Four Mums in a Boat

by Janette Benaddi, Helen Butters, Niki Doeg

  Finally, after Janette’s shouting and demanding, though not quite ordering, for her to get below deck, Niki complied.

  We did all make occasional trips onto the deck in the end, braving the storm to get to the bucket, wearing our life jackets and with a double lanyard securely tied on. Usually naked but for the life jackets, a partner kept an eye out, making sure none of us was swept away.

  ‘I think our experience was completely different from that of Janette and Frances,’ said Helen. ‘Niki was really hating it, struggling with it all, and my iPod was not working, so I had nothing but the stories in my own head. I tried to think about the nicest things – decorating my house, anything I could – and I also took the opportunity to sleep. To sleep as much as I could. And work my way through the snack packs that I had. The one good thing about Niki spending so much time on deck was that I could spread out in the cabin. But the noise was overwhelming – the waves, the thunder, the wind, the lightning – it was biblical. I can’t believe Niki spent any time on deck. That was the last place I wanted to be. I didn’t even drink any water, as I didn’t want to leave the cabin to go to the loo. It was impossible to get out, hold on, take your clothes off and use the bucket and throw the whole of it over the side when you were desperately trying to hold on and not be blown off the boat or to ride the enormous waves.’

  And then, very gradually, the storm moved on. There was not a moment when the sky suddenly cleared and the sun broke through and the sea turned pale blue and became flat and calm. There was just a moment when the sea looked rowable and the rain was less lashing, and frankly none of us could bear another night locked up in our cabins any more.

  ‘We didn’t emerge blinking into the sunlight,’ said Janette. ‘We just shouted across at each other to see if it was worth giving it a go – we had not been able to really speak to each other for three days. I gave Ben and the duty officer a call to see if anyone else had set off yet and were off para-anchor, and I thought let’s give this thing a go.’

  We picked up our oars and started to row. It was an amazing feeling as we dipped our blades in and out of the water, trying to make up the 20 miles we had lost. No one said very much, no one discussed it much – we were all quite shocked by what we’d been through and thankful to be alive – so we simply picked up where we’d left off. We had a job to do. We had survived a hurricane and now we needed to get to Antigua.

  ‘We circled ourselves in a little bubble on that boat,’ said Janette. ‘It was our little bubble and not at any time did we really focus on if there was any danger or what sort of danger we were in. We put it out of our heads. “We’ll be fine” was our motto. “It’ll be fine.” Never at any stage did we think, “We are on our own, in the middle of the ocean, with help more than 24 hours away.” We just got through each day as it came. Each shift was our challenge. That’s what kept us alive.’

  SHIP’S LOG:

  ‘Even though sometimes it is really tough, there are moments when you really have to try hard to picture the world around you differently so that you can get through. It was not nice in those cabins in the storm. Distraction can really work, but it takes some effort.’

  (JANETTE/SKIPPER)

  CHAPTER 14

  Flow

  ‘Sometimes you find yourself in the middle of nowhere, sometimes in the middle of nowhere you find yourself.’

  ANON

  Surviving the hurricane was a huge boost to our confidence. It was like the ocean had thrown all she could at Rose and us, she’d behaved as badly as she possibly could and had a full-blown tantrum, and we had managed. We had ridden the storm and we had come out the other side, still rowing. After our three days of confinement we had a new respect for the Atlantic. We had seen what she could really do, and we rather fell in love with her. It was like she was talking to us, teaching us something. All we had to do was listen.

  ‘Actually, we became obsessed by the sea,’ said Helen. ‘We spent hours and days trying to work out the rhythm. In the mornings the waves would be choppy and confused, they’d come at you from all angles. At around midday the ocean would get sticky and then at night there’d be these waves that came at the boat and you’d hear them coming and you’d raise your blades so that they could travel under the boat and you’d feel like you were flying.’

  ‘The ocean gave you so much,’ said Janette. ‘I really loved it. I got the peace and the quiet and the living-in-the-moment thing. There were no distractions. It’s funny because there was the constant noise of the sea, but, on occasions, all of a sudden the sea would go really quiet and there’d be no noise and you’d be like… no noise? Most of the time you would hear the whooshing and crashing of the waves. But there were moments when it was like somebody had taken away all the noise. It’s incredible out there. Simply incredible.’

  ‘The mornings and the sunsets were the most beautiful,’ said Helen. ‘Particularly that morning shift when we’d start in the darkness and watch the sun come up, and you’d sit there on the boat, thinking, “Okay, what have you got for me today? Let’s see what you can do.”’

  The more time we spent out there, the better we got at reading the waves and the more we found our own rhythm. We still had problems with our autohelm, our rudder didn’t work properly and we still had to hand-pump our water, as our batteries never charged properly. But now that the weather was improving it was sunny, so the solar panels were coming into their own, we were approaching halfway and Frances suddenly appeared on deck in a bikini!

  ‘Whatever is going to happen,’ she announced, ‘I am planning on getting an excellent tan.’

  She looked fantastic in her polka-dot two-piece from M&S. Her stomach was toned, she’d lost more than a few pounds and she had a broad grin across her face.

  ‘Right! That’s it!’ declared Janette, ditching the oars. ‘I am trying on the shorts!’

  Out came the turquoise shorts with the green piping for a squeezing-on ceremony. We held our breath and crossed our fingers as Janette puffed and pulled and tugged. At last, they stretched to the top of her thighs and a few inches over her buttocks.

  ‘Ta-daaa!’ she pronounced, attempting to parade up and down the boat. ‘Nearly there!’

  ‘Very nearly there,’ encouraged Niki.

  ‘Not bad,’ confirmed Helen.

  ‘Fortunately we have another 1,500 miles to go,’ said Frances.

  By now we were beginning to settle into a routine beyond eating, sleeping and rowing. At around 12.30 p.m. every day came one of the highlights: The Scores on the Doors! Everything would stop, even the rowing, and we’d pause to witness either Janette or Helen, although it was mainly Helen, emerge from the office with all the razzmatazz of a game-show hostess (albeit sporting little more than a fetid T-shirt) and we’d play The Scores on the Doors. Helen’s Vic-and-Bob-inspired game wasn’t hugely complicated, but we really looked forward to it on a daily basis. It mainly involved guessing how far we had rowed the day before, and how much further we had left to row. Actually, it involved only that. But it was dressed up with as many high kicks and jazz hands and pretend-trumpet hoots, whoops and handclaps as we could possibly execute in a 40-foot swell. We’d hurl those wild guesses around the boat – 25 miles? 40 miles? 65 miles? – with plenty of ooohs and aaaahs and noooos thrown in. And the prize for the person who guessed the closest? A general feeling of smugness at being right – that’s all. Often the mileage would be pitifully low, to which our communal response would be: ‘At least we aren’t going backwards!’

  We developed hundreds of little games to keep us entertained and to keep our bored minds from wandering or flat-lining completely. There was the Fame Game, where we had to guess the names of celebrities. Helen was excellent at this, due to her fondness for edifying editions of Heat, Hello! and OK! magazines, and Janette was terrible. Her excuse was that she rarely watched the telly. Although, in reality, she was just not terribly good at playing the game. Instead of asking the correct type of yes-or-no questions – i.e., is it
a woman? – Janette would immediately jump in at the deep end and ask, ‘Is it Richard Gere?’

  Although, oddly, she thrived at the Name Game – another word game where you had to come up with every name you could beginning with a certain letter of the alphabet. Jane, John, Jericho, Juliet, Janet, James, Jimmy… It did later transpire that she’d played it for hours with her children on the way to France, so she had something of a head start on the rest of us.

  We also enjoyed the endless gift of Helen losing something. It happened every day. At least once a day, there’d be a pause and then she’d ask the question:

  ‘Has anyone seen…?’

  Quite how she managed to lose so many things in such a tiny space we never knew. She did eventually accuse us of stealing her things for comic effect. In fact, all we’d done was some tidying. There was also another fabulous timewaster we called Yacht? Tanker? Bird? This was a particular forte of Niki’s, where we’d scan the horizon for hours looking for signs of anything other than white horses. And the first person to spot the first ‘catch of the day’ or ‘spot of the day’, as it were, got to write their ‘spot’ down on the cabin walls below.

  The cabin walls were also little oases of joy, as we had encouraged friends, family and indeed other rowers at La Gomera to write us little messages of support inside the boat. So, in quiet moments, when we needed a boost, we’d lie down in the office and read motivational missives of support from loved ones and others in the race.

  We even found ways of making our dreary food packs a little bit more entertaining. Janette used to pretend to be running a rather poor takeaway restaurant, where she’d bark our orders back at us, asking if we wanted pizza or egg-fried rice or a chicken korma. And then she’d simply hurl the same old boring beef stew at us as we pretended to thoroughly enjoy what we had ‘ordered’.

  These games entertained us for hours and made us laugh until the tears rolled down our cheeks. It is extraordinary how little you need when you are surrounded by people you love.

  The further south and west we rowed, the more the weather improved, and despite our lack of batteries, when the sun was hot enough, we realised we could play our music on the stereo for a couple of hours in the afternoon and we’d still have enough power in the batteries for the night shift. We’d spend endless hours discussing what we should listen to, and invariably it would come back to the Mamma Mia! soundtrack, as each of us knew every single word. But what a difference those two hours made. The sun on our faces, riding the waves, belting out ABBA songs at the tops of our voices. We all had a favourite for different reasons, but just powering along, pulling on the oars in time to the music, wiggling about on our seats and feeling on top of the world, or at least on top of a wave, was enough to make all of us smile.

  However, the sunshine did bring with it a different host of problems. The rules of the race dictate that you are not allowed to cover the deck of the boat with a tarpaulin or any other piece of material that might catch the wind and act as a sail, thereby assisting your ever-so-speedy passage across the Atlantic. The result was that the deck turned into a boiling sweatbox, with two even more boiling sweatbox cabins at either end. Rowing at midday was a deeply unpleasant experience. The sun would beat down relentlessly for the entire two-hour shift, burning our faces, lips, noses and shoulders, despite the huge amount of sun cream we slapped on each other. It was also painful to have so many cuts, nicks and scabs roasting in the sun. The front seat of the boat was the worst; it had a particular frying-pan quality to it, as you were first in line against the elements. There was a terrible moment as we crossed the halfway point when Janette nearly passed out with heat stroke and had to be taken back to her equally hot, sweaty cabin to get the sun off her head and drink a quick two litres of water.

  But the hazy days, or those with a little cloud cover, were glorious. By now we had more or less dispensed with clothes. Helen had lost her chafe-free pants over the side on a gust of wind quite early on, and the rest of us slowly began to shed items. Aside from the constant rubbing and the sores we now all had over our backsides, hands and inner thighs, it was just so much easier to wear nothing, to be naked, than to be constantly trying to dry off wet clothes as yet another rogue wave doused us on the boat.

  ‘You could never tell when they were coming,’ said Niki. ‘Sometimes they would go under the boat so you wouldn’t get hit, but other times they’d go over the boat and they’d smack you out of nowhere.’

  ‘And sometimes they would just come out of nowhere and cover you from head to foot like someone had thrown a bucket of water,’ said Helen. ‘And somehow the sea always seemed to know when I was coming off shift. I’d finish my two hours, ready to go to bed, and open the cabin door right when it landed. And then me and my bed would be soaking wet. It was far worse at night, because you couldn’t see them coming.’

  Rogue waves were also dangerous, as without warning they’d send us flying across the boat. Frances was ambushed one night just as she was coming off her shift and was preparing to go into the cabin.

  ‘I was sent flying across the boat, garrotted by the safety rope, and hit my back on the boat as I bounced off it. When I landed I couldn’t see anything. It was like a cartoon reaction, with stars circling my head. I went blind, it was dark and I could just see a silvery light. I couldn’t see anything else at all.’

  Janette and Niki were quick to react and hauled her into the cabin where she lay still, staring blindly at the ceiling. ‘It was frightening. I saw it happen and my heart was in my mouth. It could have been the end of her as the safety rope caught her on her carotid artery, around the neck,’ said Janette. ‘She could very easily have died.’

  But Frances was her usual sanguine self and made not an iota of fuss. She simply had a couple of glucose tablets and a lie down. Her sight slowly returned, and she was back on the oars two hours later.

  Helen wasn’t quite so lucky. She’d spent the previous few days endlessly complaining about not being able to wash her hair and ostentatiously scratching it whenever possible. It had been over a month now and the longest she, and indeed the rest of us, had ever been without the use of shampoo. It was driving her mad. She had long since given up on brushing it as well. The black hairband she used to tie it up with was slowly becoming embedded in a giant bird’s nest at the back of her head, and instead of sorting it all out in the salt and the sun and the wind, she’d simply wrapped the whole lot up in a headscarf like some crystal ball reader at the local fair.

  The rogue wave hit just as Helen was getting off the oars. It could not have hit at a more inopportune moment. With nothing to hold onto, she was sent flying across the side of the boat and as the boat flipped down and then back up again a sharp screw sliced through her scalp, leaving her with a three-inch cut to the head and blood seeping into her hair. She didn’t scream. She didn’t really make much of a noise; she just sat in the bottom of the boat, holding the side of her head, her scarf slowly turning scarlet.

  ‘Well,’ she said, looking at each of us in turn, a bewildered expression on her face. ‘At least now I get to wash my hair.’

  ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ said Janette, grabbing the medical bag as she went to inspect the gash in Helen’s head.

  ‘And no,’ said Helen, taking off her blood-soaked scarf. ‘You are not sewing me up like a pork chop.’

  In the end, Janette decided it was impossible to suture at sea in such a tiny boat, bouncing all over the place – the last thing she wanted to do was stick Helen in the head with a needle – so she simply washed the cut and stuck it together with some plaster stitches.

  We were physically beginning to fall apart. The hours, the days, the conditions, the sores, the cuts, the bruises from being constantly bashed by the boat and the sea, and the weather were really beginning to take their toll. Our hands were agony. They were callused and split and covered in blisters that bled and wept all the time. Niki’s fingernail bed was so swollen with yellow pus there was nothing to be done bu
t for Janette to take a knife to it, lance it and for Niki to knock back a course of very strong antibiotics.

  ‘I have a feeling she enjoyed doing it a little too much,’ said Niki. ‘But it was either that or lose the finger.’

  Helen’s feet went the way of our backsides, mainly because she persisted in rowing without shoes. She said the shoes gave her blisters, which were nothing in comparison to what had happened to her heels – all split with chunks of skin hanging off. But she carried on in her Christmas socks, wearing a pair of sheepskin, padded slippers that Niki had pulled out of the bottom of her Mary Poppins bag. They were apparently for the elderly, to prevent bedsores, but she’d given them to Helen right at the beginning of the trip. Helen liked them because they were cosy and they matched our individual sheepskin rugs that we used to put on our rowing seat to help with the chafing. Although, in reality, nothing could really help with the chafing. Painful backsides and swollen hands (to the point where we all had to take off our wedding rings) and puffed-up joints were things we had expected, but the little withered calf muscles were not. Who knew that not walking for six weeks would affect your legs? Our thighs were strong, but our calves had all but disappeared.

  It was the beginning of February and the novelty of being on the ocean was wearing thin. As the currents slowed us down again, we began to feel that we might never get to Antigua. We had just under 1,000 miles to go and we were counting them down on a daily basis, which is never a good sign. We heard that Ocean Reunion (with Charlie’s nephew Angus on board) had already won the race in record time. Row Like a Girl had arrived in Antigua and, against all the predictions, come in second. Atlantic Challenge, Atlantic Drifters, Oarsome Buoys, All Beans No Monkeys, Team Beyond and Row2Recovery had all finished already. We had visions of our families sitting waiting for us, staring fruitlessly at the horizon for our little boat to arrive.