by Bear Grylls
It was an emotional occasion. I had been asked to speak and accepted, even though I knew I would be speaking at about 3 a.m. British time, which I was still on, having arrived the day before.
The worst thing about speaking after dinner, though, is that it ruins your appetite. ‘So much for taking this last chance to bulk up,’ I thought, as I nervously played with my steak.
In fact I was too nervous to eat at all. It’s weird how, after all the speeches I make – almost a hundred a year – I still get terrified. I dread those moments before you stand up, that silence as all eyes are on you, that intensity, but I guess to do it well you have to use that intensity. It’s any speaker’s best tool.
The first speaker was Michael Grimaldi, the president of General Motors (Canada), and he spoke concisely and directly about his company’s pioneering spirit and how it constantly aimed to push back the boundaries in the automotive industry.
Then I stood up. All I really wanted to say was this: how so often people look at us and think that we are the pioneers and the guys breaking new boundaries, but it’s not really true. In truth we are just normal guys who have been given a chance, a chance to follow a dream made possible by the likes of them. ‘I’m not feeling very oratory-like right now,’ I went on. ‘I am nervous and we leave in only a few hours. But what I really want to say is thank you. It’s because of your pioneering spirit that we are here. And when it comes down to those crunch times, somewhere out there in the waves and ice, the times when it really matters, I hope we can show that same spirit; and that we come home safe and can say, “We did you proud as well.” Thank you.’
I sat down relieved, my job done. It was our last night, and I needed a bar and a strong drink.
As we left we said our thanks and farewells to the president of General Motors, and on the spur of the moment I offered him a quick spin on the boat the following day before we left.
‘Unfortunately I am flying back to Toronto for a meeting tomorrow morning,’ he said.
I paused, then asked again. ‘How about doing it early?’
‘That would be wonderful,’ he smiled.
So at 6 a.m. the following day, in a crisp early-morning chill, under a clear Halifax sky, three of us took GM’s president around the harbour. We were flying along over still, glassy seas at 25 knots. We watched the first of those sunrises, and it was a magical time.
Just before nine o’clock on that morning of Thursday, 31 July 2003, with barely an hour left before our scheduled departure, we were all sitting quietly around the boat, waiting. This was a rare period of calm and, in crisp sunshine, I decided it was the ideal time to convey a message. Standing on the bow, I asked Andy, Nige, Mick and Charlie for their attention. They turned to face me.
‘Chloë has just faxed me a letter that was delivered to our base in London earlier this morning,’ I said. ‘I want to read it to you.’ The letter was from the Prince of Wales.
Dear Bear,
I did just want to wish you and your team ‘God Speed’ for your intrepid adventure. I am delighted that the spirit of the Great British Eccentric Adventurer is alive and well and I much look forward to seeing you on your return.
Never has a Prince’s Trust Ambassador gone to such lengths to support my Trust, and I am hugely grateful to you!
This comes with every possible thought and countless best wishes.
Yours most sincerely,
Charles
We were far from home, standing nervously on the brink of a life-changing challenge, and everybody was apprehensive. As messages of encouragement go, this handwritten letter from the Prince of Wales was hard to beat, and I could see it on the others’ faces.
At last we were ready, and a flotilla of boats had gathered just off the quayside to escort us away from Halifax. There were 3,050 miles ahead of us. It was all systems go.
Almost.
It was 10 a.m., our time of departure, but there was no sign of Carol, the American journalist.
I had told her very firmly the previous evening that if she was late, we would leave without her.
She was late. So we were leaving.
‘No, we can’t go,’ said Mick. ‘You have to give her another ten minutes.’
‘Five,’ I replied.
The fleet of tugs, yachts and icebreakers was now moving out of the harbour, and people were glancing at their watches, wondering what was going on, what was causing the delay.
Quarter past ten, twenty past ten, half past ten. All our patience was being stretched. I could sense it. This wasn’t what the guys needed. We were ready to go.
Carol McFadden was a beautiful, extremely glamorous and very game journalist from New York. The whole idea of taking her along for the first ten hours of the first leg of the expedition had started when she came to London and said she wanted to write an article about the world of expeditions for Cosmopolitan.
She was engaging, bright and entertaining, and, even though we were meeting at a time when the corporate rejection letters were arriving on a regular basis, I really enjoyed our conversation on the top deck of our barge.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘if you want to get a real taste of the expedition, you should come with us for a bit of the first leg, from Halifax up the Nova Scotia coast.’
Carol’s eyes literally flared into life, and she asked, ‘Could I?’
‘It would be a one-off and it would have a price,’ I continued. ‘Usually, press time is press time, expedition time is expedition time; we never mix it. But this would be an exception.’
‘Well, that sounds a great idea,’ she said.
‘OK, this is the deal,’ I said, thinking on my feet, intensely aware of what was then our very real need to raise funds. ‘You can either write a normal article on the basis of our interview today or you could come along for part of the first leg, have the adventure of a lifetime and write a story about what it’s really like to be on an expedition with five men on a small boat.’
I said it would have a price tag of £25,000.
Carol thought about it. It was a one-off opportunity. ‘Inside an expedition’ was a hundred times more saleable than just ‘an expedition’. She agreed right there on the deck.
I knew we were offering a unique experience, and we were asking a premium price, but it was her call. On balance, I hoped it was a reasonable proposal.
Carol was a mother of four, leading a comfortable home life, but, there and then, she showed she was also gutsy, spontaneous and, above all, willing to grab life and have a go.
When I told Mick about the arrangement I had made with her, he congratulated me on what seemed a novel way of raising funds, but said we must make sure she signed some kind of indemnity.
‘If anything happens to her, those Manhattan lawyers will sue you at the drop of a hat,’ he warned.
‘Well, will you write this indemnity form for me?’ I asked him. ‘Thanks, Miguel.’
Mick eventually produced a brief, very blunt document which, remarkably, managed to include the word ‘death’ eleven times in the space of only five lines.
‘Mick, I can’t send that to Carol,’ I replied. ‘She’ll run a mile.’ He told me just to send it. So I did. I think the wording surprised her but, again to her great credit, she signed on the dotted line the very same day.
She later told me, ‘I sure wasn’t going to let my husband see that. You Brits, you’re nuts. You’re meant to be looking after me, not sending through suicide notes to sign!’
Well, she’d passed Mick’s litmus test.
We kept in regular touch during the preparations. At one stage, I arranged to take Carol over to Cowes for an afternoon on the boat. The aim was to give her all her kit and introduce her to what it was like on board. It was actually quite a blustery, overcast day, and I told her the sea could get pretty rough.
She didn’t seem too concerned, but I glanced apprehensively at her equipment, which seemed to include, instead of a Musto offshore jacket, an Apple Mac i-pod, a silver-plated Theo
Fennell pot of lip-balm and a Dolce and Gabbana headdress.
‘Seriously, I would store some of that away,’ I said.
‘Baa,’ she said, laughing.
It was one hell of an afternoon.
And sure enough, for the next month, we kept finding lip-gloss and Armani scrunchies wedged in between fuel filters or bilge alarms. Several times Andy appeared from the engine compartment staring at some beauty accessory in disbelief. It became a running joke.
Carol evidently lived in style and, true to form, she arrived in Halifax with her husband, the high-profile New York financier George McFadden, and their children. From the word go, they all joined in the spirit of the expedition. I remember one night in Halifax when Charlie leaned over to George, nudged him and told him to hurry up and drink his beer. He wanted to move on. No one usually talked to George like that and he loved it. It was a pleasure to have the McFaddens around.
The original plan was that Carol would remain on the boat for the entire first leg but, when it emerged that there was no decent landing strip for her to be able to fly back from Port aux Basques, we modified the itinerary. Instead, we agreed we should take her up the coast for some ten hours, until late on the first night, then drop her off at a small inlet called Glace Bay, on the northernmost tip of Nova Scotia. There was a small airport there.
As arranged, she came down to the quay the day before we were due to leave, and I presented her with all her remaining equipment. With the kids standing by and clearly loving every minute, I gave their mum a big survival knife and harness, protective waterproof clothing, flares, torches, EPIRBs and the rest.
‘OK, Carol,’ I said finally. ‘That’s you set. You’ve got all your gear. Now, please make sure you are here at ten o’clock in the morning. We will leave at ten prompt.’
Those were the famous last words. It was now 10.35 and there was still no sign of Carol.
Finally, in a frenzied flurry of bags and taxis, she arrived at 10.40, forty minutes late.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said as she kissed her family goodbye and clambered aboard.
‘Come on, Carol,’ I said. ‘We’ll talk about this later.’
I subsequently learned Carol was late because she was on the telephone to poor Chloë in London checking on all our insurance policies for her. I had taken personal cover for all the crew while we were in Canadian waters and included her on the policy.
‘Well, if you hadn’t got me so worried with that death warrant you sent me . . .’ she explained, and as she spoke I saw Mick fumbling with the rope he was stowing.
I smiled and kind of understood. She was aboard, and she was fine, and we were finally on our way.
So, with the nose of our boat pointing north, we edged away from Halifax, escorted by this wonderful flotilla of local boats. We waved at them, and they waved at us, and I found my heart was pounding. So many people in this town had done so much for so little reward. We’d miss them, but we had a job to do now.
As we left the city behind us, I felt a peace, a quietness. It was such a relief after so long to just be us. Alone. No mass of people, no more interviews, no more anything apart from what we could bring to this ourselves. We were as well equipped and trained as we could be and we all felt proud to be here. The sea was mirror calm, the sky clear, and I sat on my own with my feet over the prow. I closed my eyes and breathed in the cold Nova Scotia air. The hull, with all those signatures from the Boat Show now painted over, glided though the water with ease, and I found myself thinking of Shara all those miles away, safe at home.
Carol settled as we picked up speed, and I quietly sat back and thanked God that we had a calm day and a flat sea. She was not short on courage, but I am not sure whether she would have coped very well if conditions had been really rough.
Several days later, when the boat was being thrown around and we were all being repeatedly drenched by sprays of icy water, Charlie suddenly piped up from deep within his survival suit pulled over his head: ‘I think Carol would be looking for an exit strategy by now, don’t you reckon?’
I think that was a fair response. But to her credit she had agreed to come whatever the weather, more or less.
Mick obviously gave the whole subject some thought and, some weeks later, over a beer in Iceland, he turned quite serious and said, ‘Do you know, if we had been caught in a storm when Carol was on board, I think we would have had no option.’
‘To do what?’
Carefully measuring his words, he replied, ‘In those sort of horrendous conditions, not just with Carol but with anyone who was unprepared for that kind of onslaught, I think you would have had no choice but to tie their arms and legs together and strap them down in the sardine tin until we were out of trouble.
‘She wouldn’t have liked it,’ he added between sips, ‘but at least she would have survived.’
We all looked at Mick, a little concerned.
Mercifully, the conditions did not arise where Mick had the opportunity to test his theory on Carol. A gentle breeze ensured her day unfolded with no greater alarm than our first sighting of a minke whale.
Into the afternoon, we gave her a chance to helm. I told her it was her watch, and she should take the wheel. She seemed uncertain whether I was serious but, in exactly the manner we had grown to expect, and actually respect, she just got up and took over.
I gave her the bearings and showed her the direction we needed to take. She stared intently ahead, but we were soon doing figures of eight in the ocean. Anybody watching our path from above would have assumed we were trying to signal SOS in the water, but Mick stepped forward as Carol’s personal tutor.
‘OK, now this is going to be easy,’ he began. ‘Just imagine . . . you are driving this boat down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Prada is over on your right, Dolce and Gabbana is on your left. Go straight ahead up Fifth, aiming straight towards Gucci on the horizon.’
Her course became as straight as an arrow.
She was laughing, and was always a good sport. Despite all the endless jokes, each of us was highly impressed by the fact that someone like her had risen to the challenge, done everything expected and walked the walk. For all she knew, it could have been blowing a Force Eight gale out there. And as for the banter, well, that just meant everyone had accepted her.
We arrived at Glace Bay just before midnight, still in calm seas. The sun had long since disappeared in a distant glow of orange across the sky and we had all sat mesmerized, lost in our own thoughts. I felt so calm and content.
Nige had navigated us carefully through the myriad of tiny islets around the bay itself, and it was strange to pass by so many moss-covered rocks, sometimes just 30 yards away. Nige was concentrating intently on the GPS screen.
‘Left five degrees, and hold the course for 300 metres,’ he would say quietly. He was in his element, using the precision accuracy of the Simrad navigational equipment to chart a safe course and ensure we avoided those lethal outcrops.
Finally, we entered the tiny harbour itself, and noticed more than a hundred little fishing boats moored together in a small bay. The fishermen were working in silence by halogen light, processing their catch, and the whole place was dominated by an overpowering stench of fish innards. As we glided silently up the narrowing creek, the locals seemed to hardly notice us.
We moored and found that the only place open around the dock was the small ambulance station, with its doors open, so we went in there. The crew on the nightshift seemed surprised to see five massively overdressed men shuffle into their hangar, and they were intrigued to hear what we were doing. They could not have been more friendly, and they generously plied us with sandwiches and cups of hot tea.
It was soon time for us to say our goodbyes to Carol, and we found her a taxi that would take her on to the hotel she was staying at, near the airport, from where she would fly home.
‘Thank you all so much,’ she said. ‘It’s been amazing. It’s been a real privilege to have shared these early moments wi
th you. I will think of you all every moment until you are home safe. Look after each other, eh?’
‘We will,’ we promised.
Soon after 1 a.m., we were heading on out again towards Port aux Basques, a small town on the southern tip of Newfoundland, the huge island that sits to the north of Nova Scotia. Once again we wove a careful path through the small islands and rocks, each still beautifully silhouetted in the moonlight, until finally we were in open water.
It was 100 miles straight across this stretch of water to Port aux Basques, where we planned to refuel before heading up to our final Canadian port on the tip end of the Labrador coast, far to the north.
At about 3 a.m. Charlie was on watch and his attention was drawn by a green glow in the sky to the north.
‘What’s that?’
‘It must be the lights of Newfoundland,’ Nige suggested.
But Newfoundland is a huge, magnificent wilderness, not a city electrified and lit for 10 million inhabitants.
‘Or maybe it’s an oil rig,’ I wondered.
‘No way,’ Andy replied. ‘That’s the northern lights.’
And it was. This was nature’s famous lightshow, staged every night at the northern end of the planet. We sat in wonder. The effect was stunning, as if the sky was being illuminated by the stage-lights of some sort of heavenly concert. We sat entranced, in the world’s biggest and most spectacular arena.
Our expectation after that first night was that we would be treated to this natural extravaganza most nights across the freezing ocean ahead. However, we never saw them again. The weather made sure of that. More often than not, dense cloud cover obscured the northern lights and gave us long, dark nights.
But that was all in the future. For now, on this first night of the expedition, the five of us settled back, enjoyed the view and picked contentedly at our boil-in-the-bag sachets of baked beans. That night, it was impossible not to feel richly blessed.