by Bear Grylls
This is an endurance exercise, and it gets much more frightening at night, because you just can’t see the waves. All you see is the white water.
We’re still going at 8 knots, not much faster than running pace. But the guys have been incredible. I feel so genuinely proud of them right now. I thought the people without military backgrounds would be struggling, but Nige and Charlie have been an inspiration.
Charlie happened to be helming when I climbed along to the foredeck. My whole life was in his hands, and he held everything together. Not long ago, he was asking for advice, but now he has mastered the helm, he’s in control, and I trust him completely. That’s very special.
Nige is coping amazingly, considering. He’s wet through and should be bloody miserable, but he just turned to me to say he could murder a Danish pastry and a cappuccino. He smiled faintly. But Nige’s great quality is that he just gets on with things. It’s these small things that make such a huge difference.
So much can go wrong on this boat: if the engine stops, we’re in big trouble; if the forecast is wrong, we’re in big trouble; if the navigation is not done properly, we’re lost. But each of these guys has taken responsibility for his job, and everyone trusts that person to do it. Not just with words but with their life.
Things are really bad right now, but there’s something pretty unique about this situation: five men in a small boat, all trusting one another, looking after one another. Caring.
I had told everyone so often that there would be times when we would be at our wits’ ends, but also that it is in those times that I need them to give that little bit extra. To laugh, to watch out for someone as they pee, to dig out a chocolate bar for the guy on watch, when you’re exhausted. This is what really matters, and they have all done this over and over again.
These four guys are just bloody brilliant British people. They show so much quiet, cheerful strength, and yet I know how cold and wet they are because I can feel them shivering alongside me. I will buy the biggest round ever if we reach Greenland, I promise.
When I finished recording these thoughts, it took me some time to push the stop button on the Dictaphone. It should have been the simplest task, but my fingers were numb, and I fumbled around angrily for several minutes.
By midnight, three o’clock in the morning back home, I decided to call Chloë again, to keep her informed of our progress and to check that the Danish navy had been alerted to our situation.
I got through second go this time and told her our status.
‘And one other thing,’ I added.
‘Yes?’ she said.
‘Can you call Charlie Mackesy and ask him to pray for us? He’ll understand, even if it is three in the morning. I really need his help.’
Charlie was my best man at our wedding and one of my closest friends. An artist in London, he is also Jesse’s godfather, and in this desperate situation I needed to feel that he was praying for us, praying that everything would somehow be all right.
Charlie recalls:
I was staying with my sister in Yorkshire, fast asleep when the mobile rang under my pillow. I woke up, looked at the display, saw it was Chloë and immediately knew Bear was either in real trouble or was dead. It would have to be something terrible for her to call me at three o’clock in the morning.
She told me Bear wanted me to pray for him because he was stuck in this storm. It was getting worse, there were icebergs about and he didn’t think he was going to get out of it.
To be honest, I wasn’t feeling very full of any sort of faith at the time, but I went downstairs, sat quietly in a chair and said a prayer. I simply asked God to calm the storm. I slowly became aware of a strange, but very clear image, where it was pitch black, ice was everywhere and people were screaming. I prayed for it to go quiet, and then fell asleep in the chair. I woke up in the early hours of the morning with a sense of calm, and went back upstairs to bed with no idea what had happened.
Meanwhile, three of us were soon back in the sardine tin, once again trying to ignore the stinging, salty spray and the relentless battering of being lifted up and then thumped down. I was done in. I lay there, wedged against Nige and Mick, and out of sheer exhaustion I somehow fell asleep. It was a magic relief from the grim reality of our slow-burning failure.
I woke with a start. It was just after 5.30 a.m., and immediately I became aware that something was different. The boat was planing. We were surging forward smoothly and the sea was millpond-calm. I blinked hard, suspended in that demi-world between sleep and being awake. I blinked again.
This was for real.
Andy and Charlie were helming, and chatting. Then Andy turned towards me and smiled.
‘Things are starting to look up, Bear,’ he said. ‘We’re doing twenty-two knots.’
I sat up and looked around. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The sea had just died away. The apparently endless storm had ended. The sky was clear blue. It was a beautiful day. I sat and stared.
‘We’ve got about 400 litres in the centre line tank,’ Andy continued. ‘I think we might just do it.’
He grinned at me.
Elated, I began to get up from the sardine tin. For the first time, we had a real chance of making it.
I knew we should call the base team in London, just to let them know our situation had improved, and I duly phoned Chloë. She in turn contacted Shara to say everything was all right; Shara then phoned Charlie Mackesy in Yorkshire, just to let him know all was well and that his prayers had been answered. Charlie suddenly adopted this guru-like status. It was very funny. But God had shone on us very clearly and I was in no doubt of that at all.
We were not quite out of trouble but we were all beginning to believe we could make it to Greenland. Everybody was wide awake, enjoying the sunshine and our newfound speed. Andy was carefully monitoring the fuel situation, with Charlie helping him read the dials. Mick’s lifejacket had also gone off sometime during the last twenty-four hours, and he and Nige were laughing at themselves, looking like drowned rats dressed in bright yellow blow-up jackets. It was our finest time on the entire expedition so far. We forgot the wet, the cold and the hunger and enjoyed being able to talk for the first time in days. The wind had disappeared and the boat was flying.
At last, at 9 a.m., Greenland appeared on the horizon.
We were still 65 nautical miles offshore, but even from that distance we could identify the gigantic mountains and broken glaciers of this, the largest and most remote island on the planet.
‘How are we doing on fuel, Andy?’
He looked up from the console. ‘I’m trying to drain all the different tanks into one. It’s hard to tell exactly but we’re still going, eh?’
The sea was like glass, and there was a crisp chill in the air. I had never before seen sea like glass at that distance offshore. It was incredible, and I felt the mercy of God that morning. We were exhausted, but we were so relieved.
Seagulls were swooping above us, playful puffins fluttered frantically in front of our bow, and stunning-shaped icebergs were dotted along the coastline as far as we could see. The miles were dropping off behind us fast. It was a dream.
We eventually eased carefully past a cluster of giant growler icebergs that surrounded the small harbour of Nanortalik. They floated freely, sculpted like vast statues, and you could see their huge mass of cobalt blue ice under the surface of the calm water. We had finally reached Greenland.
We were met at the small harbour pier by the mayor and a group of locals. They held out strong hands to help us ashore. I had never felt so pleased to arrive anywhere.
Andy took a look at the last tank.
‘How much fuel is left?’
‘About fifty litres, I reckon,’ Andy replied.
Fifty litres? That was perhaps enough to have kept us going for another half-hour on the ocean. We had started the leg with 4,000 litres. Fifty? It was the tightest of margins. It was nothing. Bluntly put, if that storm had raged for thirty minutes longer,
we would not have made it. It had been that close.
We had been lucky, very lucky. I knew that, and I was with four men who were deeply grateful to reach dry land.
We all were desperate to lie down and sleep, but first there were a couple of SAT phone calls to be made.
I called Chloë to tell her the good news that we had finally arrived in Nanortalik; then I called Captain Pennefather direct.
‘What was your fuel state when you arrived?’ he asked.
‘Vapour,’ I replied, smiling.
9. GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS
Indecision is the thief of opportunity.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Sleeping for a couple of hours, taking a hot shower, getting something decent to eat: these are the kinds of thing most of us take for granted every day of our lives. After 700 miles of living in an open boat on the Labrador Sea, exhausted and salt-burnt, these simple acts took on a meaning that is hard to describe.
The Inuit mayor showed us to our ‘hotel’, which was a relatively large corrugated building surrounded by several rows of smaller corrugated houses. But at that moment, a five-star West End hotel could not have been more enticing.
We hung our soaking kit up to dry in the dusty boiler room, and Nige, Mick and I were asleep, fully clothed, before we had even closed the door of our small bedroom. The shower could wait a few minutes longer.
We woke an hour or so later; it was mid-afternoon. Andy and Charlie were beginning to let their hair down and have a few beers with some of the locals. They had certainly earned a night off.
There was an Internet terminal in the hotel reception and I stayed behind with Mick to check the weather forecast on the increasingly familiar series of websites.
Our next leg was going to be the longest of the expedition, and probably the most challenging: just over 800 miles round Greenland, across the Denmark Strait and on to Reykjavik in Iceland. The web pages took a while to download, and I watched them slowly unfold on the screen.
My heart sank as I read what appeared.
‘There will be a Force Three weather pattern for the next forty-eight hours . . . and severe storms are expected to arrive in the Denmark Strait by Friday afternoon.’
It was already Tuesday evening.
There was no problem with a Force Three weather pattern. That would be ideal. That was about as good as the weather was ever going to get in this part of the world. The real problem was that, for the second time on the expedition, just like in St Mary’s, I was being presented with a dangerous dilemma, a fifty–fifty decision, a roll of the dice.
The choice was straightforward: either we seized the latter part of the forty-eight-hour weather window, banking on reaching Iceland before the main storms hit this far north, or we played safe and waited in Nanortalik until conditions improved.
Was forty-eight hours long enough to reach Iceland? Maybe it was just, if we left now, but that was impossible. We couldn’t even refuel until 10 a.m. the following day. That reduced the forty-eight-hour window to thirty-six hours. But what was the alternative? A wait that might not break until the ice-packs returned in earnest?
Yet again, I felt as though I was being challenged to gamble with our lives. And I hate gambling. It just takes one bad call to make it your last. Mick looked at me. Only a matter of hours ago we had been pleading for land, dreaming of respite from the fury of the sea, and here we were debating whether we should put ourselves back into that furnace. It didn’t sit easy at all.
I leaned back in the chair and wished I could be in a situation where the forecast meant the decision was obvious, either way.
Mick wrote all the data down, to spell it out clearly.
The advantages of staying were that we would all get the few days of rest that we so desperately needed after our ordeal in the Labrador Sea. The drawback was that the bad weather could remain in place for three to four weeks by the look of the weather patterns moving up from the south. That would mean we could be stuck in Greenland until September when winter would begin to draw in again. The temperatures then drop even further, the ice starts to compact, and it would become impossible to complete the expedition.
‘Who dares wins,’ rolls off the tongue so easily. It is much harder to say when your life is in that dare.
No doubt the benefit of leaving Greenland as soon as possible, most probably the following morning, was that we would sustain the momentum of the expedition and, with a bit of luck, reach Iceland before the predicted lows and rough weather really took hold. The danger was if these lows came early; no one wanted to find themselves in another, bigger storm.
An additional factor was that this time we would be racing towards the bad weather, trying to beat it to Iceland. On the Labrador we had been travelling through the storm, eventually away from trouble. Now the front would be blowing into us, so if we hit it, there would be no respite until port. The longer we took, the worse it would get. We knew that.
The others were now well into the drinking. I could hear them next door in the bar. The tension of the Labrador was getting drowned away in time-honoured fashion.
The little voice at the back of my head was urging me not to be impatient, to be responsible and cautious. I didn’t mind waiting, I had always wanted to have some time in this remote, beautiful part of the world, but we had a goal in mind, and instinct told me we had to seize this window of opportunity.
Once again, five lives seemed to rest in my hands. Why couldn’t this decision be simple? Mick presented me with the facts in black and white, on paper, in his scrawl that I knew so well. Mike Town concurred. It was my call. But I couldn’t make it.
This was a massive decision, and I didn’t feel able to make it alone. In search of calm, wise advice, I called Captain Pennefather. He listened quietly as I explained the situation, sketching out the pros and cons.
Willie didn’t say much because he didn’t need to. He just let me talk through the situation and, as I talked, I gradually began to realize there was really no choice at all. Yes, it was exhausting, it was too soon in an ideal world, and it was maybe a shade risky, but if we were going to complete the expedition, we basically had little choice.
Willie simply, cleverly, gave me the space to reach my own conclusion.
We rang Mike Town once more. Again he confirmed that two big fronts were on their way from the south and that if we didn’t leave soon, we would probably have to remain in Greenland for several weeks. Mick looked once more at the charts, estimating wave heights and our chances of reaching Iceland in the time that this weather window seemed to allow us.
I asked Mick for his honest view on what we should do, no holds barred. I knew it was important to be decisive with the other guys, but Mick was different; he was my closest mate. I could share everything with him, without shame, my real fears and doubts, the sheer uncertainty of it all. I looked at him. His eyes looked tired. Tired of the salt water and now tired of the computer screen.
‘So?’
He frowned, paused, then said quietly, ‘Bear, I guess we’ve got to leave in the morning.’ He continued, ‘Every minute will count. How early do you think we will be able to get away?’
‘Well, if we refuel on time, we should be able to leave at around eleven thirty, at a push.’
This didn’t even give us time to dry our clothes.
‘Instinct is the nose of the mind . . . trust it.’ This was one of the quotes that we had laminated and stuck on the boat. ‘Bloody quotes,’ I swore. But it was our answer.
Now I had to break the news to the others.
As I stood outside the bar, grey clouds of doubt scudded in all over again. Was I putting my ambition to complete this expedition ahead of our lives? Was I being impulsive and foolish?
I knew that 80 per cent of the time people die on high mountains because they push on when common sense says they should turn back. Was I doing just that? We had been let off the hook on the Labrador Sea. How smart was it to go straight back out, into possibly even worse
weather? But how would we know if we never even tried?
I called them together in a room alongside the bar. They were enjoying a few beers and were not really in the mood for a meeting. I would have felt exactly the same in their position. I felt a strange pang of envy. I didn’t want this burden.
‘Well, there is good news and bad news,’ I began, realizing that none of them was expecting what they were about to hear. ‘The good news is that we have a window of good weather, and the bad news is that, to take this opportunity, we must leave as soon as possible in the morning.’
They stood motionless. Nobody said a word.
‘It will mean we need to get up at five,’ I continued, filling the void, ‘and start prepping the boat. It’s not great, but it seems our only choice if we are ever to reach Iceland.’
I paused.
‘And I’m really sorry we can’t delay the weather.’
Mick, at least, had been prepared. Andy, Nige and Charlie just looked understandably fed up. The long-awaited period of rest and recovery after the Labrador crossing was being cancelled. This, I am certain, was the single most difficult moment of the entire expedition.
Mick outlined the reasons for the decision, explaining the weather forecast and how forty-eight, possibly seventy-two, hours of clear weather would be followed by weeks of storms, but Andy was clearly hesitant and uncomfortable.
‘Bear, the one thing we all said when we arrived here was that, above all, we didn’t want to get caught in bad weather again,’ he reminded us. ‘We were bloody lucky out there this time. Now you’re telling us to go back into it with a shit forecast, with little chance of beating that weather to Iceland. What happens if the fronts come sooner rather than later?’