The same fate befell the five oarsmen – four Britons, one American – who since 1966 have perished attempting to emulate Harbo and Samuelson’s crossing of the Atlantic.
Johnstone and Hoare, who disappeared while racing Ridgway and Blyth across in a 15ft boat in 1966, were the first to die. Kenneth Kerr, a Scottish submariner who set out from Newfoundland in 1979 in a bid to claim the record for the smallest rowing boat to cross the Atlantic, was next. His first attempt ended in a rescue after fifty-eight days, but his abandoned boat, a 13ft glass-fibre dinghy called Bass Conqueror, washed up on the west coast of Ireland five months later. Kerr recovered the boat and made another attempt, setting out from St John’s once again the following year. He disappeared, not far short of victory, but once again the boat made it across. This time she bypassed Ireland altogether, looped up over Scotland and threaded her way through the Orkney Islands before crossing the North Sea to wash up near Stavanger, Norway. She was found there on 26 January 1981, three months after contact with her skipper had been lost.
The Atlantic claimed the life of another British rower that same year. Andrew Wilson, a twenty-one-year-old student, set off alone from St John’s in a homemade boat on 25 June 1980, one month after Kerr. Wilson never made any of the weekly radio calls he had promised to make to his father in the UK and was never seen or heard from again. Ten months later his boat Nautica, a 20ft plywood dory he had built himself in a workshop at his old school, was found washed up on the island of South Uist in the Hebrides.
It’s always the people, not the boats, that fail. Almost always, the boats make it across.
Next to die was Nenad Belic, a sixty-two-year-old retired cardiologist from Chicago, and in many ways his death – like his decision to row the Atlantic in the first place – was the strangest of them all. It was also the one with which I felt most connected. Belic put out from Stage Harbor in Chatham, Massachusetts, in the Lun, a specially designed 21ft rowing boat, on 11 May 2001, five months before Dominic and I set off from Tenerife to row the southern Atlantic in the opposite direction. We didn’t know it at the time – no one outside his family and a small circle of advisers did. After a successful career, Belic was financially comfortable and had no need of sponsorship or desire for publicity.
The last contact he had with his wife and family was on 27 September and a signal from his emergency beacon was picked up by British and Irish coastguards three days later. The position it gave was about 230 miles southwest of the Irish coastal town of Dingle – no more than 30 or so miles from where Pink Lady would come to grief three years later. Two aircraft and a helicopter were scrambled but only the beacon was found – there was no sign of Belic or the Lun.
On 8 October, the day after my Atlantic rowing race started, Belic’s son Adrian published an open letter addressed to the international seafaring community, asking sailors in the east Atlantic area to look out for his father and his boat, but no sign of either was seen until 16 November. Six months after Belic had set out from Chatham, Irish fishermen spotted the Lun off the village of Kilkee, on the rocky Atlantic shore just north of the mouth of the Shannon river. Its skipper’s body was never found.
On that day, alone on Star Challenger, 2,500 miles to the south, I was out of electricity, short of water and starting to hallucinate, shooting the breeze with Jim Morrison and just a week away from abandoning ship after forty-seven days at sea.
Belic’s disappearance remains something of a mystery. How had he been parted from his boat, which he knew like the back of his hand? Made from cold-moulded cedar wood and epoxy with a glass-fibre shell, the Lun differed from the ocean rowing boats that had gone before it in that the rowing position was fully enclosed, with covered ports along the sides for the oars. In profile, it looked like nothing so much as a miniature submarine and, if necessary, could be completely sealed off from the elements. The yellow craft had become a familiar sight on the 300-mile-long Lake Michigan, where Belic trained over six years, rowing repeatedly from one end to the other, before he finally started out.
It’s known that Belic passed through a bad storm. But when his boat was found the cabin hatch, though damaged, was closed and sufficiently intact that a person could not have passed through it. It seemed that he must have left the shelter of his cabin and closed the hatch behind him – but why? There was one clue: when the Lun was recovered it was found that two of the windows in the aluminium superstructure had been repaired with fresh putty. This was still soft, which indicated it had not had time to ‘go off’ in the air before the boat had been overturned. All this raised the sobering possibility that Belic may have been on the outside of the boat, repairing his windows, when the fatal wave struck. Was he tied on? Inexplicably, probably not. Belic knew well enough how to tie a proper knot, but no broken line was found attached to the Lun. Perhaps, after so long at sea and becoming so thoroughly adapted to his precarious environment, Belic had fatally allowed confidence to evolve into carelessness. He wouldn’t have been the first.
From an honorable defeat to a dishonorable surrender. After abandoning and burning Star Challenger mid-Atlantic, all I had left of her was the small yellow disc of plywood I salvaged. Three years later, just before Pink Lady set out from St John’s, I fastened it on a line around my neck. At least one small part of the boat I had built to cross this ocean would finally make it, I told myself.
I was wrong.
When it came to designing ships capable of weathering the worst that the seas and oceans could throw at them, the Vikings knew their stuff. For them clinker was not just a way of building an attractive-looking boat, but a breakthrough technology that brought the riches of the known world within their grasp.
In 1893, a Norwegian newspaper publisher and a crew of eleven set sail from Bergen on the west coast of Norway in a reconstruction of the Gokstad longship that had been unearthed thirteen years earlier from a burial mound at Sandefjord, in the south of the country. Their destination was the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The arrival of the Viking, slap bang in the middle of celebrations marking the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of the New World in 1492, somewhat upstaged the arrival of the Spanish-built replicas of his three ships and served as a timely if awkward reminder that Norsemen had beaten the Genoese explorer to it by a good 400 years.
Skipper Magnus Anderson reported that throughout the 3,000-mile, six-week voyage, during which the crew and their ship weathered at least one fierce storm, the Viking had behaved admirably. Thanks to its clinker construction, in which each plank and the ribs to which it was attached retained a certain amount of independence and flexibility, the entire ship was able to twist and flex, rolling with the waves rather than rigidly slamming through them, while remaining completely watertight.
The same, however, could not be said for the ultra-modern, ultra-lightweight and, ultimately, ultra-fragile carbon-fibre hull of the Pink Lady, which, in the grip of a fierce storm on 8 August 2004, snapped clean in two about 200 miles southwest of Ireland.
We almost made it, we really did, the four of us slogging at the oars in pairs for two hours at a time, and then resting for two, a punishing routine we repeated ad nauseam through seas rough and calm for thirty-eight days and nights. We lost a lot of weight, ate a great deal of increasingly disgusting dehydrated food and developed many painful saltwater boils on our behinds, for which the only relief came from Sudocrem, an antiseptic healing cream we’d brought along in industrial quantities. A decade later, after Phoebe was born, Sudocrem came back into my life, an old friend recruited in the battle against nappy rash.
When Pink Lady reached the halfway point we broke open the bottle of Newfoundland screech we’d been saving for the occasion, and Mark Stubbs, our skipper, decided he would go for a celebratory mid-Atlantic swim. Naturally, we rowed off and briefly left him to it.
All in all it was terrific fun. Until one day at around 2am when suddenly it wasn’t. We’d covered 2,000 miles from St John’s. We were withi
n 360 miles of our finish line, the Bishop Rock lighthouse on the Isles of Scilly, and well on target to shatter the fifty-five-day record for the crossing, set in 1896 by Harbo and Samuelson in their open clinker boat, when it all went horribly wrong.
For days we’d been chased across the Atlantic by the unseasonably early Hurricane Alex, which had first come to the attention of the American National Weather Service just over a week earlier. We were in daily contact with a shore-based weather router in the US and what had begun days earlier as a joke – ‘Hey, guys, guess what? A hurricane’s heading your way!’ – had become progressively less amusing. On 6 August, with Alex hurtling in our direction at almost 52mph, my watch-mate John Wills had his most depressing conversation to date with our weather guy. It was, he said, not going to be pretty.
‘Bruce thinks we ought to consider pulling the plug,’ John said. I knew we wouldn’t. Quitting was the last thing any of us wanted, each for our own reasons. For me, and for Mark, the Atlantic was unfinished business. If we didn’t face it this time, we’d only have to come back again. John and Pete felt the same. We were also aware that setting off our emergency beacon now could pull somebody else into the same situation, and none of us could stomach that.
We set about stowing all our loose gear, battening down and preparing to meet whatever was heading our way. The ocean was already a boiling cauldron. I remember looking up as I filled water containers for the siege ahead and thinking, ‘Christ, if anyone was just dropped into this boat right here, right now, they’d go mad with fear.’ To us, after more than a month at sea, this was business as normal. But normal was about to get a whole lot worse.
By the early hours of Sunday, 8 August, two days after America had finally lost interest in Alex as it skittered off into the North Atlantic, we were riding out what the Times weatherman would later describe as an ‘horrendous storm . . . a depression packing colossal winds and rain in a powerful mixture of steamy tropical air, with winds in excess of 40mph and waves over 4m’.
That sounded bad enough, but the description neglected to mention that, on the surface of the ocean, chaos now ruled. Gone were the familiar orderly processions of big but predictable walls of water that Pink Lady could reasonably hope to negotiate, either under oar or, in real extremes, with her nose held defensively to windward by the sea anchor. Instead, there was only a fantastic madness, churning the surface of the ocean into a crazy, animated alpine waterscape.
Until even recently, the concept of rogue waves had been dismissed as the mythology of salty old sea dogs, but thanks to networks of solar-powered sensor buoys scattered across the world’s oceans and observations made by weather satellites, oceanographers now know that they exist and probably account for the loss of dozens of very large ships every year. It’s thought that rogue waves form when trains of several large waves join forces, and that the resulting monster can rear up to 100ft in height. Data from mid-Atlantic sensor buoys would later show that our killer wave was probably no more than 40ft high – ‘only’ about the size of a four-storey building.
Later, a Falmouth Coastguard spokesman would tell the media we had been ‘very lucky . . . when it hit them, they were battened down and they were well ready for it. They rowed most of it out, but they got caught by the back end of it – [Alex] hit them with its tail, if you like.’
And then, thanks as much to my own stupidity as to Alex, I very nearly drowned.
At about 2am that Sunday I was hunkered down, along with my watch-mate John, in the tiny, coffin-like cabin at the rear of Pink Lady, my hands and feet braced against the chaos of the seas, when I heard what seemed to be the sound of an approaching express train, rising above the already monstrous din of the storm. Mark and Pete were in the even smaller forward cabin. My first thought was that we were about to be run down by a ship, blind to all about it in the chaotic seascape. For a brief moment, I was twelve years old again, spinning over and over in the freezing water of the River Orwell, hearing the muffled growl of an engine and bracing for the impact of a propeller . . .
Then the wave struck, with the sound and force of a missile, and we were suddenly and violently submerged. Entangled in the chaotic wreckage of the instantly flooded cabin, I could see nothing in the turbulent blackness. I had no idea which way was up or down, nor, indeed, whether the boat was already on its way to the bottom of the Porcupine Abyssal Plain, more than 13,000ft below.
Holding my breath until stars danced in my skull, I very nearly drowned right there and then, but somehow I managed to escape just in time, finding a way out of the tangled wreckage thanks to sheer dumb luck and a great deal of highly motivated thrashing about. That first, glorious breath above water felt like being born again.
Then the stupidity kicked in. Just before the wave had struck, unable to endure the stifling heat of the airless cabin any longer I had briefly undone my survival suit, sealed against water ingress at feet, wrists and neck. Such a bad, bad idea. Now the unzipped suit began to fill with Atlantic ocean and I found myself drowning all over again. In the interests of obscure research, I can confirm that it is possible to kick oneself while frantically treading water in the face of impending death.
When I’d surfaced I was probably no more than 15ft from the relative safety of the capsized wreckage, and in between waves I even caught glimpses of the handy grab lines we’d rigged along the undersides of the hull for just such an occasion. But in those conditions I might as well have been a mile away. As my rapidly filling suit grew ever heavier, every ounce of strength I could muster was committed to the losing battle of keeping my spray-lashed face above water. Simultaneously propelling myself in any direction was out of the question. I’d have drowned for sure, probably in less than another minute or two, had Pete, a former diver with the SAS, not suddenly surfaced, spotted me and swum over. Having dragged me back to the comparative safety of the wreckage, he then dived down and recovered from the foundering hull the life raft and grab-bag, complete with satellite phone. Even still, our chances of being found would have been slim if John had not spotted our emergency beacon floating away and grabbed it just in time. The flashing light was a comforting sight inside the life raft as the beacon sent its SOS signal up to the orbiting satellites that at that moment seemed to have been lofted into the heavens solely for our benefit.
Sponsored by an apple company, we were eventually plucked to safety by a large banana boat. I shall be forever grateful to the crew of the Scandinavian Reefer and her skipper, who with exemplary seamanship managed to manoeuvre his massive ship between our tiny raft and the worst of the weather. Cold and utterly spent, we nevertheless shot up the rope ladder dangled over her side like monkeys.
The only possessions I salvaged were the clothes I was wearing – my self-sabotaged survival suit, underpants and a Tshirt – and the small yellow disc that still hung around my neck. The following August, a year after Pink Lady was wrecked, my passport, Times press pass and three bank cards, which I’d stashed inside a waterproof bag, washed ashore on the west coast of France, not far from Brest. French police passed them to their counterparts in Plymouth, who sent them on to me. It was a sobering moment. I wondered whether our bodies would have made the same landfall had things worked out differently. Of Pink Lady, fatally broken in two, there was never any sign. Bucking the trend for abandoned Atlantic rowing boats, she failed to make it home.
Thanks to Phoebe Louisa May, and Roosevelt’s rhetoric notwithstanding, the disc has not only lost its power to lure me into dangerous places, but also serves as a daily reminder that, while worse things most certainly do happen at sea, much better things happen on dry land.
About a week after Dominic quit the Atlantic rowing race in October 2001, leaving me to press on alone on Star Challenger, The Times spoke to his wife, Beryl, at home in Hong Kong with their year-old son. ‘There have been times when I’ve felt so proud that Dom would try to do something like this, whether he finished or not,’ she said. ‘But there have been just a few times when I’ve b
een angry, wondering why he would want to do it at all.’
I get that now.
15
OVER SHE GOES
‘The setup is a critical step in building your boat. It determines the shape of the boat and provides the base for your boatbuilding efforts. It has to be accurate, fair (no lumps, flat spots or unwanted twists), and sturdy, yet light enough to move around if required.’
– Richard Kolin, Building Catherine: A 14 Foot Pulling Boat in the Whitehall Tradition
21 MARCH 2017
I have, quite literally, reached a turning point. Up until now the emerging boat, gripped firmly by the keel in the jaws of the twin Workmates, has been the right way up. But the plans call for the Swift to be planked upside down and so now over she must go.
First, she needs four legs, cut from 2×2 lengths of planed pine and fixed with multiple screws to two of the moulds. The idea is that when the inverted boat is standing on its own four feet the keel will be at about eye level, making it easier to work on the planking. Only when the seventh plank is on, at which point it will be too difficult to reach inside to do the riveting, will she be turned back up the right way once more. To give the whole structure strength and prevent it wobbling under assault from saw, plane, hammer and chisel, a complex network of timber supports follows, bracing leg to leg, mould to mould, and mould to base board – fore and aft, side to side, and diagonally. All this is done with strict attention to accuracy – the moulds must not be twisted out of alignment, by so much as a centimetre, because to do so will cause a distortion in the symmetry of the hull. It goes without saying that the centreline must also not be distorted.
How to Build a Boat Page 17