Stop Drifting, Start Rowing

by Roz Savage

  A film crew was on board a sailboat alongside me, shining a light on my boat so that the camera could pick me out in the darkness. Another camera crew was on the bridge above. I became increasingly embarrassed by my lack of progress and was grateful we hadn’t invited the media. It was like one of those nightmares where the dreamer is running and running but going nowhere. For half an hour I battled the current. Every time I looked across at the pylon of the bridge, I was still exactly level with it, despite my increasingly strenuous efforts.

  At last, either because I redirected my attack to a point closer to the shore, or because the tide had finally turned, I managed to break free and emerge to the ocean side of the Golden Gate. I paused from my rowing to punch the air, and whoop and cheer as if I had just crossed the finish line, rather than merely the start line of my row. Surely it has to get easier from here on, I fervently hoped.

  It was around 3 A.M. when the camera crews bade a belated farewell and left to go home and get some sleep. But there would be no sleep for me. I rowed away from the bright lights of the city, past the dark silhouettes of the headlands that guard the entrance to San Francisco Bay. I was surprised by how quickly I found myself surrounded by inky darkness, the Golden Gate Bridge a dividing line between the safe shelter of the bay and the wild ocean outside.

  I navigated a succession of three buoys, their lights tiny pinpricks in the blackness of the night. Despite the close proximity of the great city of San Francisco, already I felt very alone. It was deeply counterintuitive to row away from friends and familiar surroundings, out into the unknown. I had no way of knowing what adventures might await me between here and Hawai’i. I just hoped that this voyage would redeem me from the humiliating failure and the at times still-raw fury of the previous year.

  I ROWED THROUGH THE NIGHT. I saw no maritime traffic, but I was keenly aware that I was in a major shipping lane, so it could be dangerous to go off watch. By seven o’clock the next morning, the sun had risen and I was getting tired, the long night being the culmination of several days of frantic activity and little sleep. Technically I had been on standby to depart for several days before I actually left, but when the call came from Rick, I found that all the tiny little last-minute tasks added up to a considerable amount of time. The night before I set out had been spent mostly in a fitful doze as my restless mind interrogated itself to find out if I had forgotten anything vital. Part of my brain tried to convince me that my packing list was reliable and everything had been checked off, but that little voice of worry that besieges the small hours of the night refused to accept the reassurance and continued to nag at me. Now, as dawn broke on my first day at sea and my eyelids drooped, I decided that surely I could take a half-hour power nap without disaster.

  My head had barely hit the pillow when a Klaxon sounded outside my cabin. I wearily returned to the deck. A pilot boat bobbed nearby, and a voice came over their loudspeaker. “You can’t stop here, you’ll have to keep moving,” it boomed. I sighed, and put out my oars once more. No rest for me yet.

  Later in that interminable day, I was rowing past the Farallon Islands. When the White Holly had stopped there on that early morning in 2007 and moored up to the buoy, the islands had been fogbound. Now it was a clear and sunny day, and I paused to take a few photos of myself against the backdrop of the craggy skyline that had earned the islands the nickname of the Devil’s Teeth.

  A little later, I was concerned to see a small rigid inflatable boat (RIB) bouncing across the waves towards me. Trepidation knifed through my tired mind. This was a marine protected area, and I wondered if I had strayed somewhere I shouldn’t, and was about to receive a rebuke from the authorities.

  The RIB’s engine cut off and it drifted towards me until we were within earshot. “Ahoy!” one of the two men on board called out. “Where are you going?”

  “Australia,” I replied, still wondering if I was in trouble.

  “No kidding!” came the reply.

  It turned out that I was not in trouble—far from it. Pete and Russ were two marine biologists stationed on the Farallons to study the local wildlife. They had spotted me through their binoculars and been intrigued by this bizarre craft passing their remote and lonely outpost, so they’d come to investigate.

  “You’re the most interesting thing we’ve seen all year,” they told me. “Do you mind if we bring out our interns to meet you?”

  “Sure,” I answered slightly uncertainly.

  They offered to bring me a beer, which I declined, as I run a dry ship, mostly for safety reasons, but also because rowing is the perfect opportunity for a detox, far from the temptations of land. They also offered to bring bananas and some chocolate, which I accepted. I knew that this would nullify my unsupported status, but that was of no importance to me. I had already proved on the Atlantic that I could complete an unsupported row, even turning down the offer of replacement oars when all of mine broke, so I felt no need to make the point again.

  Russ and Pete went to fetch supplies and interns, peeling away in the direction of their wind-blasted island home, leaving a trail of foaming wake.

  A half hour later they were back, with a gaggle of young women on board. We chatted for a while, and I traded them a business card for the food. It may seem strange to have business cards on board a boat bound for the high seas, but you never want to miss a chance to make a friend.

  They asked me about my trip and seemed to find the scale of the challenge almost incomprehensible. I found their reaction amusing—I never fail to get a kick from the look of slack-mouthed amazement that usually greets my description of what I do—but it was also sobering to hear the words coming out of my own mouth. It’s so easy to get caught up in all the busy-ness of departure, and it is only after I have cast off that the daunting scale of my endeavour becomes all too real.

  After a while, I had to get going. Once again I only had a limited window of opportunity to get away from dry land before the onshore winds strengthened, so every moment was precious. Exchanging final farewells, we parted company. The marine biologists and their interns would be the last humans I would see for a while.

  ON THE SECOND DAY OUT from land, the GPS chartplotter stopped working. This was the same one I’d had the year before, which had seemed to temporarily malfunction during the capsizes, but once back on land it had dried out and appeared to work perfectly. Its early demise was, to put it mildly, disappointing.

  I didn’t want to borrow the backup GPS out of my grab bag. The point of the grab bag was that if I needed to abandon ship and get into the life raft, there would be just one thing to grab, rather than having to run around the boat collecting everything I needed. So it was best if I left its contents fully intact. Looking around my cabin, I spotted the TomTom satellite navigation unit from my truck. A friend was going to sell the truck on my behalf, and as I was leaving, I realized I had nowhere else to put the satnav unit so I had thrown it into the sleeping cabin. Now I turned it on and tried a few options on the touch screen. Aha! On a little-used menu, I found the option to display latitude and longitude. This was all I needed. There were no islands between San Francisco and Hawai’i, apart from the Farallons, so I could simply navigate using my GPS coordinates.

  FOR THE FIRST FEW DAYS AFTER setting out from the Presidio Yacht Club, conditions were calm and pleasant as promised by my weatherman. But then the winds rose, as did the seas. The Brocade was once again battered by high waves, and I wondered if this row would end as prematurely as the previous year’s. Before I set out, a veteran ocean rower had told me I had “no chance” of a successful departure from San Francisco, and I started to wonder if he was right. I didn’t quite dare to believe that I would succeed, so I adopted an attitude of feigned indifference—or as I preferred to describe it to myself, pseudo-Buddhist nonattachment. I would focus on doing everything that I could on a day-to-day basis to ensure success, but I would not tempt fate by speculating as to the actual outcome.

  I had learned this motiva
tional technique on the Atlantic, after driving myself nearly insane by looking too far into the future and trying to control things that were inherently uncontrollable, such as the weather. When I had eventually found the mental space to step back and analyse why life felt like such a struggle, I realized I was setting myself up for mental meltdown if I carried on as I was. I learned to keep a strong vision of my goal constantly in my mind and surrender to the uncertainties of my situation, while always doing everything in my power to inch a little closer to my objective. This technique now proved its worth.

  The period of rough seas and headwinds dragged on—for about a week I could neither row nor make progress. I passed the time by listening to audiobooks on my iPod, a welcome innovation since the Atlantic, when I had endured the journey accompanied by nothing but my own thoughts and the sounds of nature after my boat’s stereo rusted to death early in the voyage.

  I put out the sea anchor to mitigate my backwards drift, but that created yet more problems. The trip line kept getting tangled up with the main chute, so I had to use brute strength to pull the sea anchor back in while it was still full of seawater. As I was battling with it one day, a wave caught the sea anchor and jerked it away from me, walloping my finger painfully against a fitting on the boat. The finger swelled to almost twice its normal size, probably broken, and I cut up an old pair of rowing gloves, as my injured finger was now too fat for me to force it into gloves that were still intact. It hurt, but not too badly.

  One night the sea anchor tore itself clean off its rope. Where the long splice ended, the rope had twisted as the chute rotated in the waves. Eventually the twist became a weak point, and my sea anchor disappeared forever. I was made abruptly aware of this fact when the boat capsized just before 2 A.M. My memory flashed back to the fiasco of the year before, and I wondered if yet again my voyage would end in failure, but the boat self-righted as it should and stayed upright for the rest of the night. The cause became apparent when day broke to reveal the frayed end of the line. Not wanting a reenactment of the 2007 airlift, I took the precaution of not mentioning this in my blog.

  But meanwhile, I had a more immediate concern. The piece of equipment most essential to my continued survival was the watermaker, a small desalination plant that uses reverse osmosis to transform saltwater into freshwater, powered by the solar panels attached to the roofs of both fore and aft cabins. Electronics and seawater are not a good combination. Water plus salt plus electricity equals corrosion. Even exposure to sea air, let alone seawater, is enough to cause problems. Immersing the entire apparatus in saltwater for about 24 hours guarantees complete destruction. Trust me on this—I’ve proved it. I recorded the following notes in the ship’s logbook.

  3rd June: WORRIED: watermaker hatch flooded. Bailed and tested—seems okay for now.

  4th June: Put Bag Balm [a skin remedy that I use as a waterproofing gel] around watermaker hatch to try and waterproof it.

  5th June: Put WD-40 on watermaker. Seems to be working but sounds rather feeble.

  8th June: Watermaker not working—hums but no water from output pipe.

  9th June: Watermaker worked. Almost pleasant on deck today—fewer crashing waves.

  14th June: Watermaker didn’t work. Better luck tomorrow?

  15th June: Watermaker worked! Sounded healthy.

  18th June: Ran watermaker.

  20th June: Ran watermaker for about an hour.

  21st June: Watermaker sputtered to a stop after a minute.

  22nd June: Tried directing all solar panels to one battery to boost power, but watermaker only ran 1 min.

  23rd June: Can’t get watermaker to run off either battery. Spent 2½ hours trying to fix watermaker. Rang Darren [at Spectra Watermakers] twice. No luck. PUR 06 [backup watermaker, operated manually], here I come.

  Later: A trying day—watermaker problems, rough water, Good Morning America cancelled interview. Tomorrow has to be better.

  26th June: PUR 06 test: 45 mins to produce 600 mLs [equivalent to little more than a Starbucks grande latte]. Pathetically slow and laborious.

  27th June: Spoke to Kyle at Spectra. Faintly hopeful.

  Later: Spoke to Rich Crow. He promises we will get watermaker going. More hopeful.

  28th June: Opened up watermaker feed pump. Totally f—-ed.

  1st July: PUR 06 backup watermaker now also kaput. Sprung leak, won’t work. Note to self: don’t buy vital survival equipment off eBay.

  The PUR 06 was unused when I bought it and had been tested before I set out. For it to fail at this inopportune moment was most extraordinarily bad luck. I prided myself on being professional and thorough in my preparations, so while concern over my survival should have been uppermost in my mind, my immediate emotion was indignation at the unfairness of it all.

  More out of a sense of due diligence rather than in realistic expectation of a repair, I called the manufacturers of the manual watermaker, Katadyn. They told me that I would need specialist tools and parts, which I had not brought with me because their unit was only ever intended as a backup for use in emergencies. To borrow a line from Oscar Wilde, to lose one watermaker may be regarded as unfortunate; to lose two was starting to look like carelessness. The customer-service representative offered to fix the manual watermaker if I could send it in. I didn’t go into detail, but simply stated that this might be logistically challenging.

  LOOKING BACK ON THAT STAGE OF THE ROW from the comfort of dry land, I wonder that my logbook is not even more full of expletives. A steady accretion of problems was threatening every aspect of my expedition. But there was never a single moment when everything was bad all at once. One day I would be worried about the water situation, another day my broken finger would be aching, the next day I might be concerned about the effect of the headwinds on my course, and on yet another day it would be the sea anchor that was uppermost in my mind. Yet it never reached crisis point, and I just kept doggedly hanging in there.

  You might imagine that this would be a tremendously stressful situation, particularly for somebody who, in her land-bound office life, had been accustomed to being very much in control. But the events of the Atlantic crossing and of the previous year had taught me a new humility about my ability to control circumstances. I had come to expect and accept difficulty as the normal mode of life at sea. I was resigned to the fact that there would always be problems—it was just a question of how many and how serious.

  The Atlantic had given me confidence in my ability to cope with stress. It had forced me to develop formidable resilience to suffering, and I felt certain that no matter how hard this Pacific row might be, it surely could not be as difficult as my maiden voyage, when I had been relatively unformed as a person and as a seafarer.

  I have a pet theory about the nature of stress: that we all have a set point of stress with which we feel comfortable. If we don’t have enough in our lives, we subconsciously engineer additional tension to bring us closer to our set point. See the film stars, rock musicians, and supermodels who appear to have supremely privileged lives, yet somehow contrive to introduce trouble in the form of illicit affairs, family conflicts, drug problems, and criminal convictions. At the opposite end of the spectrum are those enduring enormous amounts of all-too-real stress, such as war, financial duress, homelessness, illness, or bereavement. Yet somehow most of them find the strength to keep going without succumbing to breakdown or suicide. They adapt to this as the new norm. Human beings are remarkable in their ability to adapt and cope.

  It is the people who endure the everyday hardships not of their own making that truly inspire me when I am unhappy at sea. I have, at least, chosen my challenge, while they had their challenges thrust upon them. I had no right to complain—which, of course, is not to say that I never did. But out of deference to those with real and valid problems, I tried to confine my whining to the pages of my logbook rather than going public on my blog.

  I confess that there were moments when I succumbed to anxiety. When I contemplat
ed what consequences could ensue from my situation, I sometimes felt a rising panic and had to deliberately quell it, pushing it back down to the dark place from whence it came. I knew that panicking would only cloud my judgment and blur my thinking. I had to stay calm and rational if I were going to survive.

  ALTHOUGH I HAD CHOSEN NOT TO POST about the watermaker on my blog, I’d shared the bad news with my mother. Mum was keen to put the word out that the device had broken and that I needed a resupply of water, but I was considerably less eager. There were two aspects of my unfortunate experience the previous year that made me hold back. First, I didn’t want anybody to know that there was a problem, in case another would-be hero decided to intervene. Second, I knew from my encounter with the MV Overseas Long Beach just how difficult it was to transfer anything from a very large vessel to a very small one. I couldn’t see how we could get a resupply of water over to me without running the risk of losing it in the ocean, nor what kind of containers they could put it into that could then be stowed securely on my boat. Ideally, heavy items such as water supplies are stowed in hatches below the level of the deck, to keep the centre of gravity low and ensure that the boat can self-right in the event of a capsize. If the water was in containers too large to go into the hatches or that could not be at least secured to the deck, then if the boat started to go over, the containers would start to slide and add to the momentum of the capsize.

  In fact, the only obvious way that I could see for any resupply to succeed was to use bottled water—and that ran counter to the very point I was trying to make on this leg of my voyage, that single-use plastic objects are environmentally disastrous. I would be rowing around the outskirts of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a concentrated area of trash reported to be around twice the size of Texas, and containing around 3.5 million tons of rubbish.