by Julie Angus
It seems ironic that the goals that appear so intimidating, complex, and glorious are often composed of simple, mundane activities. Pulling on oars in the ocean is not difficult in itself; the challenge is to stay steadfast and committed in the face of adversity. I thought again of what John Ridgway had said: It’s all up here. That’s true for most objectives in life. It’s not talent that ensures success, but commitment and perseverance.
Easy enough to say, but our levels of perseverance were running low. After a frustrating eight hours of rowing nowhere, we finally gave up. Colin cut his rowing shift short and instead we trailed a rope and chain to slow our drift. We both settled into the cabin and drifted backwards, slowly losing the hard-won progress gained earlier in the day. Colin called Dean Fenwick, our coordinator, on the satellite phone for the latest weather forecast, and the news was good. In twenty-four hours the winds were forecast to switch around to the northeast, and they would be in our favour.
But the headwinds would not let up until two days later, so we spent little time rowing. Instead we lay in the cabin, and Colin worked on his book Beyond the Horizon while I read Farley Mowat’s A Whale for the Killing.
Mowat has long been one of my favourite authors, and this book is especially compelling, a true story of the sad fate of a pilot whale that became stranded in a tiny bay in Newfoundland. The whale pursued a school of fish through the shallow entrance of the bay during an exceptionally high tide, but once the tide ebbed, the creature’s exit disappeared. The gentle giant became a source of unwanted attention from the local villagers, who chased the whale in speedboats and used it for rifle target practice. Pocked with countless bullet holes and wounded by a boat propeller, it eventually died from its infected injuries. That was in 1967, and thankfully societal views towards whales have improved since then.
Many whale populations have rebounded since the moratorium on commercial whaling; some, such as the grey whale, have returned from the verge of extinction. The pilot whale, once hunted ferociously, is now one of the most abundant and widespread cetaceans. So far we had spotted what we thought were two pilot whales, but sadly neither had come very close to our boat.
“TRICK OR TREAT. Our fortieth day at sea is Halloween, and we’ve been treated to northeast winds at force four! We’re moving at 1.8 to 2.5 knots, and our spirits are high,” I wrote in my journal.
It was a wonderful change, and these conditions were forecast to persist all week. It finally looked like we would make some decent progress. Perhaps this was the start of the famous trade winds.
“I’m afraid I forgot to pack our Halloween costumes,” I joked.
“You can dress up as a mermaid and I’ll be a pirate,” Colin said.
“You already look like a pirate,” I said.
All Colin needed was an eye patch. His hair had not been cut since he’d left Vancouver seventeen months before. It now reached his shoulders, a far cry from his usual crew cut, while his bushy beard enveloped the lower half of his face. Had I not seen the transformation in slow motion, I might have had difficulty recognizing him.
I, however, looked no different. My hair was a little more knotted and my face sunburned, but that was about it.
“Well, if we do get any visitors . . . I know one treat we could offer,” Colin said pointing to the lure on our fishing rod.
“That would be a trick.”
“That depends on your perspective,” said Colin.
The deck of the rowboat, showing the two rowing seats, circular hatches, and bow storage compartment. PHOTO: COLIN ANGUS
Showing off a dorado caught mid-Atlantic. PHOTO: COLIN ANGUS
A typical day rowing on the ocean. PHOTO: COLIN ANGUS
A larger-than-usual dorado we caught that provided several meals. PHOTO: JULIE ANGUS
Sun-drying dorado fish that we caught mid-Atlantic—delicious in soup. PHOTO: JULIE ANGUS
Eating a special dinner of dorado, rice, and vegetables on the rowboat. PHOTO: COLIN ANGUS
A loggerhead turtle that took a keen interest in our boat and in the barnacles growing on our hull. PHOTO: JULIE ANGUS
Colin rowing towards St. Lucia, after being on the ocean for four months. PHOTO: JULIE ANGUS
Rowing near St. Lucia in the Caribbean, after travelling more than seven thousand kilometres from Portugal. PHOTO: KIRK ELLIOT
Sitting inside the cabin while moored in St. Lucia. PHOTO: ANGUS ADVENTURES
Celebrating our arrival in St. Lucia after rowing from Lisbon, Portugal. PHOTO: ANGUS ADVENTURES
One of the Costa Rican newspaper articles that covered our journey. PHOTO: COLIN ANGUS
Reaching Port Limón on the east coast of Costa Rica after rowing ten thousand kilometres from Lisbon, Portugal. PHOTO: ANGUS ADVENTURES
Celebrating the completion of the expedition in Vancouver after cycling 8,300 kilometres from Costa Rica. PHOTO: ANGUS ADVENTURES
Hiking along the Puntledge River, near our home on Vancouver Island, after completing the expedition. PHOTO: JULIE ANGUS
10
ENCOUNTERS WITH A
LOVESTRUCK TURTLE
DISTANCE TAKES ON a different meaning when you move through a landscape that never changes. On the open ocean, only a gently curving horizon cuts a line between blue sky and cerulean sea. There is nothing to indicate forward progress, no milestones to check off—just a hope that the GPS is accurate. Nothing on terra firma can compare; even the most unchanging lands offer slight aberrations—hills, shrubs, dunes, rocks—to be used for reference.
Our lives were now governed by firmly established, unchanging routines, and the days swallowed each other, each one shaped from the same cookie cutter. We rowed for twenty hours and travelled between fifty and eighty kilometres. The weather was warm, the winds not too strong, and the sky was sunny, dotted with fluffy, innocent clouds. Sporadically, we saw tuna, dorado, and flying fish; occasionally we were visited by dolphins or whales. Our conversations revolved around the mundane as well as the philosophical. Conditions were better now, but our overall progress was far from ideal. In forty-nine days, we had rowed only one-quarter of the distance to Miami. If we continued at this speed, our supplies would be depleted long before reaching land.
Two days before—nine days after leaving the Canary Islands—the weather had briefly taken a peculiar turn. A thick cloud cover created a dark, shadowy world, and a dense haze reduced our visibility to just two or three kilometres. I wondered if it was created by fine sand being blown out to sea from the deserts of Africa, a phenomenon we’d read about in our pilot book. Our speed dropped by 40 per cent, and we faced steeper swells with shorter wavelengths.
“It’s the currents,” Colin said, looking at the GPS. “They’re no longer flowing southwest, but have reversed, pushing straight into the winds. When the winds and currents are not unified, they create a wind-over-current situation, which creates choppy seas.”
“Why would the currents and winds flow in different directions?” I asked. “I thought surface currents were created by the winds.”
“That’s usually the case. Generally, currents are created by prevailing winds, but the water can continue flowing great distances from momentum, even pushing into contrary conditions as it is now. Based on the information in our charts, though, it’s not common for currents to flow northward here.”
The boat rocked violently in the steep waves, and for the first time in weeks, I felt queasy. We had to continue rowing hard to move out of this strong current. But we had no way of knowing where the edges of the flow lay. The great, fluid movements of the ocean are constantly changing, and satellite technology does not have the means to detect ocean currents. We could only hope to bumble our way along.
We decided to clean the bottom of the boat to help increase our speed. It was my turn, but a splitting headache all but incapacitated me. So I kept watch, and Colin jumped overboard with the mask and snorkel to scrape the barnacles. He gripped the safety line with one hand and rubbed off crustaceans with the other
. The boat bounced wildly in the waves, and I worried the hull would hit him.
“I can’t believe how fast these guys grow,” Colin said as he surfaced between dives.
“Just be quick,” I said. “It’s hard to see in these choppy waters.” I scanned the horizon and the water beneath the boat for sharks. My polarizing sunglasses helped cut what little glare was on the surface, but visibility was still poor.
Colin submerged again. I squinted—nothing in the distance, nothing under the boat. What if a shark snuck up? What if I didn’t see it? The risk just didn’t seem worth it.
Colin had already been in the water for ten minutes scraping off hundreds of barnacles, meaty morsels that rained into the ocean depths like the ringing of a dinner bell to all predators. I turned to scan the waters behind me, and a dark shadow flickered.
“SHARK!” I screamed. “Get in the boat, now!”
Colin shot to the surface and got into the boat in one fluid motion. He was panting, and blood dripped from a scratch on his thigh.
“Are you okay?” I asked, pointing to his leg.
“I’m fine,” he said. “It’s nothing.”
Colin’s reaction time had been incredibly quick. Instead of getting into the boat as he usually did, by grabbing the railing and pulling himself up—which would have left his legs dangling in the water for precious moments longer—he had thrown his legs onto the boat first and quickly pulled himself out of the water. The cut was from where he’d rubbed against the boat’s metal oarlock.
“Where is it?” he asked.
“Over there,” I said, pointing to a now-empty area of water. “It was about a metre and a half long and just off the starboard side.”
We scanned the water for a sign of the shark, but found none.
“Maybe it wasn’t a shark after all,” I said sheepishly. “I just saw it out of the corner of my eye.”
“I’d much rather you to be wrong about seeing a shark than wait another minute to confirm that a shark is sizing me up.”
“I don’t think you should scrape the hull anymore,” I said.
“At least not today,” Colin agreed.
Colin dried off and went into the cabin. I started rowing.
“Hey, your scraping job did the trick. We’re going faster than before—about 0.3 to 0.5 knots faster,” I said, watching the speed reading on the GPS.
“That’s great,” he replied. “I only cleaned off about half of them.”
“Now that you mention it, we seem to be tracking a little more to the starboard side. That was the side you didn’t scrape, right?”
Colin looked at me with dismay.
“Just kidding.”
“IT’S TED AND FRED!” Colin suddenly shouted.
He dropped the oars and peered over the side of the boat. I quickly joined him to view two fish swimming off our portside.
“Are you sure they’re Ted and Fred?” I asked.
“It sure looks like them. Look at their stripes. That one there with the scar is Fred, and remember Ted’s ripped tail—that looks just like him. Maybe they were following our boat from a distance, or somehow they tracked us down again.”
I wasn’t entirely convinced. The fish certainly did look like Ted and Fred, but why hadn’t we seen them all this time? And where were Ned and Oscar? I searched the surrounding waters, but there was no sign of the other half of the quartet. I was excited to have a couple of pets again, and who knows, maybe it was them. I tossed a few spoons of leftover rice and corn over the side for the hungry fish.
TED AND FRED had rejoined us just as we were about to enter the tropics and cross the tropic of Cancer, the latitudinal meridian that lies at 23°26 north, approximately 2,600 kilometres north of the equator.
“Let’s have a party to celebrate being in the tropics,” Colin said.
“Sounds great. I think we should drink the wine that Mario gave us with tonight’s dinner,” I said.
Though we were happy to be in the tropics, things didn’t look any more tropical. The weather had been in the mid-twenties for a long time now, and the sea was just as blue and empty as always. The waves were still choppy, and the currents continued to come from a suboptimal direction. But it was still an exciting moment, and I was glad it wouldn’t slip by unnoticed, swallowed by another nondescript day rowing.
“Did I ever tell you the story about when we crossed the equator in the Virginian?” Colin said, his eyes glazing over as he remembered his heady years sailing.
“You mean the time you pierced your ear with a potato and a needle?”
“That’s it,” Colin said, mildly disappointed. “How about when we went up on a reef in Palau in poorly charted waters?”
Colin retold his story while we searched for exciting dinner ingredients. Our food selection was getting pretty slim. It was now day fifty-two, and we had almost finished the food set aside for the first half of the journey. We would soon need to access the second half, which was stored in separate storage compartments.
“How about some American cookies to start the party?” I said, rummaging through the food pile that now sat on the mattress in our cabin. Chocolate chip cookies with an “American” label were our favourites, along with sour candies and canned lychee fruit.
“You bet,” Colin said enthusiastically. He set down the oars and stretched out his hand for the treats.
Our food shopping in Lisbon had been a rushed affair, and we’d been unfamiliar with many of the products. Now, in the middle of the ocean, we quickly learned the difference between good and disgusting. Unfortunately, we had no choice but to eat everything.
The “American cookies” turned out to be the best treat on board. Unfortunately, the very name had put us off buying too many of these biscuits. I had assumed they were full of preservatives and heavily processed. In fact, the Portuguese-made goodies contained all-natural ingredients and tasted as though they were fresh from grandma’s oven. If they’d labelled them “Portuguese Cookies” or “All-Natural Cookies,” we probably would have purchased several dozen more packages. Instead, we had enough only for special occasions, such as birthdays and crossing the tropic of Cancer.
I gave Colin three cookies and took three more for myself. We’d eat the remaining six tonight, before they softened in the moisture-laden air.
“Mmmm,” Colin said, his face an expression of joy.
Colin finished his cookies in a few bites between oar strokes. I nibbled mine slowly, willing them to last as long as possible, while I pondered what to make for dinner. I had soaked dried chickpeas in water overnight, so I decided on a vegetarian version of the Moroccan chicken I make at home—a baked dish of browned onions, chickpeas, raisins, and chicken in a medley of Middle Eastern spices. Unfortunately, we didn’t have an oven, chicken, or most of the required spices. But with a few modifications, almost any recipe can be adapted to a rowboat galley.
So here is my version of Moroccan Chicken, rowboat-style. Thinly slice half an onion and sauté it in olive oil. Sprinkle sugar on the onions after they have browned, and continue cooking until the sugar caramelizes but before it burns. (On a rowboat, brown sugar is preferred. While white sugar absorbs moisture and turns into a solid block, brown sugar stays soft and moist.) Add one cup of chicken broth, four cups of softened chickpeas, and a handful of raisins. Simmer until the chickpeas are cooked and the liquid is mostly absorbed. Add salt, pepper, and a pinch of cinnamon. Serve on a bed of rice or couscous.
We celebrated our progress and official entrance to the tropics in a boat that smelled like the kitchen of a Middle Eastern restaurant. I heaped large helpings of curry and couscous onto our plastic plates, and filled our mugs with wine. The sky blazed with pinpricks of light—millions of stars to remind us that we were just tiny specks in the universe. I could see the Big Dipper clearly in the northern sky, looking just as it had from my bedroom window in Edmonton when I stared at the constellations as a little girl.
“That’s the Southern Cross,” Colin said, poin
ting to an area low in the southern horizon.
I searched the sky for the telltale five stars that make up the constellation and finally found it. The four brightest stars can be connected to create a cross, like the four corners of a kite. The Southern Cross is one of the most prominent celestial features in the Southern Hemisphere and, since ancient times, has been used by sailors for navigation. It serves a similar purpose to the North Star, or polestar, in the Northern Hemisphere.
We finished the bottle of wine under the star-filled sky, waves lapping gently against the boat and a warm breeze caressing us. Ted and Fred illuminated the phosphorescence as they splashed around the boat. Colin’s arms were wrapped around me, and life seemed perfect. I couldn’t imagine a more romantic night.
THUMP . . . BANG . . . THUD . . . It was 5:30 AM, and the noise reverberated through the hull of the boat. Something was banging against it. At first I thought the ropes securing the rudder had loosened and that the rudder was being slammed against the boat. But the noise was too loud and irregular to be the rudder. When I climbed out of bed to investigate, the racket suddenly stopped. I paused, listening intently. Bang. This time it was terrifyingly loud. I lunged out the main hatch while Colin squeezed through the smaller roof hatch.
“The rudder looks okay,” Colin yelled from the back. “The lines are a little frayed, but everything’s still . . . ”