the stern while the boat floated in relatively calm water. From the gunwale, he saw the barrier reef glittering below the boat. The high tide had come in during the night with a rising wind, and now there was a line of white foaming breakers at the edge of Hedley Reef that surged with barely restrained violence toward the boat. Somewhere in the midst of all that mayhem was the anchor buried with the boat’s chain and line.
I sat up reluctantly and turned over to look out of the cabin hatch. The waves were scary, but as long as the anchor was holding, we could eat breakfast and figure out what to do next. Curt wanted to spend some time videotaping the scene, though I thought we should get off the reef as soon as we finished breakfast. When he pointed out the fantastic opportunity to photograph the reef up close, I had to concede he was right. Afterward, I planned to take a few sun sights to confirm our proximity to Noggin Passage.
We suited up in heavy-weather jackets and clicked on the safety harnesses. I put my arms around Curt as he lowered the video gear into the water in a bulky fiberglass box that he had built in Vermont. When we looked at the video later, the sight was incredible: iridescent tropical fish swimming in and out of coral heads as sea anemones waved back and forth in the surging water. There was a fantastic world beneath our boat and no sign of the coral bleaching that was to come years later.
The anchor would not budge, but we needed it for the next few nights before and after reaching Australia, so I sat down to the oars. Curt pulled hard on the line leading to the short chain attached to the anchor as I backed the boat toward the breaking waves. But the line kept slipping through his hands and burned his skin. He grabbed again and pulled as hard as he could, but this time only thirty feet of line came up. I stopped backing the boat just before the white lines of breaking waves. We tried together, but the anchor must have been wrapped tightly around a coral head. It was obvious we would have to let it go unless we were willing to row into surf that would swamp the boat. We decided to abandon the anchor. Curt grabbed the machete a Marquesan had given us last March and hacked at the thick nylon line until Excalibur Pacific gave one last jerk and we were floating free.
A quarter mile to the west, we could see the part of Hedley Reef that was above the water with heavy breakers pounding its edges. The exposed reef confirmed what the sun sight had told us: we needed to row for another two miles or so, and then make a turn to enter Noggin Passage and begin the twenty-mile-long southwest row to the Inner Run that would eventually lead us north to Cairns.
“Look, it’s land! That’s got to be Clump Mountain!” In the late afternoon, I spotted the purplish outlines of land on the southwest horizon and then checked the Sailing Directions to confirm that the sketched version matched the one I was looking at. It was the same and our first sight of Australia. We laughed that our first sighting of the Australian mainland was in the lumpy, rounded shape of a mountain called Clump.
Once we rowed into Noggin Passage, the deep blue waters with a southwest tidal flow indicated we were going in the right direction. At about four in the afternoon, Curt took another sun sight and calculated that we were two miles from the end of Noggin Passage and just about into the Inner Run, a shipping lane inside the majority of the reefs that make up the Great Barrier Reef. It varies in width from five to ten miles, depending on the pass a boat enters from. At that point, the Inner Run was only five miles or so from shore, but in a rowboat with strong diurnal tides to contend with, it was difficult maintaining our position.
As we rowed, the usual bad afternoon weather set in and the entire sky and horizon were blanketed with grayness and heavy rain showers. Strong, gusty winds blew out of the south, and it was difficult to hold the course with the wind and waves battering the downwind side of the boat. Finally, the squall passed overhead, and the sun slowly disappeared in the western sky behind Clump and the rest of the visible mountains of Queensland.
Curt’s log: July 29, 1985
We weren’t able to get to Cairns today. This means an all-night watch, taking lines of position from the visible lighthouse beacons. Just before dark, after calculating our LOP, I found that Excalibur Pacific is safely within the Inner Run, though it would be better to be in the middle of the Run when the tide returns so we won’t be carried back out the passage we’ve worked so hard to transit.
The winds died down as we headed into the cabin for the night. I’ve set the Casio watch for 20-minute intervals when I plan to take bearings
from the lighthouses north and south of our position. Throughout the night, I’ll give the bearings to Kathleen so she can plot them on the chart. At around 3 a.m., I plan to put out the sea anchor so when the tide goes down, we won’t lose ground.
July 30. By first light, I saw that we were very close to land, in fact closer than we imagined. The tide was in the process of coming in through the passes and we had drifted a ways inland from Cape Grafton, a large rocky promontory to the north that protrudes into the Inner Run. To get to Cairns, we would have to row around Cape Grafton. The weather has deteriorated again with the wind and waves coming out of the south with the usual rotten rain squalls and darkening skies. The wind is pushing us toward shore and it is going to be difficult to row around the Cape today. A wide sandy beach only a few miles off the port side of the boat beckons. We’re going to row for it.
With mounting excitement, we rowed Excalibur Pacific steadily toward the beach. Curt stopped to tie the video camera on the roof of the aft cabin and turn it on to record our arrival. Within a short distance from the beach, with the bottom coming up fast, I put down my oars to pull up the dagger boards, and when the water grew even shallower, Curt pulled up the rudder. The boat suddenly skewed to the side and we had to pull harder on the port side to bring the boat around as the waves broke faster.
“Damn!” The port oar in Curt’s hand snapped in half. I paused for a microsecond and then reached wide to grab more water with my port oar. Exhilarated by the danger and perhaps playing to the camera, Curt jumped up and began shouting to row harder on the starboard as the boat began to zigzag. Without missing a stroke, I yelled at him to sit down and keep rowing with his starboard oar so the boat wouldn’t go broadside to the waves and flip over. He looked at me and then sat down, and together we pulled the boat straight for the beach, where Excalibur Pacific hit the sand with a thud. Curt grabbed the mess of mooring ropes and jumped out of the boat in the shallow water while I slumped over my oars, exhausted but deeply content.
Rowing for My Life Page 27