by Sarah Outen
Jamie said that he would circle me for an hour just to make sure I was OK, before he headed back to shore. It would take him nearly two days to sail back in and he admitted that he wasn’t looking forward to battling the Leeuwin, which had slowed his progress out to me. I hated that he was watching me struggling. Frustrated and shattered, I cried and cried angrily, pulling hard into the waves and head wind, hoping that he couldn’t see my tears. I must have looked like a complete idiot, out of my league and making almost no progress. I admire him for not telling me as much – if anyone knew about fight in this life he did, and he also knew that I would give it every ounce of strength I could muster. He sailed back close in to me for one final chat then disappeared as quickly as he had arrived. I sat down on my seat to cry, my energy all gone and my morale plummeting, not really very keen on this rowing lark any more.
That evening I put Bob out, resigned to the fact that I would be pulled further south and even further off course, but not knowing what else to do. Soon the seascape was a foaming white mess of giants, dancing wildly beneath grey skies, sending Dippers and me crashing into walls of water as waves rolled through underneath or into us. Curled up in my cabin, over the next few days I drifted in and out of sleep through some of the scariest hours of my life. Night-time was the worst; at least in the daylight I could sit up and see the waves out of the hatch so that I could brace myself as they charged at the boat, ready for the impact. In the dark my ears provided my only reference, of rushing water, of waves thudding into us and the creaking lines of the sea anchor.
Ric promised that I would soon be out of it, that the current was kicking me south and out into the open ocean; he said that he wasn’t too worried, although I think he was just trying to make me feel good. I got quite angry at his suggestion that I was ‘so close to being OK and out of trouble’ if only I could row a ‘teeny bit west’. How teeny? ‘Forty miles.’ That was not very teeny in my books, not when I couldn’t even make one mile west in these conditions. How did he not see that I was as good as 300 miles from clear water? The Australian authorities had a different take on the situation and were concerned. Paraphrased, our phone call went a bit like this; ‘Sarah, we’re worried you’re going a bit too far south, mate.’ It was true; I was en route to dinner with the penguins, in some of the world’s toughest and roughest waters. The Southern Ocean officially started just a few hundred miles to the south and the no law, no God thing kicked in soon after.
I struggled to remain optimistic amidst talk of rescue and huge bills to tow me in for a restart and I got quite upset, rationale and reason being hard to accept in my fatigued and fragile state. So I thought I would put the question to the floor and see what my friends and ocean-rowing buddies thought. At three o’clock in the morning I rang twice-Atlantic rower and friend Sally Kettle for some wisdom and she agreed in her sleepy state that a tow seemed like the best option. Another veteran rowing buddy, Roz Savage, reassured me that this was the right thing: ‘Spectacular ending to first attempt, glorious success second time round: it’s what all the best adventurers do.’ Her first attempt to leave America on her Pacific row in 2007 ended with a rescue and restart so she knew what she was talking about. Poor Mum – I had these conversations with her too and it wasn’t easy. I cried, she cried and I wished it all wasn’t happening.
There were ships about and I was worried that we were going to be squashed; I felt overwhelmed and I was getting myself worked up about the options for a restart. Would I tow the boat north? Would I go from Fremantle again? I grew more and more agitated and scared at feeling so small, so lonely and so out of depth, that I was soon blubbering and reaching for the phone to call Sally again. I hate ringing people when I am upset but I was so soothed by the voice of someone who I knew had been out in big seas in small boats and I knew she would make me laugh, too. And she did.
As it happened, the following day saw a significant drop in the sea state and wind strength; it was as though the nasty stuff had blown through to test us. I was quietly proud that we had survived, even if I was a little annoyed at being so far off course. I felt like Dippers and I had earned a stripe and knew that although I had a lot to learn still, we had come through some very rough stuff and she had proved her place on the team. With the easing of the seas, I pointed to Fremantle and started rowing back in to shore, calling off the tow. The next two days were like a welcome weekend to my dreadful week; the sun shone, the wind disappeared and the sea smoothed to a gentle rolling swell. This allowed me to do some washing of myself, the boat and my clothes – I was a bit smelly by now and there were splashes of dried sick all over the deck where I hadn’t quite made it overboard. For the first time in days I brushed my teeth and washed my hair, which I hadn’t done since my last morning on land. My appetite returned as my seasickness waned and I ate everything I could get my hands on, cooking for the first time in a week. The on board kitchen was fairly limited in terms of facilities and consisted of pulling out my little gas stove and a plastic spoon-fork hybrid from one of my hatches and boiling water in the footwell to add to whatever sachet of dehydrated food took my fancy. I loved this new found tranquillity in my feelings and stomach, and I was glad to be rowing again – albeit back to base to loop the loop. Now that I had found my sea legs and was ‘in the groove’ with a new routine, I decided that I wouldn’t go back to shore, but would instead row up the coast to where the Leeuwin Current was narrower, and perhaps offered my best shot at getting through. I was relieved to hear that everyone, including the knowledgeable locals, had been surprised by how much the wind and current had affected my course and this made me feel less silly.
One night on that return row I listened to Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto through my speakers on deck as I paddled under a blanket of silver stars; that piece will forever remind me of the deep peace and contentment I felt at that moment, rowing through inky seas, with bioluminescence twirling off each stroke. The sea stayed smooth and I surfed up the coast, helped by following seas. Late one afternoon, I spotted a pod of about one hundred spinner dolphins chasing each other across the sea, cavorting and somersaulting, while the horizon to my left showed signs of land. I rowed outside of Rottnest Island on the evening of day ten, under a dramatic sky of pinks and reds, enjoying the fact that I had something other than sea to look at, but on the other hand a little bit nervous at being so close to land and ships again. I was on high alert and slept in short bursts, waking regularly to check for ships, while trying not to disturb the tern who was hitching a ride for the night, perched on my forward cabin, his black head tucked under his wing, showing only one eye to the world.
At three o’clock I woke again and puzzled over why the cabin looked so different. There were two sets of very dim lights on each side of the cabin which I had never seen before. They were the LEDs of the cabin lights. I noticed that all of the other lights on the boat were either off or extremely dim. The VHF radio display no longer glowed orange and the voltmeter read way below what it would normally do. Clearly, something was very wrong with the electrics. A phone call back to my electrician in the UK and some investigation left me with no option but to radio in for a tow. It would be stupid to carry on with a problem like that, especially given that I was just 10 miles out of Fremantle, from where I had launched eleven days before. I guess some things are just meant to be.
Either way, I decided that it was a blessing in disguise and had proven to be a damn good shake down for the ocean ahead; in short, a 400-mile practice run. Some asked if I would be going home and I laughed – I wasn’t going to step down that easily.
Chapter 11
The Orange Inquisition
‘Drag your thoughts away from your troubles... by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it’
Mark Twain
Life on dry land exploded into a maelstrom almost as soon as I stepped off onto the jetty. There was my first (and actually illegal) mistake – I hadn’t warned the Australian authorities that I would be back on thei
r shores until after I arrived. The second mistake was in telling them that I had left my boat and been out for a meal (also illegally) before I had been quizzed and vetted and officially ‘welcomed’ back in to Australia. I was threatened with every punishment under the sun apart from being pushed out to sea in a small boat: namely monstrous fines, destruction of all my food supplies and impounding of my boat. The issue was that I had effectively just imported all of my food (and myself) into their country illegally. The food issue was particularly naughty because of all the strict rules about imports and exports to protect their island wildlife from invasive species. As a biologist I salute the stringency, but as a rower I hated every bit of it. After much growling and scowling, the customs heavies decided that I was just a very bad wannabe ocean-rowing Pom and signed me back into the country with some fines, metres and metres of yellow tape marking my boat out of bounds, and pages of rules and restrictions about just what I could and couldn’t do with my boat and food.
The Orange Inquisition is an amusing little memory nowadays, but in my tired and on-the-verge-of-tears state it was anything but. Two of the Australian and Quarantine Inspection Service (AQIS) inspectors had been sent down to the yacht club to go over my boat with a fine-tooth comb and look for beasties and nasties, remove anything that presented a threat, cordon off anything that I was allowed to keep and take notes to help AQIS decide whether or not I could keep all, or any, of my food. Given that this freeze-dried food is expensive and had all been packed neatly away into the hard-to-reach corners of my boat, I was floored by the suggestion they might leave me with nada. It takes a certain knack to look comfortable in a little ocean-rowing cabin and it is impossible to look good while foraging about in all of those well-hidden hatches where my supplies had been packed neatly away. Watching those two AQIS monkeys struggle inside the tiny cabins was the only funny thing about that process; until they spotted where I had spilled a packet of teeny red radish seeds on the deck and spent twenty minutes on their knees trying to pick them up with wetted tissue paper. After that they returned to the cabin, where the smilier of the two, a friendly chap called Damien, pulled out an orange from one of the stowage nets and held it up into the sunlight, looking at it cautiously. Glancing up at me through knitted brows, he asked me what I was going to do with it. I looked at him as though he had just asked me something in Polish, and tentatively suggested I was thinking of eating it. I wasn’t aware you could do anything else with an orange.
‘Am I allowed?’
‘Only if you eat it now, down here on this boat, give me the peel to put in this ridiculously large yellow quarantine bag and I then sign this form here to say you’ve done it, spray you with pesticide and push you out to sea.’ I considered for a nanosecond, pushed it away and told him to do what he wanted with my orange. I didn’t want it any more. ‘TAKE THE DAMN ORANGE!’ screamed a raging imp in my head. Thankfully, I don’t think Damien heard the imp.
A lemon came next. It, too, was scrutinised by the frown and latex gloves. He wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead, struggling under the pressure, and then called out to the gloves in the other cabin. ‘What do you reckon to this?’ Inquisitor no. 2 forced himself out through the hatch, matched the frown of his compadre and looked up seriously. ‘She can keep it: the sticker says it’s from Australia’. Deep joy: lemon one, orange nil. Sadly, leaving Australia in a hurry wasn’t on the ‘Can do’ list from AQIS – I wasn’t to move my boat at all or to touch any of the yellow tape or forbidden objects. Nothing should be added or removed until further notice had been given, meaning that I was grounded for the foreseeable future. This also meant that I could be assured of rest and sleep and food for a few more days on shore while I waited for decisions from the AQIS powers above. Or so I thought.
Rest and sleep actually didn’t figure very much at all as I tried to get my head around the logistics, formalities and general decompressing from my Warm-up Lap. Everything felt out of control and seemed too big and complicated, as things do when you’re tired and emotional. There were important decisions to be made about the plan for my next attempt, such as where I would be leaving from and when and how I would get there if it was from further north. There was a lot of talk of trailering the boat north, of rowing it north, even one mad idea of having Jamie tow me north in his yacht. It seemed everyone loved the bloody north. Arguments for going further up the coast were based on differences in currents and winds; it was also where previous attempts on the Indian had left from, but Ric was still keen that I stay put. Coupling all that with simple things such as my not having any clean land clothes anymore (only very smelly ocean clothes) and being absolutely dog-tired, I had a teary break down on the phone to Mum, reassuring her that I was fine but not fine but would soon be fine… ‘Honestly, Mum. If only [sob] they [sob] would let [sob] me [sob] back out to [sob, sob] sea.’ In spite of all the lovely folks around me who were offering to help, I felt swamped and quite alone. My team were scattered about the world and I was driving everything myself again and after two hectic days on land I cracked. As the tears rolled down my cheek onto the damp patch of pillow below, I consoled myself with the knowledge that the ocean would be much simpler. Now all I had to do was get back out.
Fortunately, nothing major needed to be changed in the set-up of Dippers and the kit and there was nothing too catastrophically wrong with the electrics either. It transpired that the batteries were in fact just fine, apart from some mis-wired connections – not my fault – which meant that the batteries hadn’t been charging as efficiently as possible. The power issue had been a combination of, rather embarrassingly, my playing my music too loudly and rowing north for the last few days, which meant that the solar panels hadn’t been charging nearly enough for my carefree, power hungry (and I now realise, quite naive) lifestyle. I didn’t mind the little bit of egg on my face, though; it was better that I had learned these lessons just offshore rather than far out to sea.
After a week on land I was worn out. Stressed, tired and emotional, I wore my sunglasses permanently, to hide the tears which were now in my eyes most of the time. The lovely Margot (one of my surrogate Aussie Mums) rang me up and invited me to her family home for the weekend, away from the sea, promising I could sleep as much as I wanted, that she wouldn’t talk about rowing and that she would feed me up with home cooking. Finally, did I have any requests? Bed, shower, sleep, bush walk and a supermarket trip: my needs were simple. The weekend was wonderful; to be away from boats and interested onlookers with their barrage of well-intentioned questions was so relaxing, and to be with a family a real comfort.
Feeling renewed and awake, and with the blessing of the AQIS that I could keep all my food and head out to sea without having to pay the long list of punishments and fines, I now had headspace to make important decisions about my point of departure. There had been quite a lot of debate and discussion over the options. I made a list of pros and cons for each place, bearing in mind that Ric was right-hand man in my team, I had little money and I had already annoyed customs. My gut instinct said Fremantle. I had friends here now; I knew what it was like to row out from Challenger Harbour and after all, I had said I would, so I would damn well prove that it could be done. Everyone still felt that if the wind hadn’t shifted as it did, then I would have made it out to sea safely the first time around. Departure day was named as 1 April and Ric was confident that the new weather window would be enough ‘to blow and row the hell out of Australia once and for all’.
On my final night on land I was raring to go, the nerves helping to keep me focused. Geoff the Expert had helped me pack the boat; some new friends had kindly taken me on a supermarket run and generously footed the bill; and I had been lucky enough to be visited by British rowers Guy Watts and Andy Delaney. They were due to be setting out from Australia in a couple of weeks’ time in a rowing race with eleven other boats, also aiming for Mauritius. I had not wanted to be a part of the race as I didn’t want to pay the £15,000 entry fee and felt I had more flex
ibility and control over everything if I did it independently, leaving from Fremantle instead of Geraldton in the north, for example. We had met in Southampton the year before and kept in touch intermittently, each conscious of everything the other was doing to prepare for the ocean. We exchanged telephone numbers with promises to keep in contact on the water and I reassured them that it was great out there, while I showed them round the boat and passed on what I had learned. We hugged and wished each other well for the journey. ‘SEE YOU IN MAURITIUS!’ I shouted after them as they left me to my final packing, hoping that our arrivals would overlap and that we both made it across in one piece. We would both fight many battles out there, some the same and some different – I envied them having each other but at the same time I loved my independence and all that would bring to my journey. For dinner, I went out with my Aussie friends for pizzas and beers and even landed myself a new sailing jacket, after complimenting Jamie on how warm his looked. It is the first time I have ever done that and been gifted with the item in question, so I well recommend it. Note to self: compliment more people more often on their clothing.
As I wandered along the jetty to Dark Energy, the yacht that someone had kindly offered me to sleep on, I looked across to Dippers, bobbing gently at her mooring and shining brightly in the moonshine. She looked like the runt (albeit the beautiful one) of the litter surrounded by all the gin palaces and posh yachts and suddenly I knew that I should sleep in her tonight; it didn’t seem right to leave her. I stepped over the safety rail and crept quietly through the hatch so as not to wake I don’t know who, and took a moment to run through a list of things for the morning.
Diary entry: 31 March