by Sarah Outen
Halfway through the build I gave Serendipity a nickname, borne out of talking about her as though she was a friend – Dippers seemed to fit her perfectly. She would be Serendipity at heart and on the formal documents, but to me she was Dippers. I finally collected her from the workshop in September 2008, bursting with pride as I drove home with my shiny new boat in tow, and bloody nervous too; having only ever trailered a horse box before, it was a novel concept to be towing £45,000 worth of boat up the M4. The first of my friends to see her was Roostie in Oxford who, to my delight and her credit, cooed approvingly in all the right places as I showed her round and let her get inside the cabin, opening hatches and showing her where I would store things, making me feel like a very proud mother. Mum even waited up until after eleven o’clock to see me home and welcome the new addition, photographing her from all angles, even though it was pitch black outside. Dippers was plain white at this stage, no sponsor stickers – just shiny and new, brand new, looking exactly like one of the lifeboats you get on the side of a cruise ship. There were three main parts to her – a cabin and deck sandwich, essentially. There was a 2-metre cabin at the back of the boat where I would sleep and which housed the control panel for all my electrics and various storage compartments below my bed. It was tall enough for me to sit up inside and long enough to lie down, but there wasn’t room for standing. Through a hatch in the bulkhead was the deck, similarly about 2 metres long and 1.5 metres wide, with a footwell just outside the cabin where my foot plate would go. I would row facing the door of the sleeping cabin, moving up and down on a sliding seat over the deck. Below the deck there was storage space, including my emergency drinking water compartment. The third section was another, slightly smaller cabin at the bows of the boat – all for storage of equipment and food rations. Running between the two cabins were safety rails – one on each side of the deck, there to stop me falling out of the boat and to hold on to in rough weather – something I was especially keen to point out to my mum!
It wasn’t just me who thought she looked gorgeous and over the next few days while she sat outside our house she had plenty of admirers, before I took her up to Rutland Water where she would stay, tucked away underneath a tarpaulin in the boat park until I shipped her out to Australia ready for the row. It seemed fitting that she should have her first splash test and most of her outings at Rutland Water, where I had first learned to kayak all those years ago. It was a grey autumn day when I first launched her and my PR manager Adrian had driven up from Oxfordshire to be there. One of the staff from the water sports centre hooked the trailer up to the tractor they use for launching and pulled her round to the slipway. I stood on Dippers, grinning the happiest of grins, while he reversed us down towards the water, throwing the bowlines back onto the jetty for someone to tie up when we were floating. She bobbed gently, proudly even, as she sat alongside and waited for me to sort the oars. I had started chatting to her months before, even before she had left Jamie and Emily’s, and it was now for real – we were actually going rowing. She felt light and smooth as I pulled away for the first strokes and made easy work of the water; I knew that if she could smile, she too would have been sporting a big grin. It might seem ironic that I did most of my mileage on this inland reservoir, but it was the best option on offer and proved useful for getting to know her, as well as taking family or journalists out for a little row.
Due to time and money issues, my previous plans for a series of coastal trials were whittled down to a single weekend in Devon in December 2008, just four months before I would set out on my row for real. It was absolutely freezing in the south-west that weekend, so cold in fact that I woke to a layer of ice inside Dippers’ cabin on my first morning. I had stopped for the night in a public car park in Lymington and in between dozing and shivering I woke to hear various intrigued passers-by stopping for a look and a chat. Had I not been so cold it would have been fun to jump out of the hatch and surprise them all, but I was chilled to the bone and decided it wasn’t worth the effort. To top it, exhaustion had caught up with me and delivered a honking cold, meaning that my first day of rowing ended after a one-hour battle into head winds in which I barely made it out of the harbour, before I retreated to sleep it off. The next day went swimmingly until I almost ended up on a sandbank. On my way in to my planned destination of Teignmouth at sunset, I met with an outgoing tide and a sandbar blocking the harbour, so had no option but to row up the coast to the very place where Dippers had been built, Exmouth. It was cold and tiring fighting strong winds and sloppy seas in the dark, but the stars twinkled overhead and I enjoyed it, in spite of the fatigue, the wet and the cold – perhaps even because of them, in that strange way that makes endurance sports fun. The run in to the harbour nearly ended in a stranding, especially as Christmas lights along the shore were camouflaging the green and red lights of the navigation markers. At least there should be no sandbanks on the ocean, and I would only have to land once.
The following month I spent the entire ten days of the London Boat Show in January 2009 showing Dippers off and turning hoarse as I talked to as many people as possible – admirers, enthusiasts and a handful of naysayers. One day I gave a presentation on the main stage and invited some friends, family and sponsors up to officially launch her with some bottles of fizz which had been cooling on ice in the footwell. Late into the night, every night that week, I sat at my cousin’s kitchen table in North London typing out emails following up contacts from the day’s efforts. Some of it worked, and much of it didn’t, but by the end of the week I had a few more important sponsors on board, hundreds of pounds in the charity pot and plenty of people keen to follow my journey. I turned around after giving my sales pitch to one gentleman, who I knew was just bluffing, to find a man and his son smiling at me. ‘I work for a vending machine company. What can I do to help?’ I smiled at the thought of my very own chocolate machine on the boat and then said that a bit of chocolate would be quite useful and maybe some drinks. He told me to leave it with him and wandered off. So many promises never came to anything and I had learned not to get my hopes up too much, because it was tiring to keep falling from confident anticipation to the lows of a rejection or, worse still, just no response. You can guess how I felt when I answered my phone the following week to hear Brian Tustain (vending machine hero) saying that he had secured me a huge stash of Cadbury chocolate and £2,000. Magic. And it didn’t stop there – he fixed me up with an energy drinks supplier too and enough hot chocolate powder to sink a ship.
My other favourite sponsorship story started with a toilet conundrum. I had been trying to work out how many loo rolls to take to sea or indeed if I should just go with the friendliest wet wipes I could find so that they could serve two purposes. Determined not to pollute the ocean, I decided I wanted only the purest, friendliest (to the ocean and my bottom) wet wipes that I could find – cotton, biodegradable and organic. So I asked one of my existing ‘green’ sponsors if they had any links to any. The phone number of the first of her suggestions was engaged and so I went to the website of the second, found the phone number, rang up and popped the question. Of course they would like to sponsor me – Natracare was a leading brand in this arena of organic toiletries. The young lady on the other end of the line and I then tried working out how many packets of fifty I might need for the crossing. That evening I opened up an email from Natracare’s director, Susie Hewson, and within two sentences she had made me cry. In the opener she explained that she too had lost her father too young and so admired my dedication to the cause – things like this always make me cry. In the second sentence, she wondered if £5,000 might go some way to helping to ease my deficit. It was the end of January 2009 and I still had things to pay for – this was a welcome boost to the project bank balance and a perfect bit of serendipity.
Mid February, I posed for final photographs with Dippers outside the house. She was now loaded up with most of the equipment and provisions I would need for the voyage – all to be shipped out to Austra
lia by container. There were 500 dehydrated meals, 150 bags of porridge, 10 kilograms of dried fruit, 500 chocolate bars, boxes of cereal bars, treats for Easter, treats for my birthday, treats for when I was sad, treats for when I was happy, a bottle of port, two bottles of eco-friendly soap, four tubes of toothpaste, six different hats, a few hundred paracetamol and three full medical boxes, twenty packets of wet wipes, five books, emergency strobe lights, emergency rations, emergency repair kit, VHF radios, satellite phones, a video camera, solar panels, a water maker, oars and spares, 100 metres of rope, a sleeping bag and a pillow, more spare batteries than I had seen in my life, a British ensign, a Portuguese ensign and a couple of cuddly toys. It was a five-hour drive down to the loading bay in Essex and I am sure I spent most of it looking up into my mirrors to check that she was OK. It took ten men to get her into the container and nestled on her cradle and just one bolt to close the door. It was a poignant moment as I realised that my unique and precious cargo was now just another metal box amid the thousands. I already had a special bond with her and it felt like waving goodbye to a friend, even if I would be seeing her again in four weeks’ time. I wished her well as I drove home, an empty trailer in tow, still checking my mirrors most of the way and wondering where Dippers had got to.
My final two weeks at home were spent with farewells and parties and last-minute preparations. The hardest farewell was to my Taid, my Welsh Grandfather, old and frail and fading. His huge smiling eyes fixed on me for my whole visit and he hugged me as though it was our last. I wondered if it might be, too, and swallowed back the tears as I drove out of his driveway. At the end of February I found myself at Heathrow having breakfast with a little group of family and my closest friends. Sally Kettle met us there, my friend Anita had driven us down and, after some scheming with Mum, Roostie and Miranda, another of my good friends from Oxford, had surprised me with their appearance – I had already said goodbye to them a few weeks before. As I munched my way through the biggest English breakfast I have ever eaten I tried hard not to think about saying goodbye to them all; I would be flying out to Australia on my own, though my weather man Ricardo would be joining me a few days later to help.
Having worked flat out for the past eighteen months with little rest time, I was shattered but I felt as ready as I could have been. My leaving party stood in a semicircle and I worked my way round, hugging them tight in turn and wondering if I would ever see them again. While we had never discussed that scenario, we all knew it was perfectly possible I might not make it out the other side. Mum wiped away tears as I wrapped her in a hug and she gave me a kiss from Dad. As I rounded the barrier to head through security, my heart raced. I grinned and waved, skipped back for another wave, and then turned my back on the people most dear to me. This was all in the name of adventure. ‘It had better be worth it, Sarah Outen,’ a voice warned inside my head. Gulp. I wondered if Mum was crying and imagined my little group parting to go home. What the hell was I doing? Gulp again. ‘Sarah Outen – you had better come back in one piece,’ I growled at myself. My bags were gobbled up by the conveyor belt and I walked through to the other side. Gulp.
Chapter 8
Kangaroos Next 14 Kilometres
‘Gullibility is the key to all adventures.
The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything’
G. K. Chesterton
A stopover in Hong Kong meant noodles and monasteries. I took a taxi up to a hilltop monastery, where an enormous bronze Buddha smiled out over the rising sun and low-lying mist. I suspect he chuckled smugly, as I did, at the throngs of overweight tourists puffing and panting their way up the long flight of steps to admire the same views he enjoyed all day, every day. I scanned the blue bits of the horizon and tried to imagine my little boat way out to sea, bobbing along under the sun. I couldn’t – it all seemed so abstract.
As I sat and slurped noodle soup at a little street cafe, I enjoyed the contrast to the stresses and rushing around of previous months. No one could call me and I had no obligation to anyone; I felt free and calm. So many projects fail due to lack of money or teams breaking up, motivation waning or some other obstacle before getting anywhere near this stage so it felt like a triumph to have at least made it out of the country and to the other side of the world.
After another flight I finally landed Down Under, smelly round the edges after twenty-four hours travelling but bouncing inside with nervous excitement. Struggling under the weight of my impossibly heavy bags I was impressed by the cheery sing-song ‘Welcome to Australia’ from the customs man at Perth Airport. Less cheery was the hefty bill he later presented me with for the privilege of quarantining the various bits of food that I hadn’t been able to ship with Dippers and so had brought out in my baggage to go into the boat. I had a thirty-second debate in my head about whether or not to declare the packet of radish seeds which I knew had fallen out of the main seed stash I had just told him about as I handed over the pile of food, but knew that one sniff from an eager customs pup would have me booted out of the country before I had even been allowed in. This would be a serious blow to the plans. I was lucky to be allowed to bring my food into the country at all. Back in the UK, for months I had worked hard to persuade the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service (AQIS) that it was my sole intention to leave Australia as quickly as possible, I had absolutely no intention of returning and that I certainly wouldn’t be selling or giving away any of my ocean food. The normally easy-going and pragmatic Aussies are fiercely (and rightly) protective over their island wildlife, enforcing some of the strictest import and export rules in the world. As I filled out the forms, I was not unsurprised to see that there was no ‘Start an Ocean Row’ option in the ‘Purpose of Visit’ box – so I ticked ‘Holiday’ instead and underneath ‘Occupation’ wrote boat captain, not brave enough to write adventurer.
Two hours after landing, with all the paperwork now done, I grinned my way to the arrivals exit and scanned the faces for Hilary and Patrick – friends of Alex’s family who had kindly offered to host me while in Perth. Ric and I had pinpointed the end of March as a likely departure point so I had a fortnight, which hopefully translated to enough time to acclimatise, receive the boat, pack and sort it all, focus, get a haircut and prepare to push out to sea. As we drove back to my new home, up into the hills behind Perth, I kept pinching myself to remind myself that this was for real. Goodness knows what Hilary and Patrick must have thought – but they were polite enough not to tell me how silly I was being and instead made me feel very welcome indeed.
Over the next few days, I was so intent on getting ready for the ocean that I ticked off ‘See Australia’ on my ‘To Do List’ with a single afternoon visit to a koala sanctuary. Here I saw haughty kookaburras survey the world from lofty perches, fed eucalyptus to a narcoleptic koala, and amused myself watching wallabies and kangaroos lounging in the dust. Glad to have seen something of the country, I now focused all my energy on preparing to cast off the bowlines and push out to sea. Hilary and Patrick looked after me like I was their own child. They ferried me about, fed me and pretended not to be bothered by my late-night computer sessions as I waited up to speak to various folks involved in the project in different corners of the world, like Tom Sjoren from Explorersweb who was sorting out all the techy bits of my emailing system from the boat, my PR team Adrian and Amy back in the UK or Robert in America who had volunteered through my website to help record some phone blogs from the ocean.
My first sight of the Indian Ocean came on my second day in Australia with a visit to the leafy suburbs of Perth to meet Caroline and Roger Winwood – the local Oxford Alumni contacts who had agreed to help with some local contacts and generally mother me a bit. From their hilltop house I could see a sparkling blue rectangle in the distance. I whooped with delight – that gem was the ocean. The Indian Ocean. My ocean. Roger drove me down to one of the local beaches, miles and miles of it, and I stood and surveyed the shimmering blue – scanning from far left to far right and b
ack again – scrunching the silky white sand in my toes. It was vast and beautiful and I wondered what on earth it would be like out there, surrounded by it, consumed by it, with no one else in sight, no boats, no beach, and no anything. Just me, my boat and the sea; I was both excited and terrified by the thought, and so I ran down into the warm surf and tried to erase any thought of empty blue seascapes from my mind. Shortly before I left for Australia, I had carefully diverted Mum’s attention away from a newspaper piece about an unfortunate swimmer who had been munched on by a great white shark while swimming on the coast of Western Australia, not too far from here. No fins in sight today, but I kept a careful lookout while I swam up and down, trying not to look edible. Friend or foe: I wondered what the sea would be to me? For so long I had felt it would be friend, and I just hoped that I was right.
Once she had been delivered and taken out of the container, Dippers sat on her cradle on the quayside at the Fremantle Annexe of the Royal Perth Yacht Club (RPYC) so that I could do various jobs before she went into the water. The hull needed another layer of anti-foul, the cabin needed padding with foam and there was lots of sorting to do. Except during the hottest midday hours of sunshine, she was generally admired, photographed and questioned from all sides. Everyone was encouraging, kind and very helpful – while also reminding me that I was a daft Pom and should probably book myself in for a head check. It became a little frustrating as my work stopped for the umpteenth time that afternoon and I started my little spiel. ‘I sleep in here, I row there and this is where I store my chocolate. She should self-right if we go over and yes, I have spare oars. Water maker in here and solar panels on the top there. Wanna see where I sleep?’ Faces lit up as though I had just offered a thousand pounds, and they would nose through the hatch into my cabin, jaw open, eyes wide and generally shaking their head, with mutterings of ‘You’re one helluva Sheila,’ punctuating the rolling stream of questions. They smiled at my Australian yellow road sign with a kangaroo and ‘Next 14 km’ stuck on my cabin door, asking if I had put it there ‘because roos can only swim that far?’ People were quite exhausting and so my most peaceful times were spent pottering about quietly in Dippers, sorting supplies into different piles as I tried to decide which sort of pile or combination was best. There I had head space to chew over all the bits and pieces that I still needed to, or to wonder at what it was going to be like out there.