by Roz Savage
However, somebody had deemed otherwise and had taken it upon him- or herself to call the Coast Guard. I was livid. I didn’t know who it was, but I was outraged that somebody would have the arrogance, the presumption, to deem themselves a better judge than I of what was good for me. How dare they?
But whoever had done it, and however little I liked it, the Coast Guard was here, and they were determined that there would be no casualties on their watch. The best way they could be sure of that was to bring me in.
“Are you in distress?” they asked me. On the ocean, as I recalled from my VHF radio course, distress is a technical term, meaning that the crew of the boat perceive that they are “threatened by grave and imminent danger, and require immediate assistance.” I’d had better days, I told them, but I was not “in distress” in the technical sense. I did not require assistance or rescue.
According to the Coast Guard, however, the weather was going to get even worse over the next 48 hours. I phoned Rick to double-check, and he reiterated his earlier prediction: that if I could just hang in there for another 24 hours, the conditions would ease and the waves subside. It was difficult to know whom to believe.
Over the next six hours the Coast Guard’s calls became more persistent, increasing the pressure on me to accept rescue. We debated the issue backwards and forwards on the radio. They would push, and I would resist, in a verbal tug-of-war.
As the pressure grew, I became less and less certain of myself, and doubt over the viability of my voyage took root. I was concerned about the state of my boat. I had lost the use of a number of instruments, as well as my sea anchor. I was experimenting with an autopilot for the first time, having used a simple foot-steering mechanism on the Atlantic, but the device had taken a knock during one of the capsizes. The O-ring that formed a waterproof seal around the seam in its middle had slipped out of place, giving the black plastic case the appearance of having been disembowelled, the translucent white O-ring hanging out like a loop of intestine. Water would now be getting inside, and like most electronic devices, it would not take kindly to a soaking. But this was no big deal. It would be easy enough to switch to the backup plan: rudder strings that could be adjusted by hand and then secured through cleats on either side of the rowing position.
Marginally more serious was the problem that the GPS chartplotter had stopped working. Again, there was a backup plan—a second GPS in my emergency “grab bag”—but the unit was a small and basic model that didn’t show nautical charts of the coastline. And again, it wasn’t a big deal. Once I got away from the California coast there was nothing for me to bump into. All I needed was my latitude and longitude and that would be enough to get me to Hawai’i.
By far the most serious problem was the loss of the sea anchor. This was an important safety device in rough conditions, and could also help in mitigating backwards drift in a headwind. I wasn’t wildly keen on the idea of continuing my voyage without a sea anchor. If I ran into big seas again later on, I would have no defence.
None of these issues in themselves would have been enough to make me abandon my attempt, but in combination they added up to a situation that was decidedly less than optimal. I sat in my cabin, swaying as the waves pummeled the boat, weighing up the pros and cons of the situation. As I did so, I became less certain about resisting rescue. One minute I would be marginally in favour of continuing despite the equipment losses and breakages, the next minute my mental seesaw would tip and I would be marginally in favour of returning to shore while I still had the opportunity to repair the boat. Sleep deprivation had interfered with my decision-making abilities, and I couldn’t make up my mind.
In mid-afternoon, the arrival of the MV Overseas Long Beach temporarily interrupted my deliberations. The merchant vessel was answering the Coast Guard’s summons to bring me a replacement sea anchor. The huge ship throttled back as she approached, wallowing in the heavy seas. I was amazed, and a little awed, to notice how even a ship of her size was affected by the conditions. Waves crashed around the enormous bows that loomed like cliffs from the water.
The captain brought his ship as close as he dared without swamping me, and hailed me on the radio.
“Thank you so much for coming to help,” I said, somewhat insincerely. I didn’t want help. I wanted everybody to go away and leave me alone. “But please make sure that you do not put your crew at risk. I repeat, do not put your crew at risk. I am not in distress. It would be helpful to have a sea anchor, but it is not important enough to risk anybody’s safety for.”
“I understand,” he reassured me. “I will not put my crew at risk. We are going to try to shoot a line across to you, which we will then use to send over a sea anchor from one of our lifeboats. Do you have a boathook?”
“Yes, I have a boathook,” I replied. Ever since I had needed to use a boathook to repair my oars when all four of them broke during the Atlantic crossing, I had vowed never to set to sea without one again. They’re designed primarily to hook a mooring buoy in order to tie up a boat for the night, and are therefore theoretically useless in mid-ocean, but you never know when a long, telescopic pole might come in useful.
“Good, so we’ll get the line as close to you as possible, and if it lands in the water, you might be able to use the boathook to reach it,” the captain said.
“I’ll certainly give it a try,” I promised.
And try I did, but despite repeated attempts, they were unable to shoot the line within range of my boat. After each attempt they had to steer around in another huge circle in order to approach me again from upwind, as there was no point trying to shoot the line into the teeth of the gale. Each circuit took about half an hour. I stayed out on deck, getting progressively colder and wetter as the waves soaked me, waiting for them to come around to try yet again.
At last, on the seventh attempt, I managed to reach the line as it trailed in the water and hauled about 500 feet of thin orange line on board. This thin orange line was tied to a thicker line, which in turn was tied to a still thicker line. At last, when the entire deck of my boat was covered in a tangle of ropes, I reached the end, to which was attached a lifebelt, a buoy, and a small conical sea anchor made out of thick yellow canvas. It wasn’t as large as the 12-foot parachute-shaped anchor I had lost, but maybe it would work. I wasn’t sure why they had sent me the buoy and the lifebelt. Maybe they were just there for flotation. I pushed them into a corner of the deck.
It took about an hour for me to disentangle the lines, but eventually I was able to deploy the anchor off the bows of my boat. I watched anxiously to see if it would succeed in making the Brocade pivot around to lie with her bows into the waves. At first I thought it had worked—the boat turned through 90 degrees—but then she carried on turning until she had done a full 180, so I was still sideways to the waves, but facing the opposite way. Sideways was not where I wanted to be. This was where the boat was most liable to capsize.
My spirits plummeted, and I suddenly felt exhausted. I had barely slept for two nights, and I hadn’t eaten much, my appetite affected by the nauseating movement of the boat. I’d spent hours on deck trying to get hold of this sea anchor, another hour sorting out the tangle of ropes, and ultimately it had made no difference whatsoever. The prospect of another dark night of capsizes loomed.
Just then the Coast Guard called back. “We need a decision, right now,” they said. “We can’t get a boat out to you—the Dorado had to turn back because the waves were too big.”
This made me pause for thought. Too rough for a Coast Guard cutter? This really was quite a storm.
“You’re drifting away from the coast,” they went on, “so by tomorrow you’ll be out of range of a helicopter rescue. It’s about to get dark. If we’re going to send out the helicopter for you, it needs to be now. The weather is going to deteriorate. We’re very concerned about you.” Accept our help before it’s too late, was the subtext. Just say yes.
Just say no! screamed my heart. Don’t give up on your drea
m!
I asked for five minutes to consider my options and hung up. I tried calling my weatherman, but got his voicemail. It looked like I was on my own. The choice would be mine, and mine alone.
It was one of the toughest decisions of my life. I had spent well over a year preparing for this voyage—raising money, renovating and improving the boat, training, reprovisioning. It wasn’t easy to let all that hard work go to waste. I was ten days out from shore, and in the last 48 hours had actually been making impressive progress in the right direction. I believed I’d done the most difficult work—getting clear of the coast—and I didn’t want to have to go back and do that part again. Like so many enterprises, the hardest part of an ocean row is the beginning—those early, nervous, vulnerable days when there is still the option to turn back. But as the saying goes, a job begun is a job half done, and since I had left harbour, got the first few miles over and done with, and settled into my routine, I was keen to maintain the forward momentum.
Additionally, it would be embarrassing to turn back. Thanks to Nicole’s hard work there had been quite an avalanche of media coverage. For it all to end prematurely in failure would be humiliating.
And what of my self-respect as an adventurer? I prided myself on being fiercely independent, on not quitting when the going gets tough, and on not getting myself into situations that I wasn’t willing to get myself out of. To accept rescue went against my stubborn grain.
But on the other hand, my safety was now compromised by the loss of my sea anchor, the load of broken electronics, and my cabin being a mess of uselessly dangling lee cloths and untethered seat belts. I still had at least two more months out on the ocean and wanted to be ready for whatever the weather might have in store for me. I was being offered an opportunity to restore my boat to a shipshape state before continuing. Safety has to be paramount, I reminded myself.
It went against my instincts, but accepting rescue seemed to be the sensible thing to do. Argh—I hated this feeling of caving in to the pressure.
I rang them back. “Okay, let’s do it,” I said. “Come and get me.”
I hung up the VHF handset and burst into angry tears. I had long dreamed of this row ending with a triumphant arrival in Hawai’i—not an airlift into a Coast Guard helicopter.
It would be a half-hour wait before the helicopter arrived. So many times during those 30 minutes I reached out involuntarily towards the VHF handset. Was it too late to change my mind? Could I still call off the rescue?
But each time my hand fell back to my side. The die was cast. I pictured the helicopter on its way, lifting off from the Coast Guard base, tilting and turning towards the ocean, and speeding across the waves into the gathering twilight. I had made my decision, and now I would have to stand by it. When the time came, I would meekly obey their order to abandon ship. The prospect appalled me. This felt wrong, so wrong.
The radio crackled. It was the helicopter pilot. “Vessel Roz, vessel Roz, vessel Roz,” he called. That was funny. They thought Roz was the name of my boat, not the rower. I almost smiled, desperate to find some humour in this awful situation.
I picked up the handset. “This is Roz.”
“We are going to lower the swimmer into the water. When you see the swimmer is ready, you are going to jump into the water and swim over to him. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said sounding calm enough, but inside I was thinking, You’ve got to be kidding me! You expect me to jump out of my boat—my nice, safe boat—into 20-foot waves? Suddenly staying on board seemed much more attractive than the alternative. But I had made my decision, and I had to follow through.
It suddenly occurred to me that I should take my laptop and mobile phone. I would need them to communicate with my team and my mother once I reached shore. And if I was to never see my boat again, I wasn’t willing to leave them behind.
“Can I bring a bag with me?”
“No. You can’t.”
“It’s a very small bag,” I eyed the grey Pelican case that housed my MacBook. It wasn’t exactly small. But it wasn’t too big, either. It depended on what you were comparing it with, really.
“Okay then,” the voice on the radio conceded.
“Just give me a couple of minutes,” I said, and hung up before the voice could change its mind.
I wriggled awkwardly into my survival suit, a red, rubber-lined, all-in-one garment like an overgrown baby’s romper. It had got damp during the Atlantic crossing, and despite my best attempts to dry it out, the rubber lining had started to rot. I hadn’t expected to need it, though, so I hadn’t replaced it. As I pulled it on over my shorts and T-shirt, the material clung clammily to my bare arms and legs. Yuck.
I swiftly looped a strap through the handle of the grey Pelican case that held my electronics and slung it diagonally around my body. Pushing it out on deck ahead of me, I groped my way along on all fours, staying low to avoid toppling or being swept overboard. I retrieved the MV Long Beach lifebelt from the corner of the deck where I had flung it earlier and put it around my middle. I didn’t want the weight of the Pelican case dragging me down to the bottom of the ocean, and the lifebelt would keep me afloat.
Leaning back into the sleeping cabin, I picked up the radio. “I’m ready.”
I watched as the hovering helicopter opened its door, and a small orange figure was lowered on a line into the water, like a spider abseiling down a strand of gossamer.
“Okay, go!” I heard the command from the radio inside the cabin.
I latched the cabin door behind me and, taking a deep breath, steeled myself for the plunge. Was there even the slightest chance I could still change my mind? No.
Go, go, GO!
I jumped.
Saltwater spray stung my eyes and the Pacific sucked at the legs of my survival suit as I half-swam, half-wallowed through the towering waves to the orange-suited Coast Guard swimmer. The helicopter’s blades thumped deafeningly into the 50-mph winds overhead. The swimmer helped me into a harness and hitched me to the winch line. At his signal, the helicopter started to gain altitude and we rose from the water in tandem, much too intimately entwined for two people who had met only a moment before.
As we were hoisted aloft, I looked down at my trusty rowboat, labouring in the foaming swells. She had looked after me throughout 103 days of storms, struggles, and solitude on the Atlantic crossing the previous year. On that voyage she had witnessed my gradual transformation from a nervous novice, a 30-something former management consultant hopelessly out of her depth on the high seas, into a self-sufficient, capable adventurer. She had been my prison cell, but also my life-support capsule. I owed my life to her. But now I was abandoning her. I felt a harsh pang of guilt and an overwhelming sense that I was making a bad mistake.
As we reached the threshold of the helicopter door, helping hands came out to haul me in. As the helicopter bore me swiftly towards land through a rapidly darkening sky, I huddled disconsolately on the floor in the back, my survival suit peeled down to my waist and a thick, standard-issue grey blanket wrapped around my shoulders over my T-shirt. A puddle accumulated around me as I sat in my soaking clothes, alone with my thoughts. All I could see of the helicopter crew was the back of their heads, and the headphones clamped over their ears made conversation impossible. I was in my own little world of misery.
I replayed the events of the last few hours again and again in my mind. I had set out to complete an ocean row to draw attention to environmental issues facing the ocean. Now, ironically and unwillingly, I had contributed to ocean pollution by losing my sea anchor, I was riding in a chopper that was burning fossil fuel at a phenomenal rate, and I had abandoned my precious boat—my only possession in this world apart from my old yellow pickup truck. What a mess.
Yet, I reminded myself, this is what I signed up for. When I had written those two versions of my obituary several years before, I had thought of the obituaries I enjoyed reading in the newspaper—the colourful characters who seemed to have p
acked several lifetimes into one, who followed their passions, who might succeed or fail equally spectacularly, and who, if they failed, would pick themselves up and dust themselves off and try again. They had been my inspiration, and now I had to draw on their example and find the strength to persevere.
I had wanted to push my limits, to get outside my comfort zone—and of course that would, by definition, be uncomfortable. On the Atlantic, I had thought many times that I was about to hit my limits—of pain, frustration, anger, boredom—only to find that my limits were far beyond where I thought they were. I had time and again gone past the imagined point of impossibility, only to look back on it from the other side and wonder why I’d held such a small view of my capabilities.
When setting out across the Pacific, I’d known that I was pushing myself even farther—5,000 miles farther. The more I pushed, the more likely it became that I would fail. There was only one way to find out how far I could go, and that was to go there. At the outer limits, there’s a fine line between courage and stupidity. On this occasion, at least, I had stayed on the right side of the line.
Although to some extent the choice had been taken away from me, I nonetheless held myself responsible for my decision. I had committed to being the captain of my own ship. Setting out across the Atlantic soon after my divorce, I’d been determined to demonstrate my self-reliance, to myself as much as to others. I wanted to prove that I didn’t need a husband—or anybody, in fact—to take care of me. This didn’t just mean the physical self-reliance of being alone on a rowboat; it also meant the psychological self-reliance of making my own decisions and standing by them. There was nothing to be gained by blaming the informant or the Coast Guard. Ultimately, the choice had been mine, and there was no benefit to regretting it or revisiting it and wondering if I’d done the right thing. I would never know what might have happened had I taken the other option and steadfastly refused the rescue. The decision had been made, and my job now was to figure out what to do to make the best of a bad situation.