How to Build a Boat

by Jonathan Gornall

  Someone has introduced me and, to the sound of a thinnish round of applause, the house lights are going down. Weak-kneed and cursing the damnably efficient heating, I totter across the stage towards the lectern, drawn like a dying man towards the glowing light of the laptop on which some technician has, with luck, loaded the photographs I have given him. In my trembling left hand I clutch the sheath of notes I banged out the night before.

  Four days before I took to the stage at the RGS to talk about how I had given up after forty days at sea, solo British rower Debra Veal, who had been taking part in the same race, finally landed in Barbados after a voyage lasting 112 days. Her triumph, the Yin to the Yang of my failure, had been all over the TV and the newspapers. Her husband, Andrew, had abandoned ship after just two weeks, and she and I had been alone out on the Atlantic from about the same time. At one point we’d spoken by satellite phone. I had called to cheer her up, but in the end it was she who spent the call lifting my spirits. I start my talk by acknowledging Debra’s achievement.

  This speech had been scheduled early last year, before I’d set out to row across the Atlantic with Dominic Biggs, a fellow journalist and close friend I’d met working on a newspaper together a decade earlier. Of course I’d agreed to it, partly because it was for a good cause, partly because it was a long way off, but also because I figured it would feel pretty good standing up there, coming over all self-deprecating as I lectured all those armchair adventurers about what a tremendous battle we had fought and won with the mighty Atlantic. Except, of course, we had lost the battle. Or, rather, we had surrendered. Ducked it. Flunked it. Chickened out.

  When I crept back to England from Barbados with my tail between my still aching legs, I’d forgotten all about the RGS gig and was horrified to receive a call from the press office at Orbis, a charity that operates a flying eye hospital in remote parts of the developing world and whose logo had gone up in flames with the rest of the boat. As the intended beneficiary of our row, they had arranged for one of us to give the fund-raising speech upon our return and now, to my utter dismay, they had called in the favour.

  ‘But, you do realise that we didn’t make it?’ I said. ‘That Dominic got off the boat after thirteen days? And that I lasted only another thirty or so?’

  ‘Oh, yes, we saw all the stories.’

  Well, who hadn’t? It was all over the paper I worked for, The Times, from ‘Gornall left on his own’ and ‘Monotony, madness and chutney’ to ‘Our man down and almost out in mid-Atlantic’ and, finally, ‘Times rower’s Atlantic odyssey ends in flames’. As a Times journalist, I had of course lapped up the opportunity to write endlessly about our preparations in the run-up to the race, but the media loves disaster and hubris and when it all went so dramatically wrong the headlines kept coming.

  Unfortunately, there was no chance of getting Dominic to do the talk. For one thing, so far as I knew he was back in Hong Kong. For another, we were no longer talking. In fact, we haven’t talked since. I should have paid closer attention to the hard-won wisdom of Ranulph Fiennes, offered in Mind Over Matter, the account of his fraught 1992 crossing of Antarctica with Mike Stroud: ‘To take friends on stressful expeditions has always seemed to me to be foolish since I can think of no easier way of maiming a friendship for ever.’

  I don’t make male friends easily. I tell myself I like it that way, that I am self-reliant and that it has nothing to do with having been a single child with no father, or that all those years spent sharing dormitories with boys at boarding school gave me enough male company to last a lifetime. Regardless, I value the few friends I have managed to make along the way and, until 2001, Dominic was one of them.

  It was only much later, when I plucked up the courage to read the accounts in The Times, that I really understood what had happened between Dominic and me. In the three years between agreeing to row the Atlantic and pitching up in Tenerife for the start of the race in 2001, Dominic had married and, more to the point, he and his Australian wife, Beryl, had had a baby. The astonishing thing to me now, post-Phoebe, is that Dominic agreed to come along at all once he had a baby son to consider.

  The real problem, I see now, was that I was the only one of the two of us who had a crisis to resolve. In Dominic’s view I had become obsessed, selfish and manipulative; this was supposed to have been a joint venture but I was the captain and he was the crew. Looking back, I think he was right.

  The last night on land I stood alone looking out to sea, entranced by a shimmering highway of moonlight that led away from the small harbour in Tenerife and towards the promising horizon to which I had been drawn for so long. The race began the next morning, 7 October 2001, two days before my forty-sixth birthday. I was ecstatic. Dominic was quiet and thoughtful. On a sparkling sea, the race fleet scattered and edged away from land and we were quickly alone. That night the wind picked up and over the next few days, emotions ran as high as the seas. Taking two-hour turns to row and rest, we barely spoke and whatever strand of friendship that still connected us began to unravel.

  When after a few days Dominic started to talk about leaving – boarding one of the two support yachts shadowing the race – I encouraged the idea. I may even have suggested it. I’m not sure at which point I forgot that Dominic’s wife, who worked for a television company in Australia, had secured the sponsorship that had made the whole thing possible. Either way, out came the satellite phone and on our tenth day at sea I watched the masthead light of the approaching yacht rising like a star in the predawn.

  With Dominic gone, I felt elated, liberated – finally in sole control of my boat and my destiny. Except, as it turned out, I wasn’t.

  At first, finding myself alone in the Atlantic was like stepping off a cliff and discovering I could fly. The triumphant sense of self-reliance in those first days was electrifying. I rowed, navigated, rested, rowed again, heated water and cooked food and, unbelievably, made progress, pausing each day at noon to mark my position on the chart. With no other human being in sight, I was free to look up and out and that first evening, as the Atlantic heaved rhythmically under the boat, the sunset was a spectacular detonation of colours so beyond description as to border on the intimidating.

  Night and day, the sea was alive, with everything from small fish to dolphins and the occasional ominous, thrilling presence of a shark. At night, trails of phosphorescence lit the darting passages of unknown creatures below the black surface, turning them into the sea serpents old sailors swore they had seen. One morning, disappointed by my flagging mileage, I looked overboard and saw the boat had grown a beard. On a dead-calm day, armed with a plastic scraper and attached to a line, I went over the side and found myself floating 13,000ft above the bottom of the Atlantic, mesmerised by the clarity of the water and the sun’s rays arrowing into the depths. As the evicted plant life sank, small fish appeared to feed and bigger fish gathered to feed on them. By the time I hauled myself back on board I had created an entire food chain. Later, a shark brushed past the boat, reminding me I could have become part of it.

  I’m not sure exactly when, but at some point awe and wonder began to give way to fatigue and a gnawing despair that I would ever reach Barbados. In the days after we set out from Tenerife, both Dominic and I became increasingly concerned by the failure of our solar panels to generate sufficient electricity to run both the water-maker and our night-time navigation light, which supposedly reduced our chances of being run down by any nearby shipping. The lack of power also meant we couldn’t keep our GPS unit switched on for more than a few minutes each day, and that our compass couldn’t be read at night.

  ‘I believed that by going on we would be taking an unacceptable gamble on safety,’ Dominic had told Richard Holledge, one of my Times colleagues who was reporting on the unravelling adventure and had managed to reach him on the rescue yacht via satellite phone. He also feared that as we drank our freshwater ballast to compensate for the lack of water production, we would jeopardise the boat’s stability. This puzzle
d me. Dominic knew I intended to replace any ballast water we were forced to drink with seawater, to ensure both the stability and self-righting ability of the boat were not compromised.

  The bottom line, though, was that Dominic realised he had made a mistake in embarking on the adventure at all. It wasn’t just that he had become a father. But his son, now a year old, had come into a world that had suddenly become a much more hazardous place, without the need to create artificial danger of the adventurous kind. On 11 September 2001, as the competitors gathered in Tenerife in the weeks before the start of the race, America was attacked and the entire world seemed to be teetering on the brink of a new dark age.

  Dominic felt that under such circumstances rowing the Atlantic was a frivolous and selfish pursuit. I disagreed. So did John Zeigler, one of the two US competitors in the race, who responded to his government’s advice that Americans abroad should keep a low profile by going nowhere without first wrapping himself in a large Stars and Stripes.

  After Dominic eventually quit I struggled on for another thirty-four days, growing steadily weaker and increasingly dispirited, and somehow it all just slipped away from me. Surmountable problems with gear, food and water became insurmountable as the will to deal with them ebbed away along with my energy and sanity. I started to have long and fairly interesting conversations with flying fish and the occasional storm petrel. Once, I rose from the oars, fell asleep on my feet and woke up overboard. Luckily, tying myself on had become a habit. I wept when my salt-encrusted short-wave radio finally gave up the ghost and I was denied the company of the BBC World Service and the Voice of America. I finally recognised that some sort of end was nigh when, one brilliant, star-lit night, Jim Morrison of the Doors appeared and joined me for a singsong. We were pretty good, actually.

  Shortly before I packed it in, 1,000 miles from Tenerife and with perhaps another 2,000 ahead of me, I received a satellite call from Kiwi rowing legend Rob Hamill, one half of the two-man crew that had won the very first transatlantic rowing race, in 1997. We’d met briefly in Tenerife in the weeks before the start of the 2001 race and now he’d heard I was thinking of giving up and called to talk me out of it. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I know the weather’s been against you and it’s bloody tough. I really admire you for being out there on your own. I know I couldn’t do it.’

  That was a nice touch, from a sportsman who knew the value of psychology, but we both knew that he could – and would, if he had to, with relish.

  ‘Remember,’ he said, his voice echoing off a satellite. ‘Pain is just for now. Failure lasts for ever.’

  Sitting on the deck of the yacht that had accepted my abject surrender after forty-seven days at sea, I could only look on as the crew burnt Star Challenger to the waterline and then repeatedly rammed the stubbornly buoyant carcass with their steel hull. I’d felt I owed it to the boat to burn her myself and the crew, having doused her in petrol, duly handed me a flare. I fired it up and threw it, but missed. I tried again with another, and missed again, and then gave up in despair. I couldn’t even do that right. She sank eventually, but fought like hell to stay above water, a mortally wounded animal clinging on tenaciously to life. Too late, I realised I had made a terrible, irrevocable mistake.

  All I had left of her was a small, yellow disc of plywood, drilled out on the quayside in Tenerife during last-minute alterations in the hours before the race began. It must have fallen inside her. As I prepared to abandon ship, feverishly scooping up belongings, I spotted the disc amid the detritus on the deck and instinctively seized it. Ever since, it has hung somewhere in my line of sight as a constant reminder of – what? Failure? Shame?

  Some of that, yes. But as I slowly came to terms with what had happened, that little yellow disc also came to symbolise something else, something summed up in the words of a speech by a former US president, Theodore Roosevelt, which a friend kindly sent to me after my Atlantic debacle. Roosevelt’s opinion carried weight with me, for the simple reason that in January 1909, during his last days in the White House, he had taken the time to pen a fan letter to Kenneth Grahame, the British author of The Wind in the Willows. To Grahame, the president wrote that he and his family had ‘come to accept the characters as old friends and . . . I felt I must give myself the pleasure of telling you how much we all enjoyed your book’.

  With his judgement, in my eyes at least, thus established as sound, I attached some import to the words of a speech Roosevelt gave in Paris on 23 April 1910. It was not, he said, ‘the critic who counts . . . The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again . . . his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.’

  Well, that was me, I thought and, even though the topic of Roosevelt’s speech had been citizenship in a republic, rather than ocean rowing, I was very happy to take comfort from it.

  11

  RIDICKEROUS

  ‘Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.’

  – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

  16 FEBRUARY 2017

  Cutting out the stem was one thing. But excavating the trench down either side of it, in which the forward ends of the planks that form the hull will be embedded, is quite another. Of course, this being the arcane business of wooden boatbuilding, nobody calls it a trench, or a groove, or even a slot. This is a ‘rabbet’, or ‘rebate’. To build a boat, first learn another language.

  Eric McKee, doyen of the League of Dead Experts, defines the rabbet as a ‘channel, usually V-shaped, cut in one member so as to accommodate the end or edge of another without forming a lip’. That’s reasonably clear, as far as it goes (although as the channel is being cut to accommodate the squared-off end of a plank, strictly speaking it will be L-shaped, but hey). The course followed by the bottom of that channel – the pointy bit of the ‘V’ – is drawn on the plans and described as the ‘rebate middle line’ (though it can also be referred to, variously and unhelpfully, as the ‘inner rebate’ or ‘ghost line’).

  Thanks to Kate’s pattern-wheel breakthrough, I have managed to transfer this line accurately to the stem. But before any chiselling can begin, the position of two other crucial lines must be established – the top ends of the twin arms of the V, which run either side of the rebate middle line. Cutting down at an angle from these two lines to the middle line creates the V-shaped channel in which the front ends of the planks of the hull will eventually nestle. These two lines, however, are not drawn on the plans, for reasons that elude me. Instead, they must be extrapolated from another section of the plans, using a combination of mathematics and what I can only describe as weird geometry.

  Weird to me, anyway. It doesn’t help that halfway through grappling with the sort of maths I thought I’d left behind at school (or, rather, which left me behind) it strikes me that it would have been so easy for Fabian to have drawn these two lines on his plan, along with the rebate middle line. Maybe that’s just the way it’s done. Maybe real boatbuilders find building boats so easy that they need an esoteric puzzle to solve to keep their interest alive. But it doesn’t matter. That’s what the picture of Phoebe on the wall of the shed is for – to remind me why I’m doing this, and that if it were easy it would have no real meaning. But it’s still annoying.

  The rearward of these two phantom lines is the so-called ‘bearding line’, described by John Leather as ‘the line where the inner face of a plank leaves the outer edge of [the] stem’, and the position of this line relative to the middle line varies along its length. Think of the organic shape of a boat at the front, the way the width of the bow starts out broad at the top but becomes increasingly narrow, curving under itself, until it meets the keel. This means that every single plank lands on the stem at a slightly different angle to the ones above and below it, with the result that the
distance between the bearding line and the middle line will gradually increase as the angles become more acute. At the same time, the forward line – referred to with confusing similarity to the nomenclature of the rebate middle line as the ‘rebate line’ – will draw closer to the middle line.

  Figuring out where these two lines should run down the flanks of the stem is a baffling process, begun by bringing two sheets of the plan together and overlaying the drawing of the stem with a section known as the ‘lines plan’. I know this only because Fabian tells me. There is simply no way I could have worked it out for myself and no book I have seen is of any help. Eventually, I think I’ve worked it out, but I have no real confidence I’ve got this right. If I haven’t, and I start hacking out wood from all the wrong places, there will be nothing for it but to start over with the entire stem.

  I give in and email Fabian, not because I don’t want to bother him by phone but because my problem is so visual that only an email will do. The word ‘Help!’ in the subject field will, I hope, convey urgency. I attach a photograph of my efforts to draw on the plans a series of boxes, cross-sections of the stem at each waterline position, that will supposedly give me the precise measurements I need to start cutting the stem rebate. No matter how I try, I can’t get past the fact that I am asking my mind to operate simultaneously in two different planes, yet in the same space.

  Fabian replies almost immediately, which is just as well as I’m going nowhere until I can crack this.

  My confusion, he says, is because the drawings I have created are cross-sectional slices across the stem in the planes of the waterlines, as seen from above, which are then superimposed on the profile, or side view, of the stem. I should, he advises, think of each of the waterlines on the plan as ‘an axis about which your section drawing rotates 90 degrees’. As for the actual positions I’ve extrapolated for the bearding and rebate lines . . .