by Sarah Outen
‘HIP HIP!’
Oh shit!
‘HOORAY!’
Heart racing, mouth dry.
‘HIP HIP!’
Keep it together Outen, keep it together.
‘HOORAY!’
Oh shit, oh shit!
My inner monologue competed with the three cheers and willed me to look composed. Instead, all I could manage was a huge beaming nervous grin before swallowing back a tear and taking my first pull at the oars. Those first few strokes felt perfect as we slicked through the silky black waters of the silent harbour, like an old carthorse slow and steady, finding its rhythm. Dippers and I were away and would next be touching down in Mauritius. Gulp. The distance ahead was huge and the ocean vast and that scared me, so I just focused on the song which I had chosen to play through the speakers for those first few moments, ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ by Queen. We had played it at Dad’s funeral as the curtains closed around his coffin and so for me it spoke volumes. Instead of worrying about how far I had to journey, this song reminded me of how far I had already come. All the same, I cried as I sang and I sang as I cried.
Outside the harbour the darkness went on forever. Lights punctuated channels for this, safety zones for that, shipping lane this way and danger over there; red dots blinked, white lights flashed and greens and oranges danced to some unheard beat. I concentrated on the compass in front of me, trying to row on the course Ricardo had suggested. The idea was to push to the north of Rottnest Island which lay 12 miles out, and gradually edge out to sea. A support yacht was going to escort me for the first few hours, just to see me safely away from the main port entrance and so that the agency photographer could get some good shots. I felt so self-conscious with everyone on the support yacht watching me, tracking me, and occasionally crackling some instruction through on the radio. There were some serious sailors on board and I wanted to impress them; I wanted to be credible. I also wanted to go to the loo, but there is no polite way to do it when you have a little troupe of kayaks beside you and a boat full of supporters watching your every move; it was a bucket and chuck it set up so not the sort of thing you do in the company of people you’ve only just met. I tried to think of other things; not water and not toilets and not the ocean. Not water and not toilets and not the ocean. The stars were a good distraction. They made my world huge, emphasising the dimensions of my new home. And to think that the sea beneath me was only a blip of the space above me – that was weird. My mind boggled at how humongous the world is and how humongous my task was to me, but how small and insignificant it was in the grand scheme of the universe and all that space. Gulp. That was almost as bad as thinking about needing the loo. Something else, Sarah, find something else. Sunrise? To the east, dawn seeped into the corners of the night sky, lightening the black through greys and pastel shades to welcome in the day. Not just any day but The Day. I didn’t know how yet, but I was sure that this trip would change me.
After an hour Geoff the Expert and his little troupe of kayakers bid me a hugged farewell over the side of my boat and turned back to shore, my last hug for goodness knows how many months; it was a strange feeling and my stomach knotted for a moment as I waved them off. They would be going back to get some breakfast now and a shower, perhaps a snooze, and then they would get on with their day. I would carry on rowing for the next four months before I had another shower. The escort boat played around me, sometimes dropping back to get some wide-angle shots and at others coming alongside for close-ups or to say hello. From time to time Ric whistled like a songbird to get my attention for the cameras or to show me what they hoped looked like a Mexican wave. They made me laugh and I enjoyed the company and our odd bites of conversation, again trying to soak it all up before they turned back for the harbour. They said they would come straight back out to find me in a faster boat to check on me one last time, but it was still a goodbye and I only had one left after this; then I would be completely and utterly alone. Part of me wanted to eke out the company as long as possible; another wanted to get out to sea and another was now desperate for a pee. So in the same moment that I waved them off I dived into the forward cabin to find the bucket and sweet relief.
As the sun climbed higher through clear blue skies, I picked my way through the container ships moored outside the port. They were metal giants, vast as sprawling warehouses. None answered my calls on the VHF radio and I suspected they were all having a lie-in or tucking in to a hearty breakfast. Mmmm. Breakfast. I had been rowing for four hours now and had eaten my sandwiches and fruit a few hours before, so popped inside to find something to munch. I had to throw some sandwiches overboard, regretting that I hadn’t mentioned to Clem that I didn’t like mayonnaise as I watched them float away; what a sorry waste of sandwich potential. My last for months, lost to the deep. At this point I should probably describe just what ‘popping inside’ entailed. The hatch door to my cabin was less than a metre across and a metre tall, so involved simultaneously crouching and stepping through into the cabin space – not the easiest of manoeuvres but one which I would need to perfect if I was to be efficient and safe at sea, particularly in the rough weather.
An increasingly boisterous sea followed me round the north of Rottnest and waves bounced up over the side of the boat to soak me every so often. I welcomed the cool contrast to the 40°C heat, which was already wearing me down and at times making me nod asleep at the oars as my tired body rocked up and down the sliding seat, up and down, down and up. Legs, back, arms. Legs, back, arms. Over and over, hour after hour. I longed for night-time, both for the cool air and the opportunity to snooze; I had only clocked about forty minutes’ sleep the night before and that was definitely not enough. ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ I joked out loud and chuckled to myself. Then I let out a few big shouts of nothing in particular, just testing the acoustics of my new home. There was no reply and no echo. Nothing; just the sea doing its thing, gurgling and rippling and fizzing. I returned to the oars and rowed on.
I had been scanning the horizon for a while now, wondering if any of the boats I could see were the Fremantle Sea Rescue Boat RS100, which I knew would be heading out to find me for a final hello and goodbye. There was the fast ferry nipping back and forth between Rottnest and the mainland as well as various other motor boats and small yachts. I waved at some and tried hailing others over the radio. With no response from the waving or hailing, I imagined that I must be invisible. It turns out I was. It took RS100 over twenty minutes to find me when they made it back out to where they thought I would be, Dippers’ little white cabins lost in the cresty white surf which now rolled with the growing swell. It was quite emotional saying hello when they arrived, never mind saying cheerio. All of those people had come back out to look for me, to be a part of my adventure, and I was grateful to them for it. If hello had been hard, then goodbye was even harder – both to hear and to say. They must have been quite emotional, too – there were mothers on there, seafarers who knew the ocean and folks for whom this was completely alien. It was a bizarre day for us all, I suppose. We reached out in gestured hugs and then waved each other home. The only difference was that they had just 10 miles back to shore and I had over 3,000 before I was home and dry. I waved them into a distant dot, tears washing suncream and sweat into my eyes and making them sting. I hoped they wouldn’t have their binoculars out as I didn’t want anyone to see; this was a private moment, just for me and Dippers. Relief, pride, happiness, sadness, nerves, exhaustion – it all came crying out until there were no more tears inside and nothing left to do but row. The thought scared me a little bit, especially as I would probably have another couple of weeks wobbling while I settled in to the journey. Whatever feelings emerged, I would need to embrace them and relax into all that it threw at me if I were to make it to the other side. I later found out that Ric had summed it up beautifully on my website that evening, writing: ‘The task ahead is huge. The first night at sea is always one of mixed feelings. Sarah now has to be born again, into the oceans and grad
ually switch off from earthly thoughts and emotions if she is to be happy alone at sea.’
As with all major changes, it took me a while to get my head around it.
Chapter 10
Feeding the Fishes
‘A sure cure for seasickness is to sit under a tree’
Spike Milligan
Forty-five miles out from Fremantle made a great start for my first day. I ate one of the dehydrated meals for dinner as the sky turned pink, sitting out on deck waiting for the stars to arrive, trying not to think about the waves of nausea quietly stirring inside me. I pulled on some more clothes as the temperature dropped and rowed on through the night, fighting to stay awake and keen to put as many miles between me and Australia as possible. I finally collapsed onto my beanbag bed at 2.00, not even bothering to undress and leaving the thick zincy sunblock all over my face. I was spent and a bit dehydrated, with a little bit of seasickness round the edges; sleep was all I needed and all that I was capable of now. I had been awake and rowing for nearly twenty-four hours. There was no autopilot on Dippers so besides setting the rudder and pointing her in the right direction before I turned in, there would be no way of controlling her course while I slept. This close to land, I couldn’t afford to drift backwards – out at sea I knew it would happen and I knew it wouldn’t be the end of the world. But until I made it clear from the coast, I had to do everything I could to keep her moving in the right direction.
Inside my cabin, wedged in between the two big food bags that didn’t fit inside the front cabin, I slept sweetly for a few hours and woke to see a cloudless sky through my hatches. There was one above my head which I had to be careful not to hit as I sat up, and the other was at my feet, looking out on to the deck – both less than a metre across and opened by two swing handles. Outside it was cool and fresh with dew – a welcome contrast to the stuffy and airless cabin. I was feeling sick so I didn’t manage much breakfast, especially as the porridge mix looked rather like pale vomit once I had added some water and stirred. I smiled, thinking of Mum and me covered in porridge dust at home in January, mixing up deep bowls of oats and dried fruit, a spoonful of salt, a cup of sugar and half a tub of dried milk. That was the easy bit; vacuum packing it into individual sachets had been some Herculean effort. Once I had tidied away the breakfast clutter and my bedding I pushed on in much the same way as before, making steady progress under the relentless sun. I was already doing battle with sleep monsters and fighting off hallucinations, convinced that Ricardo and Margot were in the cabin, packing things away as they had done the night before I left. I had to keep opening the hatch to tell them to go away, warning them not to be there when I went to bed later. It was all very strange and I hoped they would leave me to cross the ocean in peace; the last thing I wanted was to be haunted the whole way to Mauritius.
By the afternoon of my second day, seasickness had added another layer of fatigue as I alternately nibbled on food, sipped energy drinks and fed the fishes with it all. The wind was also causing me some issues and had shifted to a not-very-helpful direction. Given that it was still fairly calm, I decided the best thing was simply to monitor my course over the next few hours, suspecting that it wouldn’t cause too many problems. I was not a happy rower but a tiny part of me was strangely relieved that I could lose myself in a sweet and sleepy oblivion while I waited for it to blow through. How wrong I was. The wind had picked up so much by the third day that I wasn’t making any useful progress on the oars. The waves were too much for me to row into and I was just getting blown backwards towards land, watching my newly won miles un-tick themselves on the GPS. To have this happen so close to land was frustrating, and I’m sure I did a bit of crying. There was no use trying to fight it as I wouldn’t win, so I decided the best thing to do would be to sleep and deploy the sea-anchor. I had already nicknamed it ‘Bob’ – a 3.5-metre parachute, ‘flown’ beneath the waterline to hold the bows of the boat in to the waves, thereby reducing drift and stabilising the craft. Unfortunately, Bob acted like a sail in the current and meant that although we didn’t lose much ground to the east, we were pulled steadily south in the famous Leeuwin Current. When I say we, I mean me and Dippers: talking about Dippers as a member of the team meant that I wasn’t alone. It was another of those little tricks that would see me safely to Mauritius.
By now I had already exchanged numerous text messages with Ricardo via my satellite phone. Now came the news that the weather had shifted from what we had previously expected and that the sea would become ugly, uncomfortable and messy as a low pressure system rumbled up from the south.
I later found out that he had written this on my blog:
‘My only hope is that this weather system doesn’t change its mind yet again and hang around for a day longer or provide stronger winds than forecast. This part of the ocean is known for its dramatic weather and Australian Navy rescues. So we hope.’
I pulled Bob back in after twenty-four hours to see if I could make any more progress. Rowing and sleeping alternately in blocks of a few hours through day and night for the next four days, we were pulled further and further south with only the tiniest bits of progress west. I was going anywhere but towards Mauritius and spent a lot of time crying at the oars in frustration; this was not how my first week at sea was supposed to be. Even so, I managed to put on a surprisingly cheerful bit of chat for Radcliffe and Maconie on BBC Radio 2 one evening. Amusingly, in my brain-mush state I had confused my time zones and when I woke up to wait for the call, I quickly received a worried call from my PR manager Adrian Bell on the satellite phone. Apparently the BBC had being trying to get hold of me for an hour and were concerned that I had been lost to the sea, to sharks or seasickness. I had in fact just been sleeping with the phone turned off to save batteries.
Sitting out on the deck underneath a full moon and a canopy of stars, surrounded by waves and occasionally being rinsed by an over-excited one, I chatted live with ‘the boys’ in Manchester; it was surreal. Metaphorically, there were a lot of people on that boat already, supporting me from all corners of the globe, and I was pleased to share my experience with the rest of the world over the airwaves. As I pressed the red button to end the call, I marvelled at this little phone which could connect me with anyone, anywhere on the planet via a teeny satellite way up in the ether; we humans have invented some ingenious technology over time.
I had forgotten that Ric was due back in Portugal, so the news was crushing when I heard from Clem via text message that he was en route to Sydney for his flight home. Even in these six days I had already come to depend on him so much for weather information, motivation and morale. He had done this ocean-crossing lark a number of times before as a sailor and had gone solo too, so he knew what it was like to push out to sea and renounce normality for an unknown period of time. That meant he understood something of what I would be going through.
His departure coincided with a worsening of the already unhelpful weather, which made me feel inadequate and powerless, as though all my dreams about this voyage were disappearing towards the raging Southern Ocean. I was just below thirty degrees south at the moment, remembering the whalers’ saying that, ‘below forty degrees there is no law; below fifty there is no God’. I was scared, I was embarrassed by my lack of progress and I was cross with myself for worrying friends and family. While struggling into the waves in the afternoon of my sixth day at sea, I stopped to look for a ship. My sea-me (a radar reflector) was beeping, which meant that a ship’s radar must be hitting it. There was someone else out there, but where were they? The beeping got louder until I eventually spotted a yacht, rising and falling over troughs of waves; I had found it. This was exciting – I hadn’t seen anyone since leaving Fremantle a week earlier and had only spoken to one ship so far and they hadn’t been too keen on chatting. I held on to the top of my cabin, straining for another glimpse. What sort of yacht was it? Length? Colour? Who was on board? Where were they going? Friend or foe? Most importantly I wondered if it would see us; I
hoped so.
I had been struggling to interpret weather and information, so I didn’t trust my judgement completely and wondered if I was hallucinating again. But it looked like a yellow yacht was heading straight for us. Apart from hoping that we would rendezvous, I was worried that we might collide. I picked up the VHF.
‘Yellow yacht, yellow yacht, yellow yacht – this is rowing boat Serendipity. Do you receive me? OVER.’
I was prepared for them not to answer, but to my surprise and delight, a response swam back to me through the squelch.
‘Serendipity, this is Spirit of Rockingham. I am receiving you loud and clear. OVER.’
The name sounded familiar and I frowned in concentration for a second before I realised to whom I was speaking.
‘Spirit of Rockingham! Is that you, Jamie?’ I squealed down the radio, both surprised and excited that my new friend, Jamie Dunross, the quadriplegic sailor from Perth, had sailed out to see me.
I rowed on a bit further to turn us back into the waves, now rolling on a 5-metre swell capped with white. Any meeting with another boat at sea is exciting, but Jamie’s arrival was pure magic. To see another person I could speak to was wonderful out here, particularly at this point when I was so low and going nowhere fast. I watched in admiration as he moved in and out of the cabin: here was a quadriplegic man, sailing solo offshore on a 40-foot yacht. What on earth did I have to complain about? Over the radio he said that he had brought something which I had forgotten and I racked my brains to think what it could be. He pulled out Wilson, a painted volleyball named after the Castaway film character, from below deck and threw it into the water for me to row on to and pick up. Wilson had been given to me by the boys of Hale School before I left Fremantle, so he was a special addition to my on board crew and I was glad to have him back.