Stop Drifting, Start Rowing

by Roz Savage

  My good Samaritans managed to persuade an airline to let me on board without a passport, and loaned me enough money for a ticket. At last I was on my way back to San Francisco and, I hoped, a chance to redeem my interrupted voyage.

  ON BALANCE, I WOULD HAVE PREFERRED not to have had this unscheduled pit stop in Eureka, yet I was touched once again, as I have been hundreds of times since I started ocean rowing, by the heartwarming gift of human kindness. Time after time I have been moved and amazed by the willingness of people to reach out and embrace a stranger, opening up their homes and their hearts, and often their wallets, to help me achieve my dreams.

  My interpretation of this phenomenon is that strong need, whether generated by a mission or a crisis, creates an energy vortex that draws people in and allows them to express their love and affection for a fellow human in a way that is rare within the boundaries of ordinary life. An adventurer or a victim is a rogue variable thrown into the mix, and draws forth the goodness inherent in most people. One of the biggest perks of my work is that I get to see this wonderful, kind, generous, life-affirming side of human nature, which I rarely witnessed in my office-bound days.

  At first I had struggled with embarrassment at asking for favours or living on charity, but then I read about St. Francis of Assisi, who encouraged his followers not to be too proud to beg, and I was inspired to overcome my embarrassment. I was, I believed, doing a good thing arising from good motives, so I reasoned that I would have to get comfortable with being on the receiving end of altruism. People seemed to derive genuine joy from expressing their generosity, so who was I to deny them that pleasure? I learned to receive and to be grateful, and to try through my endeavours to give as much back to them as they were giving me.

  My blog was one way that I could reciprocate. I understood that many of my supporters would love to have an adventure of their own, but due to circumstances, family obligations, or time constraints, they were unable to do so. The least I could do was to allow them to vicariously enjoy my adventure by taking the trouble to craft an interesting and thoughtful blog post every day. It was often difficult for me to embrace this task with enthusiasm. After a long day at the oars, I was impatient to reach the relative comfort of my bunk, and it could take well over an hour to unpack laptop, phone, and cables from their waterproof case, type out a blog post, add a photo, upload it via the satellite phone over a tenuous connection that would often drop many times during the transmission, and then pack everything away again. It was a labour of love, and it reaped huge dividends in the form of appreciative online comments and messages of support. I wasn’t able to view the comments, having only e-mail capabilities, but my mother would send me the best of them, and so blog posts and comments would develop into a mutually satisfying dialogue as my readers and I exchanged ideas and opinions on a wide variety of topics.

  The blog also allowed me to gently push out my environmental messages, although I made an effort to keep these to no more than about one in five of my blog posts, not wanting it to turn off potential readers who did not regard themselves as environmentally inclined. I reckon that you can’t win converts if they’ve stopped reading.

  Over and above the blog posts, I felt that the best way I could reward my faithful supporters was to succeed in my mission. There were many, many days at sea when the only thing that kept me going was the knowledge that there were people around the world who were watching and waiting and caring about my fate. If the goal had just been about getting to the other side of the ocean, there would have been numerous times when it would have seemed hardly worthwhile. But the blog comments were regular reminders that my adventures mattered to many people besides myself, so even if my motivation was waning, I told myself that I owed it to others to keep going.

  So it was also for them, the supporters both known and unknown, that I was determined to continue my voyage, to put behind me the humiliation of this disaster.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ULTIMATE FLEXIBILITY

  “Be infinitely flexible and constantly amazed.”

  — ATTRIBUTED TO JASON KRAVITZ

  It was midnight, and a full orange moon was rising over San Francisco when the RV White Holly set sail from Sausalito. The moon cast an eerie shadow on the clouds that rested lightly on the tops of the pylons of the Golden Gate Bridge. As we motored under the bridge and looked back, the shadows shifted. At first the shadow pylons had been in alignment with the real ones; but with our changing perspective, the shadow pylons appeared to tilt and topple into San Francisco Bay as if the bridge were collapsing in slow motion, a disturbingly apocalyptic sight. We all stood on deck, mesmerized, until the bridge and its phantom pylons disappeared into the darkness.

  The White Holly was a 133-foot research vessel, usually carrying a team of scientists intent on deepening human knowledge of the oceans. A shark cage resting on the ship’s deck bore silent witness to the risks that the researchers faced in pursuit of their mission. The Farallon Islands, about 20 miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge, are famous for their seasonal population of great white sharks and form part of the Red Triangle, an area of the ocean notorious for shark attacks. The crew now on board were no less intent on their mission than the scientists, but it was a mission of a very different nature. We were setting out to intercept my rowboat as she drifted down the California coast.

  There was no time to lose. We needed to salvage the Brocade before anybody else got to her. Under the law of the sea, she was now technically abandoned and would legally become the property of anybody who took her into their possession. They could then do with her as they wished, including charging me full market value if I wanted her back. Some of the crews who had been forced to abandon their boats during the 2005–2006 Atlantic Rowing Race had fallen prey to this law when local fishermen found the capsized vessels and demanded full payment, so the risk seemed real enough.

  Even assuming we managed to find the Brocade, we would then face another challenge. We would need to bring her on board the White Holly. It is difficult enough to locate a tiny rowboat in the vastness of the ocean, but the most important part of the task is also the hardest: physically reconnoitering one boat with another without inflicting damage on either.

  I hoped to continue almost immediately with my row to Hawai’i, but we would need to make running repairs first, and we needed a relatively stable platform to do this. That was why I had chartered this particular vessel. Equipped for marine buoy maintenance, she had a powerful crane that we could use to lift my boat out of the water and onto the deck. The Brocade’s boat trailer, last seen in Crescent City and then driven by Nicole back to San Francisco, had been retrieved from storage and brought on board, lashed securely to eyebolts embedded in the deck of the White Holly, ready to serve as a makeshift cradle to hold the boat safe and steady while we worked to restore her to seaworthiness.

  To get the Brocade safely on board, we needed calm conditions. According to Rick, we had just a small window of opportunity, early on Wednesday afternoon. Any earlier or later than that and the waves would be too big, and we would run the risk of pounding the fragile carbon-fibre shell of the Brocade against the unforgiving steel hull of the White Holly, destroying her rather than rescuing her.

  IT WAS NOW JUST TWO DAYS SINCE I HAD RETURNED to San Francisco from Eureka. During those two days I had been working flat out to find a suitable salvage vessel; launch the mission; and source every last nut, bolt, and screw that I might possibly need to repair the Brocade. I’d been helped immeasurably by Aenor and Melinda, a couple of 50-ish friends whom I had met only a couple of months previously when I gave a presentation to a small group of women at a home in the Oakland hills. Melinda was a corporate lawyer and an Australian by birth, although her family had moved to the United States when she was young. Aenor was an orthpaedic surgeon and a survivor of colon cancer. She had volunteered to be expedition doctor, pledging to be available by phone 24/7 in case of emergency and filling a large case full of pills, potions, bandages,
and needles for me to take on my boat to cover every possible medical eventuality.

  But now she and Melinda were about to become an even bigger part of my story. They had made it their mission to find and buy every item on my considerable shopping list, and many more things besides, “just in case.” They had scoured every West Marine chandlery store in the Bay Area, and we had duffle bags full of marine miscellanea—stainless-steel hardware, flares, hand tools, safety equipment, survival suits, and so on.

  It was also thanks to Aenor and Google that we had found the White Holly, possibly the only vessel in the Bay Area that met my requirements. The charter would cost a small fortune, but to reconstruct my boat from scratch would cost even more. I had invested my life’s savings in buying and fitting out the Brocade, and to leave that huge investment of time, money, and effort drifting around the Pacific as a large and potentially hazardous piece of flotsam went against all my principles.

  As I was using my row to raise awareness of environmental issues, including the impact of climate change on the small island states scattered across the South Pacific, it made me wince that the airlift and salvage operation combined would produce more than 16 metric tons of carbon dioxide. In the space of a week I would have doubled my emissions for the year, taking me slightly over the American average and 100 percent over the British average. It was difficult for me to incur these massive costs financially and environmentally, but ultimately I had little choice if I was ever going to row again—and that was never in doubt. Quitting simply was not an option.

  BY GOOD LUCK—IF THERE IS SUCH A THING—the White Holly was available at the time when we needed her. With my permission, Aenor had arranged the charter with the skipper, Captain Vince Backen, a tall, craggily handsome man who reminded me of George Clooney and most definitely had a way with the ladies. The first time we met, he took my hand to help me aboard and, looking deep into my eyes, said, “You’re younger than I expected.” It is lucky I am not susceptible to such obvious charms, I told myself sternly, as I stepped onto the deck of his ship.

  The afternoon before we set out, I received a phone call from Aenor as she and Melinda conducted yet another chandlery raid on the West Marine store in Alameda.

  “Roz, we were wondering. … We really don’t want to get in the way, so please say if this doesn’t work for you, but we wondered if we could possibly come along?”

  “Could you? Wow, yes, absolutely! I would love it if you could come along!”

  I had cleared it with Captain Vince, who agreed on condition that they buy the food for the expedition. So Aenor and Melinda hit the shops yet again, the supermarket this time, and arrived with enough food to feed a small army—or navy.

  Also on board was Eric Sanford, my boyfriend, who was from White Salmon, Washington. It would be his birthday in a couple of days, and he had been due to go to the Burning Man festival in Nevada, but he’d sacrificed both birthday and the Burn to come and lend a hand. Since the airlift, he had been tracking my boat’s progress as she drifted south, taking the reported GPS coordinates from her Marinetrack beacon and plotting them on his laptop. He had extrapolated her current trajectory to predict the position where we were most likely to intercept her course. As our resident geek/navigator, his role would prove to be crucial.

  Also on board were Vince’s crew: Caitlin, his whippet-thin girlfriend; Chris, a blond, good-looking young deckhand; and Mike, a salty old fisherman complete with moustache. So there were eight of us in all. We had loaded our gear onto the boat that afternoon and made up our beds in the communal bunk room. The interior of the boat was spartan. It was definitely a working vessel, not a luxury liner.

  After watching the Golden Gate Bridge retreat into the darkness, we went belowdecks. Melinda took up her post in the galley, the industrial-style ship’s kitchen constructed entirely of stainless steel, from where she would produce a steady procession of generously proportioned and delicious meals over the coming three days. After dinner, Eric showed me the chart he had plotted on his laptop, tracking the progress of my errant vessel since her abandonment.

  LITERARY CONVENTION WOULD HAVE ME SAY a few words about Eric at this point. I will buck convention and start with his demeanour rather than his looks, for it was his ebullient personality that first attracted me to him.

  When, about nine years earlier, I had sat down and written two versions of my own obituary—the one I wanted and the one I was heading for if I carried on with the salary-slave existence I was living at the time—I had thought about the people I admired, whose obituaries I enjoyed reading in the newspapers. They seemed to have lived many different lifetimes in one, constantly reinventing themselves as circumstances changed or as they realized that their existing incarnation was no longer challenging them to grow. They tried many things, lived large, and had a gusto and a zest for life that lesser mortals seemed to lack. Whatever life force is, they must have been at the front of the queue when it was handed out. They were joie de vivre personified.

  Eric was such a person. So although he’s 18 years older than I am, about the same height, and would never be considered Hollywood handsome, I’d fallen for him. Within the first few weeks of our relationship, Eric had taken me kayaking, cross-country skiing, mountain biking, and windsurfing. I dismally failed to display an aptitude for any of them, but Eric was endlessly encouraging. It may have been wishful thinking on his part, hoping that he had found his ideal adventure playmate—too bad that I was a complete klutz at anything apart from rowing. How rarely are we able to see someone as they truly are, rather than as we wish them to be.

  The first crack in our relationship had appeared the previous year while we were sailing in Mexico. We had four friends staying on board, and I welcomed the opportunity to spend some time working on my book about the Atlantic crossing while Eric had so many other hands on deck. But one day he took me aside and expressed his disappointment that I wasn’t participating more in the sailing activities.

  I had been proud of my progress with the book—it was proving difficult to find time for writing amongst all the adventures that were such a feature of our life together—and I was deeply wounded by his criticism. I saw the book as an essential step in my mission to show that there are ways to be happy other than having a steady salary and a large house in the suburbs, and had hoped that Eric would be more supportive of my goals. We had talked about them at length, and I knew that he understood. So I was upset that he didn’t seem to understand that I needed to devote time to fulfilling my purpose.

  Matters deteriorated further during our trip to Africa to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, after which I was due to spend some time back in Britain. I was quietly relieved to have this opportunity to take some time away and to focus on what I felt was important. I realized that relief was probably not an appropriate emotion if I was really committed to making the relationship work, and that for the time being I was probably better off being single. That had been the state of play when I had set out across the Pacific.

  So we were a crew befitting the standard formula for a Hollywood disaster movie: the dishy captain, the glamorous girlfriend, the hot deckhand, the crusty old sea dog, two staunch female friends, and a couple whose relationship was on the rocks.

  No matter what the state of our romance, I was very pleased to have Eric on board. An experienced mountain-rescue expert, he had that confidence-inspiring mix of common sense and emotional wisdom often found in people who have had to guide others through adversity and misadventure. These were trying and traumatic times for me, and I welcomed his reassuring presence.

  ACCORDING TO ERIC’S CHART, WE WOULD INTERCEPT the Brocade around noon the next day, so after discussing our plans with Captain Vince, we retired to our respective bunks to get some sleep in preparation for a busy day ahead. The White Holly motored on into the moonlit night, the drone of the engines lulling us to sleep.

  We were up bright and early the next morning, and I was anxious. In what state will we find my boat? I wondered. H
as she capsized again since I involuntarily abandoned her nearly a week ago? Will we have everything that we need to make the necessary running repairs?

  But first and foremost we needed to find her. Despite Eric’s careful plotting of the Brocade’s position, this was a big ocean and she was a small boat. Rick had predicted calm conditions, and the flat water would help. I knew from past experience that it could be very difficult to spot her in rougher seas. During the Atlantic crossing, the Royal Navy’s HMS Southampton had wanted to make a rendezvous with me on Valentine’s Day during their passage from Grenada back to Great Britain. Despite knowing my last recorded position and having a boat bristling with radar equipment, they hadn’t been able to find me. It had been a rough day and my boat was hidden from sight down amongst the waves, which also caused enough interference on the radar to conceal me. Ultimately I spotted them before they spotted me.

  So unless the conditions were dead calm, we might not see the Brocade until we were almost on top of her—if, indeed, we managed to get that close. What would we do if she weren’t where we expected her to be? The position reports from the onboard transponder were coming back irregularly, sometimes hours without an update. What if the signals became even more intermittent or stopped altogether? We would have to resort to crisscrossing the ocean in a grid pattern or circling outwards in an expanding spiral from our best guess at her last position.

  Captain Vince had offered to undertake this mission almost at cost, just covering his crew’s wages and the cost of fuel, but even those came to $4,000 a day. Time was of the essence. The longer we were out, the more fuel—and the more money—we would burn.

  FORTUNATELY RICK’S PREDICTION PROVED to be correct. During the morning the waves, already slight, subsided further, and by late morning conditions were flat calm. All hands were on deck, scanning the horizon for a first glimpse of the Brocade. Aenor took up position in the crow’s nest near the top of the mast. After finishing her breakfast duties in the galley, Melinda came up on deck to keep a lookout. Eric stood next to Captain Vince on the captain’s bridge, alternately gazing out to sea and peering down through his half-moon glasses to check and double-check the tracking positions on his laptop.