by Bear Grylls
I’m still feeling tired, and I’m apprehensive. I’m not sure about the forecast. It’s awkward whether to go before the bad stuff or to wait. It’s the toughest call yet.
I remember Annabel, my sister-in-law, telling me before we left that I would have to make some hard decisions out here as leader – and this is one of them.
I miss Shara and little Jesse; I really miss us just being together, especially at times like this.
I feel edgy and vulnerable when there are these difficult choices to be made, especially as the person leading the team. I just want to keep everyone together and happy, and to make the right decisions. I hope I can.
Later on I spoke to Chloë again on the SAT phone. She had received a phone call from Mary, Mick’s girlfriend. It was bad news. Mary’s father had suddenly passed away. It had happened the hour we had left Halifax. I found Mick prepping his kit and told him to telephone Mary. I warned him it wasn’t good news. Mick was devastated, but also torn. Torn between the team and wishing he could be there for Mary at this awful time.
Mary broke down and cried. Her father had just fallen from the cliff of life, and Mick, her boyfriend, was now treading precariously near the edge. It all became too much for her later that day when she found an envelope. It was Mick’s will, which he had written the day before he left. This was the final straw.
Mick and I spoke for a while, partly about Mary, partly about what to do now. We were trying to rationalize everything, but soon we were interrupted by a familiar voice.
‘So we’re all looking forward to seeing you tonight.’
It was Mayor Rumbolt again, extending the warm hand of hospitality, inviting us to an occasion at the town hall where, it seemed, we were to be the guests of honour.
‘We would like to initiate you all as honorary Labradoreans,’ he grinned. That sounded worrying. I had done initiations in the army, and they were rarely good news. Ever.
‘Um . . . yep, that would be a pleasure,’ I said.
The words tumbled out. We had all planned on an early night but it would have been ungracious to turn him down.
‘We’ll go along for a short time, show our faces and present the mayor with a decent bottle of whisky as a thanks for all he has done, and then bed,’ I told the others.
As it was, they were all much keener to go than me. ‘It’ll be fun,’ Charlie added.
So we went.
Everybody was in high spirits as we approached the house where we had been asked to meet before going on to what Alton cheerfully referred to as the ‘town hall’. The guys were now in the frame of mind to celebrate our progress so far.
‘They’ve got pretty good roads for such a small place,’ Nige noted as we walked along.
‘I know,’ Charlie added, ‘especially when you think they only go round the town and that’s it. They don’t actually lead anywhere. There is no road from here to Toronto, or anywhere for that matter. The only way out of here is by plane or sea.’
We arrived at the house, full of festive fishermen, and found the beer flowing fast. The local people could not have been more friendly, and they made us feel quite proud when they said they could hardly believe we had travelled up from Nova Scotia in our small, yellow 32-foot rigid inflatable boat.
‘You must go easy from now on, mind,’ said another Rumbolt. ‘You are heading into difficult waters from here on.’
Another asked, ‘When are you leaving?’
I replied that we would probably leave the following day, and this remark provoked a chorus of amazement.
‘You can’t do that. It’s northerly winds,’ the fishermen said. ‘We never go out in northerlies.’
‘Really?’ Andy asked.
‘No, never.’
The locals were absolutely adamant, and I sensed eyes glancing in my direction.
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘The northerlies are the vicious ones,’ they said. ‘They blow onshore and come straight from the Arctic. They’re cold and dangerous. It’s a rule in our fleet. When the wind is a northerly, we wait for the winds to change.’
It made sense, but I tried to rationalize the situation.
First, I told myself, the fishermen were dealing with conditions maybe 50 miles, maximum 100 miles, offshore. We had to think bigger. We were trying to get it right for over 700 miles straight across this ocean. That made the decision a different call altogether. We had to see the whole picture.
Second, the thought did cross my mind that it wasn’t every day they have visitors, and that, even with Charlie and Nige’s terrible jokes, they might not want us to leave quite so soon. At the very least, our arrival had broken their routine.
It was soon eleven o’clock, the time when I had promised myself we would all be back asleep in our beds, but the evening was only just starting. Mayor Rumbolt announced it was time to move on and join the rest of the folks at the town hall. We arrived, and quickly realized not only that almost the entire town was present but also that the night’s entertainment seemed to be . . . us.
There was no escape from this local kindness, so I decided I might as well enter into the spirit of the occasion. We got drinks and I even had a dance with Mrs Rumbolt . . . although I wasn’t sure exactly which Mrs Rumbolt I was dancing with.
We were soon led to a kind of wooden stage where, in preparation for our initiation as honorary Labradoreans, we were told to get dressed in chest-high boots, aprons, hair-nets and long rubber gloves, and to carry a crab net round our midriffs.
This was looking bad.
Amid hoots of laughter from the assembled crowd, who were all having the time of their lives, we were asked to drink down pints of home-brewed beer and eat hunks of bread dipped in some very suspect-looking local paste. On top of all this, and at the same time, we had to sing a song.
And this was just the warm-up.
We were each then handed a clearly rotting sardine and told to eat it, head and all. Things were getting out of hand. We all hesitated, but Mick decided he had definitely had enough.
‘Listen, Bear, I’m all for being a good sport, but this is getting ridiculous,’ he said, suddenly looking very serious. ‘If we eat this sort of thing, we could all get sick for days. I hate to say it, but our mission is to complete this expedition, not to be initiated as a Labradorean, nice as it is. We have to be sensible here.’
He was right. Andy, Charlie and Mick were able tactfully to toss the sardines to one side, but Nige and I were the last in line, and people were watching us very closely. There was no escape, so I looked at Nige, took a deep breath, and together we bit the heads off the revolting sardines and chewed.
We eventually managed to leave at 1.30 a.m. ‘Give me the sea over the sardines any day,’ I told Mick as we finally reached our hotel room.
Our plan remained to leave at 6 a.m., so long as the final weather forecast was all right. Whatever our doubts about the wind and a beam sea, whatever the local fishermen said, the bottom line was that worse weather was on the way. If we waited we would get caught in it for certain.
We had forty-eight hours’ clear weather ahead of us, and I believed we could handle the Force Five winds if they did happen to come early.
I tossed around my bed sleeplessly. Wondering. Questioning. Then finally, thankfully, out of exhaustion, I fell asleep.
7. UNSEEN CREW
Man must live by faith – faith in himself, and faith in others.
Anon.
Everyone was awake by 4.30 in the morning after our initiation at St Mary’s, ready to set out on the second-longest leg of the entire voyage, just over 700 miles straight across the Labrador Sea. We checked the weather forecast. It was still no change, and by 6 a.m. we were on our way.
Once again, Canadian hospitality had been so warm. It was sad to be finally leaving these shores and lovely to see a small group of the locals gathered on the jetty, even so early in the morning, to wave goodbye.
As we left, I had passed Alton a sack of surplus chocolates fo
r his fishing trips, and we were all shouting thanks to him across the water. It was a lovely moment, but I did feel rather bad when I realized later that by mistake I had also included in Alton’s goodie bag a leftover medical kit of Carol’s.
It was not just any old medical kit. It was a personal enema kit that Carol, for some bizarre reason, had deemed indispensable. Alton was going to get the shock of his life when he rummaged through the bag on a cold fishing trip looking for a Mars bar.
None the less, everything was going smoothly, and all of us felt a surge of confidence and excitement. We were moving through a beautiful part of the world, down the narrow inlet from St Mary’s to Battle Harbour, past rolling mountains on either side, through the now familiar strong scent of heather and fir trees. The water was mirror calm, and I recall thinking to myself that there was nowhere in the world where I would rather be at this moment than right here with these four guys. It was magical and free.
Andy was checking the engine; Mick had been on the SAT phone, getting a final up-to-date forecast from Mike Town; Nige had been punching in the new waypoints on the plotter; and Charlie was checking the waterproofing on his camera. Everyone was getting on with their specific tasks, and everyone was feeling strong.
We had no idea how much we would need our strength.
Privately, I felt as though I had been tested back in St Mary’s, and had managed to pull through with a tough decision. I felt certain it was right to go. Even as we cruised down the inlet, I was running over the logic again: the fishermen said the northerly winds were bad, but they had also talked about the sea being full of ice; we had to take the weather windows when they became available, and the immediate forecast was not bad.
I spoke into the Dictaphone:
I just want to get the first twenty-four hours of this leg out of the way. That could be the tough time because we are heavy with fuel and so slow and vulnerable to big seas. We need a day and night’s grace before we hit the big stuff; that’s when we will need all our power and manoeuvrability. There is an element of risk and unpredictability in all this. I know that, but I just hope and pray we have made the right decision.
With that, I flicked the stop button on the recorder and took a piece of paper, wrapped in plastic, out of my grab bag. On this I had written out one particular verse from the Bible.
Nicky Gumbel is another squash friend of mine in London; he also happens to be a priest. Everyone at the gym simply calls him ‘the Pope’. It makes us laugh. Nicky had phoned me as I was checking in my luggage at Heathrow, and given me a little verse that he and his wife Pippa had felt strongly that morning applied to me. It had lifted my spirits then as it did now when I read it leaving Labrador.
When you walk through the waters, they shall not pass over you. I have saved you. I have called you by name. You are precious in my eyes.
(Isaiah 43:2)
That was good to know. I read it again, took a deep breath and tucked it away in my bag. I remember a famous round-the-world sailor once saying, ‘There’s no such thing as an atheist in the Arctic Ocean.’ I had always liked that. It had soul.
We duly passed Battle Harbour and headed out northeast into the Labrador Sea, the stretch of water I had read so much about. As we advanced we felt noticeably colder air on our faces. The next land we would see would be Greenland.
I had done my fair share of reading in advance of the expedition, and this research included a science journal which had described these particular waters as follows:
The Labrador Current originates in western Greenland. The outflow from Hudson Strait combines with the Baffin Island Current to become the Labrador Current. This Labrador Current travels 1–2 knots an hour, and carries with it pack ice, cold water and icebergs.
It was one of these icebergs that sank the Titanic off the Grand Banks in 1912. Upwards of 10,000 bergs are released each year, as many as 1,300 bergs from Greenland’s Jacobshavener Glacier alone. The bergs slowly disintegrate as they are carried south from Baffin Bay, and a grand spectacle of about 2,500 giant ice chunks parade past the Labrador coast each year. More than half of these icebergs pass the Belle Isle Strait, and this whole area poses a substantial hazard to shipping, particularly when the area is thick with the Labrador’s prevalent sea fog.
Nobody could say we hadn’t been warned but we were only half a mile out from the coastline, when I noticed something strange.
‘Hold on.’
‘What?’
‘This wind is not quite a northerly. It’s coming from more north-east. It’s going to give us a head sea. Look at the waves already beginning.’
In layman’s terms, the waves were not rolling across us, they were building and rolling directly towards us. Already laden down with full tanks of fuel for the long crossing, we now faced the harsh reality of heading straight into the waves and weather.
My instant reaction was that we should turn back, retreat to St Mary’s and revise our plans. These were not the conditions that we had expected, the conditions upon which we had based all our calculations. A different wind and a different kind of sea meant we would be playing a completely different game.
Then I looked at the waves. They were pretty small, just gentle rollers. They didn’t look that bad, and the wind was steady. We were expecting it to strengthen significantly over the next twenty-four hours or so, but not unmanageably.
We all had a quick word together, to discuss the situation. It was not ideal but, we agreed, no reason to retreat. We were on our way and all of us were hungry to get this leg done.
Our spirits were raised soon afterwards by the sighting of our first big whale, spouting magnificently on the port side, and within the hour we had passed another massive, majestic iceberg. If we had been passengers aboard a big cruise ship, we would have been able to sit back and savour the Arctic wonders. That would have been great, gin and tonic in hand. Instead, we were perched on our open RIB, anxiously studying the state of the wind and waves, trying to predict the future.
We didn’t like what we saw. Hour by hour, unmistakably, the conditions were deteriorating.
The swell was building slowly and the temperature was dropping fast. By mid-afternoon we were in full gear: waterproofs, two balaclavas, gloves and helmets. Each of us was working hard to stay warm. We had given up trying to stay dry.
The boat was hitting the waves head-on now. Every wave was steep and sharp. They were pitching us up about ten feet as they connected, then crashing down on top of us – over and over again. Each time we were lifted up we braced ourselves, tensing every muscle; and each time we slammed back down every bone in our bodies shuddered with the impact. We winced on contact.
By late afternoon the light was fading and the temperature was still dropping. I was shivering uncontrollably. This was not good. It wasn’t even night yet. I looked around at the others. Some were lying in the sardine tin, eyes closed. Charlie was awake but he was shivering too. We had to do something before it got dark, otherwise we would freeze to death.
‘Stop the boat, Andy,’ I said, tapping his shoulder. ‘People are getting really cold, me included. We need our final layers.’
The boat lolled about in the swell. We could no longer see land and the sea was a dark and menacing grey.
The two guys who had all the kit on, every last fleece, seemed to be managing. They weren’t as cold as us three. I had wanted to wait until it got dark and much colder before putting on my last fleece layer, but that time had come sooner than expected. My hands were shaking.
‘Mick, can you help me get this zip undone on my dry-suit?’ I asked him urgently. ‘It’s jammed.’
It had also started to rain steadily.
He undid the zip, fed the fleece over my head and pulled the arms down sharply.
‘Thanks, buddy,’ I muttered as he helped rezip the dry-suit over me. Then we both checked Charlie. He was looking warmer.
Cold is so dangerous and this was a different sort of cold to that found on high mountains. This
was a constant damp, wet cold that penetrated everything. Everest might have been technically colder, but it was not so all-consuming. The temperature there might drop to –40 degrees, but it was powder-dry. Nothing ever got the chance to melt. This was different: it was not so far below zero but it was wet, and, with the constant wind chill of 20 knots forward speed plus the head wind, it got bitingly cold. And the wind and wet got in everywhere.
Now we were wearing everything we possessed. If any of us got cold now, there was nothing else to rely on.
We were soon under way again, sticking to our rota, but nothing seemed straightforward any more. Helming became much more difficult because it was now imperative to keep the boat straight into the oncoming waves. But our course was just off that angle. That meant we had to weave our way forward, bringing the nose back into the sea when the waves were breaking ahead of us.
Navigating was awkward because it was difficult to follow the course when the instruments were being continually covered in spray. When it was your turn to rest in the sardine tin, all you could do was huddle under the tarpaulin and curl up in a ball to try to keep warm.
I heard a murmur next to me. Nige rolled towards me and spoke through his helmet.
‘Just think, we could be in the old speedboat I had in Poole. Remember? The one that almost sank when a yacht went by, where you would get swamped by a ripple. Just imagine how that little boat would have coped out here.’
Nige chuckled at the thought, then was forced back again as he braced against another wave. This was Nige through and through. His approach helped keep us all smiling at many hard moments, in spite of genuinely miserable conditions.
Each of us was feeling tired as darkness fell. We had been hoping for a break from the relentless head seas but through the night they gradually built up even more. Hour by hour, shifting through the rota, we just focused on the next wave, concentrating, surviving, advancing out to sea.