Bear Grylls (43 page)

Our barge is one of ten house-boats moored at the same pier on the Thames, and I live there for one reason. In this big, faceless city we have something special: a community. People care and
tend to look out for one another. It makes coming home so good.

I told Heidi things were not going well, and she listened.

‘Well,’ she said after a while, ‘why don’t you give me one of your proposals? I can’t promise anything, but I will give it to the people at work, at Vitol, and
we’ll see what happens.’

The following day I saw Heidi again. She was smiling as she banged on the door.

‘They’ll do it,’ she said as I opened the hatch.

‘What?’

‘We’ll take one of the £15,000 packages. Vitol have said they will be a sponsor.’

I could hardly believe it. I literally picked Heidi up and squeezed her. After so many months of people saying no, someone was actually saying yes. Vitol, an oil-marketing company, had become
our first sponsor. That night, I started working out if we could do the expedition on only £15,000.

We were off the mark.

Not long afterwards, Lunson Mitchenall, the company of property surveyors that Nige works for, also agreed to take one of the packages. That news sent me scampering off again to calculate
whether we could make it now with just £30,000. It was beginning to happen. Yes by yes, our hopes and expectations started to gain ground. Then Shell agreed, then Lafarge Aggregates. Even BT
came back. It was affordable now.

We had found a formula and it was working: the more talks I found myself doing, the more I would follow them up with a proposal. And people just got it; it was simple and justifiable and it made
sense. My belief in it grew, and companies sensed that. There was a momentum behind us now.

In the end we filled all the lead sponsor slots within two months. In total a dozen companies, from General Motors in Canada to the
Daily Telegraph
over here in the UK, took the
£15,000 package, and we still had the title sponsorship to sell.

We were prepared to name the entire project after one company, in all the press coverage and branding. It would include the boat’s name, the title logos, talks and corporate days
afterwards, and this bundle was going to cost someone £50,000.

Early in 2003, just before the Boat Show, I learned that a Swiss–British company, British Masters, a specialist watchmaking group, was trying to contact me through a speakers’
agency. They had read an article on ‘risk’ I had done in the
Daily Telegraph
and they had liked it. But more importantly, they saw an opportunity. The company was headed up by a
couple of Swiss guys from Lausanne, Eric Loth and Jean-Marie Florent, and when I contacted them, they explained they were eager to revive a connection with British exploration which the company had
developed in the days of Shackleton and Scott. They had a brand they wanted to relaunch worldwide – it was called Arnold and Son.

‘Well,’ I replied, ‘the title sponsorship is still available, and . . .’ I paused, then I just went for it . . . ‘if you can make your mind up within the next
forty-eight hours, we will have time to get the boat covered in Arnold and Son logos by the time it appears at the London Boat Show in three weeks’ time. It could be amazing.’

Some time before, I had agreed with the organizers of the Boat Show at Earl’s Court to display our boat on a podium at the front of the exhibition. It was the same place where Sir Francis
Chichester’s
Gypsy Moth
had stood during the Boat Show in 1967. I felt honoured and also a little daunted, but I knew it was the chance of a lifetime. We just ran with it.

Arnold and Son instantly recognized the opportunity. They wanted to call us the ‘Arnold and Son Trans Atlantic Arctic Expedition’. It was a bit of a mouthful and took me seven
attempts to say fluently on our answer-machine, but it was really happening now. They called back the following day to say they would like to take the title sponsorship slot at £50,000. We
had never met in person and we agreed all this on our word alone. That was it, and it was a great way to cement a deal.

Their corporate logos went to print, and the first time we met was on a freezing January morning outside the Boat Show. There was snow on the ground, and the partially completed boat stood
proudly at an angle, floodlit for all to see. When Eric and Jean-Marie saw it, they smiled to themselves. She was perfect. We knew we had been given our final break, and we had sufficient funding
to set up the expedition just as we wanted. We were truly up and running.

Both the boat-builders
and I had bust a gut to get everything ready in time for the show, and together we had done it. It had gone to the wire and a whole team of people
were helping late into the night before the show opened.

The logos were sealed round the base of the stand, the maps waterproofed and sealed to the sides, and a Musto mannequin, dressed in full survival suit, was perched on the half-finished tubes of
the hull, high above the ground. It gave the whole boat life. Each night before I left for home, I patted her hull. She was to be our home and our only lifeline out there in the ice-strewn seas.
Sitting there silhouetted at night, with the hull covered in the signatures of so many well-wishers, she was already looking beautiful.

I was exhausted though, and so was Shara. She had seen her carefully maintained home slowly become buried under a mountain of equipment, logos and survival gear. Even Christmas had been a
washout of phone calls and late nights. I tried desperately to keep home as home, but it never quite happened. By New Year Shara was four months pregnant and was still trying to help me. But I
could tell she was drained.

She had been pregnant earlier in the year but it hadn’t worked out for us. Shara had been distraught. As I held her in my arms, sobbing in the hospital, I knew we had just lost everything
we had ever hoped for together. But what broke my heart even more was seeing her pain. Her miscarriage left us both feeling empty.

Life had thrown us some bitter deals. Within two years of marriage, we had both lost our fathers, Shara’s dad, Brian, having passed away only ten weeks before mine. We had cried in bed
together for so many nights since. Her getting pregnant was a way forward. But then we lost it. Life was sick. And we were struggling. I just felt this ache inside. But Shara was incredibly strong
and, like so many women before her, she quietly and slowly picked herself up and carried on. She was truly an inspiration.

Six months later, she was pregnant again. But this time she was terrified. As I held her each morning, with her hand in mine, and felt her caress her tummy nervously, I promised her everything
would be OK. She’d close her eyes and say she believed me.

Deep down, I knew that this next year was going to change everything. I prayed to God I wouldn’t let her down.

The world often steps aside for people who know where they’re going.

Miriam Viola Larsen

So the money
was finally raised, and a myth developed in exploration circles that I had, somehow, discovered the secret of securing sponsorship to fund an expedition.
Many people have contacted me since to ask for advice, perhaps thinking I have an address book full of contacts just waiting to write cheques. I wish that was true. In fact the secret was nothing
more glamorous than that Ranulph Fiennes quote which so simply said, ‘them that stick it out is them that win’.

As time went by, I became increasingly grateful that the Royal Navy was on board, and I recognized that its level of involvement and enthusiasm owed much to the contacts and help of Captain
Willie Pennefather.

I had first met Willie a year earlier. We had started talking about the sea and I told him about my hopes for this North Atlantic crossing. He was hugely enthusiastic about it all, and in no
time I began to recognize his expertise. Ever since that evening, and particularly since my father died, he has been somebody whom I can trust and turn to; someone whom I can be sure has my best
interests at heart. That means a lot to me.

He used his access to the highest echelons of the Royal Navy and eloquently explained why he thought it should get involved in our project. The First Sea Lord agreed, and doors began to swing
open.

Beyond this, we had Willie as a constant and reliable source of support and advice. With his experience and contacts, he was the ideal man to stand quietly in the background, ready and willing
to make the vital decisions at crucial moments, and in this decisive role he would in time prove absolutely invaluable.

I asked Willie to speak at the naming ceremony of the boat, on 29 April 2003 down in Portsmouth, and he used the opportunity to explain why he felt so strongly about this expedition.

The combined effect of finally having money in the bank and the navy on our side gave enormous impetus to our preparations, but the single most significant consequence of these developments was
that we could afford to build exactly the kind of boat that we wanted to take into these precarious, icy waters.

I first came across Ocean Dynamics when I was casually browsing through a trade boating magazine and noticed their small advertisement in the classified section. They sold themselves as
specialists in building tough, resilient boats, and when we saw they made lifeboats for the RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institute), worked with clients in Scandinavia and didn’t do too many
drinks trays, we sensed we had found the right people to build our boat.

They were based at Pembroke docks, far away in west Wales, so Mick, Nige and I drove five hours from London and found ourselves sitting in a Portakabin describing the boat we needed.

Shaun White and his team listened patiently. We said we wanted a boat with a range of 1,000 miles, and we needed extreme durability; we wanted an aluminium hull that wouldn’t crack if it
hit small, submerged icebergs at night, and we needed a jet engine instead of a propeller that, again, wouldn’t get damaged by hitting any floating debris or random containers. None of us
wanted to spend the amount of time and energy preparing as we had and then find ourselves 500 miles offshore without a prop, having clipped something in the night. It was a risk we could minimize
and it made sense to give ourselves the best advantage at this early stage.

Other boat-builders had considered our requirements but said we were asking for the impossible. It was too difficult, too risky. So we looked again. These men didn’t say that, but they
quickly and bluntly identified our main challenge as finding a way to carry the required amount of fuel in an efficient manner.

‘I think it’s possible . . .’ Shaun White said, smiling.

That was what we wanted to hear.

Through all the deliberations and discussions that followed, as we pored over power ratios, different types of engine and various configurations of storing the fuel, we accepted professional
advice when it was given and constantly focused our efforts on minimizing the expedition’s technical risks.

Shaun became a friend and a confidant and I ended up calling him, ‘Uncle’. The name has stuck. When we finally came to leave, Shaun was determined to be there with us in Nova Scotia.
He flew out with us and looked so proud as hundreds of well-wishers looked round the boat on the quayside in Halifax. It had been his baby too, and he had put his heart and soul into its
construction. Part of me wished ‘Uncle Shaun’ was coming with us as well.

Difficult decisions were unavoidable in the design phase, because we were going into new territory with the specification. For example, the ideal would have been to fit two engines, but with the
range we needed there simply was not room for double the fuel load. Our need for fuel economy meant we could have only one engine. I know Andy was taken aback when he saw this arrangement because
it left us with no fallback option – the navy follows the belt-and-braces principle where you make sure you always have a Plan B – but RIBs are generally designed to have a range of
around 100, not 1,000, miles. It was a risk we had no choice in taking.

Even to achieve this kind of extended range, we needed to carry 4,000 litres of fuel and the reality was that we could go further by using one engine rather than two. That was the bottom
line.

The question of how to store the fuel occupied the team’s minds for a long time. We knew the performance of the boat would be poor at the start of each leg because we would be so heavy
with fuel, but we had to try to ensure the weight was spread as economically as possible across the boat. It would be a deciding factor in really heavy seas. Move two tonnes of weight and it makes
a huge difference to the trim and pitch of the boat. I was forced to sit back and let the experts work out these different ratios – my job was to probe, to question and then to trust their
decisions.