by Julie Angus
But it wasn’t long before my suspicions were confirmed. Our anchor was gone. In its place were a few tatters of red cloth clinging to a swivel. The very weather it was supposed to protect us from had destroyed it—alarmingly, it was only our fourth day out.
Colin retrieved our sole backup drogue, affixed it to the swivel, and dropped it overboard. We inspected the replacement several times throughout the day and it seemed to fare better than its predecessor. By the following morning, its services were no longer needed.
ON THE SIXTH day the winds picked up again, and our exercise was limited to rolling around the cabin. Adding insult to injury, my period started. I was sore, my back ached, and my muscles felt stiff, as though I’d been sitting in an economy plane seat for several around-the-world flights. I was irritable. Colin was grumpy. I moaned about aches and pains while Colin, who is amazingly oblivious to physical discomforts, grumbled mostly about our lack of progress. There was tension in the cabin, and we were becoming short with each other. So far on this expedition, we hadn’t had any major fights, but this situation put our relationship to the test. We wanted to row, not to be thrashed around like we were in a barrel careening over endless rapids. Originally we planned to row twenty hours a day or more, and now we seemed to be averaging half that. We were worried that this slow pace would extend our trip. If this kept up, we would have to start rationing our food supplies soon.
The winds blew at about forty-five kilometres per hour. They had been between force three and six on the Beaufort scale since we’d left. Force three is a gentle breeze (twelve to nineteen kilometres an hour) with waves of 0.6 metres. This was ideal for rowing. At force four, winds are between twenty and twenty-nine kilometres and waves are about 1 metre. Waves would regularly crash into the boat, making it a little harder to stay on course. At force five, wind speeds increased to thirty to thirty-nine kilometres an hour, and waves doubled in size to over 2 metres. And now we were in force six conditions—wind speeds of forty to fifty kilometres an hour and waves 3 metres high with foam sprays off their crests. Small craft advisories are issued in force six conditions, and rowing is pretty much futile.
By the morning of day seven, we had been cooped up in the cabin for thirty-six hours. Imagine spending a day and a half with your partner, lying in a standard bathtub—which is actually more spacious than our cabin was at the time. At first it’s somewhat comfortable, even a relief to just relax. But then you start shifting, trying to find a comfortable position. You lie on your back until an ache in your lower vertebrae forces you to roll onto your side, but soon your hip bone is sore from the pressure. You try to shift the weight more onto your thigh by extending your leg, but then you kick your partner. You both grumble about how small it is. Then you discuss body arrangements that might lead to more comfort, and through a coordinated effort you switch positions so that your head is at the other end of the tub. Your partner’s feet are in your face, but you don’t care; surprisingly, they smell less than you remember.
Finally, on day eight, the low-pressure system moved on and the violent motion of the boat began to diminish.
“I think it’s getting better,” I said.
“It seems to be. I’ll haul up the sea anchor and try rowing,” Colin said.
“Sounds good. I’ll make breakfast.”
With great effort, I propped open the hatch to reach the stove. Something was wrong. Instead of looking out into a heaving sea, a solid wall of blue lay to my left. For a split second I thought a rogue wave was about to destroy us. Then I realized it wasn’t a wave—it was the hull of a freighter. The wall of blue was steel and just metres away, about to crush us. I screamed—a long, loud, piercing scream.
“What’s going on?” Colin yelled.
I kept screaming. The tanker was aimed directly at the centre of our boat. In seconds our home would be splintered. The ship was so close I had to crane my head back to see the top of the bow. I desperately hoped to see a human looking down, a crew member who might witness our boat’s destruction and pluck us from the sea if we survived. Instead I saw nothing, apart from streaks of rust below an anchor cinched tight against the hull. The tanker created a surging wave with its bow. This mass of water was about to hit us.
I was still screaming, and Colin was thrashing around in the cabin, trying to turn around so he could see outside. Our boat would be crushed before he even knew what hit him. I grabbed both sides of the hatch, bracing myself for the impact. We rose on the bow wave. But instead of splintering against thousands of tonnes of moving steel, the surge of water pushed us to the freighter’s starboard side, and the steel hull slid past, inches from our boat.
Colin finally scrambled around and shoved his head out next to mine. His jaw dropped in disbelief as he stared out at the wall sliding past, still a metre from our boat. The ship was so long—about ninety metres—that it took almost a minute to pass. Waves crashed against the steel, the spray and whitewash deflecting against our own boat. Without another word, Colin ducked back inside the cabin and emerged with the video camera.
I inhaled the acrid scent of combusted diesel and rusting steel, and listened to the not-quite-subsonic rumble of an engine churning out thousands of horsepower. Our own boat rose and fell on the confused seas. A wave could easily slam us into the freighter, fracturing our boat or sucking us through its giant propeller. Then, finally, it was over. The transom of the giant ship passed by, and it continued on its course, oblivious to our existence and our narrowly averted destruction.
“The boat was a foot away from us, I’m not kidding,” I said in a shaky voice. “It was coming straight for us.”
As the freighter moved on, we stared at the name and home port printed on its stern. Norca from Hong Kong would forever be imprinted in our minds. Later research revealed that the steel tanker weighed in at twenty-eight thousand gross tonnes empty—thirty-five thousand times more than our fully loaded boat.
“Thank God our boat is so light and a freighter is so powerful,” Colin said. “It takes a lot of force to displace that amount of water. If we were much heavier, the bow wave wouldn’t have tossed us to the side so easily.”
The irony of that: we’d been saved by our own insignificance. The story might have played out very differently had we been a little farther ahead or the tanker on a slightly different trajectory. If the bow wave had instead pushed us to the portside of the tanker, our drogue line would have been run over and caught on the tanker’s hull or propeller. We would have been dragged behind the boat like a forgotten family dog tied to the departing motorhome. We had been very lucky indeed.
These were busy waters. We were parallel to the Strait of Gibraltar, a place where numerous shipping lanes converged. Because of our limited vantage from inside the cabin, we had made a point of regularly opening the hatch and scanning for boats. But from the depths of our trough our outlook was restricted, and even when we crested a wave, neighbouring waves limited our view. We had a radar reflector meant to enhance our signal on other boats’ radars. But we had no lofty perch on which to mount the reflector, so it wasn’t very effective in high waves. It was terrifying to think that we had been unable to spot an oil tanker, and that its crew had been completely oblivious to us.
Other than our near death, the day was going well. The weather was improving quickly and we ate our first hot meal in two days—rice pudding and coffee. After breakfast, Colin pulled up the drogue and took the first rowing shift while I made our daily water supply.
The technology that enabled us to convert salt water to fresh water was incredible. The desalination unit uses a heavy-duty pump to force salt water past a semi-permeable membrane at high pressure. The pressure creates a process that is the reverse of regular osmosis (where a solute moves from an area of low concentration to an area of high concentration), and fresh water passes through the membrane. The final result is drinkable water with 97 per cent of the salt and minerals extracted.
This sewing-machine-sized desalination unit alm
ost thwarted our journey before it even started. When we received our boat in Lisbon, we discovered our water-maker was defunct. It was an older unit; the malfunction stemmed from leaky seals and problematic valves, which negatively affected the pressurizing mechanism. (If the water cannot be brought to high enough pressure, fresh water is not produced.) The motor whined and groaned, but no fresh water came out. We had two choices: fix it or replace it. We already knew that none of the marine stores sold compact desalinators, so it would have to be shipped in from elsewhere (a process that might take weeks, especially when Portuguese customs was factored in) and would cost five thousand dollars (money we didn’t have).
Our only option was to fix it. After countless inquiries and many dead ends, we found a local business that specialized in making gaskets and O-rings, the components we needed. Two bus rides later, I found myself in the industrial section of the city, holding the prized rubber rings in my hand. Meanwhile, Colin had disassembled the unit; when I returned I found him hovering over dozens of meticulously oiled pieces of metal, looking more than a little distressed. Together we cleaned off the various components and replaced the O-rings. We swapped the tired-looking valves with a new set that, by some miracle, we found in the bag that contained the pump manual.
After a full day of tinkering, the desalinator eventually sputtered to life and produced fresh water. I felt a pang of anxiety knowing that we would rely on this decrepit machine to produce enough water to cross an entire ocean. As a precaution—in case our water-maker decided mid-Atlantic to gush gallons through a gimpy gasket—we brought three backup solutions: a small hand-cranked desalinator, a basic still consisting of little more than a pipe, and a rain catchment system.
After just a week at sea, our desalinator performed flawlessly; its electric motor hummed steadily while fresh water trickled forth. After two hours, our ten-litre plastic jug brimmed with clear water that could rival Evian.
We were fervently frugal with our water and used it only for drinking and food preparation. We used salt water for everything else: cleaning, washing, and even cooking noodles and rice (in a diluted solution). Our water-maker was our most treasured piece of equipment, even more precious than the GPS, which sadly did not share its longevity.
“The GPS went out again,” Colin said. “Can you try restarting it?”
I pressed the button on our electrical panel to cut its power supply, waited a few seconds, and then turned it on again. “Does that do it?”
“No, I’m still getting that error message that says the antenna connection has shorted.”
I leaned out of the cabin and unscrewed the antenna cable from the back of the GPS. It looked okay, but I blew on the terminal anyway to clear any hidden debris before firmly reinserting it. Nothing. Although the unit was brand new, the connection had started to cause problems a few days before, and the short was occurring with increased frequency. Now, no amount of cleaning or fiddling would bring it back to life.
I pulled out our small emergency GPS. It was vastly inferior because it was independently powered and thus could not be left on permanently. Instead, we would turn it on periodically to check that we were still on course. This meant we couldn’t continually monitor our speed, which was important for setting the ideal course to accommodate for the variable currents.
The row had been tough so far. We’d lost our drogue, our main GPS had malfunctioned, a tanker almost introduced us to Davy Jones, and we still felt seasick. The experience was very different than my preconceptions, but I wasn’t complaining. It seemed a miracle that we were still afloat and still healthy. We were now making good speed, and it appeared our silver lining had finally arrived. The weather continued to improve throughout the day. The winds subsided entirely, but we had a strong, favourable current.
Two birds slightly larger than seagulls soared above us for much of the day. They were white with black shadows near their wingtips and heads. Their flight seemed effortless. With outstretched wings they glided on air currents, a “shearing” flight technique that earned these pelagic birds their name—shearwaters. We now saw only seabirds, and then only two types. The other was the storm petrel, a small black bird with white markings that flew slower and lower to the water than the shearwater.
It was incredible to imagine that these birds spent most of their lives flying above ocean waters. Shearwaters could easily fly a million kilometres in a lifetime. The only thing they couldn’t do on the water was breed. For that they would have to travel to a remote island, maybe in the Azores or the Canaries, where the female would lay a single egg in a burrow or rock crevice. But now the two birds I was watching had other priorities: their only concern was the fish they periodically dove into the water for.
THE NEXT FOUR days slipped by quickly while we carried out our routines with pseudo-military precision. If it wasn’t for my journal, I could barely distinguish one day from the next, and even these entries were quite brief. The main thing that differentiated the days was what we ate and any sighting for our “I Spy” game.
Colin had started “I Spy.” The rule was that you could choose any object on the ocean or in the sky, but nothing on the boat. It may sound lame, but when you’re in an unchanging world, the slightest intrusion is exciting. Shearwaters or storm petrels, and sometimes a jumping tuna, were the usual objects. Occasionally it would be a freighter in the distance or a jet contrail. And more often than we liked, we saw a piece of trash float by.
It seemed strange to see garbage so far from land, in such a massive ocean. Where did it come from, where did it go, and who cleaned it up?
According to the 2006 Greenpeace report Plastic Debris in the World’s Oceans, an estimated 8 million pieces of litter enter the oceans each day. That’s 6.4 million tonnes of trash a year. An estimated 20 per cent of that garbage comes from the cargo of ships accidentally lost in storms. The remainder comes from land—trash washed into rivers and storm drains, or offloaded by cities that use the ocean as a de facto landfill site.
We saw at least a piece of trash a day, almost always plastic—a bottle, wrapper, or some other unidentifiable chunk of man-made polymer—which, sadly, was unsurprising, as 9 0 per cent of the trash floating in the ocean is plastic, according to the 2006 Greenpeace estimate.
This is not good news, because unlike trash in the past, which eventually decomposes, plastic endures. It takes 450 years for a plastic bottle to break down, and what it leaves behind is far from harmless. Unlike natural materials, which decompose into simple chemical components, plastic is synthetic and can’t biodegrade. Instead it photodegrades: sunlight breaks it down into smaller and smaller particles. The plastic never leaves the sea; it simply becomes increasingly ingestible, but not digestible. The small, hard polymers still can’t be broken down by the wildlife that mistakenly consumes them.
But now there is another danger: the smaller plastic particles absorb non-water-soluble toxins and pesticides, becoming a sponge for DDT and PCBs. The concentration of these chemicals in the plastics is up to one million times higher than in the ocean. In parts of the ocean, plastic outnumbers plankton six to one (in some areas it’s as high as one thousand to one), and jellyfish who cannot distinguish between the two consume copious amounts of poisoned plastic particles. The jellyfish are eaten by other animals and the toxins move up the food chain, becoming increasingly concentrated as they accumulate in creatures with longer life spans. At the top of the food chain are whales, which are now so polluted that, when they die and their bodies wash up on shore, some species are treated as toxic waste. Killer whales are the most contaminated species on Earth.
Soon we crossed trash off the list of eligible items for I Spy. It just wasn’t fun lying in the cabin guessing bird, plane, or fish while a plastic bucket floated by.
6
A SEA OF MOLTEN
METAL
ON OCTOBER 4, our twelfth day at sea, the ocean reached its calmest state yet. The sea gleamed like molten metal as a lazy swell gently rocked our bo
at. The sky was devoid of clouds. Our little red vessel was the only object that gave us perspective in a vast world of blue.
During my first shift that day, I pulled long, steady strokes on the oars, and I realized that for the first time since leaving Lisbon, I didn’t feel seasick. I was ravenous when Colin relieved me at eight, and I wolfed down the meal waiting for me—rice pudding followed by instant coffee laden with full-fat powdered milk. After enjoying one of the most relaxing breakfasts I’d had in a long time, I rinsed my dishes and stowed them under the stove. I exchanged the empty water jug for the full one and turned the desalinator on. As the machine whirred comfortingly, I pulled out a book, shuffled some bags to make a comfortable seat, and began reading.
After a few hours, I glanced at the instrument panel and noticed something was wrong. The amperage meter, which monitors energy inflow from the solar panels, was only showing three amps instead of the usual six at this time of day. With few clouds in the sky, the electrical generation should have been at its peak. Were the solar panels malfunctioning? Perhaps there was a bad connection between the battery and the panels. I groaned inwardly. Our electrical generation system was fundamental; it ran our navigation, communication, and video equipment. And most importantly, it powered our desalination unit.
I clambered onto the deck to see if the solar panels were all right; perhaps they were encrusted in salt and needed cleaning. But I was struck by a bewildering phenomenon. The whole world was dim. It was as though the sun’s light had suddenly been obscured by a massive thunderstorm, except the sky was clear.