Bear Grylls (44 page)

Andy was coming into his own now. He was brilliant in this area, and as soon as he joined the team full-time I took real confidence from his presence in all these vital early discussions. He was
diligent and exact, and he was cautious and conservative by nature: vital ingredients in a craft where we were dependent on only one engine.

As soon as the boat was ready, we began to plan the sea trials. These were always going to be critical. We had been designing a boat that was in many ways unique. No one really knew how she
would perform fully laden in a swell. Only our trials would tell us that. We needed to test and trial at different payloads in different conditions, and then retest. A thousand miles was already at
our outermost limit of range. If we got these small calculations wrong, it could be critical.

We also needed to trial the human factor; how we, the team, would cope. Living in what was described by one journalist as ‘an area the size of an open-top car’ for over 3,000 miles
of wild seas, with no shelter, strapped in day after day, would take its toll on us physically. We needed to begin to get used to her and learn how to feel at home on board.

My plan was that these trials should be short and focused, intensive weekends when the team would be on the boat, seeing what worked, what didn’t, getting used to the way she handled and
finding out how we would cope when it cut rough.

There was a balance to be found: we had to get a reasonable number of miles on the engine and get the early services out of the way before we set out on the ocean but, on the other hand, I
didn’t want any of us to be sick and tired of the boat by the time we reached Canada. It still needed to be fresh and exciting.

So, for the first sea trial weekend, we planned to take the boat from Portsmouth to the Scilly Isles and back. The weather was not great and within an hour or so of the start most of us were
feeling sick. I had forgotten quite how debilitating seasickness can be. You fix your eyes on the horizon, but that doesn’t stop the world inside you starting to spin. We would need an
endless supply of anti-seasickness pills.

We learned lessons, and took notes.

We would have to wear our helmets when the sea was rough, to protect our heads if we fell or slipped as we shifted around the boat. Pot Noodles made us vomit. Talcum powder needed to be at hand
to ease the gradual biting of the neck and wrist seals of the dry-suits into our skin. Vaseline protected our nostrils from the salt and spray and prevented them becoming raw.

The idea of having an inflatable mattress in the ‘sardine tin’, the area at the back of the boat where two, maybe three of us, could lie down and rest, seemed inspired. It
wasn’t. The mattress made us feel sick and was easily punctured. OK, so we needed to get some absorbent foam instead.

We hadn’t planned where we would put our feet when we were helming, so they dangled uncomfortably in mid-air. Right, we would need to weld some kind of footrest into position.

The boat, in the final stages of building, became a test bed for many maritime companies. Many people approached us with new ideas. Some were bonkers; some were amazing.

By the end we were trialling seats for the new naval fast-response crafts, testing a small exterior water heater that would take the pounding of all poundings and only worked periodically. We
were also experimenting with a marine tracking device that would send back a signal every half-hour with our speed and latitude and longitude, as given by the GPS (Global Positioning System). This
data was sent via satellite to the Internet and became a lifeline to those waiting for news back in the UK. But it had its dangers too, and when all our systems went down in a storm, including this
device, people understandably jumped to conclusions. They would see our speed gradually falling away and the weather patterns worsening. When we went blank and offline, we were in trouble, but it
wasn’t fatal. We were still upright, but they weren’t to know.

Yet when it worked, it gave people hope; hope that slowly we were coming home, wave by wave.

By the end of
that first night of our sea trial, we were all starting to feel really cold, which was not promising. This was a midsummer’s night off the south
coast of England, not the frozen North Atlantic. We weren’t even that wet, but it became obvious we were going to need much more kit if we weren’t to freeze. But already we were looking
like Michelin men in all our gear.

More notes were made.

The wind always whistled behind us wherever we sat and we lost a lot of heat like this; roll-mats to sit on would shield our backsides.

We needed better lifelines: the clips were far too small – in a storm at night, in mittens, we’d never get clipped on. They needed to run the whole length of the boat, and be big and
strong.

These were all small details but, in my experience, on any expedition it is the small things that make the biggest difference. Something that seems insignificant and minor on shore can make a
life-altering difference at sea, so I was determined that every little glitch and problem should be identified and resolved at this stage. When we finally left, it would be too late for this sort
of refinement. This was the time to iron things out, when it was calm and when it was good, before it got nasty.

The truth is that our first night aboard the boat had not been much fun and, weighed down by fuel and hindered by rough weather, we had not made very good progress towards the Scilly Isles. We
were all tired and wet, so at four in the morning it seemed sensible to tie up on a buoy at Salcombe harbour in Devon. Our performance might not have been outstanding, but it was our first time out
and there was no point in going completely mad. We waited until dawn, then headed off to find some breakfast on shore.

I had spoken to Neil Laughton, the leader of our Everest expedition, during the previous week and knew he was planning to be in the Salcombe area over the weekend. We bumped into him in the
village and he casually asked if we could take him and a couple of friends out for a spin on the water.

‘No problem,’ I replied; it would be fun, just like the old days. We were laughing and joking. The mood was good. Neil was excited to see the boat.

Somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind, however, a bell was ringing. I remembered that Salcombe was known for a raised strip of sand and rock just beneath the water’s surface, somewhere
near the front of the harbour. ‘Salcombe Bar’, as it is called, was reputed to be one of the most treacherous hazards on the British coastline.

The conditions were wind over tide now. Later – too late – I read the view of a round-the-world yachtsman who said he had seen awkward conditions all around the globe but nothing
quite so bad as the Salcombe Bar.

But this was only a muffled bell at the back of my mind as we headed out into the harbour. Neil was standing right at the bow of the boat, with two of his friends, and all seemed well. I did
notice the waves were beginning to build just a bit, but everybody was relaxed and smiling, shooting the breeze.

Then I looked straight ahead and saw what can only be described as a monster wave approaching. It was probably around 200 yards away, but it was very obviously heading in our direction.

Standing at the helm, my first instinct was to turn the boat and run away from this thing. Then I decided there was not enough time. We would have to face the wave head-on and try to ride it.
Seconds passed like minutes. Nobody was laughing any more. This rogue wave rolled irrepressibly towards us. People grabbed at handholds. We were doing only 10 knots.

It connected head-on, and our boat literally took off, nose up, out of the water. Then we dropped straight down 15 feet as the wave fell with a crash on to the stern of the boat. She pitched
forward wildly. It felt as though we had all been standing in an elevator and the cable had broken, and we had fallen down two storeys and smashed into the bottom.

Andy gashed his knee. I was shaking like a leaf. Neil was still just clinging on.

‘You guys are insane,’ he said, smiling, after we had turned the boat round and run back to shore with the subsequent waves. ‘You wouldn’t catch me 500 miles offshore in
this thing, in a big sea. Bloody hell! It’ll be nuts.’

To be honest, my legs were still shaking a couple of hours later, but in time we would learn to deal with waves like that. It was a matter of confidence and trust. We were learning how to handle
her in these conditions, slowly but surely, day by day.

On our second sea trial, we encountered some similar conditions around Portland Bill, Dorset, when the sea was breaking up and coming at us wildly from every direction. The area was infamous for
its rough waters. Although it was only a small taste of what we would find out in the big ocean, we began to feel the boat responding really well to the challenge. It was what she was designed for
and she loved it.

Andy was handling the throttle, I was helming and the boat was alive. We were being thrown around, but we were making progress, finding our way, starting to enjoy the challenge. The adrenalin
was up.

The following day, with everyone back at work, each of the guys – Mick, Nige, Charlie and Andy – called me individually to say they could hardly move because of the physical
battering they had taken on the water. I felt it too. We were stiff and sore, and that was after only fifteen hours in no more than tricky conditions.

Our early trials left us in no doubt about the scale and nature of what lay ahead. Legs of almost 900 miles over several days would leave us battered and bruised, and that worried me. I was
wiped out after only a day and a night – in summertime.

It became increasingly obvious that the real challenge for us was the fact that we were in a completely open boat, with nowhere to hide. I had underestimated this. In a round-the-world yacht you
have a cabin where you can shelter from the worst of the weather, a place to get out of the rain and spray, a place to rest and get dry in. We had no such luxury, no respite from the elements.
Whatever the weather and sea conditions, whether it was rain, sleet, waves, hail or spray, this was where we would live, eat and sleep. It was to become our most exhausting factor: the relentless
wet, cold and exposure. And we all learned to dread it.

For our final sea trial,
we travelled the 90 or so miles from Portsmouth to Jersey and back. We took the time to run through all our safety procedures: deploying the
life raft, putting out the parachute sea anchor, rehearsing our ‘man-overboard’ drills. It wasn’t the same as the real thing, but these were necessary disciplines to have learnt
by heart. Being able to deploy the sea anchor in under two minutes as waves pounded over the foredeck at night had to be instinctive; and that takes time to learn.

I threw endless fenders overboard for the guys to retrieve, all of us learning how to handle the boat delicately in a pitching sea. I did it again at dusk. They were getting it.

By 3 a.m., Mick was on watch. Everyone was tired. It was time for a live test of the ‘man-overboard’ drill; I had decided to be the dummy, and I wasn’t looking forward to it. I
was lying in the sardine tin with Nige, unable to sleep. I looked anxiously at my watch. We were exactly mid-Channel now. It was the worst time on the worst shift. I sat up, gave Nige a nudge just
to make sure he was awake, stood on the tubes and jumped into the black.

As per the drills, everyone leaped into action and Mick brought the boat round into the sea. The spotlight flickered on and they soon had me in the lee of the RIB, Mick carefully balancing the
jet controls holding me off by 5 yards.

‘What’s it worth, skipper?’ he shouted into the night. I was cold now and my heart was still pounding. I laughed, but only a little.

‘England is sixty miles that-a-way,’ he chuckled. ‘See you for breakfast.’ He drove off.

A short dogleg, and he was back alongside me.

‘Mick, you’ve got ten seconds to bring me in or I
will
kill you.’ Strong hands dragged me in, floundering. Andy threw me one of his diesel rags to dry myself, laughing.
But it had been a good drill to do.

The night was perfect, the sea was still and the stars and sky were bright. It was as easy as pie. We all sat quietly afterwards and could only imagine what it would be like in a wind-whipped
gale with icebergs all around. It would be a different game altogether. The truth is that getting back to a man overboard would be near impossible, and we all knew it. We turned and headed for
home.

In many ways,
the expedition was beginning to assume its own momentum. The funds were in the bank; the boatbuilding process was finally complete. We were talking to
shipping agents, managing relationships with sponsors, discussing finer details of the route and working out possible dates of departure bearing in mind the state of the ice-packs in the Arctic and
the weather patterns coming in. We were busier than ever.

There had been times, especially in the early days, when it had sometimes felt as though the entire expedition was resting on my shoulders. It was my dream and I was struggling to make it
happen. Those days had gone now, and most of the time I was able to stand back and oversee all the activity. I loved that.

Everything was happening all around me.

We had arranged two major crew meetings before the expedition, one six months before our scheduled departure and one just a week before. Every aspect of the expedition was discussed and checked.
Nige had all his maps laid out and carefully went over the routes and the contingency plans once again; Andy talked about the engine and the refuelling requirements; Mick went over the emergency
coastguard procedures and weather plans, and Chloë distributed her logistics folders.

Chloë Boyes was working for Goldman Sachs in London when we met. I told her one evening, as we chatted after a talk I had given, about the administrative challenges – to put it mildly
– that existed in my life. Shara was pregnant, everything was hectic and I was struggling to stay afloat.

She saw the problem as clearly as I did. I needed some help. More than this, she proposed a solution; she wanted some excitement and I wanted an efficient number two. I should employ her as a PA
to handle all the admin. I felt a burden lift off me.