by Sarah Outen
In spite of my keep-myself-smiling tricks, a week going backwards still felt like I was running up a descending conveyor belt, or a collapsing sand dune, and I found myself scooting back towards the Australian side of eighty-six degrees east. This would mark the loss of a whole degree of longitude; 60 miles lost to the west winds. While it was annoying, it was also rather funny in a way; the odd dope on my blog wondered if I was looping loops on purpose or if I was changing my course to some other island. I tried to put an amusing twist on it by saying, ‘I consider myself thrice lucky; not many people even get to see this 60-mile stretch of the ocean, let alone shuttle row across it. If ever there’s anything you need to know about this little patch of blue, I am on my way to being an expert. Questions on a postcard.’
Andy and Guy had suffered the same sort of losses so we had a quick whinge together on the phone, swapping stories and comparing notes. I liked to wind them up by talking of chocolate too as they hadn’t taken a single bar on board with them, stocking only ten bags of sweets for weekly treats. I found this idea completely absurd and so ribbed them about it each time I spoke to them, goading them to chase me down. The contact with the lads was invaluable, as they knew what I was going through more than anyone else. We were helping each other across with humour, a listening ear and practical advice – and I looked forward to sharing a pint with them in Mauritius. When we arrived would be anyone’s guess, but I hoped that our landings would coincide. It was still too early to let Mum know when I might arrive, but I kept extrapolating, as did the boys. We all agreed that it would all come down to luck and weather.
I was all calm again by Day 70 and so didn’t really care about my progress, miles or no miles. I had my Tweedles and sunsets, sunrises and moon bows, all the stars in the world, my deep blue swims. Resigned to mile loss until the new wind blew in, my main conundrum was what to do with my hair to prevent matting, potential birds nesting or major visual impairment. I had forgotten to pack a comb and so now looked like Robinson Crusoe or a hippy surfer. That day I spent a morning in the sunshine doing useful chores such as knife cleaning and sharpening, bracelet making, career planning and poetry reading, as well as a Tweedle observation and research session. It all felt very bohemian and was made all the more idyllic by finding a surprise can of fizzy drink nestled in the bows. I went to sleep looking forward to the arrival of the new Red Carpet, now due in very soon, and Bob’s overdue banishment to the forward cabin.
Chapter 25
Fizz # 3
‘He who has gone abides with us, more potent,
nay, more present than the living man’
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Now that I was closer to Australia than I had been a week before, every little metre rowed in the right direction felt sweet. With sunshine and blue skies overhead I took the opportunity to remove the barnacles from the hull. Knowing that it would make the boat go faster was satisfying, but I was still nervous about my overboard swims, attached to my tiny boat by a tiny line, thousands of miles from land and 4 miles above the sea floor with any manner of creatures waiting to nibble my toes. It was exhilarating, and the cool blue was a perfect tonic for my knotted shoulders. To be stretched out and floating was delicious and to look down into the unfathomable depth beneath was, well, unfathomable, as if I was suspended in time, all notion of the real world frozen, and no link to it but for my lifeline of webbing clipping me on to the boat. We bobbed along with the swell while I worked to scrape off the growth round the rudder and clean up the water maker inlet; it would be a mini disaster if that got fouled up. The Tweedles wiggled in close to check me out, chasing the evicted barnacles as they sunk into the murk. I was glad that no other creatures appeared, even though I was still hoping to see a shark before I reached land and a sea turtle, as I had never seen a swimming adult turtle, only hatchlings in the surf or nesting females on the beach. I lived in hope.
I was especially glad to be heading in the right direction on 13 June, Day 74. It was the three-year anniversary since Dad had died, and so dinner began with my third and final bottle of fizz. Though not chilled on ice it was a sumptuous treat, glugged out of my plastic Little Miss Giggles cup. I sat back against my cabin hatch, looking out to the sunset, enjoying the view as I savoured every mouthful, swilling it into my cheeks to explore the novel sensation of fizzing bubbles. The contrast of the tangy alcohol with the salty water and energy drinks I normally drank was very welcome. If only I had brought more – one a fortnight would have been perfect. I used the day to look back at the last three years for our family and to remember Dad’s legacy and spirit. The one thing I didn’t regret was that he would never hurt again. There was no pain any more. That was definitely worth toasting: ‘So today, as every day, I salute you and thank you, Pops. We’re still here, we’re still laughing and we shall always remember you.’ And with that I sipped back the bubbly and watched the sunset fade and the stars stand out on parade. I had a sudden urge to holler to the waves, empowered by the thought that I was carving this line across a massive chunk of the world.
Dad would have loved an adventure out here on the waves, free and close to nature. I felt so alive and so peaceful that I wanted everyone to taste it and feel it. I wished I could photograph all these things, particularly the stars on nights when they were so bright they cast beams on the water. I wanted to take all these stories home to people on shore, and to those who I knew would never feel life like this again, perhaps too old or with too many ties, or for those who would not have the chance, for whatever reason. I wondered what it would be like to meet people again and tell them what it was like out at sea. What would they think? Would they understand? I shivered as a wave splashed me and I realised that I had fallen asleep on the deck. The sky and sea were black now and it was time for bed. As I turned to go in I saw the words of the poem I had been learning, taped to the hatch door. It was W. H. Davies’ ‘Leisure’, the opening line of which reads, ‘What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?’ I pulled off the sheet and grinned – this was exactly my life at the moment. I said good night to the stars and headed inside, warmed by the slightly squiffy-round-the-edges glow of my fizz. It had been a good day.
Chapter 26
Halfway is Not Downhill
‘Do what you can, with what you have, where you are’
T. Roosevelt
At the halfway point I had laughed at the suggestion from some of my blog followers that this meant that it would all be downhill from there on. I knew that I had probably not seen the worst the ocean could conjure up by way of storms and contrary weather; I knew there was more energy out there than I could ever comprehend. Fuelled by Red Carpet Weather I might be allowed to pass through safely and at relative speed, or I might be locked in battle with currents and westerly winds for a long while to come. For sure, to be the other side of the halfway line was a confidence boost, but it had already taken me a good while longer than I had expected to reach it. High hopes, low expectations – that was my maxim.
Ric’s weather predictions were rolling in as fast as waves on a stormy day – everything seemed unstable in this final part of the middle sector so I shifted my maxim from low expectations to no expectations. He promised that the third sector would be better, though wetter and wilder; I might make more progress but the conditions would be rather more challenging than the weather I had experienced up to now. I had to try and keep grounded.
I just plugged on, rowing as much as I could to maximise the opportunities offered by half-decent weather, and bouncing back into rowing mode after each front passed through, often followed by another. My track now looked like a tumbleweed’s path, twirling and looping around itself towards its goal. Zooming out from my GPS the wiggles didn’t look too important – I was still closer to Mauritius than I was to Australia and generally headed in the right direction. The zoomed-in version was rather more frustrating and had already led various blog followers to question how on earth I intended to reach my dest
ination. One had petitioned me to call it a day, a while ago, not long after my birthday, on the grounds that I must be lonely and had surely already given the ocean a good go. She didn’t know me, clearly. There was no way that I was coming off that ocean before time unless my leg had fallen off or my appendix had put in its notice. In my head and in my heart there was only one way to finish this journey, and I hadn’t considered any other option. Besides, how she thought I might get to land without rowing was beyond me.
I wasn’t at all lonely and I still had more in the tank. Even though I was desperately tired at times, and at others frustrated and low, there were still more positives on the balance sheet than negatives. And while I could make myself laugh and find good things about each day and about the journey so far and ahead, then I knew that my next stop was Mauritius. That belief was rock solid – the moment I thought otherwise would be the moment I cracked. It wouldn’t happen. These were only the final thousand miles of a three-year journey. It reminded me of my first two years of grieving and the long and lonely nights and empty days that I had spent in tears, exhausting myself. At the time I hadn’t seen a way out other than to keep on trucking just a little at a time, making myself tiny goals and always looking for things to make me laugh. This stretch of the ocean was just the same. That’s how I knew I would make it. I would always get back to the task in hand, sometimes after refreshing myself with a hair wash or taking a look at some of the messages from home. When the weather was so unpredictable and circumstances were changing so rapidly, I found that I had to take control of the things that I had the power to change. Attitude was the sole thing that I had control of each day.
Unfortunately, my dreams were not so easily reined in and I found myself waking up on many nights in a cold sweat, sometimes crying and often in a very agitated state. They were scaring me and stopping me from sleeping, something I couldn’t afford to happen. After a week or two of this I emailed my psychotherapist friend Briony to get her perspective. My relationship with her was a little bit like that with Ricardo – I trusted her, in some respects more so than myself, and so felt relieved when she told me that the dreams were probably a subconscious reflection of my changing and uncontrollable situation. I encouraged myself to believe that they were Briony’s problems now that I had told her about them, and it seemed to do the trick. My dreams were still a bit weird and at times disturbing, but at least I could sleep again.
By Day 76, the weather was getting wetter and wilder. Bob was in and out of the water so frequently that I had a finely tuned deployment drill and was confident that I could get him out in two minutes. Retrieving him was always trickier. Even when I collapsed the main chute, it was torturous dragging it back through the water and onto the boat in anything more than a slightly choppy sea. This meant that when the wind changed direction, I often had to wait a few hours until the seas died down sufficiently for me to bring him back on board, even while moving in the right direction; it was very frustrating, when I knew that if I hauled him in we could whizz along at over two knots, even without rowing if the wind was blowing towards Mauritius. I laugh now at the image of me standing out on deck, completely naked but for my lifeline, braced against the rail at the far end of the deck, heaving at the lines as the boat surged with each wave. After hours cooped up in the cabin it was liberating to be outside in the air, usually damp with salt spray and spume. I considered myself lucky if I didn’t get soaked in the first two minutes, but I always anticipated returning to my cabin cold and wet from the combination of wind and waves. Each time I heard the hiss of a racing wave, I braced harder and held on to the rail. Sometimes it was fine and I could carry on pulling at the line; at others I had to let go for fear of rope burn. I was just glad to have decent calluses across my palms or I would have ripped them red raw. Even once I had Bob on board the drama wasn’t over. My final (and perhaps most dangerous) task was to pack the 60 metres of soggy rope back into the bag and fold away the chute itself, then secure it down in the forward cabin. It was physically demanding, especially when the boat was surfing down waves or being knocked by slammers. The danger came in being surrounded by all the different lines on the lurching deck; it was my greatest fear that we should capsize at this moment and I would be trapped in a tangled mess during a frightening roll. I am glad it never happened. Neither did my other fear come true – that of pulling up some weird toothy beast from the deep. Instead, I often pulled bits of blue slime and tentacles of jellyfish from the rope and once I noticed a small remora fish stuck to the float with his little sucking mouth. I’m not sure which one of us was more surprised to see the other as he jumped ship as soon as he saw me.
Ric calculated a further fifty-four days to arrival, marking 12 August as The Day and bringing the total crossing time to 132 days. I had prepared myself for anything between a further forty and sixty days, but it still made me rant a bit, if only because I knew I would run out of chocolate before the end. I had already tried rationing myself to one bar a day and had even declared a complete amnesty for a day. I lasted until lunchtime when I gobbled down two at once and declared that Cadbury had never tasted so good. Another concern was how much it would cost to keep the satellite phone running that long and whether or not I would be back in time for various additional dates on which I had already been booked in for talks, including one at the Southampton Boat Show. Thankfully, my sensible head stepped in to remind me that I would get there when I got there, in true Winnie-the-Pooh style of thinking. I had plenty of food in the stores to keep going for a few more months because I hadn’t eaten most of my dehydrated stuff as it tasted so vile, although I was running out of vitamin tablets, having apparently left out a full tub of them. Still, I was sure that scurvy took longer than that to set in and Mum had suggested I could brush my teeth with salt if it came to it, of which I had plenty. All of my clothes had white tidelines and felt sticky with salt and I had a permanent crust of it all over me unless I washed or baby-wiped it away.
All of my rubbish was rinsed and folded up into big bags, which I stored away in my cabin. As the weeks wore into months the bags grew bigger, surprising me with the volume of rubbish I could produce from such a limited stock of supplies. I had taken great effort to remove all surplus packaging before leaving but I had still clocked up nearly 80 litres of rubbish after three months. To my annoyance, I had also lost a few bits overboard to the deep, including a drinks bottle, a plastic bag and a sponge. As far as possible I tried to log all of the litter I spotted at sea, so that groups like the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds could use the information in their work on the distribution of litter in the world’s seas. It is a sad fact that there is often more plastic in a plankton haul than organic matter, and my journey had shown me that there is masses out on the waves. I clocked a toilet seat, mugs, bottles and bags, various bits of polystyrene and lots of UFOs – unidentified floating objects, throughout my voyage. The scariest fact of all is that most of the plastic is beneath the surface, bejillions of tiny pieces slowly eroding and releasing toxins into the water. To think of my favourite wildlife being packed full of these chemicals was sickening, and to watch a mighty albatross soar past me and imagine his insides being clogged up with tampon applicators, lighters and other rubbish was upsetting. But there was nothing I could do but to stow away all of my rubbish as carefully as possible and to row on.
Chapter 27
Water, Water, Everywhere
‘And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb
And out of the swing of the sea’
G. M. Hopkins
I went to sleep on Day 79 sure we were about to take a beating, feeling dwarfed by mountains of cloud ahead. The sound of bullets woke me in the night, high speed rounds of raindrops eating into my cabin roof, shouting at me to wake up – sleeping was now impossible. It was exciting, though, and I snuggled down into my sleeping bag in the dark, waiting for it to stop and wondering what it
would be like outside. I wriggled down into the lumpy beanbag, shifting to find a comfortable position and tucked my feet under the control panel. I was cosy inside and if it weren’t for the noise I would have slept like a baby.
By morning it hadn’t eased and I hadn’t slept more than a few snatches either. The rain thumped on and the wind howled wild. Outside was a mix of greys and white, roughed up by crashing waves. Every so often it would hammer harder somehow, turning the surface of the water to a sort of spiky velvet as the sky emptied itself into the sea. This was my very first monsoon.
Needless to say, my enthusiasm faded after an hour of rowing in it and the novelty wore off abruptly. I had been soaked within half a second of stepping outside and well believe that I risked drowning just by breathing. To put it in perspective, I collected just over a centimetre of water in my bucket in just twenty minutes of being out on deck and filled a litre within an hour – it was awesome to be in the midst of so much water. I had never seen such intense rainfall – not even in Wales. Battered by high winds, 4-metre seas and a whole lot of rain, I rowed all morning in my swimming mask, eyes stinging, soaked and exhausted. I thought I loved rainstorms, but this was different.