Four Mums in a Boat

by Janette Benaddi, Helen Butters, Niki Doeg

  ‘But nothing did,’ said Frances.

  ‘But it could have,’ replied Janette.

  The rest of us bit our tongues. Of course she was right. We had just enough power to keep our navigation lights on and the See Me beacon flashing, but with no one on the bridge for 10 or 15 minutes, a huge tanker on autopilot, ploughing through the ocean on its way to Argentina or Brazil, could carve us up at any time.

  ‘Or,’ she added, ‘we should be checking to see if the conditions have changed and if we need to bring the anchor in and get rowing.’

  Now she was guilt-tripping us. Who on earth would pull up a para-anchor at 3 a.m. to get back on the blades? Janette, that’s who. We kept even more schtum about how delighted we were to have had more than 90 minutes’ sleep.

  We had planned to come off the para-anchor at that point and get back to rowing, but then we realised that our power failure was now total and it would be impossible to steer the ship in the pitch dark, as without the GPS we wouldn’t have any idea of where we were going. We could, in our rested enthusiasm, be powering back to the Canaries for all we knew. So we sat, eating a cold full English breakfast, riding the waves, waiting for the sun to come up.

  We needed sun. We were desperate for the sun to recharge our solar panels, and we were desperate to conserve the tiny amount of power that we had. We were only allowed our cabin lights on when we were actually in the cabin and Janette shouted at us whenever anyone forgot.

  In the meantime, we were hand-steering during the day, conserving enough solar power to use the autohelm at night. We used the hand-pump as much as possible, turning the watermaker on only briefly for a maximum of 40 minutes or so each day. But the batteries were almost as stubborn as Janette, and it took them over a week to become even 20 per cent charged while we were being so careful.

  ‘After one phone call with Charlie he suggested we switch off our navigation lights to save energy. The thought of being in the pitch black horrified me for the first few nights,’ said Frances. ‘But then we all just got used to it and, actually, we didn’t need the lights any more. We had the moon and the stars. We were fine.’

  And despite our lack of power and the constant need to pump for water, we settled into some sort of routine. ‘There were some lovely evenings and nights where we would just row and listen to our music,’ added Frances. ‘Helen had Alan Carr and Michael McIntyre on her iPod, so she would be giggling away. I think at that point all the iPods were still working, so we all had our own music. We didn’t talk as much at night. We would just listen to music, and I think Niki would just be alone with her thoughts.’

  SHIP’S LOG:

  ‘There were some stressful situations on the boat that did sometimes bring out the worst in all of us. Each one of us had a moment, for sure – you can’t possibly avoid having a moment on a 3,000-mile row across the Atlantic, no matter how great a person you are. We are all human. What was important was how we managed the situations. Our values kept us on track. It’s so important to have values in life that you believe in and that you can remind yourself of in challenging times. Our principal and most important value was to try our best, and to put everyone else on the boat before yourself. Walk in the other person’s shoes and you soon learn to be more gracious.

  (JANETTE/SKIPPER)

  CHAPTER 13

  Hurricane

  ‘And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what the storm is all about.’

  HARUKI MURAKAMI

  New Year’s Eve came and went, with the only highlight being that Helen got to broadcast to Mike Bushell on BBC Breakfast, on whom she has a terrible crush. The giggling and hair flicking was only trumped by her delight at scoffing down a Peperami to celebrate, which even in this early stage of the race was enough to make everyone’s mouth water.

  ‘I was the only who had Peperamis. We all had snack packs with a big packet of biltong, which cost about £250. But I was the only one with Peperami, and I only had about five snack packs with it in. Every time I picked out a snack pack with a Peperami in it I was so excited. Then Niki would say, “Can I have one of your Peperamis?” And I’d go, “Yes, all right then.” But I didn’t really want to give it to her because I just loved it. Anyway, the day I spoke to Mike Bushell was a brilliant day because it was my turn to talk to BBC Breakfast, and it was Mike Bushell, who I really like, and I had a Peperami in my snack pack. That was the best day ever.’

  It is extraordinary how very quickly food becomes an issue. Quite apart from the monotony of the wet and dry food that we had packed on board, our focus was very much influenced by the snack packs, and none of us had realised how much of a morale booster they would be.

  ‘About five weeks before the row, we were all at Janette’s,’ said Helen, ‘and we’d had a massive delivery from Holland & Barrett – they gave us loads of food for free, and at Janette’s house we had boxes of all the snack-pack stuff. We were basically just putting everything in bags. Nuts, banana chips, Bounce Balls, flapjacks, small bags of sweet. My neighbour helped us do it because it took forever. As did Niki’s dad. And we just grabbed stuff and shoved them into the 60 or so bags we had each.’

  The individual snack packs were stashed away in the hatches with our names on, and every day someone would hand out one of your snack packs and that was it for the day. Janette would just throw hers over the side – she didn’t like anything in them except the Mars bar. All the nuts and dried fruit would go, plus the bag of ‘powder’ (it was electrolyte powder). We would try to pour it away and the wind would blow it back all over us.

  ‘If I did it again I would do my own snack packs,’ said Helen. ‘I would just fill it with stuff that I wanted to eat and that would make me happy. You have no idea how important it all becomes. I had one Mars bar a day and I saved that for the night shift. At night I would pause to eat it and that was my thing that I really looked forward to. At breakfast I would have the flapjack, but it was massive. For some reason I didn’t like the chocolate flapjack, I liked the plain, and every time I got a snack pack mine would have chocolate bits in it when I just wanted plain things!

  ‘Niki must have been very disappointed,’ continued Helen. ‘She did so much research and so much work on them. We just didn’t like a lot of it. But that was our fault; we should’ve taken more interest. And they were so heavy as well. When we looked at other people’s snack packs they took hardly anything compared to us, which was why Janette wanted to chuck everything over the side and get rid of a load of stuff. Niki had huge snack packs because she loves food. She had loads of sweets in hers. But sadly not a single Peperami.’

  ‘You can only ask so many times what people want to eat. I tried and tried, but no one listened. I know now that all we really should have packed was chocolate, not healthy sports bars, but my heart was in the right place!’ said Niki.

  But frankly, we did have other things to worry about.

  It was Ben who told us that a storm was on its way. A storm that would develop into a hurricane. Hurricane Alex. The first hurricane to form in the Atlantic since 1955, the first hurricane to form in January since 1938 and the first hurricane that any of us had ever been in, let alone experienced in the middle of the Atlantic in nothing but a small boat made of fibreglass that was low on power.

  ‘You’re just going to have to row,’ Ben suggested – helpfully – on the telephone to Janette. The faster we rowed south, the less we would get caught up in the storm – sorry – hurricane.

  Poor Ben. He kept telling us, but we didn’t listen at first (for three whole days). We must have driven him mad. He could see the picture of the big swirly storm gathering on all his equipment back home. But we could not. So we were deaf to his entreaties. And then, finally, it was confirmed that a big one was heading right for us. Oddly, just as we
turned to move south, we saw Greg. Far in the distance. On his own. Rowing.

  Janette was straight on the radio. ‘There’s a storm! Go south! We all need to go south.’ He couldn’t believe it! We were so close and so helpful! He thanked us and off he went.

  And so we rowed as fast as we could, as far south as we could, before it was scheduled to hit. We also had to pump as much water as we could, because we knew when the storm hit us we would be confined to our quarters for hours, if not days, and we’d need enough water in each of the cabins to keep us alive as the sea raged around us. We were growing increasingly anxious. Not one of us had ever experienced a hurricane before, let alone at sea. However, on the telephone we didn’t want to worry our families, so it was agreed that the word ‘hurricane’ would not be mentioned. We could talk of ‘high winds’, things being ‘a bit choppy’ or just ‘a bit of rubbish weather’ being on its way. In fact, through our continuous downplaying of Alex we even managed to convince ourselves that it was just a small local event with nothing very much to see here.

  And then it hit.

  If you look up ‘hurricane’ on the Beaufort scale, the statistics are more than a little worrying, skimming past gales, strong gales, and ‘major damage’:

  Hurricane Force 12

  Observable Land Effects – very dangerous tropical whirling winds

  Speed MPH – 76+

  Effect at Sea – Phenomenal

  Phenomenal? It’s lucky none of us had read this as the skies began to darken on the morning of 12 January. As we put the para-anchor out again, soaking ourselves in the process, we could see the lightning and the driving rain coming towards us. All around us, the ocean was beginning to stir, and yet there was a moment when we, and indeed it, held our breaths, waiting for Alex to strike. Which he did, with a brute force 12.

  We had battened down the hatches – Frances and Janette in the office, Niki and Helen in ‘First Class’ – and hoped that Charlie really knew how to make a self-righting boat. If she went over, would she really come bouncing right back up again? The most Rose had been tested was when we rocked her side to side on a bit of river in Burnham-on-Crouch.

  The first waves were terrifying. Rose was lifted out of the water and then dropped from a great height over and over again, and we were thrown out of our small beds and spun around like socks in a washing machine. Sometimes the rise and fall was so great we’d hit our heads on the roof of the cabin before being dropped back down again onto our beds or the floor, onto some piece of equipment. Everything that was not pinned down, tied up or stored away flew about the cabin like an exorcist’s Christmas party. We tried to keep in contact with Lee on the satellite phone and the rest of the support team – it was of little comfort to know that the whole race had been engulfed by the hurricane. We had managed to row a little further south than most of them, so while some of the other teams were right in the eye of the storm, we were only catching the outskirts – but they were violent enough.

  The wind howled, lightning shot across the sky and the thunder sounded like some HGV lorry about to plough into the side of the boat. And all we could do was lie there, gripping the sides of our bunks, unable to get flat or straight.

  And it went on and on. At least with some hideous fairground ride you can get off, have a rest, exhale, take a bit of air before going back to the enclosed coffin to be shaken and bashed and thrown about again. We could not.

  We spent 70 hours locked in our cabins – two nights and three days. Of pure hell.

  ‘You’re locked in. No way out. Nowhere to go. You just have to sit it out and wait,’ said Janette. ‘You go through all sorts of emotions in the first couple of hours. I don’t know how we got through it, I really don’t. Frances and I started to get terrible headaches due to dehydration and lack of oxygen. We were desperate to get some air into the office, so we opened up the rudder compartment just to try to let something in. A little puff. There’s no actual air in the compartment because it’s sealed and it goes into the sea, but there is a small amount that comes in as the rudder bounces in and out of the water. And that’s all we needed. But the waves were ramming the door of the cabin so hard, and water started coming in. Eventually the whole place was soaked through.’

  Frances and Janette tried to while away the time playing cards, but the cards kept flying everywhere. They tried playing I Spy, but ran out of spies. They tried to watch a film on an iPhone but it soon ran out of battery. They tried to nap but every time they dozed off another wave would crash into the side of the boat and throw them about the cabin. The conditions were so cramped and confined that they both started taking analgesics to deal with the muscle cramps and back pain.

  And then it began to get hot. Extremely hot. After about 10 hours of confinement they took off all their clothes.

  ‘I got used to Frances’s bottom and tits in my face,’ said Janette. ‘I remember moving one of her boobs, thinking it was a pillow, at one point. I was trying to shove it out of the way. But they are just bodies at the end of the day.’

  Time began to blur. Day became night and night became day. And all the time we were locked up in the coffin cabs. Frances and Janette opened their snack packs and started to ration out their chocolate. At one point they found the Chocolate Orange! Niki’s mum’s Christmas Orange! A shiny orb of deliciousness! Could they? Should they? We had, after all, only had one ‘slice’ each on Christmas Day. It took them all of three and a half minutes to polish it off!

  But the real problem was water. With supplies running very low and unable to make any, as it was impossible for anyone to get on deck and use the hand-pump, Janette made a decision to break into the ballast. Just as we had used bottles of water on the estuary at Burnham-on-Crouch to keep Rose heavy in the water, so we had bottles of fresh water below decks. The race rules specify that if you break into the water you have to immediately refill the bottle with seawater so that your boat is not lighter, giving you an unfair advantage over the other competitors. Janette knew she could not refill them immediately due to the raging storm, but they were desperate for drinking water. So as the small fresh-water canisters ran out, they raided the bottles of fresh water below decks.

  ‘We didn’t have much choice,’ said Janette. ‘We were locked up in the cabins for so long, we didn’t have a chance to get on the hand-pump.’

  It was then that the madness set in. Janette and Frances developed ‘cabin fever’. It’s only after being locked in a cabin for three days that the expression can be truly understood. They started to laugh hysterically at anything and everything.

  ‘Eating chocolate, burping, farting… everything was very, very funny,’ said Frances. ‘Janette farted terribly and every time she did I would say: “Was that really necessary?” At which point we would both dissolve into fits of weeping laughter.’

  Up at the other end of the boat, in ‘First Class’, there was a separate kind of hell going on. Niki couldn’t bear being locked up for so long inside the cabin. It was driving her crazy; she was claustrophobic and could not cope with being in such a confined space. Despite the thunder, the lightning, the lashing rain and the huge waves, she wanted to stay on deck.

  ‘Even though our cabin was a little larger, we were bounced around even more, as we were at the bow of the boat. The heat and the lack of air in such a tiny space made me feel like I was suffocating – it was like being in an oven. I just wanted to get out; being lashed by the wind and the waves was preferable.’

  And so she snapped. With Helen shouting at her to stay inside the cabin, Niki opened the door.

  ‘Stay inside, Niki!’ yelled Helen over the noise of the waves.

  ‘I have got to get out!’ Niki shouted back.

  ‘You’ll die out there!’

  ‘I feel like I’m already dead!’ Niki yelled back.

  ‘Don’t go!’

  ‘I’ve got to.’

  ‘Clip yourself on!’ said Helen as Niki disappeared through the tiny cabin door.

  ‘Of cou
rse!’ grinned Niki, already giving Helen the thumbs up.

  On deck, the waves and the swell were enormous. The wind was screaming and the rain was coming down at about 45 degrees, belting against the side of Rose like millions of sharp little needles. Dressed in her life jacket, with a double-clipped safety rope, sat Niki, gripping on for dear life as wave after wave smashed against or swept over the boat.

  ‘It felt so much better to be out there. It was awful, awful, awful inside that airless, sealed unit – it was like a coffin. I was desperate to be on deck. I liked being on deck. I didn’t mind the wild waves and the wind; I found them exhilarating. I enjoyed the freedom of it all. I just couldn’t cope with being locked up.’

  ‘Niki!’ yelled Janette from the other end of the boat. ‘Get back into your cabin!’ Janette’s voice was lost in the wind and the rain. ‘Niki!’ she tried again. ‘Niki! NIKI!’

  Eventually Niki turned around. She was soaking wet, lashed by the waves, her face was dripping with water, her cheeks were chapped pink in the wind and her eyes were round with a mixture of exhilaration and fear.

  ‘I’m all right!’ she shouted.

  ‘No, you’re not!’

  ‘I’m fine!’

  ‘Get back inside!’

  ‘I can’t!’

  “Yes, you can and you will!’

  Niki stood staring at Janette as the waves crashed over the boat.

  ‘Get back inside, Niki! If you want me to order you, I will order you!’

  ‘I had to be very firm with her,’ said Janette. ‘I had to yell through the wind and the rain to get her back inside the cabin, but she wouldn’t go in the cabin. As skipper it was my job to keep everyone safe, and I was not happy that she had decided to be out on deck. I knew she was really struggling and I understood that – I don’t like small spaces myself – but taking her chances up there on deck, rather than inside the cramped cabin, was not the right thing to do.’