by Bear Grylls
But something had obviously changed now. Nige looked blank and frightened.
I was watching him.
‘What’s it say?’ I asked.
‘It dropped to 996 millibars,’ he replied. ‘That’s impossible. I have never seen anything like this before.’
The barometer had dropped 30 millibars. Much later, Mike Town would say this was almost a meteorological impossibility – it was too steep. But it happened. We all saw it.
Our weather window had slammed shut. The night was just beginning and we didn’t know what the hell we were going into.
Three hundred miles out to sea, almost exactly midway between Greenland and Iceland, there was no longer anywhere to hide.
Our ordeal would soon begin.
10. TERROR
When you are going through hell, keep walking.
Sir Winston Churchill
Our hopes plunged with the barometer.
All of us knew we had been racing against the weather. But now we were racing into that weather. There would be no respite until we reached Iceland, and we knew we were in difficulty.
We had been told the weather window would last forty-eight hours, but the low pressure had moved north at an alarming speed. That precious window had lasted only thirty hours.
The rota meant it was my turn to rest in the sardine tin, and I desperately went over the situation in my head. Clear, logical thought was hard. ‘How did this happen? Was this my fault? Should we, after all, have stayed longer in Greenland?’
In confusion, I reached for the Dictaphone.
We’re back in the really big seas now. Waves are crashing over the boat again, and we’re all getting soaked. Our kit that we had laid out so carefully on the tubes to dry whilst in the Sound is now getting drenched once more.
Our bodies are being slammed around the boat, and it’s just relentless. When you’re not on watch, sitting at the console, you have to brace yourself in your seat, tensing your stomach muscles, over and over again. The boat seems to get picked up every thirty seconds or so. If it lands on the keel, it’s OK. If it lands on its side, it sounds as if the boat is breaking apart under us.
I am dehydrated, but I can’t get across the boat to get a drink. Moving around is so hard. I’ve got a really bad headache from the slamming, and each wave makes me wince. It’s impossible to have a pee: I tried clinging to the console, but you need both hands to undo your fly-zip. In the end, I just gave up. There’s no chance of getting a drink, eating or having a pee so long as these conditions continue. We just cling on for all we’re worth.
We’re 325 miles off Iceland. That’s still a hell of a long way, when we can hardly make nine knots; and this storm is getting worse; that is what frightens me the most.
Twenty-five-foot waves were rolling, breaking and crashing all around us. And from the level of a small, open RIB, they felt immense and terrifying.
The water pouring over us, hour after hour, was icy. We were now just south of the Arctic Circle, in seas that were freezing enough to sustain tens of thousands of icebergs. This wet cold was terrible. Our underclothes inevitably, over time, got damp because the seams began to let in small amounts of water, and slowly all this then seeped down our arms and chests. Every part of our bodies felt drenched, but it was the wind that really made us cold.
This wind whipped over the console and chilled every exposed part of us; every gust carried with it more of the freezing sea spray. Heading into this wind made it twice as strong. It was both the storm and our forward speed combined. Wherever we sat or curled up, there was nowhere to hide from it. All we could do was hug one another in the sardine tin, pull the tarpaulin up to our waists and try to get through the next hour.
In these conditions, our salvation was the kit we wore. From the very first night on the Labrador Sea, when it had got so cold that we had had to stop the boat and put on extra layers, we had learned the hard way how to try to keep as warm as possible. Our survival depended on it.
From the inside out, the full kit was an unbelievable amount: next to the skin, we wore a thick, fleecy long-sleeved top and thick thermal long-john trousers; then a heavy-duty fleece, then Gortex salopettes and a Gortex fleece jacket; on top of all this went an all-in-one survival dry-suit, and another windproof and waterproof ocean jacket on top of that.
On our hands we had inner fleece gloves inside big waterproof mittens. We also had sealed fleece diving gloves, but both sets inevitably ended up sodden. You just interchanged in a futile attempt to warm your fingers.
On our heads we had fleece balaclavas and a Gortex balaclava over that; on top of these we wore RNLI Gecko helmets. But even these couldn’t keep the water out. It got in everywhere: our hair was soaked and our faces and necks had water constantly dripping down them.
Most of this kit was provided by Musto, and I will never forget standing in Musto’s headquarters, in Basildon, a year earlier. It was a swelteringly hot summer’s day, and Keith Musto, the founder of the clothing company, was helping me try all this on. Within minutes, I was sweating. Keith found it very amusing, me standing in the stock room like a giant Mr Blobby, dreading it as he approached me to add yet another layer.
‘You will need it all,’ he added, as he tugged me into another fleece. ‘This kit will keep you alive. It’s the best in the world. But have no doubt about it, if it gets really bad out there, whatever you are wearing, you will still be cold.’
I truly could never have then imagined any conditions being cold enough to make me shiver with all this amount of fleece and Gortex kit on. I could hardly move. But then I had never been in this sort of wet wind chill, this far north, so exposed, for so long before. Here in this tiny corner of the vast, 41-million-square-mile ocean, curled in a ball on the floor of this small, open boat, I found myself shivering uncontrollably.
The key to coping with cold is not to allow yourself to get to the stage of being really cold. That might sound obvious, but I have learned from climbing that if you allow yourself to get that cold, it’s almost too late to do anything about it. It’s much harder to get warm again. But here there was nothing we could do: we had no shelter in which to hide from the wind and rain and spray, and we had nothing more we could wear. All we had was what we stood in.
We relied entirely on one another to keep an eye out for signs of hypothermia, to be constantly aware of the telltale signs of extreme cold – shaking hands, slow reactions and sluggish responses – and to help anyone who seemed in trouble. Hypothermia hits silently and often very quickly. The team needed to look after themselves, and everyone needed to be aware of the indicators. If somebody is feeling cold and is crunched up in a ball, trying to protect their core warmth, that’s a good sign that they are aware and rational; on the other hand, if they are lying on their back, with their arms at their side, head and body exposed, not caring, then that is not good.
It’s good if someone sits up, offers you a Mars bar and shouts, ‘Hey, catch’; and it’s not good if they don’t even have the energy to sit up and get the Mars bars, let alone try to eat one.
We tried to drink something, maybe a cupful of water poured over our face and mouth, every few hours to stay hydrated. I ended up trying to do this once every full rota, i.e. every five hours. It gave me a focus, and I stuck to it. If one of us wasn’t drinking, someone needed to notice.
Every little ritual became recognizable and important to us: the way in which each of us sat, or ate, or helmed, or slept. We recognized what was normal for each of us. Any change in the ritual, like any other change in the routine, was often an early sign of something starting to go wrong.
This expedition wasn’t about trying to be brave or strong in front of one another, or thinking it was somehow stoic never to admit that you were struggling or something was wrong. It was about being brave enough to say just how you felt, weak or strong; it was about being honest enough to admit occasionally we needed some comfort or a helping hand, being able to say we were frightened. It was about be
ing together, about staying close. All said and done, it was simply about staying alive.
But we were suffering now. We were being lashed by the rain, and our eyes were stinging from the spray. We were getting tired from continually bracing ourselves against the violence of the waves, and our heads were aching from the deafening roar of the engine.
Darkness made things even worse. It became impossible to see the waves, to know where to guide the boat to minimize the slamming. We would stare ahead transfixed, trying desperately to determine the oncoming sea. All we could see of the horizon was a vague line between the pitch black sea and the dark grey, menacing sky. Suddenly, this horizon would disappear and be replaced by a wall of black water, then a final burst of white as the crest of the wave came into view, and then there would be the roar as it crashed over the boat. Those final moments of frothing white water were always the most terrifying, as you braced yourself once more.
You’d cling on to something, anything, and pray.
Often, it seemed the best place to be was sitting in the so-called ‘deckchair’ on the side of the boat. We had worked out how we could pull a thin plastic storm sheet over us and hide away. If we trapped the bottom of this sheet under our feet and sat on the rest of it, we could just about escape the spray and the wind, and convince ourselves, for a few precious moments, that we were safe. This thin veneer of orange plastic was our comfort blanket, an opportunity to float away into our dreams. For me, they were always dreams of being at home.
It was Charlie’s turn in the deckchair now. I was back in the sardine tin, trying to ignore the discomfort. I heard Mick shouting at me, even though his head was only inches from mine.
‘This bloody weather – it’s not supposed to be here!’ he screamed over the noise.
Mick recalls:
I felt this heavy guilt. The weather window had closed much earlier than we expected, and getting the forecast right was my area of responsibility. I started to feel as if the guys were looking at me across the boat and wondering: ‘Mick, what’s happening?’ I felt it was my fault.
Of course it wasn’t Mick’s fault. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. The only fair way to judge our decision to leave Greenland is to assess the decision in the circumstances that prevailed at the time. The reality was that in Nanortalik we received advice from three separate sources of information and they all gave us a forty-eight- to seventy-two-hour window. We had had to go. But nobody was to know that this front would arrive sooner than forecast, or that it would be much deeper and more sinister than anticipated.
There were no recriminations. We had to look forward, not back.
As time moved on past eleven o’clock on this second night in the Denmark Strait, six hours into the heavy seas and howling gale, Nige and I found ourselves in the dark, squatting on the floor, trying to hold on while opening the food sack to grab something to eat – anything. Nige pulled out a crushed and split flapjack. The wrapper was broken and it was wet. He steadied himself, broke it in two and handed one half to me. I ate it in one.
‘Ooh, I’d love to be in the curry house now,’ Nige gushed, ‘with Hussein and Mohammed and the trolley, laden with murgs and poppadoms! Absolutely lovely!’
He was smiling at me with relish, and for a moment, a brief moment, we were a million miles away.
It had become almost customary that every Sunday we would all go to the Indian restaurant in our local square. Hussein and Mohammed, the waiters, knew our orders by heart.
‘Oh, and don’t forget a bit of extra zing in the korma,’ I would remind them jokingly, while whistling and twiddling my fingers in imitation of adding a bit of extra chilli. Hussein would laugh, and Shara would roll her eyes; it was always the same old jokes between us. It all felt a long, long way from our small, open boat in this tiny part of the North Atlantic Ocean. But the memory provided us with a fleeting moment of comfort in the nightmare.
Nige looked back at me. He was tired, I could tell. But he still managed a smile.
Charlie was doing OK, but he was also starting to get really cold. One of the first things the army instils in you is the ability to look after yourself when it gets miserable. It is simple self-discipline. Charlie was always a really tough and gritty character, but he didn’t have a military background, and his clothing and equipment always seemed to be a bit more chaotic and disorganized than ours. My stuff is always a mess back home, but somehow, when I am away, I become much more careful and neat. I need to know where everything is. It’s just habit.
However, as a result, Charlie had to put up with much worse conditions than the rest of us. His spare gloves, for example, were soaking long before ours. He hadn’t had them wrapped up well enough in their waterproofing. But he never seemed to grumble. He just got on with it.
For so much of the expedition, Charlie had an almost impossible task. Filming under these conditions was nigh on impossible. Yet despite this, I would often see him fumbling with a radio microphone with cold, shaky fingers, trying to stuff it into its waterproof housing. But no sooner had he taped it to the console or elsewhere, then a wave would tear it loose. Sea-water is a killer to sensitive electronic equipment, and it is a tribute to Charlie that in the early stages of the storm he was filming at all. Despite his best efforts, the bottom line was that, whenever conditions reached gale-force, we were fighting for our lives and neither photography nor filming was possible. The world around us was black and soaking, accompanied by a 120-decibel soundtrack. Not quite ideal lighting or sound conditions.
Still so far from land, our condition was getting serious. We were moving into survival mode. We were nervously fumbling for our harnesses in the dark, feeling them beneath us, concentrating on what we were doing. There was no room for error: fuel readings had to be correct, helming needed to be perfect. One bad reaction could breach the boat in these seas. It was the blackest of nights, and the conditions were still deteriorating.
Things had suddenly got very dangerous very quickly, and it soon became clear that for the second time on the expedition, I would have to call our UK base and alert them to the situation. If conditions continued to plummet at this rate, we would lose all control. Our lives would then rest in the hands of the rescue services, although this far from land, none of us had any idea what sort of rescue could be mounted.
I urged everyone to keep focused as we slowed the boat to a crawl so I could make the call to London.
Once again, in the new, unfamiliar quiet, without the roar of the engine, I knelt down and crawled into the cubbyhole. My hand was shaking now, not just because I was cold but because I was frightened. I patiently waited to get through. It was eight minutes to midnight, their time.
Chloë had just turned out the lights in the hallway of her flat, on her way to bed. She looked at her phone ringing, and her heart sank when she recognized the +88 number identification on the LCD screen and realized this late-night call was coming from the boat. She knew, having been following our tracker, that at this time we were still a long way from Iceland. She realized almost immediately that something was wrong.
‘Chloë?’
‘Yes, I’m here. What’s happening?’
‘Get a pen quickly. I need to give you our position.’
I turned to Mick and shouted at him: ‘OK, Mick, give me the lat and longs. Loud and clear!’
He yelled at me: ‘Six-ah, two-ah, two-ah, seven-ah.’
‘Six two, two seven,’ I screamed down the receiver, trying to make myself heard above the engine and the storm. ‘Did you get that?’
‘Yes,’ she replied, writing down the numbers on the only piece of paper she could find – a copy of Time Out, the London listings magazine.
‘Read the numbers back to me, Chloë,’ I shouted.
I was cold, wet and exhausted, and I was painfully wedged in this small, dark hole. I needed Chloë to be certain of our precise position so that she could relay this to the rescue services. One number mispronounced or misheard could prove disastrous, even f
atal.
‘Four-ah, one-ah, three-ah,’ Mick shouted in my ear.
‘Four one three,’ I yelled into the phone. ‘So that’s six . . . two . . . two . . . seven . . . four . . . one . . . three . . . North, OK?’
She had the coordinates, and she soon had the latitude reading as well: 31.18.912 West.
‘Chloë,’ I concluded, ‘we’re OK, but we’re struggling. These seas are much, much bigger than they were on the Labrador. Contact the Icelandic coastguard and give them our position, and keep them posted.’
I turned to Andy, still screaming: ‘What’s the fuel situation?’
Andy paused, then shouted that the fuel was looking OK; we were still around 250 miles from Reykjavik. I relayed this to Chloë.
I remembered how she had left her safe job at Goldman Sachs for a bit of adventure. Well, now she had it – in spades.
‘And please phone Willie as well.’
‘OK.’
‘We’ll phone again in an hour.’
Chloë passed on the message to the rescue services in Reykjavik, as requested, then called Andy Billing, who was awake on our barge in London. She also woke Willie. She would need all the help she could muster.
Chloë recalls:
The call from Bear was brief and troubled; it had come out of the blue. But I had come to expect this. We had agreed before the start of the expedition, when they left England, that Bear would call me at 3 p.m. every day. This never really happened because from the start, even in Halifax, the team were busy at different times with boat preparations, last-minute weather checks and press. It is unfortunately the nature of the beast, and any form of routine was damn near impossible from so far away.
There always seemed so much to do, so many things to sort out, and in the midst of bad weather it seemed impossible to keep track of time. I had promised Chloë I would call again in an hour, so she was sitting up, coffee in hand, waiting for my call. London was in the midst of an uncomfortable heatwave, but it was her concern for us on the ocean, rather than the humidity, that was keeping her wide awake in the early hours of the morning.