Rowing After the White Whale

by James Adair

  21 Another Rower

  ‘In the maritime life, far more than on terra firma, wild rumours abound, whenever there is any adequate reality for them to cling to.’

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  On Day 18 we were back to battling away in rough seas. We were doing good miles but it was uncomfortable going. In the afternoon we spoke to Tony on the satellite phone. He warned us that we’d have strong winds for another week but he also had a fascinating snippet of news. He told us that a guy called Keith had not long left Geraldton in an attempt to row across the Indian solo. This was an extraordinary development. I had heard Keith’s name a few months back as someone who might be attempting the Indian at the same time as us. I’d forgotten about it because he didn’t have a boat and, as we’d learnt, people don’t take you seriously until you at least have a boat.

  But here we were a month or so later, in the middle of the ocean, hearing the news that Keith had left Australia. All Tony could tell us was that Keith had somehow rented Rob Eustace’s boat. The last time we’d seen Rob’s boat it had been on a trailer being driven down to Fremantle by Rob himself. Talk about the Irish having the gift of the gab. ‘Who the hell is this Keith guy?’ we asked each other in amazement.

  We were divided on the answer to this question. Ben was generally in favour of Keith. He thought you had to hand it to him for being so bold, pioneering and lucky. He admired Keith’s brazen, last minute dash for glory. Ben reckoned he was a sort of Irish Simon Chalk. To my mind he was very different from Simon. Okay, I could see there was a certain marauding charm about him, and his obvious lunacy struck a chord, too, but there was one vital difference for me. It had everything to do with preparation. I didn’t think it was fair that he turned up at the start line, got straight into Rob’s meticulously prepared boat and set off. We’d spent years saving and the best part of a year planning, preparing, filling out forms, running around the country buying second-hand kit, organising shipping, sponsorship – you name it, we’d done it and done it what felt like the hard way. Apart from being rattled by this sense of injustice, I thought it unlikely that anyone could complete the Indian in such a cavalier fashion. By way of contrast, the sheer scale of all the preparations was a huge motivation for us. All that time, money and effort were still in the forefront of my mind when we set off. There was no way I’d let us turn back, fail, no matter what happened to us.

  To turn up at such short notice and set off in someone else’s boat that they’d prepared seemed akin to doing a ‘pay-per-place’ row. ‘Pay-per-place’ is when people pay a fee to row in a ten- or twelve-man boat. It has become a popular way to cross the Atlantic as it means people can have the experience of rowing an ocean at minimal cost and without all the hassle of organising it themselves. The only drawback is spending upwards of a month in very close quarters with 11 strangers. On a boat like that you are never alone; you row with others, sleep with others and when it’s time to sit on the bucket to perform your daily ablutions you do it in front of others. No doubt it’s a great experience in its own way, but it was never what I imagined when dreaming about rowing an ocean.

  At the same time as updating us about Keith’s departure Tony also told us that Roz Savage had left from Geraldton in her second attempt to row the Indian solo. We had read about Roz, a world record holder, who had already rowed solo across the Atlantic and Pacific. She is a supreme athlete, a vocal eco-warrior and has a formidable PR campaign. She had originally left from Fremantle but had failed to make any decent headway despite battling away for ten days or so, and had to come back in after her watermaker broke.

  It was hard imagining her and Keith setting off at a similar time; they were such contrasting characters. As were Simon, Rob, the four-man crew and all the other ocean rowers we had met. What, we wondered, had all these disparate people in common?

  22 On the Personalities Drawn to Ocean Rowing

  ‘Nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber.’

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  Back in Geraldton we had asked Simon if he ever got fed up with all the complaints about Woodvale he got from ocean rowers; we knew there had been various issues in previous races. ‘The sort of people who row oceans tend to be very highly strung,’ he’d replied. From what we had seen he was right; the ocean rowers we’d met tended to be fiercely independent, emotional, highly motivated and very cavalier about personal safety.

  In our opinion, most ocean rowers fall into two categories (although there is always some overlap). First there are the endurance rowers. These are the people who see rowing an ocean as the ultimate physical challenge. For them it’s a kind of aquatic Ironman during which Mother Nature will throw everything she has at them and they have to use their strength and ingenuity to succeed. They place great emphasis on training and nutrition. They also tend to excel at fundraising and are relatively sensible people, which is to say sensible within the parameters of ocean rowing. Breaking records normally appeals to these rowers and they see the activity very much as a sport.

  Then there are the romantic rowers. For them it’s all about the journey. Being at sea is the ultimate reward. They tend to distance themselves from any record attempts, normally in the knowledge that their haphazard training regimes have slipped by the wayside as they rather chaotically prepare for their row. Being romantic, they’ve spent a lot of time dreaming and not enough time planning. While the endurance rowers prepare for the worst the romantics often idealise the voyage, imagining it as some sort of spiritual journey. Time is on their side as they are often fleeing unsatisfactory employment or relationships. If not these, then they are escaping some other aspect of modern life. As Theodore Rezvoy, who was rescued after nineteen days on the Indian, said, ‘On the ocean there are no cars, no television, no bills and no police.’

  We often joked that the reason Simon spent so much of his time (a total of 313 days) at sea, in a small rowing boat, with limited contact with the outside world, was that he was on the run from the police. In some ways it was unfair to say that he went to sea to avoid the chaos of his business and other affairs, but we couldn’t help but understand this aspect of his motivation. Hadn’t we originally thought of rowing an ocean as an escape from the drudgery of our lives in London?

  Whatever category they fell into, the ocean rowers we met always had a story and we spent a lot of time discussing all the different characters we’d met. Whenever Ben and I had a difference of opinion we’d make up bits of philosophy or quotations from various ocean rowers to prove our point.

  So Ben might say, ‘Stop whingeing. Keith famously never takes toilet paper to sea.’ To which I’d reply, ‘Yes, but Simon is renowned for always taking at least ten sheets per person per day on his trips.’

  We joked, but we had a lot of time for the ocean rowers we met. It was striking how unconventional, fascinating and, indeed, highly strung they all were. We knew of, and had met, a lot of people who had fallen out on rowing boats. The clash of strong personalities, in a confined space, in such testing conditions was sometimes so extreme that they didn’t speak again after getting back to dry land. We’d heard about a four-man boat on the Indian where an argument had led to one of the crew hiding in the forward cabin and refusing to come out for three days. We were aware of these more personal dangers and were determined not to fall into the trap of blaming each other – not to mention getting nasty, petulant or spiteful – when things went wrong. But of course anything can happen at sea.

  23 Timothy and the Filofax

  ‘We are merely the stars’ tennis-balls, struck and banded which way please them.’

  John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi

  Day 21 found us arguing. Not seriously, but in our usual ironic fashion. I was trying to convince Ben to throw his leather Filofax overboard. He had forced me to chuck a pair of chinos, which for some reason I had w
orn the day we left. We didn’t get splashed for the first four hours and I kept saying, ‘The chinos still aren’t wet, they’re proving to be a great bring.’ But then we got drenched and the chinos quickly went in. Ben, on the other hand, had insisted on bringing his Filofax, an organisational tool that went out of fashion in the late 1980s. It was massive and there wasn’t even anything in it; I had all our important documents in a waterproof wallet. Ben had been putting up a big fight for three weeks, so attached was he to this relic. He tried to turn the tables on me saying I should throw overboard my ‘Aladdin pants’, as he called the lightweight, baggy trousers I had brought from India, although his concerns here were more visual than spacial. But we were so overloaded with stuff that finally he agreed the Filofax had to go. I filmed the occasion and the eulogy Ben gave his Filofax as it drifted off like a melancholy Viking funeral ship.

  Around lunchtime, still coming to terms with his loss, Ben decided to call his mum on the satellite phone. He was standing up by the aft cabin with his back to me while I was rowing. We were seven hundred miles out to sea. All signs of land had disappeared, there was no seaweed in the water and our only companions were the pilot fish and seabirds. Then the most extraordinary thing happened. A tiny moth landed on Ben’s back. Here we were, seven hundred miles from the nearest land, and a moth was flying around. When Ben finished on the phone we inspected him, deciding that he was a normal moth, not some kind of sea moth we’d never heard of. He’d clearly been blown off course or had lost his way chasing the full moon. We named him Timothy and put him in the cabin. Tim, we agreed, was our friend and he was coming all the way to Mauritius with us.

  Things were still tough at this stage. We were desperate for a calm day in which to carry out all the repairs. Our jet boil (which was used for boiling the water that hydrated our food) had broken, so we were on our backup, only cooking inside to preserve it; our satellite phone had mysteriously broken (probably due to moisture or salt water getting into it somehow) so we were using the backup, again inside only; the rowlocks still kept coming loose; our bodies were aching and we were tiring of pumping our own water. In short, it was starting to feel like we were losing control.

  Another worrying development was how low the boat was sitting in the water. One evening in particular she was sagging so low that I became convinced we were sinking. We swam under the boat to investigate and couldn’t see any obvious holes, but this did nothing to settle my anxieties.

  On the morning of Day 22 we opened the cabin door and, after only one night of sleeping in the cabin, Tim flew away. It seemed that he preferred certain death at sea to spending any more time with us. It felt like a bad omen.

  At night we were trialling longer shifts to give the other person a chance of more rest. The extra sleep helped, but four hours on was a long time to row and in bad weather it could get particularly lonely. Small setbacks had a dramatic effect. For example, halfway through one of my four-hour shifts I made a hot chocolate and sat down to drink it. I’d spent the first two hours fantasising about it, working towards it. As I lifted the steaming sweetness to my lips a wave crashed over the side, swamping my drink. This sort of incident could ruin a night shift. But one of my worst lows came a few nights later. I had with me an iPod filled with audio books. I’d spent a lot of time downloading long novels and histories and we both found that listening to these helped get us through the darker nights. But one night I discovered that the salt water had got to the iPod, killing it. I was, for a while, inconsolable, despite having another iPod full of music.

  ‘Don’t worry; remember I’ve also got an iPod you can use,’ said Ben, in an effort to pacify my dark mood.

  ‘But you’ve only got a hundred and twenty-six songs on it and most of them are by Celine Dion,’ I complained.

  ‘Oh come on, she’s done some great work.’

  Apart from a small selection of early 1990s ballads Ben isn’t that bothered about music, whereas it has always held a lot of significance for me. Some of my favourite times on the water were listening to music. It always filled me with joy when a fitting song came on, like the time when Israel Kamakawiwo’s cover of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ came on while we were rowing through a succession of rainbows, or when Dire Straits’ ‘Sultans of Swing’ played while we skipped along at three knots under a full moon. Sometimes it could be incongruous, like when Hans Zimmer’s atmospheric soundtrack to Inception played during a storm, creating the sense that I was trapped in some weird, never-ending nightmare. Other times it was ironic, The Kinks’ ‘Sunny Afternoon’ in a rainstorm, or sometimes just downright odd, like the morning I got drum and bass during a serene sunrise.

  Either way, the iPods made the difficult times much more bearable and I really felt the loss of the audio books at this early stage. Later I would have to learn to live without music as well.

  24 The First Becalming

  ‘So strange a dreaminess did there reign all over the ship and the sea.’

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  Throughout the morning of Day 27 the swell was dying down to small ripples and by lunch there was nothing but a glassy still. There wasn’t a whisper of wind or swell, which had the extraordinary effect of making the sea as calm as a swimming pool. The surface of the sea was so flat it acted like a mirror reflecting back the blue of the sky and white of the low clouds that hung motionless above us.

  It was the calm day we’d been waiting for those past few weeks, but when it came its surreal beauty was surprising. I’d come to think of the ocean as being only capable of movement. There had always been waves or swell up until this point and we’d always been moving backwards or forwards, north or south. But as we stopped rowing at lunch and checked the GPS it confirmed that we were completely stationary. It was an amazing feeling, being eight hundred miles out to sea but suddenly in calm, millpond conditions.

  The silence when we stopped rowing was overwhelming and bizarre. Normally the boat would always be making a noise, gurgling and creaking as she moved through the water, waves tapping against the hull, the oars and the seat sliding back and forth. But now there was nothing and for the first time I experienced the truth of the phrase ‘deafening silence’.

  Peering into the gin-clear ocean, it was impossible to gauge the depth unless something, like a spoonful of lunch, was sinking down into the impenetrable blue. It was possible to see tiny individual plankton floating like planets through the eternal sea. Some were perfectly round, expanding and contracting as they drifted past while others were long like pieces of hair. These were the organisms that lit up at night in such spectacular flashes of green and gold when our oars touched them, and they were everywhere.

  We set to work on all the jobs that needed doing. When we checked all the holds where our food was stored in waterproof bags we discovered that a huge amount of water had leaked in. We pumped it out by hand, counting over a hundred litres. No wonder the boat had been sagging so sluggishly. It was incredible how high she sat in the water after we had finished. We agreed that we would have to pump out the seven holds that sat underneath the deck every few days from now on. After tackling the other repairs we managed to speak to a watermaker specialist called Jim MacDonald on the satellite phone. He talked us through a way of repairing our electric watermaker. We replaced the pressure relief valve and bled the air out of the system then we started to make sweet, sweet water. We were now on a massive high, we’d worked so hard pumping our own water but now here was a machine to do it for us.

  With the watermaker running and the other repairs done, we decided to take the rest of the day off. We took it in turns to swim. I took the film camera in and swam in a big circle around the boat. I swam about twenty metres from the boat but, even without the slightest hint of wind, it felt uncomfortable to go any further. She looked so small and insignificant on the wide sea, which stretched away in every direction, untroubled, until it merged with the horizon. But I felt confident in her. She had been battered by some fierce seas and
had stood up to the test. I pointed the camera down, filming my toes pointing into the cavernous vacuum of blue.

  Bizarrely, Paddington was still standing strong on the prow, suitcase intact, wellington boots still firmly on. The bear was clearly going the whole way.

  Finally we took it in turns to clean the hull with a metal scraper to get rid of the barnacles. It was amazing how much marine growth had accumulated in such a short time but then in this, the harshest and most symbiotic of environments, the fastest of whales host barnacles and the sleekest of sharks carry their cleaner wrasse.

  Back on board we had a wash and then lay down, one on either gunwale, drifting in and out of sleep in the warm afternoon sun.

  Later we had a call from a family friend of mine, Nick Eyles, an experienced sailor who had given us lots of help before we set off. He had seen from the tracking that we had slowed to a halt and wanted to know if everything was okay.

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said, ‘couldn’t be better.’ He had spoken to the Met Office and the forecast was good; it sounded like we’d be surfing again in a couple of days. We decided to take the night off, to rest our bodies and prepare mentally for the next weather system. ‘Anyway,’ we said to each other, ‘we’re not trying to break any records, we’re just here for the experience and we feel like taking a night off.’ Having justified ourselves, we decided on a feast for dinner, no freeze-dried food, instead we would eat some of the treats we had packed. Under a setting sun we tucked into pork scratchings, tins of tuna, pineapple chunks and two chocolate bars each for dessert. This simple fare tasted exquisite after all the freeze-dried food; the textures of each component were subtle and pleasing and it was as if our bodies were begging for what they offered in oil and fat and freshness.