by Julie Angus
Faced with a tower of pancakes, I momentarily forgot my disappointment. I dug my fork into the scrumptious, crispy pile of sugar, flour, and grease. Now that we were over our seasickness, food had reached an almost godly status. It was our reward, a distraction, a moment of bliss in a difficult day.
“Mmmm, thank you,” I murmured.
“These are good,” Colin enthused. “And there’s still more to your birthday celebration; wait until tonight’s dinner.”
“It’s a date.”
When the excitement of my birthday breakfast was over, we climbed back into the cabin to ride out the heavy headwinds. The day dragged by. It was too rough to read, so we whiled away the time telling each other stories from the past. Colin regaled me with tales from his days sailing alone in the Pacific. He told me about his parrot named Pirate, and about how he had climbed coconut trees, gone spear-fishing, and sailed through storms. While Colin was adventuring and trying to spread his DNA—albeit without biological intentions—I had been at university studying genetics. As our rowboat drifted slowly backwards, I told Colin about life at universities in Hamilton, Victoria, and England. Our conversations swung from the past to the future. We talked about the home we would buy one day and about all the meals we would cook in the kitchen—Thai coconut lemongrass curry, eggplant in black bean sauce, deep-fried bananas with coconut ice cream . . .
“Do you feel that?” Colin suddenly asked.
“Feel what?”
“I’m not quite sure. It’s kind of like a subsonic sound—you can’t quite hear it, but you just know it’s there—maybe through the vibration on your skin,” Colin said, cocking his head as if to improve his hearing. “But it’s not sound, it’s more like pressure—fluctuating air pressure,” he added, looking slightly puzzled.
“No, I can’t say I do. I do have a slight headache. I think it’s caused by the heat, combined with your farts.”
Colin didn’t answer this with the wisecrack I expected. Instead he had a slight frown of concentration.
“I’m going to check for boats again. Maybe it’s the rumble of a diesel I’m feeling,” Colin said.
He opened the hatch, climbed outside, and stood for about five minutes, ducking on occasion to avoid spray coming over the boat. Finally he returned to the cabin.
“Nothing. We’re definitely alone on the sea right now. You know, there’s something really weird about this weather. I wish we had a barometer. And what about all these bugs we’ve been seeing flying around? During my years sailing, I never saw insects this far from land,” Colin said.
I ran my fingers through his greasy, salt-encrusted hair. “Don’t worry, honey. I’m sure it’s nothing. We’re just getting a couple days of headwinds. Soon it will all go back to normal. I bet we’ll be able to row again by this evening.”
As the day wore on, my optimistic words rang empty. The headwinds picked up and, by evening, conditions were so rough that Colin had to cancel the romantic birthday dinner he had planned. Instead, we had crackers, cheese, and a chunk of dry meat.
The following morning we were greeted by an awesome spectacle. As the sun lifted above the horizon, the sky turned a red so vibrant that it looked like an accident in Photoshop. But I couldn’t help feeling concerned, even as I looked at such a beautiful sunrise. There was no story Colin liked to regale me with more than the reliability of the ancient expression, “Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.”
Versions of this proverb have been in existence since biblical times. (In Matthew XVI, Jesus says, “When it is evening, ye say, it will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, it will be foul weather today: for the sky is red and lowering.”) The colours we see in the sky depend on the composition of the atmosphere. When the atmosphere is packed with water vapour and dust, only the longest wavelength, red, penetrates the particulate and is visible. The shorter blue wavelengths are scattered and less apparent. In the evenings and mornings, the sun sits low on the horizon and transmits light through the thickest part of the atmosphere. A red sky therefore means more dust and water in the air. Since storms tend to move more from west to east (predominant wind directions play a role in this), red at night means the storm has passed and a high-pressure system is moving in, while in the morning, red announces an arriving tempest.
We spent the day in discomfort. My nightly journal entry was tellingly brief: “Too rough and contrary winds to row. Lost the second and final drogue. The swivel broke. Left the chain and rope in the water—hopefully it’ll have some effect.” The winds and waves had continued to build throughout the day and, without the sea anchor, we were even more at the mercy of the waves. It was too rough to cook, and running the desalinator was impossible. We had nothing to do but wait. We lay in the cabin, uncomfortable, hot, sore, and nauseous. Our chores were reduced to keeping watch and pumping out the bilge. Occasionally, we opened one of the hatches in the cabin, which was airtight and made it not only hot but suffocating.
How long does it take to develop bedsores? I wondered. I felt like I had been lying in this cabin for years. I slipped in and out of dreamless sleep, wishing for time to speed up. The bad weather continued to escalate and, by the time night arrived, the winds blew at what we estimated was fifty kilometres per hour. The winds had changed direction gradually, and were now coming from the west. Confused waves seemed to come from multiple directions, occasionally colliding to send a column of water into the air.
The waves looked like they had grown overnight, and we guessed the conditions were now force eight. Our boat lay in disarray. We were being beaten into a semi-comatose state of submission. Waves shuffled the contents of our cabin; cracker crumbs and milk powder dusted us, and water leaking through the roof saturated us and everything else inside. I could barely remember how it felt to stretch my legs. When we lay down, which was most of the time, agitated seas rubbed our heads against the mattress. My hair had become an oversized dreadlock, and Colin’s was even wilder-looking. This was our third day of cabin confinement, and it did not seem like relief was around the corner. In the afternoon, I mustered the energy to make a phone call. I took the satellite phone from its waterproof case, positioned the antenna near the hatch for the best reception, and dialled my Dad’s number. I thanked God, or more accurately, the technical genius of Iridium satellite telephones, for the ability to call home from the mid-Atlantic. As the phone rang, I imagined my father getting off the couch in his suburban Toronto home and padding across the living room to pick up the handset.
“Hello,” he said, right on cue.
“Hi Dad, it’s me,” I said, happy to hear his voice. “Things are going well, and we’ve made it almost eight hundred kilometres from Lisbon . . . ”
My father cut me off. “Honey, things aren’t going well. I just heard on the news that the most northeastern hurricane in history has formed—Hurricane Vince. I looked up its coordinates on the National Hurricane Center website, and it’s only six hundred kilometres away from you.”
I was stunned. Maybe there was a mistake. “Which direction is it heading?” I finally asked.
My father was silent for several seconds before he replied, “Straight towards you.”
7
OUR FIRST
HURRICANE
HOW COULD THIS be happening to us? It wasn’t right; it wasn’t fair. Never in history had there been a hurricane on this area of the Atlantic, and even the likelihood of a regular storm at this time of year was low. Why now? Was it global warming, natural weather quirks, or just bad luck? Was it something I did? Perhaps it was Nature’s way of saying: You wanted to experience the ocean? Well, here it is.
Asking why didn’t help our situation. My one hope was that my father was mistaken—perhaps he had misread the news report or assumed we were elsewhere. I decided to get verification and called my friend Mary. Her delight in hearing from me evaporated as she relayed the latest information on Hurricane Vince from the website of the National Hurricane Center, a government-
run organization that monitors and predicts hurricane activity in the Atlantic Ocean from its base in Florida. Hurricane Vince had formed several hundred kilometres away from us in a part of the ocean thought to be too cold to support hurricanes. The Hurricane Center stated it was the most northeastern hurricane in history, a complete anomaly. The worst part was that Vince was tracking straight towards us, just as my dad had said.
Colin and I stared at each other in shock. A heavy silence was punctuated only by the raucous roar of waves and the dishevelling impact that followed. I just wanted to close my eyes and pretend this wasn’t happening.
“Do you know what my birthday wish was?” I asked, finally breaking the silence.
“What?”
“For better winds,” I said, trying to hold back my tears and anger at the irony of it. “All I wanted was for the headwinds to stop.”
“Wow, it’s like some evil entity pricked up its ears when you said that. I thought those clouds looked peculiar, but I didn’t want to worry you. See those rows of wispy ones?” Colin said, pointing to high clouds that looked like white unfurled cotton candy. “They’re cirrus—quite rare to see on the ocean, except before a big storm.” Before this we had seen mostly cumulus, big puffy white clouds that begged you to find shapes in them.
“So I guess that nice weather we had a few days ago was just the calm before the storm,” I said.
From the Hurricane Center we found out that three days before, on October 6, when we had been revelling in pleasantly calm conditions, a frontal low from the northwest had swept over the Azores Islands seven hundred kilometres to the northwest. Meteorologists called it occluded and deep-layer; the wave of low pressure had brought thunderstorms and foul weather. Over the next two days, the storm had intensified and, on October 8, just as I was waking up and looking forward to celebrating my birthday, it became a subtropical storm. At that point the unusually placid waters we’d been experiencing were forming ripples from a stiffening westerly breeze, but we still thought little of the change. Tropical Storm Vince continued to intensify, and when winds speeds reached 120 kilometres per hour, it became a hurricane.
The formation of a hurricane in the cool waters above the Canary Islands seemed impossible. According to the National Hurricane Center, the temperature of these waters was only 23 to 24 degrees Celsius; hurricanes are generally thought to need surface temperatures of at least 26.5 degrees Celsius to form. The Hurricane Center doubted the likelihood of a hurricane so much that they held off a full day before bestowing Vince with his name (only cyclonic storms are named). In a written discussion dated October 9, it stated, “if it looks like a hurricane . . . it probably is . . . despite its environment and unusual location.”
For most people, the fact that Vince was a freak was nothing more than academic. Newspapers around the world used this interesting tidbit to fill tight spaces between ads. The most northeasterly-forming hurricane in history made for a catchy headline. But all the articles stressed that there was nothing to worry about; it was far out at sea. The Edmonton Journal reassured readers with its story “Hurricane’s No Danger to the U.S.”
But for two Canadians in a quarter-inch-thick plywood rowboat sitting directly in the hurricane’s path, Vince definitely was a danger.
It was surreal to look through the salt-crusted Plexiglas hatch at the spirited waves slapping our boat. The ocean conditions were still reasonable, but the new information set off an emotional tempest in our hearts and minds. A storm with the strength of a ten-megatonne nuclear bomb exploding every twenty minutes was moving implacably towards us across the open ocean. I felt like a prisoner in a penitentiary about to be consumed by flames. There was no way out. All we could do was sit in our tiny cabin and hope we would survive. I tried to calm myself through rationalization and ponder how we could prepare for the storm. Really, though, I felt the chances were quite high that we wouldn’t survive, if the hurricane hit us square on.
“Well, I guess we’d better clear the decks and get all our safety equipment as handy as possible,” Colin said in a flat voice. “We can move the life raft a little closer to the entrance hatch, at the expense of some shoulder space.”
“Have you noticed that we haven’t seen any ships since that fishing boat four days ago?” I said. Before then, the seas had been quite busy, and usually we saw several freighters each day.
“Yeah, undoubtedly all shipping is being routed away from the hurricane’s path,” Colin said. “I strongly suspect we’re the last boat in this neck of the woods.”
We clambered onto the deck and began readying it for the storm ahead. We double-checked the lashing of the spare oars and stowed the working oars. We removed the stove from its plywood recess and stuffed it into the adjacent locker. We double-checked the bilge pump, made sure all hatches were secured properly, removed and secured the rudder, and coiled loose ropes. Finally, Colin and I returned to the cabin, dripping with ocean spray, and began preparing it. We nailed down all the plywood lids for the compartments beneath our bed. This would prevent the huge mass of food and equipment stored beneath the mattress from becoming a lethal avalanche if the boat capsized.
Colin checked the batteries in the handheld VHF radio and GPS, and I organized our emergency supplies. We had a grab bag that contained what we’d need if we were forced to abandon ship and climb into the life raft. This yellow dry bag held flares, a handheld VHF radio, a GPS, high-energy food, a small amount of drinking water, the hand-crank desalinator, a signalling mirror, a small first aid kit, and other important items for survival. I added some additional chocolate, and then, thinking back to Colin’s earlier story about the crew member on the capsized trimaran and her baseball-sized turd, tossed in a handful of prunes.
Once the boat was ready, we went through verbal drills for different disasters. We would abandon the rowboat only if it was completely destroyed. If the boat was holed or taking in water, we would fight to stop the inflow and then bail or pump out the brine. If we capsized, we would wait for the boat to right and, if it didn’t, we would sway our bodies back and forth in unison to rock it back upright.
I called the Hurricane Center for an update, praying that Vince had changed course or dissipated. They relayed Vince’s coordinates, speed, and predicted path. The news was not good. The hurricane was still moving towards us and the eye was now only four hundred kilometres away. We could expect the weather conditions to degrade significantly, and within twenty-four hours, we would be in the centre of the storm.
I plotted the hurricane’s present position on the chart, and it looked frighteningly close to the little X that marked our position. I still struggled to comprehend the significance that these markings represented. One X was a small plywood rowboat, our home. The X with the circle around it was a full-fledged hurricane. We were already in the perimeter of the hurricane, and it was predicted to keep moving towards us at twenty kilometres per hour.
I peered out the hatch. Suddenly, the sea was formidable, savagely powerful. All around us, the waters heaved and surged. The crests of giant aqueous mountains collapsed in great foaming avalanches. Winds blasted spray and foam horizontally across the sea’s surface. It had only taken a few hours for the sea to transform from moderate swell to total chaos. This morning the winds had been force seven on the Beaufort scale, which would have elicited a small craft warning. Now they had intensified to force nine—gale-force. We could expect conditions to escalate to force twelve or greater (off the scale) when the hurricane was on top of us.
These conditions were beyond anything I had imagined before embarking on this expedition. I couldn’t even begin to conceptualize the state of the ocean in a force-twelve storm. Already conditions inside our boat were unbearable. Colin and I slammed against each other with every breaking wave. I was bruised and in pain. My seasickness had returned, and I was unable to eat or drink.
I broke the silence and articulated the question that hung over us. “How bad do you think it’s going to get?”
/> Colin looked more worried than I had ever seen. “I once had two cyclones simultaneously heading towards my sailboat in the Coral Sea in 1997—cyclones Harold and Gillian . . . ”
I had already heard this story, but now I listened with a renewed, grim fascination. Colin had been en route to Papua New Guinea from Australia when he heard on the shortwave radio that not one but two cyclones were forming on the Coral Sea. Neither of the storms had hit him square on, but his boat sustained significant damage and he barely made it through. He and two Danish backpackers he had taken on as crew bailed the boat throughout the storm using buckets after their bilge pump broke. They had barely kept the boat from sinking.
“I expect it will be a lot worse than that, and that was bad,” Colin said. “After that final sailing voyage in 1997, I vowed never to sail in a cyclone zone again.”
He exhaled a long, deep sigh. He looked defeated. “But here I am once again, sitting in a small boat with a hurricane closing in.”
Although the malevolent clouds and torrential rain already blocked most of the sun’s glow, I became terrified when all the light from our shadowy world was extinguished at 6:30 PM. I felt I was in a coffin and somebody had just closed the lid for the last time. According to all reports, the hurricane’s strength would be at its peak shortly after midnight. If disaster struck, we would have to function in complete darkness. I shivered and squeezed Colin close.
The wind created a permanent high-pitched shriek as it whipped through the lifelines. Breaking waves roared and gurgled—at times sounding almost guttural, like the voices of old men. I wished for my earplugs to block out the sounds. Giant waves slammed into the boat, launching us sideways down their faces at frightening speeds. Sometimes our vessel was pushed onto its side as it catapulted forward. Inside the cabin we smashed against the thinly padded walls and each other. I was tired, exhausted, and scared. I needed time to rest and recover, but the ocean wouldn’t allow it.