by Julie Angus
We had gone to great lengths to ensure that we departed from Portugal legally, within the rules delineated by customs, immigration, and the harbour police. A few days earlier, we had asked the marine police about departure protocol and whether we needed to clear anything with customs and immigration. The official had told us no; since Portugal had joined the European Union, yacht entrance and clearance formalities had eased. All that was required was the receipt for marina moorage, which would also serve as sufficient documentation for proof of stay when we entered the next country. However, we had purposely failed to mention to the official that our small vessel was a rowboat, and now that we found ourselves tied to a Portuguese law-enforcement boat on the dawn of our departure, I felt a little uneasy.
“Papers, please,” the captain finally said in English.
What papers? I thought we didn’t need papers? I removed our passports and the marina receipt from a waterproof bag and handed them up to the captain, hoping that was all he meant. He perused the passport pages and shifted his scrutinizing gaze to our faces. Apparently satisfied with the resemblance, he nodded and passed our materials to an officer who began a VHF radio dispatch to his supervisors.
We handed the other officers a book of news clippings on our journey, hoping that it would convey our experience and preparedness. But it was hard to gauge the response. The officers chatted animatedly to one another. Occasionally one of them would gesture to our boat with a shake of his head or a burst of laugher.
After what seemed like an eternity, the captain returned our passports to us. He smiled and said, “You are free to continue. We wish you good luck.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. The last official hurdle was behind us. Ferdinand Magellan was long gone, but his nation still embraced the spirit of exploration. From now on, it was just Colin, me, and many kilometres of open sea.
4
OUR FIRSTDAY
AT SEA
WHILE COLIN RESUMED rowing, I attempted to restyle our home from an overstuffed closet to something a little more livable. Too many things remained unpacked; they’d been hurriedly stuffed into wall-mounted mesh pockets instead of being neatly stored in hidden compartments. The floor of our cabin was blanketed with a three-inch closed-cell-foam mattress and, of course, this space was to be not only our bedroom, but also our kitchen, living room, office, and occasionally (when storms prevented us from exiting the cabin), our bathroom. To reach the storage areas, I moved the cabin’s contents to one side, pried back the mattress, and lifted one of the plywood lids. Using my head to prop the mattress up, I crouched over the compartment and laboriously rearranged objects until I could squeeze in a few more errant items.
A gentle swell rocked the boat, and I was pleased that my stomach remained settled. Before we left, I’d been terrified of being incapacitated by seasickness. As a child, I had suffered horrific bouts of carsickness, and even as an adult, I often feel nauseous as a passenger on winding mountain roads. I knew that the success of this expedition mainly came down to mental endurance. Coping with monotony, isolation, tedium, and fear was something I had some control over. Seasickness, on the other hand, is a physical condition that no amount of determination can quell. Over time, severe seasickness can lead to physical deterioration, fatigue, dehydration, and possibly even death. I had never been on the open ocean before, and could only hope motion sickness wouldn’t strike me down.
Suddenly the state of the ocean began to change. We had emerged from the shelter of Cabo da Roca—the westernmost tip of Europe—and huge, slow-moving swells began to rock our boat. I stopped packing gear and stuck my head out the cabin door, inhaling deeply.
“Are you all right?” Colin asked.
No, of course not. Look at me, is what I wanted to shout. Instead, I said, “Oh yeah, I think it’s just a little too early for me to be rooting around in there.”
“For a second, I thought you were going to burst into liquid laughter,” Colin said.
“What?”
“You know—technicolour yawn, praying to the porcelain god, chewing in reverse, or . . .” Colin paused for a second. “Rowing and blowing.”
He’d obviously just made the last one up; he looked extremely pleased with himself. I wanted to smack him for his lack of sympathy. Better yet, “row and blow” all over him, I thought to myself with a chuckle.
I knew the best way to deal with seasickness was to focus on distant objects or the horizon, but foolishly, I spent the next thirty minutes with my head lolling out the hatch and my eyes closed, willing the nausea to pass.
When Colin’s two-hour shift at the oars came to an end, I extracted myself from the cabin and slid into the now-empty rowing seat. My feet slipped far too easily into the men’s size 10 rowing shoes affixed to the foot plates. The shoes were oversized for me, but they fit Colin well. I grabbed the oars. Once settled, I looked at the cabin-mounted compass and noticed we were no longer pointed in the right direction. The forty-five-second interlude in which we had switched places had been enough to push us off course.
The swell, the wind, and the waves now bullied our heavy boat, and I struggled to correct our position and maintain course. The boat was constantly trying to broach, or turn sideways to the waves, and it seemed I was putting far too much energy into corrective strokes and not enough into direct propulsion. I looked at the GPS, and my heart sank. The 4.5 knots I had achieved in calm waters with a favourable current had dropped to 2. And I was working twice as hard.
The waves were now bigger than they’d been when I was inside the cabin. I wasn’t sure if the conditions had changed, or if the waves just appeared larger from this exposed perspective. They crashed against the hull, dousing me with foaming white water. Just as intimidating were the large swells that lifted us to the height of a mid-sized house. These rolling mountains had a wavelength—the distance from the crest of one wave to the next—of several hundred metres, and a height of six metres from trough to peak. Despite the size of these swells, however, they did not rock the boat. Like giant elevators, they gradually lifted and lowered us. It was the turbulence of the smaller waves that rocked us.
“There must be a big storm in the distance creating these swells,” Colin guessed.
But forecasters had made no mention of an approaching storm. I hoped they were right. The weather forecast when we departed had been for stable weather, with stiff but manageable winds from the northeast.
Timing is everything when planning an ocean crossing, and we had carefully chosen our window of opportunity. Leave too early and you encounter hurricanes farther south; too late, and it’s foul weather off Europe. Hurricanes form in the western regions of the Atlantic Ocean from June to November, while winter storms roll into Portugal and the European coast starting in late September. Although mid-September is the latest recommended time to safely leave the European coast, it is actually the earliest safe departure date when considering the hurricane belt further west. It would take about two months to reach the perimeter of the hurricane region, and our arrival in these lower latitudes would coincide with the end of the hurricane season. Our window of opportunity for avoiding the worst of both seasons was only about two weeks. We had been fortunate to get away in time and, according to pilot charts and hurricane records, our chances of encountering a major storm would be very low.
Considering that our current conditions were called good weather, I was shocked by the turbulence and size of the waves. The towering waves, crashing foam, and violent motion of the boat were what I would have expected of a storm—not a sunny, breezy day off the coast of Lisbon. It made me realize just how much I had to learn about the sea. Clearly, canoeing trips with friends in Canada had done nothing to prepare me for the reality of rowing in the open ocean.
Feelings of anxiety bubbled to the surface, and an annoying voice nagged, What have you gotten yourself into? There was no going back. Even if I changed my mind, we could not row against the currents to return to Lisbon. We were completely committed
to this row. I created a mantra out of the truism “the greatest rewards come from the greatest commitments,” and tried to push the negative thoughts out of my head. They didn’t go away easily, though. I had invested an enormous amount of time and all my finances into this endeavour, but I was not prepared to pay the ultimate price.
I focussed on my rowing technique. The words of my Vancouver rowing coach, Alex Binkley, echoed in my mind: “Keep your back straight; push with your legs; increase your speed towards the end of your stroke; don’t clench the paddles.” But it was harder rowing here than in the calm waters of Coal Harbour. The choppy conditions made it difficult to pull both oars in unison, and waves repeatedly smashed the oars into my legs. If I was a mediocre rower in calm water, I was a dismal rower in ocean chop. And to say I was a moderate rower in civilization was really being kind.
I gave up on technique. It was all I could do to keep moving. I felt exhausted; my arms ached, my knees hurt, and I couldn’t imagine rowing for another minute, let alone another several months. I looked at my watch; I had been rowing for thirty minutes.
I tried to distract myself by watching the fishing boats in the distance. I saw close to a dozen, all of them moderate in size and weathered in appearance. I knew that these were small-scale fishing operations, one or two men (I hadn’t seen a fisherwoman yet) who went out six days a week—never on Sunday—and sold their catch fresh each day at the local fish markets. They caught mostly sardines, mackerel, and hake, although local octopus, sea bass, tuna, prawns, squid, and swordfish were also for sale at the markets. Most of Portugal’s fishermen work in small boats, catching just enough fish to subsist, but they struggle to make a living amid dwindling fish stocks. Today only the bigger and better-equipped boats, which can travel farther in search of fish and stay longer on the water, can prosper (and even their margins are shrinking).
The Portuguese eat more fish per person than any other nationality except for Icelanders, but their fishing industry is in distress as stocks of cod, hake, and whiting are near collapse. They can now no longer meet their own fish needs, relying on imports of dried cod from Norway, sardines from Russia, and stockfish from Iceland.
Sadly, Portugal is not alone in facing this crisis. When I returned to civilization, I heard news reports that this could be the last century of wild seafood. The story was based on the research of an international team of scientists who published their findings in the November 3, 2006 issue of Science. They looked at fish catch reports since 1950 in almost all ocean regions, and found that, if the present trend continues, all fish species will decline 90 per cent from their peak numbers by mid-century. Once a population’s numbers drop this low, recovery is very difficult, and the species is considered collapsed. If we don’t change our approach to managing the oceans, say the scientists, all the world’s fish stocks will collapse by 2048.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. This is not a prediction set in stone, but a warning of what will happen if our approach to the ocean doesn’t change. “We can turn this around,” said the lead author of the study, Dalhousie University professor Boris Worm. “But less than 1 per cent of the global ocean is effectively protected right now. We won’t see complete recovery [in these protected zones] in one year, but in many cases, species will come back more quickly than anticipated—in three to five to ten years. And where this has been done, we see immediate economic benefits.” In other words, the costs of managing the oceans responsibly will be infinitely lower for humankind than the cost of continuing our race to catch every last fish.
As I continued rowing, the small fishing boats disappeared from sight. With this last connection to civilization broken, I felt the magnitude of our isolation even more. I looked at Colin sitting inside the cabin and wondered if he, too, worried how we would handle being in this rowboat for months with only each other for company.
IT WAS HARD to decide what was worse: rowing, or lying in the cabin waiting to row. When I was at the oars, all I could think about was how much my body ached and how I wanted the pain to end. But now that I was in the cabin, the pain shifted to other areas. I felt like a teenager who had just discovered the downfall of drinking lemon gin like it was lemonade. I clutched my stomach and closed my eyes, willing myself to ignore the nausea.
Not only was Ondine a small boat in big seas, but she lacked many of the stabilizing features of other seagoing vessels. Sailboats, for example, are steadied below the water by a large keel that resists lateral movement, and above the water by the pressure of the wind on the sails. Fishing boats and cruise ships usually have stabilizing fins to counter their natural rolling movement. Our boat, however, had only a tiny keel and no sails. The smallest wave sent it rocking and pitching.
As I lay in the cabin, waiting for my rowing shift to begin, I examined the foam-padded ceiling and read the pen scribbles barely an arm’s length above me. The previous owners had left phone numbers, short checklists, and, right in the middle, a jailhouse calendar composed of fifty-six dashes—one for each day of Ondine’s previous voyage from the Canaries to the Caribbean islands. Our journey, from mainland to mainland, would be double the distance and would likely take twice as long. It still seemed incomprehensible that we were spending a single night in this rowboat, let alone any number of months. I prematurely started our own countdown and marked off day one with a permanent marker. Then I nodded off, escaping to a dream world that didn’t include rowboats and waves.
“Five minutes!” Colin yelled.
The world came spinning and rocking back into focus. I slipped my cycling gloves onto my already-blistered hands.
“How are things coming along out there?” I asked.
“Lots of shipping,” Colin replied. “We’ve had several freighters pass quite close to us. You can still see land, but it’s getting low.”
“How about Miami?”
“What about Miami?”
“Can you see it yet?”
“Almost. I think it’s just over the horizon.” Colin looked over his left shoulder, brow furrowed. It almost looked like he really was searching for the sandy shores of Florida.
“Ex-lax!” he suddenly exclaimed.
“Huh?”
“Ex-lax,” Colin repeated. “We forgot to get laxatives!”
“Oops!” I said.
I remembered all too clearly our bid to purchase laxatives. The clerk in the pharmacy spoke no English (which is rare in Portugal). He didn’t understand what we were asking for, and finally Colin was forced to mime what the product was used for. It was funny and embarrassing at the same time. Unfortunately the pharmacy had none in stock, and we had to try elsewhere. But we forgot.
Our diet would be devoid of fresh fruits and vegetables, and very high in low-fibre carbohydrates. I shuddered at the thought of having problems thousands of kilometres away from any medical facilities or pharmacies.
“I remember reading the book Lost by Thomas Thompson,” Colin said. “Their trimaran flipped and they were living in the overturned hull. The woman was suffering from extreme constipation, and it reached the point where her husband had to reach in and remove a stool the size of a baseball.”
This conversation wasn’t helping me reach peace with our new lifestyle.
“How the hell do you just reach in and grab a turd the size of softball?” I snapped.
“Baseball,” Colin corrected. “I don’t know—that’s just what it said.”
I made a mental note of where we stored the prunes and slid out the hatch to begin my shift. Miami seemed a long way away.
BACK AT THE oars, I felt uncoordinated and exhausted. The waves seemed to be even larger from this vantage point, and far too often an oar would get caught on a wave and slam into my leg. Normally, both oars would be balanced when I pulled them through the water during my stroke, but now I found it easier to put one slightly ahead of the other. This allowed me to get the oars a little higher out of the water, and prevented unnecessary damage to
my thighs. I was sure this was a big no-no in terms of rowing technique and would dash my dreams of arriving home a rowing champion. My dreams were quickly fading.
From my outside vantage, I looked directly at the cabin. Colin’s long, sun-bleached hair poked out the partially open Plexiglas hatch as he lay on his side, munching on crackers. Although his hair was blond, his beard was mostly red, and now that it was thick and bushy, he looked like a savage Viking. And, indeed, the blood of the Norse warriors possibly did flow through his veins. His mother and father are both Scottish—their families came from Caithness, an area once settled by Scandinavians.
I couldn’t help but wonder if a seafaring heritage makes a difference to one’s level of comfort on the ocean. Colin’s father was a sea captain, and many of his relatives worked in the fishing industry. I, however, come from a family devoid of any Captain High Liners. My mother comes from a farming region in a landlocked part of Germany, my father from a large city in Syria, and, as far I knew, the closest anyone in their families got to a water-based job was when the farm fields were irrigated.
Even if nature took a back seat to nurture, I was no further ahead. Although Colin did not meet his seafaring father until he was an adult, his mother is equally adventurous, and she instilled him with a love of the outdoors through hikes in the mountains and along Vancouver Island’s coast. Even today, in her seventies, she is a very active member of the Comox chapter of the B.C. Mountaineering Club. She consistently places near the top of her age group in running races. In comparison, my family was both sedentary and interior. My father equated the outdoors with discomfort; he had spent too much time in military arctic survival courses. My mother worried that outdoor activity was unhealthy and would make me sick, or that some other unforeseen danger would befall me. Now they both shake their heads and wonder where in the child-raising process they erred.