Rowboat in a Hurricane

by Julie Angus

  Plus, they were a fun distraction from the growing discomfort in my hands. Every night, my hands swelled and became like claws, and each morning I uncurled my fat fingers one by one. After a few minutes of rubbing and stretching, they straightened enough to be of use, but they still hurt and seemed to be aching more than usual.

  Finally I confided my worries to Colin.

  “I think I’m getting arthritis,” I said.

  “What makes you say that?” Colin asked.

  “Look at my hands,” I said. “I can’t straighten my fingers. They’re swollen and they hurt.”

  Colin looked at my hands closely. “Does anyone in your family have arthritis?”

  “Yes,” I said with dismay. “My mom, my aunt, my grandmother when she was alive . . . Hmmm, I’m not sure about my dad’s family . . .”

  “I don’t think you have anything to worry about. I think it’s just your ligaments thickening. I had the same thing happen to me when I was tree-planting.”

  Colin’s hands looked fine now—apparently holding a shovel all day was harder on his digits than rowing—and he didn’t even wear gloves to protect his fingers like I did. My hands looked like they belonged to an eighty-year-old construction worker. Thick calluses, which had thankfully replaced earlier painful blisters, caked my palms, while my fingers had become plump sausages. My engagement ring was a tourniquet that I’d spent hours struggling to remove a month before.

  Besides plump fingers, sunburns, salt sores, and the occasional unidentifiable ache, we were actually doing quite well. But this didn’t stop me from worrying, and Colin wasn’t much better. Minor pains in our sides became appendicitis; extended headaches became brain tumours. So many serious things could have gone wrong—broken bones, botulism, infections, dental mishaps—and since the nearest medical help was an ocean away, fretting about our health was easy. Invariably, however, the pain would dissipate, and then the “life-threatening” condition would be forgotten.

  My menstrual cycle was still on hiatus, but I was now sure it was due to ongoing physical stress. With no morning sickness, swollen or tender breasts, or cravings for olives, I felt confident we’d reach shore as a party of two. Still, a pee-on-a-strip test would have been nice.

  Our suboptimal nutrition became a growing concern as the months ticked by. A friend of mine, Christine Leakey, sought advice for me from the nutritional company she worked for, Truestar Health. Their CEO, Tim Mulcahy, became intrigued by our trip. He realized we would benefit from their nutritional supplements, and that’s how Truestar Health joined our expedition as lead sponsor. They designed a health care plan for us and arranged to deliver the vitamins and supplements. Since we had changed our course to Limón, Costa Rica, we would travel through the Caribbean Islands, making it possible for a boat from the islands to meet us or for us to go ashore.

  This new development, which transpired within the digital corridors of our satellite communications equipment, was reason to celebrate. We could now look forward to improved health and an easing of our financial crisis. We toasted our new partnership with Truestar Health with cups of Cplus drink and American cookies.

  The Caribbean islands were still a thousand kilometres away, but I was enraptured by the prospect of stopping and visiting one of these tropical jewels. Colin, on the other hand, felt such a visit was too risky and would jeopardize our vessel. Although I knew making landfall in such a low-powered boat held risks, I felt these could be negated if we watched the weather closely and adjusted our course correspondingly. We discussed the pros and cons of making an island landing, and finally decided to stop at the island of St. Lucia. There we could not only meet with Truestar, but re-provision and experience the idyllic bliss of an island oasis. Equally important, we could pick up large-scale charts for the trip to Costa Rica. We had charts for Miami, but not for Costa Rica, and we reasoned that having proper charts for the journey ahead would make up for the risks associated with landing on St. Lucia.

  As I daydreamed about margaritas and fruit salad, a huge bird unlike any we had seen before began circling our boat. It was completely black, except for a red sack hanging from its neck, with a forked tail and enormous pointed, bat-like wings. It stayed high in the air, effortlessly propelling itself not with the subtle gliding movement of shearwaters, but with the dramatic soaring movement of eagles, hawks, and other great birds of prey.

  “Colin, come see this bird,” I yelled.

  Colin came out of the cabin just in time to see it plummet in a spiralling descent. With its highly acute vision, the bird had spotted a fish or small turtle from hundreds of metres away, and was going in for the kill. I nervously peered into the waters surrounding our boat, looking for Fred, Ted, and friends. They were no match for this ferocious predator, and I hoped they’d stay close to the boat. The bird soared back to the skies and continued its hunt for food.

  “Wow,” Colin said with a low whistle. “That is one acrobatic bird. What do you think it is?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen a bird like that. The red sack reminds me of a turkey vulture, but the wings are so unusual.”

  Colin flipped through the pages of our guidebook and, after a few minutes, he announced, “It’s a magnificent frigatebird, also known as a man o’war or pirate bird because it attacks other birds and steals their food.” Colin went on to explain that the magnificent frigatebird’s wingspan can reach two and a half metres, and that they are the lightest birds in the world—meaning that they have the longest wingspan-to-body-weight ratio. Essentially they are airbound; they can’t walk well, but can stay aloft for over a week.

  “I think it must have come from the Caribbean islands,” I said. “Given that they live on the open ocean, I wonder why we haven’t seen any before.” I’d first assumed seeing this bird meant we were close to land and was mildly disappointed to learn otherwise.

  “You’re partially right,” Colin said. “They do breed in the Caribbean islands, as well as Florida and the Cape Verde islands. But they’re tropical birds, and I guess until now, our latitude has been too northerly. But maybe this guy has a nest in the Caribbean; it says here they feed their chicks until they’re one year old. Oh, wait. It’s only the female that feeds her chicks that long. The male ducks out after three months and tries to find another breeding female.”

  “Men.”

  “And that was a male we saw—you can tell by the red throat pouch, which puffs up like a balloon during mating season. Females don’t have that, and they also have a white patch on their bellies.”

  Two shearwaters now joined the magnificent frigatebird in the skies overhead, each occasionally diving into the ocean to grab a small fish or shrimp. But the frigatebird soon overshadowed the shearwaters’ success. It turned its attention from the fish in the ocean to that in the smaller bird’s possession. With a few deft aerial movements, the frigatebird asserted its dominance and, when the shearwater dropped its catch, the frigatebird quickly claimed it. So that’s how it had earned its warring nicknames.

  Our boat had long been a magnet for birds, almost certainly because of the fish following our boat. The birds seemed to have no interest in the smaller pilot fish and triggerfish; only the larger dorado captured their attentions. The frigatebirds would follow the dorado, observing their actions from above. When the dorado gave chase to a school of flying fish, the birds spiralled down to the ocean’s surface and raced after the airborne dorado. I was amazed to see these birds with almost three-metre wingspans perform such elaborate aerobatics. At the same time, I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for the flying fish, which had spent millions of years developing a unique defence mechanism to escape from underwater predators, only to be picked off by these miniature fighter jets.

  When chased, flying fish race through the water at top speed before launching into the air, giving the water a final flick with their forked tails to increase their velocity. The timing of the final flick is an important part of the process. In the instant when most of its body
is in the air (where resistance is negligible) and its tail pushes off the water, the flying fish doubles its speed to approximately sixty kilometres an hour, allowing it to glide thirty to forty metres.

  We saw some flying fish extend their glide without fully re-entering the water. As they arced downward near what I thought was the end of their flight, they dipped their tails into the water and vigorously propelled themselves back to gliding speed. A few times we saw them stay above the ocean’s surface for two hundred to four hundred metres, with nothing more than an occasional tail-dip to maintain forward speed.

  On his previous journeys, Colin had had flying fish accidentally hit the sail of his old boat during the night. (During the day, they would see the boat and take evasive measures, but their eyesight failed them in the dark.) After they fell into the boat, he had no choice but to pan-fry them for breakfast. Unfortunately, the only flying fish that landed on our vessel were less than three inches long; the larger ones had sufficient power to clear our decks.

  Only one irregular object obstructed fish flight path over our boat: Colin or me at the oars. Colin had been hit twice and I’d been smacked once, but we never managed to capture the culprits before they slipped back to the sea through the scuppers. The collisions always happened at night, when our imaginations worked overtime and the ocean already seemed alive with unknown monsters. Colin was hit first, and he screamed like a B-grade actress in a horror movie, thinking the meaty hand of Davy Jones had whacked him on the back of the neck. Soon after, Colin had his turn to laugh at me. It’s rather surprising how much punch a trout-sized fish can pack when it’s hurtling through the air at sixty kilometres an hour.

  “I THINK WE should have gotten more cans of beans and fruit salad, and less dried bread,” I said, looking into the bow storage compartment with dismay. It was the morning of day 112; we still had dozens of packages of Melba-toast-like bread, but little else. We had grown sick of the dry bread, especially without butter or cheese to liven it up.

  “Have no worries. I’ve dreamed up a recipe that’ll transform those wretched biscuits into something fit for a princess,” Colin said.

  “Mmm, I can’t wait.”

  We had been trying innovative recipes to make use of the dried toast, but with limited success. So far we’d discovered pan-fried stuffing (dried bread moistened in water, mixed with a can of beans, and fried in oil), bread pudding (milk boiled with bread), and croquettes (moistened bread mixed with canned tuna and sculpted into patties that we pan-fried). Since we had to ration our flour, we also crushed bread and used it to coat our fish before pan-frying.

  I looked away while Colin prepared breakfast so that I didn’t ruin the surprise. Finally Colin rang the breakfast bell, vigorously banging a pot with a spoon. He handed me a towering plate of pancakes.

  “Can you guess what’s special about these?” he asked.

  I chewed thoughtfully. “Mmmm, these taste even better than usual—they’re lighter and fluffier.”

  Colin looked pleased with himself. “They’re 80 per cent crushed bread! I mixed a little bit of flour with milk powder, water, baking powder, sugar, and a lot of crushed bread. And the syrup, of course, is the usual caramelized sugar with a bit of water.”

  “I think you’ve got something here! They’re much lighter than normal, and the bread adds a rich flavour, but you’d never know what it is. If people knew how good these were, upscale restaurants around the world would start serving ‘rowboat pancakes.’ ”

  Necessity is the mother of invention, and between dried bread and fish from the ocean, we could feasibly make it all the way to Costa Rica. I hoped, however, that conditions would be right for a Caribbean landing, and that we would spend our final month at sea eating a more varied diet. We were now 160 kilometres from the island of St. Lucia, and my excitement at seeing land in a couple of days—and possibly even stepping onto it—was overwhelming. We had been on the water for almost four months, and I longed to be anywhere but this rowboat.

  15

  A CARIBBEAN PARADISE

  IN ST. LUCIA

  “WAKE UP,” COLIN yelled from outside.

  It was still dark, and a glance at the luminous dial on my watch informed me it was only 5:00 AM. We had been rowing non-stop throughout the night in order to stay on course and make landfall on St. Lucia later that day.

  “I’m coming,” I said.

  I pulled on my windbreaker and rowing gloves and peered through the hatch into the dark sea. Although I could barely make out the waves, a cacophony told me the wind was strong and the waves big. Colin’s body gyrated on the rowing seat as he struggled to control the boat.

  As I opened the hatch to climb out of the cabin, Colin screamed, “Hatch!”

  I instinctively pulled it closed and secured it. The roar of an enormous wave reverberated through the cabin, and the boat rolled onto its side. I lost my balance and slammed against the wall. Pencils, books, and cookie packages tumbled on top of me. The boat teetered on its side, on the verge of capsizing, before it righted itself.

  I looked outside to where Colin should have been, but he was gone.

  “Colin!” I screamed as I yanked open the hatch and scrambled outside.

  Please be okay, please still be on the boat, I prayed. My mind conjured a horrific scene: a bare boat and an empty, black, pitching sea. This couldn’t happen now. We’d been through so much, and land was only hours away.

  I couldn’t see him. But I heard him yell: “I’m fine.”

  I followed his voice to see him lying on the deck. The wave had thrown him off the rowing seat; he had not gone overboard.

  “Holy shit . . . that was one mother of a wave! It just reared up out of nowhere. I grabbed onto the safety line to keep from going overboard. Unfortunately, the boat rolled into the oar and snapped it.”

  I shook with relief. “Thank God you’re all right. I didn’t see you right away, and I thought maybe . . . ”

  “It’s okay,” Colin said, wrapping his arms around me. I hugged him tightly and held back the hot tears that welled in my eyes. The malevolent black sea crashed around us, and suddenly I felt we had landed on the set of a Harlequin Romance movie directed by Stephen King. The broken oar hung from the oarlock like a severed limb. Its lower half, still attached by a few strands of carbon fibre, knocked against the hull.

  After a long minute, I reluctantly released Colin from my grip.

  “I can’t believe we broke an oar,” I said.

  “I know. We’ve been through two hurricanes and two tropical storms without incident, and now, as we get near land, it finally snaps.”

  There was actually a simple reason why the oars had never broken up until now. Normally we stopped rowing when the winds rose above forty knots, securely lashing the oars inboard, where they were protected. At this point the wind was blowing at about forty-five knots, and the waves were very powerful, but we couldn’t afford to stop rowing. The elements drove us towards the eastern side of St. Lucia, where the swell crashed into the cliffs and sent plumes of foaming water hundreds of feet into the air. We would probably not survive being wrecked against the cliffs.

  We had to row non-stop to fight our way northward so that we could clear the top end of the island before slipping into the lee of St. Lucia. I quickly unlashed one of our spare oars to replace the broken one.

  “Good luck,” Colin said, just before he retreated into the cabin. “Oh yeah, I almost forgot to tell you: take a look over there.”

  He pointed westward, and suddenly I noticed the twinkle of lights.

  “Oh my God, it’s land!” I screamed.

  It was surreal. We’d been on the boat for what seemed an eternity, and finally I was looking at solid land again. I couldn’t wait to get off this stormy ocean and finally set my toes on solid ground.

  “Happy rowing,” Colin said.

  He closed the hatch firmly in case we capsized, and I felt all alone on the rough sea. Twilight set in, and I watched in awe as the shadowy folds
of St. Lucia became discernable. The jagged island was composed of several towering volcanic peaks, their summits obscured within clouds. Lush green slopes cascaded down to the ocean’s edge, hinting at the abundant rainfall in this region. We were still twenty kilometres away, but I could already see plumes of white foam against the sheer cliffs that ran along the western flanks of the island. I had barely slept in the past thirty-six hours; I felt like I was dreaming. As huge waves buffeted and twisted our vessel, I felt terrified; at the same time, I couldn’t believe that thatched huts, sandy beaches, and gourmet restaurants were so close by. But the ocean’s ferocity prevented me from feeling relief. I struggled at the oars, and the imposing cliffs in the distance seemed all too close.

  Colin emerged at 7:0 0 AM and spent several minutes studying the outline of St. Lucia and glancing at the GPS plotter.

  “If we want to reach land, we’ll have to stay very close to the tip of the island,” he said. “Otherwise the current will carry us past the islands, and we won’t be able to row back against the winds. We have almost no margin of error. If we’re too far south, we’ll be driven into the cliffs; too far north, and we’ll be blown right past St. Lucia. The current and winds are pushing us forward at almost two knots, so we want to be careful.”

  The conditions gave us very little control of our direction. We were on a giant westward-moving conveyer belt and could only alter our heading by about twenty degrees north or south. We had to row almost due north to achieve a WNW heading, which meant we were rowing sideways to the waves, placing the boat in a very vulnerable position.

  As the island drew nearer, Colin suddenly reversed direction and began rowing towards the cliffs. I shivered as I watched nine-metre swells release the energy they’d gathered across the Atlantic in one final, explosive display.

  Pensive, I watched the cliffs become nearer and nearer. “Don’t you think it’s time we changed our course?” I finally said.