Rowboat in a Hurricane (9 page)

The small school of jumping tuna had long disappeared from our sight. I hoped they would lead long lives. They were off in chase of flying fish, herring, and sardines, flitting beneath the water at speeds we could only dream of. I wondered if they swam nearby or were already miles away. It was impossible to see more than a few metres into the water directly next to us. What lay beneath the water seemed such a mystery.

THE FORCE OF
the wind grew. It created intimidating waves that rammed the oar handles into my bruised shins. The waves toppled onto the boat, striking me with their foaming plumes. I was suddenly scared of the sea, of how quickly it had grown. The darkness of our third night out settled in, and I felt no more comfortable now than I had the two nights before. On the contrary, the sea seemed even more wicked tonight.

Colin agreed, and we lashed the oars to the boat at midnight, two hours earlier than we would normally have. We huddled in the cabin—Colin on his back, me on my side—trying to get comfortable in our unbearably cramped quarters. Sleep did not come easily, so I listened to the powerful wind and waves.

In the morning I climbed out of the cabin and into the gusting winds. Waves sprayed me as I unfastened the oars and settled into the rowing seat. But I struggled to keep the boat on course. I cursed the rudder. If only I could control it while rowing, keeping the boat on course would not be such an issue. But I had only the oars to pivot an eight-hundred-kilogram boat against forty-kilometre-an-hour winds and two-metre waves. After almost an hour of futile and exhausting rowing, I gave up. It was time to deploy the sea anchor.

In rough, stormy conditions it is best to point the bow of the boat into the wind and waves using a sea anchor or drogue. A drogue is essentially an underwater parachute connected to the bow with a long shock-absorbing line. As the wind pushes the boat, the boat naturally weathercocks towards the drogue. A regular anchor would also cause the boat to swing into the wind and waves, but of course, using a conventional anchor isn’t feasible in the middle of the ocean’s depths.

I struggled to the front of the boat through driving rain and spray and opened the forward compartment where the drogue was stored. Our boat was currently broaching (sitting sideways to the waves) and in a very vulnerable position. Waves crashed over the boat, rocking it violently. I tied the loose end of the rope to an eye ring on the bow and then slipped the conical canvas drogue into the water. The ghostly shape slipped into the distance until it reached the end of the line. Suddenly there was tension on the line, and the boat began nosing into the waves. The result was a little disappointing. We had hoped that, with the drogue, the boat would be perpendicular to the waves. Instead, it sat at about a sixty-degree angle to the ideal angle of attack.

I climbed back into the cabin, absolutely drenched, and huddled against Colin’s warmth as the whistling wind increased in intensity. We ate our breakfast of salted soda crackers, cheese, and cured ham. Neither of us felt like doing any of our daily chores (plotting our position on the charts, writing in our journals, making water with the desalinator). Instead we lay sandwiched together in the cabin, bumping into each other and the walls as waves collided with our boat.

“I have to go pee,” I informed Colin glumly.

“Yeah, I have to offload some cargo myself, but I think I’ll . . .”

Colin was interrupted by the thunderous explosion of an enormous breaking wave. Our vessel rolled almost ninety degrees, and I was thrown on top of Colin. Books, charts, boxes of crackers, and waterproof electronic cases toppled onto us. Slowly the boat righted, and I could see the water gushing off the decks through the scuppers.

“Holy shit, that was a big one,” I said.

The pressure in my bladder was greater than ever, and I feared another giant wave might trigger the inevitable. There was no way I could pee in a bucket in the cabin. (I had trouble peeing in those little jars doctors issued, and that was in the privacy of an immobile bathroom.) Even when the weather was calm, I’d had trouble dealing with my toilet needs on this trip. Initially, I’d imagined we would use a bucket on the deck. (Colin always talked about the “bucket and chuck it” days back in his sailboat. He forgot to mention the importance of partially filling the bucket with water in advance, and my first attempt had been very messy indeed.)

I soon learned that the best way to go to the bathroom on a rowboat was to hang my derriere over the side while sitting on the outer rail. The lifelines made a secure backrest, and it was much more relaxing than using the bucket. Now, however, in gale-force winds, just being outside was a precarious experience.

“I’m going out. I can’t hold my bladder any longer,” I informed Colin.

“Just make sure you tie yourself on,” Colin said, looking worried.

I nodded. We had a thick six-metre length of rope with one end secured to the boat for conditions like this. I tied the free end around my waist with a secure bowline knot. If I was washed off the decks, this would be my umbilical cord to safety. I waited for a lull between waves and quickly dashed out of the cabin, shutting the hatch securely behind me. I sat on the outer rail and relaxed my bladder—relief. Momentarily incapacitated by nature’s call, I watched in disbelief as a perfectly formed cresting wave reared towards me. I tightened my grip on the safety line. The wave poured over me and the boat rolled portside from the impact, dipping me up to my waist in the ocean. I clung to the lifeline while the boat slowly righted, and then I pulled up my dripping spandex shorts and scurried back into the cabin.

“All is well?” Colin asked.

“Better than well.” I was feeling invigorated. “I’ve learned that our classy bathroom is not only self-flushing, but it also comes with a powerful bidet.”

BY MID-AFTERNOON THE
weather had not changed. While Colin rummaged for food, I decided to make some space for him by going outside to check the drogue. I tugged on the line, surprised at how little tension there was. Concerned, I began pulling in the remaining eighty metres of rope. I hoped for a logical explanation that would include a sea anchor at the rope’s terminus. Perhaps the lines had tangled and the anchor collapsed.

But it wasn’t long before my suspicions were confirmed. Our anchor was gone. In its place were a few tatters of red cloth clinging to a swivel. The very weather it was supposed to protect us from had destroyed it—alarmingly, it was only our fourth day out.

Colin retrieved our sole backup drogue, affixed it to the swivel, and dropped it overboard. We inspected the replacement several times throughout the day and it seemed to fare better than its predecessor. By the following morning, its services were no longer needed.

ON THE SIXTH
day the winds picked up again, and our exercise was limited to rolling around the cabin. Adding insult to injury, my period started. I was sore, my back ached, and my muscles felt stiff, as though I’d been sitting in an economy plane seat for several around-the-world flights. I was irritable. Colin was grumpy. I moaned about aches and pains while Colin, who is amazingly oblivious to physical discomforts, grumbled mostly about our lack of progress. There was tension in the cabin, and we were becoming short with each other. So far on this expedition, we hadn’t had any major fights, but this situation put our relationship to the test. We wanted to row, not to be thrashed around like we were in a barrel careening over endless rapids. Originally we planned to row twenty hours a day or more, and now we seemed to be averaging half that. We were worried that this slow pace would extend our trip. If this kept up, we would have to start rationing our food supplies soon.

The winds blew at about forty-five kilometres per hour. They had been between force three and six on the Beaufort scale since we’d left. Force three is a gentle breeze (twelve to nineteen kilometres an hour) with waves of
0
.
6
metres. This was ideal for rowing. At force four, winds are between twenty and twenty-nine kilometres and waves are about
1
metre. Waves would regularly crash into the boat, making it a little harder to stay on course. At force five, wind speeds increased to thirty to thirty-nine kilometres an hour, and waves doubled in size to over
2
metres. And now we were in force six conditions—wind speeds of forty to fifty kilometres an hour and waves
3
metres high with foam sprays off their crests. Small craft advisories are issued in force six conditions, and rowing is pretty much futile.

By the morning of day seven, we had been cooped up in the cabin for thirty-six hours. Imagine spending a day and a half with your partner, lying in a standard bathtub—which is actually more spacious than our cabin was at the time. At first it’s somewhat comfortable, even a relief to just relax. But then you start shifting, trying to find a comfortable position. You lie on your back until an ache in your lower vertebrae forces you to roll onto your side, but soon your hip bone is sore from the pressure. You try to shift the weight more onto your thigh by extending your leg, but then you kick your partner. You both grumble about how small it is. Then you discuss body arrangements that might lead to more comfort, and through a coordinated effort you switch positions so that your head is at the other end of the tub. Your partner’s feet are in your face, but you don’t care; surprisingly, they smell less than you remember.

Finally, on day eight, the low-pressure system moved on and the violent motion of the boat began to diminish.

“I think it’s getting better,” I said.

“It seems to be. I’ll haul up the sea anchor and try rowing,” Colin said.

“Sounds good. I’ll make breakfast.”

With great effort, I propped open the hatch to reach the stove. Something was wrong. Instead of looking out into a heaving sea, a solid wall of blue lay to my left. For a split second I thought a rogue wave was about to destroy us. Then I realized it wasn’t a wave—it was the hull of a freighter. The wall of blue was steel and just metres away, about to crush us. I screamed—a long, loud, piercing scream.

“What’s going on?” Colin yelled.

I kept screaming. The tanker was aimed directly at the centre of our boat. In seconds our home would be splintered. The ship was so close I had to crane my head back to see the top of the bow. I desperately hoped to see a human looking down, a crew member who might witness our boat’s destruction and pluck us from the sea if we survived. Instead I saw nothing, apart from streaks of rust below an anchor cinched tight against the hull. The tanker created a surging wave with its bow. This mass of water was about to hit us.

I was still screaming, and Colin was thrashing around in the cabin, trying to turn around so he could see outside. Our boat would be crushed before he even knew what hit him. I grabbed both sides of the hatch, bracing myself for the impact. We rose on the bow wave. But instead of splintering against thousands of tonnes of moving steel, the surge of water pushed us to the freighter’s starboard side, and the steel hull slid past, inches from our boat.

Colin finally scrambled around and shoved his head out next to mine. His jaw dropped in disbelief as he stared out at the wall sliding past, still a metre from our boat. The ship was so long—about ninety metres—that it took almost a minute to pass. Waves crashed against the steel, the spray and whitewash deflecting against our own boat. Without another word, Colin ducked back inside the cabin and emerged with the video camera.

I inhaled the acrid scent of combusted diesel and rusting steel, and listened to the not-quite-subsonic rumble of an engine churning out thousands of horsepower. Our own boat rose and fell on the confused seas. A wave could easily slam us into the freighter, fracturing our boat or sucking us through its giant propeller. Then, finally, it was over. The transom of the giant ship passed by, and it continued on its course, oblivious to our existence and our narrowly averted destruction.

“The boat was a foot away from us, I’m not kidding,” I said in a shaky voice. “It was coming straight for us.”

As the freighter moved on, we stared at the name and home port printed on its stern.
Norca
from Hong Kong would forever be imprinted in our minds. Later research revealed that the steel tanker weighed in at twenty-eight thousand gross tonnes empty—thirty-five thousand times more than our fully loaded boat.

“Thank God our boat is so light and a freighter is so powerful,” Colin said. “It takes a lot of force to displace that amount of water. If we were much heavier, the bow wave wouldn’t have tossed us to the side so easily.”

The irony of that: we’d been saved by our own insignificance. The story might have played out very differently had we been a little farther ahead or the tanker on a slightly different trajectory. If the bow wave had instead pushed us to the portside of the tanker, our drogue line would have been run over and caught on the tanker’s hull or propeller. We would have been dragged behind the boat like a forgotten family dog tied to the departing motorhome. We had been very lucky indeed.

These were busy waters. We were parallel to the Strait of Gibraltar, a place where numerous shipping lanes converged. Because of our limited vantage from inside the cabin, we had made a point of regularly opening the hatch and scanning for boats. But from the depths of our trough our outlook was restricted, and even when we crested a wave, neighbouring waves limited our view. We had a radar reflector meant to enhance our signal on other boats’ radars. But we had no lofty perch on which to mount the reflector, so it wasn’t very effective in high waves. It was terrifying to think that we had been unable to spot an oil tanker, and that its crew had been completely oblivious to us.