by James Adair
The wild seas of the North Atlantic are a constant draw, although they are the most dangerous, with five of the seven rowers lost at sea dying on this route.
All the early ocean rowers were extraordinary characters. My personal favourite is John Fairfax, who in 1969 became the first person to row the Atlantic solo. Born in 1937 to a British father and Bulgarian mother, he was still young when he first got into trouble, booted out of the Boy Scouts for opening fire on the scout hut with a pistol following an argument with another boy. He moved to Argentina with his mother and not long after at the age of thirteen ran away to live in the jungle where, inspired by the Tarzan films, he lived by selling the furs of ocelots and jaguars he trapped. In his early twenties he inherited $10,000, upon which he flew to New York, bought a Chevrolet and drove to San Francisco. Here he took up with a Chinese call girl and, when his funds had dwindled to $150, decided to return to Argentina by bike. He got waylaid in Panama where he became a smuggler for a couple of years (taking a year out as a fisherman in Jamaica), before he had to flee after his involvement in a shoot-out. He returned to Argentina by horseback, where he briefly managed a mink farm before news of Ridgeway and Blyth’s Atlantic crossing spurred him on to make his solo voyage.
Fairfax’s Atlantic solo row took 180 days and saw him fight and kill a mako shark as well as board a passing cargo ship for a fry-up and a few beers. On completing his row, he received a message of congratulation from the crew of Apollo 11. In Florida, a journalist questioned the truth of his shark-fighting tales so Fairfax rented a boat, poured fish blood in the water and, when a suitable specimen turned up, leapt in, killed it and dumped the carcass on the journalist’s doorstep.
Two years later he rowed the Pacific from San Francisco to Hayman Island, Australia, with his girlfriend, who couldn’t swim. It took them 361 days with various stops. He later married another woman and lived out his days gambling as a baccarat expert in Las Vegas.
As cavalier as he was brave, the unconventional Fairfax embodied the spirit of the early ocean rowers. The few people who dared to row oceans between 1966 and 1982 pioneered the routes that would later be raced by the modern ocean rowers.
Modern
The first modern row was British adventurer Peter Bird’s epic 294-day voyage from San Francisco to the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia. This length of time at sea was only possible with a watermaker, and consequently the adjudicators of ocean rows, the Ocean Rowing Society, started standardising the criteria for an official row.
Still, only a trickle of independent rowers continued to cross oceans until, in 1997, Chay Blyth organised the inaugural Atlantic race with a business he would later sell to Simon Chalk, who would name it Woodvale. For the 1997 race, Blyth initiated an interesting rule that any abandoned boats would be torched in case they became a navigational hazard, so retiring crews had the double blow of watching their boat go up in smoke along with their dream.
The route, from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean, would become the standard route for rowers attempting the mid-Atlantic and, with official races on this route in 1997, 2001, 2003-2007, 2009 and 2011, it remains the most rowed of all oceans. Of the 329 boats that have thus far attempted this route, 247 have completed it. This figure includes solos, pairs, fours and larger pay-per-place crews.
Successful crossings of other oceanic routes have been less frequent, but teams have made it across the North Atlantic, North Pacific, Mid-Pacific and South Pacific, as well as the Indian. Other challenges have been completed, such as an Australia to New Zealand row and a race in stages around Britain. There have also been attempts to circumnavigate the world in a rowing boat by way of the treacherous Southern Ocean, but all have failed. This remains the most elusive prize in ocean rowing.
Unsurprisingly, the two men who have attempted a rowing circumnavigation are both experienced ocean rowers and both are British. The sport is dominated by the British, who are to ocean rowing what the Nantucketers were to whaling. Of the 519 people who have rowed an ocean, 321 are British. France is next, with 51 rowers.
Of those 519 people who have rowed an ocean, only 32 of them have gone back for more and crossed a second ocean. As we painstakingly hand-pumped our fresh water and tried to ignore the pain of our salt sores and claw hand we began to appreciate why.
29 The Thieving Dorado
‘The robb’d that smiles, steals something from the thief; He robs himself that spends a bootless grief.’
William Shakespeare, Othello
If we were to break any records we knew we would have to lighten the boat, so on Day 36 we had a further clear-out, chucking ruined provisions and clothes overboard and pumping out the water which had flooded into the hatches. During this clear-out one of the more extraordinary incidents of the trip occurred.
Ben was pumping out one of the hatches, with the handheld bilge pump, draping the hose over the side so the water flowed back into the sea. Without any warning a large dorado appeared from beneath us and snatched the hose in its mouth, swimming down fast with it. ‘You thieving bastard!’ Ben shouted as it snapped the hose from the pump and disappeared, no doubt carrying it off as some sort of exotic gift for a potential mate. Thereafter we would pump any flooded water into a bucket, cursing the dorado all the while.
30 Small Aliens from the Deep
‘Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs / upon the slimy sea.’
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
That night was the blackest yet with not a star or a slice of moon to light our way. With no distractions from above I watched the bioluminescence flare up in the water as the oars scooped flashes of green, silver and gold. As we passed through thick patches of bioluminescence, the drops of water falling from the oars would light up little splashes of gold back on the surface of the water. In the dark they lit up like shimmering trails of molten lava.
Other times flecks of luminous green would get stuck on the oar blade or would creep in through one of the scuppers to gall brightly on deck. There would be occasional explosions of colour in the water, no doubt as a larger creature swam through the clouds of minuscule plankton which flash electric colours in response to being touched.
When we were going fast, the wave created by our bow would light up the black sea in streams of gold while, if you looked out of the back cabin, you could see the rudder wake creating the same fire-flashes in the water.
I knew that this natural light show came from tiny zooplankton, but such was our fascination with the beauty of the displays that we decided to take a look into the gloom of the night sea to see what we could with a torch. We were greeted with a horrifying sight. The sea seemed to writhe with millions of pale, minuscule, alien-like creatures fighting their way to escape the beam of light cutting into the abyssal black of their universe.
‘Weird,’ I said, sweeping the beam across the surface as the zooplankton cowered away from the light.
‘That’s disgusting. Remind me not to fall in at night,’ replied Ben.
It was strange to think that these, the smallest of the sea’s creatures, are the foundation of the oceanic food chain and are the diet of the blue whale, the biggest animal ever to have existed.
The word plankton comes from the Greek planktos meaning ‘drifter’ or ‘wanderer’. Near the surface live the phytoplanktons, which are plant-like plankton. They live between the surface and a depth of 200 metres, in an area called the epipelagic zone where there is enough sun for them to photosynthesise. Then there is a huge variety of zooplankton, which includes fish larvae, arrow worms, copepods and tiny crustaceans that tend to inhabit the darker mesopelagic zone from 200 to 1,000 metres . . . at least until night. When it gets dark, many of these creatures rise in order to feed on phytoplankton and also each other. Since they spend their lives in the dark, many of these zooplankton are bioluminescent, as are other larger creatures such as the squid which also inhabit the mesopelagic zone and deeper.
It was unnerving to
think that on dark, moonless nights, right underneath our barnacled hull there was an almighty struggle for survival going on at a microscopic level. The fact that the zooplankton were so many and varied and that they drifted or propelled themselves through the dark made them seem even more alien, blind in the blackness of space. As the first creatures to have appeared out of the primordial soup around 600 million years ago they are, to my mind, still the strangest that live today.
31 The One Thousand Mile Mark
‘The true peace of God begins at any point one thousand miles from the nearest land.’
Joseph Conrad
On Day 37 we rowed past the one thousand miles from Australia mark. Just over a month before we’d never been out of sight of land and now we were one thousand miles from the nearest landfall. My sister sent me the Joseph Conrad quote on our satellite phone, and how apt it was. We had now settled into the routine of life at sea.
All around us was the immensity of the sea and sky. Never for one second was I bored. Instead, while rowing, I was lulled into a hypnotic trance, watching the movement of the sea and the change of the weather overhead. Perhaps it was an illusion, but the sea always appeared to change with our geographical location. The valley of waves through which we travelled so fast after the vortex had given way to a plateau of water that seemed to slope gently, so that every evening it felt like we were rowing slowly downriver. After the utter still of the first becalming we would occasionally go through what we called Inception seas, after the mind-bending film, Inception. Here it seemed as if the vast sea was being slopped around like the water in a washing-up bowl as it’s carried slowly across a room. Long, low walls of water seemed to collide gently with each other from every direction, mixing imperceptibly. There was always something to look at and the vast expanse of water created a peace of mind impossible to find amid the madding crowds on dry land.
We were relentlessly positive. If something broke, which it nearly always did, we were bullish about being able to fix it or find a way around it. We’d come up with little tricks to get around our problems with seeing the compass or using the foot steering; after all, we had plenty of time to think up and try out solutions.
There was the physical pain, but it was easily worth it to be in amid the beauty and solitude of the sea. Also, there was our habit of turning everything into a joke and making fun of each other, which always lightened the mood and prevented us from falling into navel-gazing and misery. Despite some hardships and a few scares, we were having fun. Every Monday morning we would remind ourselves that we weren’t in ‘the office’. No, now we had a new office, the ocean, and it was one that I felt suited me more than any other workplace I’d been in. Of course, in this new office there were some serious health and safety risks and the pay was non-existent; in fact, I’d given up my lifesavings and more to be there, but it was better than I’d ever hoped for. No amount of money, I thought to myself, would stop us or buy us out of this experience.
32 The Great Becalming
‘The secrets of the currents in the seas have never yet been divulged.’
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
For the next 16 days we experienced what we’d later call the great becalming. During this period we averaged only 17 miles a day. By way of comparison, we had averaged 27 miles a day for the previous 16 days and would average 32 miles a day for the 16 days after the great becalming.
What we discovered was that when the wind dropped we were entirely subject to the ocean’s currents, and the Indian Ocean is notorious for its fickle, ever-changing currents.
On Day 38 we had headwinds; 15 knots of south-westerly winds were pushing us backwards, so we had to put in the parachute anchor. We lay in the cabin eating neat peanut butter and honey and talking ourselves into eating some of our chocolate supplies. The great becalming would be very bad for our small supply of food luxuries.
I went over the side to clean the hull and was amazed by how quickly the marine growth had returned. Ben had decided that swimming was making his salt sores worse, so he didn’t swim much, but I was still keen and loved putting on the mask and seeing what fish I could spot.
We had a metal scraper, which I ran over the hull to remove the barnacles that sat with their arms fanned out in the water catching phytoplankton. As they started their slow, twirling descent into the blue the pilot fish would dart among them, accompanying them down but never seeming to eat them.
The pilot fish, I noticed, were breeding. They massed around our hull, one moment hiding behind the rudder, the next swimming confidently up to my mask to investigate me. We had about twenty of these zebra-striped scavengers who were obviously thriving on the scraps of dinner and buckets of poo that went overboard. As well as the pilots, we also had a cleaner wrasse or ‘sucker fish’ attached to the hull. Clearly he thought we were some sort of slow-moving whale. We also, to my amazement, had a tiny pale crab that seemed to be busily harvesting the barnacles. How has he clung on through all the rough weather? I wondered. Later on, on Day 50, this little guy scuttled through the scuppers and sat on deck staring at us grumpily. I offered him a minuscule bit of beef jerky, which he immediately ate and seemed to enjoy. It must be one of the strangest inter-species meetings: a crab being fed dried South American beef by a human being in the middle of the Indian Ocean. We never saw him again but occasionally, when we passed floating debris, we would see one of the same species of pale little crabs bossily commandeering the piece of oceanic litter.
We had a shortwave radio and after my swim we managed, for the first time, to pick up the BBC World Service in among the many Chinese stations and the occasional crackly call to prayer. Even though we were going slowly backwards it was a surreal treat to listen to the modulated, reassuring tones of the BBC.
When we brought in the para anchor we noticed that it had attracted a new dorado, more colourful than the others, who seemed to have a harem of duller green females following him. Or maybe it was the other way around; maybe the dull green males were vying for the affections of this rainbow-coloured female. Maybe she had been the lucky recipient of our hand-pump hose. Either way, I wanted to capture this new character on film. I stopped coiling the retrieval line and picked up the camera, plunging it over the side.
‘If you pull the main line and inflate the anchor just next to the boat I think that could be a really good shot with all the dorados swimming around it,’ I said excitedly.
Ben looked at me, bemused: we had just gone six miles backwards and now I was asking him to delay longer and take the strain of the para anchor line while I got what I thought was a good camera shot. Well, it would have been, but it annoyed him nonetheless and fair enough, but now the multicoloured dorado was swimming right up to the camera and leaping out of the water in a captivating display of gymnastics. I felt like I was being wooed by this magical fish.
‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll bring in the para anchor,’ said Ben, frustrated at my distraction.
One of our differences was our attitude to filming. I was intent, perhaps slightly obsessive, about capturing everything on film. It’s difficult to film nature and it’s often the last thing you want to do when you’re tired, but I thought it would be a better record than the illegible scrawl in my journal. Also, I felt I owed it to my friend Adam, a producer who wanted to make a film about the row, to get some decent footage. I’ve always loved documentaries and had various ideas about how our film could be different. Ben would watch me, slightly perplexed. He did a bit of filming, but I think I appeared to him like one of those tourists who, always looking through the lens, misses the ‘real’ experience.
33 Gyres
‘Down dropped the breeze, the sails dropped down,
’Twas sad as sad could be;
And we did speak only to break
The silence of the sea!’
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Although the going was slow it was beautiful. It tended to be very sunny at this time,
and we were treated to some extraordinary clouds. One day all the clouds were shaped like pillars, vast columns of white hanging utterly motionless in the sky. Another day they were all sitting at exactly the same height, puffy on top but perfectly flat underneath as if someone had run a knife along their underside.
It became clear during the great becalming that Ben liked going fast whereas I preferred to go slow. Ben didn’t mind the dampness that built up in the cabin when we were going fast and thought speed was more fun than the slower pace of life in the doldrums. He maintained he wasn’t set on breaking any records, but he was keen to make good time and would always be working out our average mileage and likely dates for crossing the halfway point, finishing, and whatever else. Apart from being too bad at maths to do this, I honestly didn’t care. I thought we’d get there when we got there and there was no point analysing it. The surfing conditions could be fun, but I preferred the flat calm during which I could sleep in a dry cabin, sit on a dry deck and fanny about with the camera at my leisure. While Ben got frustrated with the calm I got more upset when, on Day 39, one of the two cameras followed the first of our iPods, dying without explanation.
Little or no wind meant we were vulnerable to the strong currents of the Indian Ocean. Sometimes we’d fire along for a couple of hours at three knots only to then come to a halt and barely reach half a knot, even if we rowed together. Rowing together wasn’t sustainable, though, so where teams of four can use their greater strength to increase the boat’s speed and row with ease through adverse currents we, taking it in turns to row alone, were much more at the currents’ mercy.