by Bear Grylls
I squeezed into the sardine tin, so tight against Mick that I could feel the zip on his dry-suit back pressing against me. I put the Dictaphone’s watertight pouch to my mouth . . .
We seem to have been going for ever; then I look at the chart and see we’ve still got hundreds of miles to Greenland. I’m not sure if we can keep going like this. Everything is so wet. My head is freezing, as my balaclava has been continually drenched for almost two days and nights.
Our dry-suits are being amazing and I have no idea how the hell they are keeping this amount of water out. But still inevitably water gets in, all down your legs. This happens when your zip is undone to try to pee, or when you stretch out at the wrong time and break the seal on your wrists or neck. This sea is just so cold and so penetrating.
Nige’s lifejacket has just gone off. These lifejackets are very high-spec commercial ones and they are supposed to inflate only when you are in the water. Nige’s has just gone off in the sardine tin. That’s how sodding wet it is in here.
These seas are ferocious. We are into deeper ocean now, so that means the waves should become longer and it should be more comfortable. But there’s no sign of that yet. It is just black all around us. I am cold and damp, and I am just dreaming of Greenland with each bit of salt water I taste.
We were approaching the end of our second day on the Labrador Sea, and the North Atlantic was doing what the North Atlantic does best. Creating chaos. Andy understood the seriousness of the situation. ‘I’m not a very religious person,’ he would recall later, ‘but I lay in the sardine tin that night and prayed. I prayed that my late dad would help us with the weather. I might not be a huge believer in God, but I believed in my dad, and I knew we needed help from somewhere.’
As dusk approached, we checked all the gauges again and ran through the calculations. We were burning only 70 litres of fuel per hour, compared to 90 litres per hour earlier, and we had only lost one knot of speed. That was encouraging, but reaching Greenland was still going to be touch and go.
Everyone knew the plain facts. If the sea died down a bit we stood a real chance of making it. But in our heart of hearts we all knew that if the weather conditions did not improve, we would almost certainly have no chance of getting there. Now, forty hours into the storm, and still with no sign of reprieve, everyone sensed that rescue was beginning to look like the most likely outcome. We were powerless to do anything more.
We simply weren’t getting any breaks in these conditions. The seas were still running wild and huge.
The physical battering was taking its toll. Every twenty minutes or so we all made a point of looking around the boat, checking how the person next to us was coping. I had started to suspect that all of us, including me, were suffering from the early stages of hypothermia. Our reactions were more sluggish than usual, and it felt impossible to concentrate on anything. We were drained and we were cold. Even the most straightforward tasks – whether it was checking the fuel gauges, tying a knot or just having a pee – now took on the dimensions of a major undertaking.
But I needed to pee. I tried to stave it off. To perform even this simple task was a nightmare. I tried to block it in my mind. Ten minutes later, I knew I had to go. I clambered out of the sardine tin and tried to steady myself against the console.
The drill normally was to go to the stern of the RIB, harness on so that you felt confident enough to use both hands to undo the dry-suit zip, and then pee. But in these conditions, to move even that far around the boat was dangerous and unnecessary. I wedged myself between the console side and the sardine tin and started to fumble with my dry-suit zip.
A wave crashed over the back of me and I frantically grabbed the edge of the console. I steadied myself again and tried to hold on with one hand and undo my fly with the other. It was impossible. In desperation, I realized there was only one way to pee in these conditions: kneeling down.
I crouched down on the floor and using my elbows as a brace, I found I could hold myself steady against the violent motion of the waves. I undid the zip and peed on the floor. Another wave poured over and washed it away in seconds. I spat the salt water from my mouth and clambered back alongside Nige.
To do ‘number twos’ in this sort of condition just wouldn’t happen. It would be lethal. Most of us managed to crap in calm seas, hanging inelegantly off the back of the jet platform, but in this sort of sea it was unthinkable. Somehow our mindset and the adrenalin ensured we never needed to go when it was rough. I guess we weren’t eating much, which helped. But looking back, it is strange how we managed to last out for days at a time.
Andy was helming now, but he was drowsy and veering wildly off his course. His head was drooping and he was struggling, although he was only twenty-five minutes into his shift. His concentration had gone and the waves that were smashing into the side of the RIB were hardly even drawing his attention. He was going down with exhaustion. To his credit, he recognized this. He turned to Charlie and asked him to take over. He couldn’t focus his eyes. The chart plotter had become a blur to him. He needed Charlie to help him this time.
This kind of gesture takes real courage, but it was what I had wanted from the team all along: an honesty, a humanity, a willingness to be vulnerable and draw on our strengths together. That was what made us stronger. Collectively, we were always going to be better than when we were on our own.
I had no doubt that Charlie himself would need Andy’s help sooner or later, but for now it was Andy’s turn to need that help. They swapped helm and the boat carried on into the waves.
But all our bodies were slowing down, and I for one was shivering. I had seen hypothermia among climbers high on Everest, and I knew that there was not much we could do. We just needed that break in the weather.
But that wasn’t happening, and with every minute that passed, we seemed to be drawing nearer and nearer to the moment I had been dreading, the moment when we called for help. It would be my decision, and a terrible one to make.
‘We shouldn’t leave it too late,’ Mick told me sensibly at one stage. ‘I mean, if this is the situation, well, there’s no point waiting until we have run out of fuel before we put out a Mayday. We don’t want to be floating around for a day with no power. We can at least put them on standby and let them know our position.’
He was right. It was logical.
It was just that I didn’t want to face it.
‘OK,’ I said, relenting in the face of common sense. ‘I’m going to call Chloë and just let her know what’s happening.’
Mick nodded. ‘She does need to be informed,’ he affirmed. ‘It gives us a backup if we do run out of fuel.’
I agreed. ‘Slow the boat right down, will you, Nige?’ I asked.
Whenever we wanted to use the SAT phone, we had to reduce our speed to a knot or two. Then one of us was able to crawl on hands and knees into the tiny cramped console, under the helm position, in order to dial. This space was jammed with spares, food and supplies; it was dark and stank of leaking diesel. It was a miserable place on land, in a big sea it was hell. Idling along at just 1 knot keeping the boat head to sea made her loll about awkwardly. Most of us would start feeling sick. These calls needed to be made as quickly as possible.
I crawled inside on all-fours, banging my head on the metal hatch. I cursed. Nige swung his feet out of the way to let me crawl past. I took off my diving gloves. My hands were shaking as I pulled out the SAT phone and began to unwrap it from its plastic bag. I fumbled to attach the charger, then the antenna wire. Time was ticking on. I could hear my own breathing – it was nervous and rapid. I could also hear Charlie being sick again. More than any of us, he hated having to stop the boat.
I carefully dialled Chloë’s number in London, holding the phone a few inches from my soaking head in an effort to keep it dry. This phone was our lifeline, and needed to be kept out of the water at all costs. I waited.
Nothing. No dial tone.
Lying half in and half out of this tiny hat
ch, desperately trying to stop my head banging on the metal rails on the console roof inches above me, I dialled again. Still nothing.
‘Bloody work,’ I cursed at the phone.
Finally, on the fourth try, I heard a telephone ringing far away in London, in a different world, a warm and comfortable place where all was safe and dry and OK, a world away from here.
‘Hello, Chloë?’
‘Hi, Bear, how are you?’ she replied, bright and breezy.
‘Get a pen and paper,’ I told her. ‘We’re in trouble.’
It was around eight in the evening in London, and Chloë seemed to be in a restaurant somewhere. I could hear noises behind her. She was back in seconds. ‘Go for it,’ she said.
‘Mick, I need our lat and longs,’ I screamed to him. He would be able to read these off the plotter.
‘Four-ah, two-ah, seven-ah.’ Mick was shouting them in his loudest, most clipped voice. It made me smile. This sure had his concentration; Mick didn’t want any errors here. I relayed the numbers on, shouting them out above the clamour of the wind. Chloë repeated them correctly. Then I told her we were running critically low on fuel.
‘We’ve got about 1,200 litres of fuel left,’ I shouted down the phone. ‘We reckon that should last us for eighteen hours, and get us maybe 140 miles closer. Right now, we are 195 miles from Greenland in terrible conditions.’
‘OK, I’ve got that,’ Chloë said. Her tone of voice had changed. She knew it was serious.
‘One more thing,’ I added. ‘Please call Captain Pennefather and tell him what’s happening. We’re OK, and will call again when we reckon we have two hours’ running time left.’
I replaced the SAT phone and wriggled back out of the hatch, trying to yank my gloves back on. Andy revved the engine, and we started to move again. We struggled on, the RIB crawling up and over the waves at a pathetic 9 knots.
Chloë was aware that Willie Pennefather was in Scotland, where, among other things, he was sorting out various aspects of our scheduled return to John O’Groats. She eventually tracked him down to Edinburgh.
Willie recalls:
I had left for Scotland on 2 August with a slight feeling of detachment from the expedition, although I had followed the crew’s progress every day on the Internet. I had been invited to be part of the official party attending the Edinburgh Military Tattoo. It was a very formal occasion involving drinks and a black-tie dinner, before we were to travel in official cars with police outriders to Edinburgh Castle, arriving in time to allow us to be seated in the Royal Box at exactly the start of the display.
At dinner, the sergeant came to tell me that Chloë Boyes was on the telephone for me.
I told him to ask if I could ring her after dinner. I assumed it was to discuss the plans for the crew’s return. The sergeant reported that after dinner would be OK, but said Chloë had sounded a bit alarmed.
I thought of leaving the table unseen, but my host General Nick Parker and his guests, General Sir Mike Jackson and Menzies Campbell among others, were not the type of people who would not have noticed. Thoughts of Sir Francis Drake and his game of bowls crossed my mind, but I eased out and called her back some fifteen minutes later.
She then dropped the bombshell.
‘They are 200 miles west of Greenland in a gale,’ she told me calmly, ‘and Bear says they are critically close to running out of fuel. I don’t know what to do.’
The next hour was frantic as I somehow tried to combine the jovialities and formalities of the Tattoo parade with also trying to instigate some rescue contingency plans. I found myself conducting analysis discussions with the London team at the desk of the GOC Scotland, then in the back of a car on the ADC’s mobile phone, with flashing blue lights all around, then at the back of the Royal Box at Edinburgh Castle with pipes swirling in the background. It was strangely surreal to know that at this precise moment of such pomp and ceremony here in Edinburgh, these guys were struggling for their lives in a lonely, terrifying sea.
I must say I could easily watch the Edinburgh Tattoo again, having had my mind so firmly elsewhere! On this occasion, I could only think of the boys and what they were going through out there.
Our task was to do everything possible to prepare for whatever fate would decide was to happen.
We knew we could do no more than alert the rescue services, keep them informed, and ensure Bear told us at least an hour before they ran out of fuel, so that they could be rescued from a boat which still had steerage – this could be critical if the weather was still atrocious. We also decided to keep the team’s families in the dark for the time being, and to contact the Duty Fleet Controller at Northwood, who gave us vital access to the Naval Weather Centre.
All this done, I returned to the party, even if my thoughts were elsewhere.
Meanwhile, nothing was giving at all. We were still battling against the brutal ocean. Waves as large as houses kept thundering towards us, picking us up, dumping us down and soaking us in icy water. Perhaps it was the cold and fatigue, but I started to personify the waves. To me, as they flew past, they seemed to turn and look at us strangely, as if they were asking, ‘What the hell are you doing out here in such a boat?’
I didn’t have an answer. Then the wave was gone.
We were all becoming frightened and I knew it; we were so completely exposed and vulnerable, dangerously out of place.
I prayed again.
‘Please, God, please calm these seas,’ I said under my breath, lying in the sardine tin, hugging Mick in front of me not just to keep warm, but because I was scared. ‘You’ve helped me so many times before, but I really need you now. I really need you to hear me. I really need you to help us.’
None of us had managed more than a brief doze over the past two days, and a couple of hours later I was helming again. For this particular shift, from 11 p.m. till midnight, Charlie and I sat shoulder to shoulder at the console, fighting to keep the boat on course and under control.
As I helmed, I noticed a small piece of coloured plastic flapping around on the anchor, attached to the foredeck. I knew it was some sort of Chinese lucky charm that a stranger had placed on the side of the boat while a bunch of well-wishers were crowding around us on the quay in Halifax, Canada. Most of them had draped flowers and things on the boat, but this particular woman had presented this small, peculiar token.
I saw her, and didn’t really like the idea of the charm, but it would have been rude not to accept the gesture and I let it pass. I hadn’t given it another thought until now – in trouble, so far out in the ocean. I began to wonder whether this could be the reason why God was not answering my prayers. Maybe this charm was keeping His goodness out. It sounds crazy and superstitious now, but right there, in the darkness, I was clutching at anything and praying like never before. I was desperate.
As the minutes passed, I felt compelled somehow to get rid of the charm. Everything might be OK then, I thought. The sea might die down. ‘Just forget it and concentrate, Bear,’ I told myself.
But the more I dismissed this idea as ridiculous, the more I believed it to be the case. And a minute later, it was all I could think about again. I couldn’t take my eyes off this ruddy little plastic thing, swinging hypnotically with the motion of the bow.
The problem was, however, that it was wrapped around the anchor arm at the very front of the boat, and I knew that getting to that area would be extremely risky, especially while the boat was being thrown around in the storm. One slip on those slippery tubes, one awkward pitch of the boat, and I could easily be washed overboard. My lifeline should hold me, but at 10 knots, in the black of night, in these waves, I would be dragged until I drowned.
‘Forget it,’ I told myself. ‘God might not like the charm, but He doesn’t want to me drown either.’
I did forget about it.
For about thirty seconds.
Damn it, I had to get rid of that thing. Charlie hadn’t noticed this and I didn’t want to tell him what was on my
mind. He would have said to stay put and that I was being irrational, which may have been true. So I made up a story about the sea anchor looking as if it was coming loose from its housing. That would do.
‘Don’t bother, Bear,’ Charlie said. ‘It’s fine.’
‘No,’ I persisted. ‘I’m going. Take the helm.’
So I slid from my seat and began to fumble for my harness. I swung myself over the edge of the console and began to edge, step by step, along the tubes, round to the front of the boat.
Once on the foredeck, I grabbed for the handholds and steadied myself as she pitched on top of another wave. Water flooded over the tubes and all around my feet. I snatched at the charm. It wouldn’t come away because it had become tangled around the anchor warp. I yanked again, but still it wouldn’t break. I was becoming annoyed. So, summoning every bit of strength left after two nights without sleep, I grabbed it and pulled.
It finally came free, and I hurled it into the waves.
On reaching Charlie again, I felt a surge of relief. I again took the helm and waited . . . waited for the miracle of calm seas. But the sea never even looked like subsiding. It stayed just as rough through both our shifts, and I was tiring.
This vast ocean just didn’t care about us, didn’t care if we reached Greenland or not, if we capsized and drowned. It was so immense, and we were so very small. This can be the sea’s greatest quality – the way it reminds us of our own mortality. But that reminder is also very humbling. Being big or brave doesn’t seem to count for much. In fact, even just trying your best and slogging your guts out means very little. It is irrelevant, and only the sea decides who wins the battle.
All we could do was endure. Waiting, like ants on a motorway.
Once again, as shadows of exasperation closed in, I reached for the Dictaphone’s pouch and pressed record . . .
I am getting exhausted. The other guys are as well. They are doing so well, trying to knuckle through this thing, but it has been exhausting. I just want to get to Greenland. I am going to sleep, and I’m not going to move for six months. I don’t care. I’m not going on another adventure like this. It’s too intense, too exhausting. It’s so different from climbing Everest: there we had that stillness, and you could always climb into a tent and get away. But this is so relentless – the pounding and the wet. There is no escape. I just long for it to be calm.