Rowing After the White Whale

by James Adair

  The weather was beginning to come from behind; small waves were tapping at the stern and every so often we could hear a brief whoosh as we moved forwards through the water.

  ‘Okay, let’s finish this first and then get rowing.’

  ‘No way, this is our chance to do some miles.’

  ‘You’re only saying that because you’re losing at Scrabble for the first time; now I’ve remembered the rules you’re running scared.’

  But he couldn’t be persuaded and, gifting me the game, he started rowing for our best run of the trip. Over the next three days we covered 160 miles. We’d managed roughly the same distance in the last ten days.

  It was good to be on the go again, surfing down waves and counting down the miles in each shift. There were some big waves out there and it always took a while for all the waves to get behind us. Even after a day of wind and swell coming from one direction there would still be rogue waves that cut across the rest. We invented acronyms to describe them. The small ones which slapped the side of the boat and leapt up, splashing us insultingly in the eyes were called Angry Port Side waves (APS) or Angry Starboard Side waves (ASS). The big ones that rocked the boat over, filled her up or spun her round were called Monumental Angry Port Side waves (MAPS), and so on. Not being true sailors and retaining our suspicion of the related terminology, we made up our own acronyms for nearly everything. The radio antennae were the Sock Drying Poles (SDPs). Ben would still tell me off whenever I used nautical language. ‘What’s a lanyard?’ he’d say in all seriousness. ‘All I can see is a bit of rope.’ We even ended up calling the oars ‘the wooden planks’ or ‘the long things’.

  The big weather was back and the rowing was fun, but the cabin once again became damp and uncomfortable. On entering the cabin for a sleep we would struggle out of our foul-weather gear, normally getting thrown against the sides of the cabin when half undressed. Then, lying down, the cycling shorts came off and various lotions and potions were applied to the bottom.

  At this stage in the trip we started hugging our cycling shorts to our chests, which dried them out over the few hours of rest. Weirdly, it was nice to feel a little bit of damp close to my body as I lay wrapped up in the camping quilt, which nearly always managed to remain dry. Those damp cycling shorts, held close, reminded me of what I wasn’t doing and made me feel drier than being totally dry could ever feel.

  It is truly all in the contrasts. While I’ve never worked as hard physically as rowing twelve hours a day, I’ve never felt as rested as after occasional nights in the cabin when we slept for as much as eight hours. A tin of tuna has never tasted, nor will ever taste, as good as the one we had at our halfway party. Deprivation and difficulty only served to heighten any small moments of comfort, so that snatches of relief often seemed almost absurdly ecstatic.

  40 The Moon

  ‘Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending – something dead, cold, and lifeless.’

  Bertrand Russell, ‘Why I Am Not a Christian’

  The full moon at this time was sometimes so bright the night would feel more like daylight. In the rough, following seas that brought us so many miles we were able to see the waves, anticipate them and line the boat up to get the most out of them. When the moon was behind us a long runway of glistening, liquid silver stretched out over the water as we sped along.

  We’d worked out that if we successfully rowed across the Indian Ocean we would cover the same distance as halfway across the surface of the moon. Looking up at the cratered surface of the moon, which appeared freakishly close, made this a tiring thought.

  Although its brightness blotted out the stars the moon was mesmerising in itself. How strange to think that, according to the giant impact theory, the cold moon was once part of our planet, formed when Earth collided with the planet Theia, sending a large number of moonlets into orbit. These moonlets eventually joined together to form the moon. It was this impact that tilted our planet on its side and gave rise to the very specific conditions that made life on earth possible.

  We couldn’t help but feel a connection with the moon, and its gravitational pull that governs the tides. By now, we knew when it would rain, where the moon would come up and how much of it we would be able to see. It was therefore a surprise when it disappeared before my eyes on Day 56.

  I was rowing along in the dead of night, with the moon behind my back illuminating the bulkhead in front of me in its luminous blue light. Then all of a sudden it started to dim and, turning around, I saw the edge of the moon blackening. I stopped rowing, scrambled over the deck and opened the cabin door.

  ‘Wake up; I think there’s a lunar eclipse!’ I said excitedly.

  ‘Leave me alone, I’m sleeping.’

  Fair enough, I thought. Maybe I’m seeing things.

  But over the next twenty minutes the moon disappeared as the earth cast more of its shadow across its surface. Watching it gradually darken really intensified that feeling of moving through space. Eventually there was a halo of dull light glowing around the black sphere and the stars once again flickered all around. There I sat watching the blackened moon from the black sea until the process started reversing itself and the moon’s blue light crept back over the water.

  The next day I switched on the satellite phone and the first text to come through read, ‘Did you manage to see the lunar eclipse last night?’

  41 Halfway Point in the Sea of Rainbows

  ‘Alone, alone, all, all alone,

  Alone on a wide wide sea!’

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

  The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

  On Day 59 we passed the halfway point. We had been experiencing biblical rainfall all the previous day and night and still showers were passing overhead. But the sun was there in the gaps so that rainbows beamed in every direction. Full rainbows, half rainbows, double rainbows; they were everywhere and they were close. It was possible to see their ends dipping into clouds or looping into the water.

  In this sea of rainbows we crossed the halfway point and shook hands. Every mile now was one mile closer to Mauritius. Apart from, of course, when we were going backwards, which we didn’t doubt we would be doing again. But here we were in one of the most beautiful and isolated places in the world, halfway to achieving our dream and, as Tony told us, only thirty-four miles behind the record. With the weather still behind us we decided to put off our halfway party for a calm day and carried on rowing as normal.

  On Day 62 that calm day came. First, we managed to fix the watermaker by rigging up a header tank. Someone would still have to stay on deck to feed it for a couple of hours each day but it was a lot less work than pumping. Then we made our celebration meal. We’d agreed that there would be no freeze-dried food, so we delved into the small bag of ‘land food’ we had brought. We made a salad with two tins of tuna, one tin of sweetcorn and one tin of beetroot. A dash of Tabasco, and it made the finest meal I’ve ever tasted; the rich oiliness of the fish against the sweetness of the vegetables was exquisite. We drank two miniature bottles of champagne to accompany our feast.

  There we sat, looking out over the untroubled water, surely two of the most isolated people on the planet. I was so proud of what we had achieved in rowing halfway across the Indian Ocean under our own steam, and we congratulated each other under the fiery sunset.

  Finishing the champagne, we found ourselves quite light-headed and decided we were still hungry. Like two foraging bears we riffled out some chocolate and ate it, then drank some of our brandy, smoked some cigarettes and then decided it would be a good idea to eat some more chocolate. It was a surreal feeling, treatin
g ourselves as if we were on a holiday boating trip when we were actually over one and a half thousand miles from the nearest land.

  As darkness settled on the calm we stumbled, exhausted, into the cabin where we fell asleep, giddily happy, like two old men who had broken out of their retirement home and spent a night in the local pub.

  42 Moby Dick

  ‘I am half way in the work . . . It will be a strange sort of book.’

  Herman Melville, on writing Moby Dick

  It had been hard work getting to the halfway point and, as we resumed our relentless routine of rowing and sleeping, we realised that all halfway means is that you’ve got to do it all over again. We would need something to keep us going, something to look forward to, and so we decided to start reading Moby Dick.

  It worked. Now every day as we rowed we knew that we could look forward to another instalment of this massive tale with its many meandering deviations and musings. As the story unfolded, we came to see the similarities between ocean rowing and whaling. When talking about the characters attracted to whaling in the mid nineteenth century, and the very business of being at sea for long periods, Melville could have been talking about the world of ocean rowing. When the whaling ships caught up with a sperm whale they would lower rowing boats in which the crew would give chase, which means that much of the book is about rowing around in the middle of the ocean in the shadow of a watery death.

  Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick in 1851 when he was 31 years old. He had served on one of the many Nantucket whaling ships that circumnavigated the globe, hunting sperm whales for their oil. Melville had jumped ship in the South Seas and lived there for two years before returning to America to become a writer. He had some early successes, but Moby Dick was a flop and his writing career went on the slide until he took a job at the New York Custom House in 1866, where he worked until his death in 1891.

  Moby Dick tells the story of Captain Ahab’s obsessive pursuit of a white sperm whale; the eponymous Moby Dick. Ahab sails over the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, enquiring of each whale ship he meets, ‘Hast ye seen the white whale?’, until he eventually tracks Moby Dick down in the Pacific.

  Using the narrative of Ahab’s obsessive quest as his backdrop, Melville exhaustively describes every aspect of whaling, whales and life at sea. With all the time in the world on our hands we were constantly entertained by his many factual and metaphysical digressions. Even when Melville occasionally gets his facts wrong, like assuming from the available evidence that the whale is surely a fish and not a mammal, he writes captivatingly about the wild beauty and unforgiving danger of the ocean.

  One of us would sit in the cabin with the hatch open, reading aloud to the rower, shouting or singing when required, stopping only to sip sweet tea or to argue a point.

  Perhaps it was because we came to love the book so much that we saw so many comparisons between whaling and ocean rowing. As I’ve said, I related to Ahab’s injury-driven obsession (if not its object), and there were many other comparisons to draw too. Nobody ever got rich rowing an ocean and likewise the crews of whaling ships served on long two- or three-year voyages for negligible returns. They were in it for the adventure and to escape the mundanity of landlubbing, just as we were. Obviously, we didn’t want to slaughter whales to the point of extinction, but Moby Dick is about so much more than just whaling and it became as much as a comfort to us as a Bible might be for a God-fearing seaman.

  43 Passing Ships

  ‘Some merchant ships crossing each other’s wake in the mid-Atlantic, will oftentimes pass on without so much as a single word of recognition, mutually cutting each other on the high seas, like a brace of dandies in Broadway.’

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  The evening of Day 63 was dark. It was a night so black, with not a star or hint of moon behind the low clouds, that we decided to turn on the navigation light. This small light at the front of the boat cast an eerie shadow over the surrounding sea and all night we could see the pale flashes of the ghost-like dorado as they sped under the hull in pursuit of their prey. Rowing the first night shift I nearly turned off the navigation light, thinking I’d prefer the pitch black to a dim glow that barely illuminated the boat.

  All of a sudden there was a great commotion behind me. A thrashing and splashing, but as I turned around all I could see was a large patch of white water. Had a whale sounded as quickly as it had breached? Had a shark taken one of the dorado? Or was it something else? This was the problem with rowing, you always had your back turned to your direction of travel. Despite the thousands of miles of open ocean, it still felt unnatural not to be looking where you were going.

  Luckily the GPS sounded an alarm later in the night to warn us of an oncoming container ship, the motor vessel CMA CGM Blue Whale. It was the first ship we’d seen since Day 11 and as it loomed into sight we excitedly called it up on the VHF radio. We reported our position and the master confirmed that he would give us a wide berth, but he asked nothing of who we were or what we were doing. Clearly we were just a dot on their computer system that needed to be avoided.

  ‘They’re just like bus drivers,’ Ben said disparagingly.

  ‘Blue Whale, hast ye seen the white whale?’ I joked, paraphrasing Captain Ahab, but already the ship was pulling away to the east, its lights fading as it disappeared with its towering stacks of containers.

  44 Splendid Isolation

  ‘This most excellent canopy,

  the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament,

  this majestical roof fretted with golden fire.’

  William Shakespeare, Hamlet

  No matter how dark or difficult the nights, the sun would always rise, heralded at first by the morning stars. The sunrise nearly always appeared like an upbeat, motivational poster, with thick beams of light dappling the ocean, and night would be forgotten as we began to warm up and dry out.

  However clichéd, the sun’s beauty and warmth were always a relief after those tough nights in which we made little progress and during which we were becoming more tired as we lost weight and became nutritionally deprived.

  On the evening of Day 67 the red sun sank below the horizon as the sky was already filling with stars. We had slowed down again and decided to enjoy the night instead of battling away into yet another countercurrent. Watching the GPS for a while, we worked out that if we didn’t row for two hours we’d go back only half a mile. It wasn’t even a debate. As it was calm and dry we had the iPod on deck and chose a piece of Renaissance choral music called Spem in alium. We each leant back onto the bulkhead, one on either side of the deck, passing the whisky and smoking our last few cigarettes.

  ‘We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,’ I quoted.

  ‘Oscar Wilde; he had some good ones, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yeah, he also had one of the top ten deathbed quotes: “Either that wallpaper goes or I do,” which is up there with Spike Milligan’s: “I told you I was ill.”.’

  ‘Who said, “Punctuality is the virtue of the bored”?’

  ‘Not sure, but if we take an embarrassingly long time getting to Mauritius we can just say we had better things to do than row.’

  ‘Good plan; this is much more fun than rowing.’

  We stared up at the flashing satellites as they tracked silently across the immense, star-clouded sky. Of all the amazing nights we had on the ocean this was the best.

  But did we talk each other into taking breaks too easily? Even with the relentless rounds of countercurrents should we not have been pushing all the time? Despite our mutual belief that records were relatively meaningless, our morale tended to be higher when we were going fast. So, on Day 72, when we spent the first four hours of the day hurtling along at four knots we were on a high and when later that day we slowed, so did our spirits. Perhaps it was the feeling of rowing hard and going nowhere, of working and achieving nothing, that grated. When it was tough, it was hard to remember that in adverse conditions i
t was a victory simply to stay stationary.

  Having a great experience and getting to Mauritius, these were our common goals, but as the trip wore on it seemed like we weren’t having that great experience unless we were making decent progress towards Mauritius. At this time I was experiencing the usual pain, stiffness and sores, but Ben was in agony on account of some serious bowel trouble. The bucket was my friend, but it had now become his enemy. This must have played a part in his newfound focus on the finish line, while I felt more unhurried, sensing that Mauritius meant the end of the adventure. I didn’t feel any urgency to get to the finish line. The ocean was beautiful and always interesting and, most importantly, it was turning out to be everything I’d dreamt of when crammed into the underground on a Monday morning. I was lost in my own little world and I had no interest in re-entering what others called the ‘real world’ any time soon.

  45 Reveries

  ‘There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; falls of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner – for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.’