Four Mums in a Boat

by Janette Benaddi, Helen Butters, Niki Doeg

  Our confidence at getting through the hurricane, at forging forth across the ocean, was waning. We were finding it very hard going and harder still to keep on course, and no amount of Mamma Mia! could make it feel any better. Our autohelm was still not working and we were having to steer by hand in strong seas, which we had to do in shifts of 15 minutes each, as it turned out that steering was physically much harder than rowing.

  A low was beginning to engulf the boat. We had a meeting to try and talk through how we were all feeling. We’d had a few of these since we left La Gomera, but they’d mostly been about food and what cabins we were in. This was a little more serious. We’d all had enough. More than enough. We could feel ourselves flat-lining. We would have to rally ourselves or slip into a deep depression. Janette’s solution to our being marooned and isolated and frankly desolate was to suggest that we rowed harder, that we lengthened our time on the oars and rowed three up instead of two. It did not go down well.

  ‘I want to get there now,’ she said. ‘I think we need to do more rowing. What does everyone else think?’

  ‘I don’t think we can row any more,’ said Helen. Out of all of us, she was always the first person to speak up. ‘The boat is being permanently rowed. It is never NOT being rowed. How can we row any more?’

  ‘But if we rowed three up then we’d get there quicker,’ Janette replied.

  ‘Quicker?’ queried Frances.

  ‘The thing is, you are making it sound as if we’re lazy,’ said Helen.

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Yes, you are, and we’re not being lazy. We physically can’t do any more.’

  ‘How about rowing more if you feel like it? If you’ve got a bit left in you? During the day, not at night. You can get up on the oars and row if you fancy it,’ suggested Janette.

  ‘My feeling is, we get there when we are meant to get there,’ said Frances.

  ‘I just want to get there,’ said Niki.

  We all looked at her. Over the last few weeks Niki had become a worry to us all. She was less and less talkative, particularly at night, when we would either row listening to music or we’d talk. But Niki didn’t. She would disappear into her own head for hours at a time. She then started to complain about the noise we were making. It was almost as if she was in a situation where she felt out of control and she was trying to seize some of it back. It was clear that we were all finding it difficult, living on top of each other all the time.

  ‘She’d complain about my music being too loud, that she could hear it through the earphones,’ said Helen. ‘She didn’t like any noise at night.’

  ‘Helen’s earphones were SO loud!’ replied Niki. ‘She didn’t like us talking on the night shift.’

  ‘I was trying to sleep.’

  ‘Janette and I decided to try to train ourselves to virtually talk,’ continued Helen. ‘She would say, “Think of a colour,” and then I’d think of one and she’d ask what it was. And I’d say, “Green.” And she’d scream, “Green! That’s what I was thinking!” I don’t think Niki was the only one going mad at this point!’

  We were supposed to rotate accommodation, to share the luxury of ‘First Class’, where you could stretch out a little more and not need an analgesic to get through the extra hours of a night on para-anchor. But after a couple of weeks, Niki said she just couldn’t go in there.

  ‘I struggled with the cabins,’ she said. ‘I never realised I was claustrophobic before I went. It was something to do with the heat. I get really bad hay-fever-related asthma. When I was a teenager I used to be rushed into hospital and put in oxygen tents. I’ve always had a problem with my breathing, but only in the summer. When I was on the boat, when it was cold it was all right, but the hotter it got – and having to seal yourself into these little spaces, with no air… I’ve never experienced anything like it. By the end of the journey, I was having palpitations whenever I went into the cabin – almost panic attacks. It was awful, absolutely awful. I would try to be out on deck as much as I could, and during the day, rather than having a sleep, I would sometimes stay out on deck and just stand at the back to be outside. Eventually, we had an informal arrangement, which nobody ever talked about, where I would get into the cabin and shut the door, leaving a tiny gap, and actually just a little bit of air would come through, so I would lie with my face right next to the door and try to go to sleep as quickly as possible. Then the girls would come and shut it properly after I’d gone to sleep.’

  Niki couldn’t bear to sleep in the office, so Janette offered to stay in there for the majority of the trip. ‘While it would have been nice to have had some extra legroom, I felt responsible as the skipper; I wanted to keep Niki in a cabin – any cabin. I didn’t mind too much, as the navigation equipment was in there,’ said Janette. ‘The only person I didn’t want to share with was Helen, as she was so messy! She used to wash herself with her wet wipes and leave them on the bed. She insisted she was going to recycle them as toilet paper later, as we had to ration ourselves to six wet wipes a day for everything. But actually, in the end, even Helen became quite tidy. She stopped walking around the boat asking everyone, “Where’s my…?” and started keeping her storage nets near her bunk, quite nice and tidy.’

  As things wore on, Niki became obsessed with the speed of the boat.

  ‘She would ask every other minute from the back seat,’ said Frances. ‘It was everybody’s favourite seat because you had a little bit of shelter and you were right by the loo; however, you were reliant on the people in front of you to look at the speedometer, so she would always be asking, “How fast are we going? How fast are we going?” In the end, we more or less just said, “D’you know? I can’t see. The sun is shining on it. I can’t see how fast we’re going.” She was very sad, missing her family. I don’t think she realised the effect she was having on the rest of us. It was the hardest thing for me. I would always say, “We’ll get there when we get there. Don’t worry about it.” But she couldn’t understand how anyone would think that was a reasonable response.’

  ‘I missed my family so much,’ said Niki. ‘I was desperate to talk to them, desperate to see them. My children are a little bit younger than everyone else’s and perhaps I felt they really needed me. I was at a very low point and I think the more you get told you shouldn’t do something, the more you want to do it. So the other three kept saying to me: “We’re going to get there when we get there. You don’t need to work out when we’re going to get there.” But that’s what I spent hours doing. I quite enjoyed it, actually. I think the pain of my idiotic coccyx injury and the terrible claustrophobia I felt about the cabins meant I was desperately trying to take my mind off things, off the thought of being enclosed in an airless cabin, so I found myself doing the mathematics of miles done and miles to go. Working out, “Right, we’ve done so many miles today, so if we average that, then we’ll get to Antigua around this date.” It was something to do. It was something to keep my mind occupied. It was like counting sheep. I probably got a bit frustrated. On our boat everyone was quite happy to just take as long as it took, to go with the flow, whereas a lot of other boats, they were more like I was, working out estimated times of arrival and pushing more. I wasn’t pushing to get there in a certain position in the race. I just wanted to get there to see my family.’

  Helen suggested that Niki start calling home and talking to Gareth more often. Although Janette spoke to Ben every day, albeit briefly, the rest of us were sparing in our contact with our families – partly because it was so expensive and also partly because a lot of the conversations didn’t go terribly well! Janette’s children were almost never home when she called; Helen’s were at boarding school and having their own brand-new experience, although she did once memorably spend 15 minutes asking her mother for shampoo. The conversation went something like this:

  Helen: ‘Hi, Mum. I need some leave-in conditioner.’

  Mum: ‘Levin conditioner? What’s that?’

  Helen: ‘Leave i
n.’

  Mum: ‘Levin?’

  Helen: ‘No, leave in – as in leave in.’

  Mum: ‘Levin?’

  Helen: ‘No, leave it in.’

  Mum: ‘Leave what in, dear?’

  Helen: ‘Arghghgh!’

  And then they were cut off.

  No, phone calls were not that easy. Frances’s children were busy with their friends and one of Niki’s sons brilliantly passed the phone back to Gareth, complaining that he couldn’t carry on talking to his mum, as his Shreddies were getting soggy. Which is as it should be, really. The last thing we wanted was for our children to be sitting at home, weeping into sodden handkerchiefs, staring at the phone. The truth was, we were more needy than they were. Our husbands, on the other hand, were always positive and upbeat, but when your only news is that the flapjacks are too big, or you’ve been hit in the face by a flying fish, it’s quite difficult to have a conversation.

  But the extra calls to Gareth only made a small bit of difference, and soon it wasn’t just the constant need to know how fast we were going; Niki then moved on to food. ‘She was so worried about her food running out,’ said Frances. ‘She started not eating, even though she needed to eat.’

  ‘I started stockpiling all my nuts and fruit and shouting at anyone who was throwing their food away, saying, “No! Give it to me!” I was like a squirrel and I had little batches of it everywhere,’ said Niki. ‘They got very frustrated, but I was probably just trying to take back control.’

  And by now, she wasn’t the only one. Firstly, Frances had a low spell early one evening, before we moved into our night-time routine. ‘It was about three weeks before we finished. ‘I’d been finding some of the night shifts more worrying as it was harder to stay on course during the nights. For some reason, when we went off course it always took longer to bring the boat around at night compared with during the day. The night I felt sad wasn’t even a particularly rough night.’ ‘Weirdly, we all had different things that we hated,’ said Niki. ‘I couldn’t stand the cabins, and both Helen and Frances hated the boat being hit by massive side waves in the middle of the night. They really didn’t like it at all.’

  ‘There was no high drama that night,’ Frances says. ‘The thought simply crept into my head that there was a chance we could be hit by a big wave, capsize, and the safety lines might break, so we wouldn’t be able to climb back on board. I felt that I’d been self-indulgent risking my life when my children needed me to at least do my best to stay alive until they’d grown up. I could just imagine the headlines about how irresponsible we’d all been. I finished my shift and shed a few tears behind my sunglasses. Janette gave me a hug and a kiss and told me it would be all right.

  ‘I went into the cabin and tried to sleep but I couldn’t, so I listened to some music until it was time to row again. When I got on the oars two hours later I was fine. It seems almost irrational, but after that night the longer we were out on the ocean the less worried I was, because I trusted Rose, and her ability to stay upright in all sorts of seas, more and more.

  ‘Helen was always so certain that we were going to get to Antigua because her angel cards had said so. She was totally confident that there was nothing to worry about. But for those two hours, doubt had found its way into my mind. I’d spent my whole life being responsible and doing what was expected of me, and it had been quite a leap of faith to enter this race and do something so out of the ordinary.’

  Janette’s way of dealing with the stress of being on board was to laugh, hysterically. ‘I did this a couple of times – I just laughed manically. Honest to God, I went mad. I can remember one night, I was in front and Niki was behind me, and I’d been laughing at Helen’s legs because they looked so funny. Skinny legs with socks on the end. They just looked like sparrow legs. It kind of set me off and I started laughing and I could not stop. I couldn’t row because I was laughing so hard. I was in hysterics and I knew that Niki was sat behind me, miserable and very fed up, and even that made me laugh. It wasn’t helpful for Niki, because she was down in the dumps and I’m hysterically laughing for about an hour. Laughing was my release, whereas crying was Niki’s. We all had something.’

  ‘I cried and she laughed,’ said Niki. ‘I was sitting there in my own little world, dreaming away, and then all of a sudden Janette just started laughing, and she laughed for an hour, hysterically, to the point where she couldn’t row, she couldn’t sit on her seat. It wasn’t laughter. It was hysteria. It happened to her a number of times.

  ‘If you ask Frances and Janette what they struggled with mentally on the boat they would say they did not. But both Janette and Frances became students again, laughing and making jokes. And Helen and I would look on. They both dealt with stress through laughter.’

  In fact, the only person to maintain a firm grip on her sanity was Helen. Although on dry land she is probably the quirkiest of all of us, on the water she was the most balanced! Her strategy, such as it was, was to keep calm and keep buggering on. She was determined, focused and did not deviate.

  ‘A woman of steel,’ said Janette. ‘A bit like a robot!’

  ‘One of the duty officers, Ian Couch, said to me that you see people’s true personalities when you’re on that boat. Their true personalities will come out, their strengths and weaknesses. You will see the real person,’ said Helen. ‘I always knew we would make it across. I never had any doubt in my mind. Maybe that’s why I didn’t have a wobble or a moment.’

  ‘Helen is a lot more mentally strong than you realise,’ said Frances. ‘I think because we have both lost parents, we’ve seen somebody close to us go through that, and it makes you tougher. We know that’s as bad as it gets, and you do survive. So there’s been that big crisis for us and we’ve moved through it. You realise that you are not in control of life. We don’t know how the story will end, but if we all think positively it will end well. We just needed to work through this.’

  And so we did. We needed to pull together; we needed to help each other. Otherwise we would lose exactly what we had come to find out here in the middle of the Atlantic. And that is what we did. Together.

  ‘The strength of our team is each individual member. The strength of each member is our team.’

  ‘One afternoon,’ said Janette, ‘when Frances and I were rowing, we started discussing Niki and how she seemed so low and how we could help her through the difficulties she was having. We were trying to work out why Niki was so miserable, and what we could do and how we could help. I was really feeling sorry for her because I thought it must be awful for her to feel like that on this tiny boat in such a confined space.’

  ‘Is there something wrong?’ asked Niki, poking her head out of the cabin.

  ‘What?’ asked Frances.

  ‘Only I couldn’t help but overhear you talking about me,’ said Niki.

  ‘Well, actually, now you come to mention it,’ said Frances, ‘I would like to say something.’

  ‘They were talking so loudly,’ Niki said later. ‘It was impossible not to hear them!’

  ‘Fortunately, Frances was the one who was sat right near her at the back, because I think Frances is quite good at dealing with things like that,’ said Janette.

  What followed was a firm and frank discussion about how Niki’s mood was affecting the group, and she admitted that she really needed our help to keep her mind off missing Gareth and her family. Helen popped her head up like a meerkat halfway through the conversation, only for Janette to indicate very quietly that she should bugger off.

  ‘Niki was very brave,’ said Frances. ‘She didn’t get upset at all. She just said she was finding it hard and asked if I could help her. She admitted that she was a person who liked to be in control and at that moment she felt as though she wasn’t in control. She was especially struggling with the uncertainty of not knowing how much longer we were going to be out on the ocean. She found the feeling of being adrift unsettling. She said she’d started to feel particularly isolated.’
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  ‘The only problems we had on board,’ said Helen, ‘were when we stopped talking properly to each other, when we withdrew into those tiny cabins with our own thoughts. So we decided to hold more meetings where we discussed how we were feeling. And we would go over conversations, saying, “You hurt me when you said this. I need you to listen when I say that.”’

  So we upped our meetings and gave each other carte blanche to discuss whatever was bothering us. Whatever anyone had said, or however anyone had behaved – it was aired. We were extraordinarily honest with each other and we had a no-sulking policy. Otherwise things festered. We were living in a very small, confined space, with zero privacy and no escape. We all agreed that if some feedback was a little too punchy, we’d add ‘just saying’ (usually in a sing-song voice) at the end of the sentence to take the sting out of the tail!

  We’d had a phrase that we often used in the build-up to the race. ‘It’ll be fine,’ we found ourselves saying all the time. ‘It’ll be fine’ even though we got on the wrong train. ‘It’ll be fine’ if we don’t quite have the sponsorship money at the moment. ‘It’ll be fine’ even though we’ve only managed five hours of training this week. But as we found ourselves very alone on the ocean, stalked by our own demons, we decided ‘It’ll be fine’ was perhaps not positive enough and we (at Niki’s instigation) decided to borrow from the fine words of Pollyanna and started to play the Glad Game. So every negative situation had to be turned into something positive.

  ‘If something shit happens, you have to find a reason to be glad about it,’ explained Niki. ‘In the film and the book, the storyline is all built around this game. The Glad Game. So we played the Glad Game. “I’m glad the water-pump is broken because I get to stay on deck a little bit longer and talk to my friends.” That sort of thing. That was the challenge. The more difficult the problem, the more fun the challenge, and the more you did it, the easier it got to find the “glad” in things.’