Bear Grylls (48 page)

At about 3 a.m. Charlie was on watch and his attention was drawn by a green glow in the sky to the north.

‘What’s that?’

‘It must be the lights of Newfoundland,’ Nige suggested.

But Newfoundland is a huge, magnificent wilderness, not a city electrified and lit for 10 million inhabitants.

‘Or maybe it’s an oil rig,’ I wondered.

‘No way,’ Andy replied. ‘That’s the northern lights.’

And it was. This was nature’s famous lightshow, staged every night at the northern end of the planet. We sat in wonder. The effect was stunning, as if the sky was being illuminated by the
stage-lights of some sort of heavenly concert. We sat entranced, in the world’s biggest and most spectacular arena.

Our expectation after that first night was that we would be treated to this natural extravaganza most nights across the freezing ocean ahead. However, we never saw them again. The weather made
sure of that. More often than not, dense cloud cover obscured the northern lights and gave us long, dark nights.

But that was all in the future. For now, on this first night of the expedition, the five of us settled back, enjoyed the view and picked contentedly at our boil-in-the-bag sachets of baked
beans. That night, it was impossible not to feel richly blessed.

The northern lights lasted until around 4 a.m., and Mick and I helmed through that last night-time shift before dawn, while the others snatched a couple of hours’ rest in the sardine tin.
In a tranquil, misty dawn we pulled into Port aux Basques at just after 6.30 a.m.

We could hardly have been luckier with the way things were going so far. Everyone was slipping into their role and feeling confident. Each of us was playing our part with one clear goal in mind:
to stay alive and complete the crossing. If it was going to be like this every day and night, then it would be easy. Privately, we knew that wouldn’t happen. It was only ever a matter of time
before the skies and seas would change.

As we approached
the quay at Port aux Basques, I spotted the harbourmaster standing by to welcome us. He had been telephoned and forewarned by Chloë. The tracker
system had kept her informed of our every move, and her attention to small details like this had an enormous impact on the expedition. It was the difference between being warmly greeted on arrival
at a far-flung outpost and arriving and trying to find someone to talk to and having to explain who we were.

‘Welcome to Port aux Basques,’ declared the harbourmaster with a broad smile.

I had expected this place to be a major hub for shipping in the area. It was, after all, one of the last ‘big’ ports before the northern waters of the Arctic ahead and a staging post
for shipping between Newfoundland and mainland Canada. Instead, there were just a few old concrete and wooden piers stretching out to sea, where the big icebreakers and ferries could refuel and
disembark.

The rapidly rising sun was warming the cold air of dawn, and, happy to have arrived, we all began to peel off the layers of dry suits, thermals, Gortex and waterproofs.

A group of local fishermen were sitting on the wooden walkway at the head of our pier. Leaning over the railings, side by side, smoking silently, they were dressed in lumberjack shirts and
chest-high rough waterproofs and were watching us cautiously as we bustled about the boat.

I was now down to my undies, and felt deeply relieved to have got rid of all the heavy, stinking kit, which now lay in a pile on the foredeck. Right then, I realized we needed some more rope
and, on the foreshore, I happened to spot an old corrugated building with a sign marked ‘supplies’.

They would have what we needed, but I really didn’t fancy getting dressed in all my kit again. I glanced over at the fishermen and thought, well, I am sure they have seen a man in his
underwear before. So I pulled on my Musto ocean boots, took a deep breath and, dressed in nothing apart from underpants and boots, walked gingerly past the fishermen to the shop.

They looked at me, looked at each other, then stared out to sea, puffing on their cigarettes, without saying a word. Charlie, chortling, caught the whole scene on camera.

The sun was shining on a clear morning, and I was wandering around a chandlery in my pants. I was in heaven.

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he first loses sight of the shore.

Christopher Columbus

British people traditionally
seem fascinated by trying to forecast the weather. It’s a national obsession: we watch the news and then we watch the weather. It
never serves much purpose, save the vague satisfaction, upon hearing the rain on the roof, of noting whether or not the forecasters were correct. This is a strange pastime, and one at which my
mother-in-law is a maestro.

‘Hmm,’ Vinnie often muses from her sofa when it starts to pour outside, ‘they were right.’

She assumes this is, of course, highly irregular.

Out on the North Atlantic, though, the stakes were a bit higher than whether or not it would drizzle during the summer fête.

For us, the weather forecast was everything. If our expedition was going to go smoothly, it would probably be because we got the weather forecast right. Similarly, if the expedition ended in
disaster, it was more than likely going to be because our weather forecast was wrong. This worried me. So much seemed to hang on these forecasts . . . our lives in particular; and so many of those
forecasts, ultimately, appeared to be down to luck.

We were not looking for rough seas and storms – there was too much at stake. We didn’t want to be heroes – all we wanted was to be safe. We would stay safe by getting the
forecast right.

It was as simple as that.

Everything I wanted most in the world – to get back safely to Shara and Jesse, to be the best husband and the best dad I could be – depended on accurate weather forecasting and
staying away from the bad stuff.

Plenty of other factors could go wrong, but the implications of bad weather were by far the greatest danger. In such an exposed, small boat, we were highly vulnerable.

Andy, with his experience of the sea, was well aware of our precarious circumstances. In March, some months before we set off, he was on board HMS
Newcastle
in heavy seas off the coast of
Cornwall. HMS
Newcastle
is a type-42 Destroyer, 462 feet in length, and, from his position on the bridge, with hundreds of tonnes of wild water pouring over her bows, the ship pitching
wildly as she battled through the blackness, Andy began to understand how vulnerable we would be in an open RIB, only 33 feet long. He knew as well as we all did that the forecasting really
mattered.

As soon as we arrived in Port aux Basques, I took time with Mick to check the weather forecast. This would become a ritual: whenever we arrived in port, Mick and I would use our first spare
moments to research the weather and call Mike Town in the UK.

Mike is one of the top meteorologists in Britain and was one of the few experts to predict the hurricane in 1987. We were extremely lucky to have him on hand.

We got through to him on the satellite (SAT) phone first time.

It was our first call back from the boat. Our system of hunting good weather had begun. It was midday back in England, and this was just about the only occasion when Mike Town would be called at
a sensible time of day. Unfortunately, we ended up calling him at all times of the nights ahead, but he was kind enough to expect and accept these calls whenever they came. He understood only too
well how much we relied on him.

‘We’re in Port aux Basques. How does the weather look from here?’

‘It’s looking OK,’ he replied. ‘You shouldn’t have any problems for the next twenty-four hours.’

‘So it’s clear?’ Mick asked.

‘Pretty much. There are a few localized small fronts but nothing really menacing. There’s a big storm passing to your south, but that should miss you. The temperature will drop from
here onwards, but you shouldn’t find more than Force Five northerlies, and they’re going your way. It should be fine.’

When I first met Mike I called him ‘sir’. He was my geography teacher at school, but he soon became a friend as well. He was a climber and a martial artist and a real character,
loved by many of his students. He used to arrange climbing trips to the Lake District, which Mick and I, aged fifteen, adored and took very seriously. For both of us, he became genuinely
inspirational, and we have stayed in touch with him ever since leaving school.

Soon after meeting Shara, I planned to take her away for a weekend’s climbing. Shara was under the impression it was purely a romantic getaway weekend, which it was of sorts, but it did
also involve two ascents of Skiddaw, the hard way. It was Mike who lent me the keys to his cottage in Cumbria.

In the years when I was training with the army, Mike used to pack stones in my rucksack and run off ahead up the mountains, dragged by two abnormally large Bernese mountain dogs, telling me to
hurry up because he had the sandwiches.

Time and again, Mike has been a source of support and friendship, a man I have learned to trust absolutely. And I loved the fact that he had been one of the few to predict the hurricane!

Some people might think it is a bit unusual, maybe a bit amateurish, to set out across the North Atlantic with your old geography teacher as one of your main sources of meteorological advice.
But I liked that. I suppose I was just lucky that my old geography teacher happened to be such an expert in this field.

The Fleet Weather Centre, operated by the navy, also provided us with invaluable information at various stages of the expedition, and when Internet access was available in port we logged on to
various weather websites, including one maintained by, and designed for, the US military.

Our third source of guidance was the local population. The people living in these isolated and far-flung places were not slow to offer their opinions on the weather. Down the years, through the
generations, they had learned to interpret and recognize patterns; to look at the sky, feel the wind and trust their instincts.

The bottom line was that we were trying to avoid the storms, and these people were fishermen by trade. Avoiding the storms was what they had to do every day of every year of their lives.

In Port aux Basques, the local people seemed relaxed about the weather. Wizened old men appeared near the dock later in the morning and told us how they had only just emerged from nineteen days
of dense fog, but now things seemed to be clearing.

‘You should still be careful,’ said one old man, dressed in a thick woollen jersey and faded jeans. ‘Things can change very quickly out there.’

Routinely, we were used to predicting the weather for a journey of, say, 60 miles offshore. That is still a long way out to sea. But we needed now to estimate the conditions for a crossing as
long as almost 1,000 miles. That was a whole different beast.

You might be told that wind speed was only 5 to 10 knots, and think that is all right, but a wind just 20 per cent over that can still produce enormous swells. This in turn reduces the speed of
the boat, and suddenly your carefully planned two-day forecast would have to become a three- or four-day guestimate . . . and it was that extra time that was so unknown and dangerous.

We had always known that accurate forecasting would be difficult, not least because we would be passing through waters that were, to a large extent, uncharted. Where little shipping traffic
passes, the authorities understandably don’t place too many weather buoys, so information was sketchy and forecasts often unreliable.

Most of the time, we simply had to be satisfied with an accurate twenty-four-hour forecast, and thereafter we would make a reasonable assessment and hope. Above all, we simply tried to be
cautious and sensible.

It was just before ten o’clock on another brisk and clear morning when the
Arnold and Son Explorer
pulled away from Port aux Basques. We had refuelled, paying for the diesel with a
heavy fistful of our US$50 bills, taken from a watertight container in the depths of the hold where we stored our cash, passports, wallets and photographs of home. We said goodbye to the locals and
once again pointed our nose north.

Within fifteen minutes, though, we were in dense sea fog, and we found ourselves edging through what felt like thick, soggy soup. The fog was so intense that at times it was impossible to see
the bow of the boat. We were driving blind.

We had been warned of magnetic variables in this region, and the compass started to behave erratically. This was worrying. We were now relying entirely on the accuracy of our electrical
instruments to make any progress at all.

Every now and then, through the mist, we caught a glimpse of Newfoundland away to our right, a craggy stretch of coast or a distant lighthouse; then everything would go grey and damp again,
enveloping us in mist. Everything gets wet in seconds as this type of fog hits you. Inexorably and quietly, it covers you in moisture.

The sea though stayed calm and flat, and we moved steadily on through this strange, silent seascape. Minute by minute, we were beginning to settle into a routine.

As the afternoon drew on, the temperature began to drop and the waves started to build steadily into a swell. The change was slow and gradual, but we were clearly approaching much bigger seas.
We knew we were heading up towards the Belle Isle Strait, a natural funnel of water where the wind and currents drive the ice down between Newfoundland and Labrador. It was an infamous stretch of
water, and not much used. It was dangerous and unpredictable and was now less than 300 miles to the north. We were readying ourselves.

Perceptibly, the feel of everything was changing. We were alone and heading north. It was only going to get colder and more isolated from now on and ice was ahead, somewhere. We had no idea how
long it would be until we saw it, but it was out there, waiting, floating massively to our north. We knew that Port aux Basques was to be our last port of accessible civilization for a long
time.