Authors: Bear Grylls
Bear Grylls (59 page)
Time was moving so slowly, but everything was hurtling through my head at treble speed. I suddenly saw familiar faces in the sea and the waves. I reached out to touch Mick. I just needed to know
he was there.
I was tiring. I had to be stronger.
The only light on the boat was a dull green glow from the screen but it was enough to see what I had spotted. Glued to the edge of the console was a small, laminated photograph of Shara, holding
our little Jesse; and she was smiling at me.
I had never felt in such danger of not seeing them again. I felt sick. I stared at Jesse, my little son. It broke my heart. ‘How have I got into this situation?’ I murmured. ‘I
promise you I will come home. I will see you again.’
I started muttering even louder to myself, almost talking out loud. I was speaking to Shara. My love.
‘I will get this boat back safely. I will get back to you. Watch me, baby, this one last time.’
Shara has always
believed in me. She thinks I am stronger than I am. She thinks I am nicer than I am. She defends me and always takes my side. If I am annoyed with
someone, so is she. If I am exhausted, she soothes me. She makes me calm when I am nervous. And I have always loved her. She’s my buddy. I would not break the promise I had made her at
Heathrow.
Together, we had the world to live for. We had a son.
My mind raced back to that afternoon when little Jesse was born. I remember so vividly how people had warned me against watching my wife give birth: ‘It’s so animalistic,’ they
said.
It was a strange word. Yet every ounce of me wanted to be alongside her. It was our time, the biggest moment of our lives, and I knew we should be together.
It felt as though the world was standing still. I sat there and held her as she writhed in pain. In her weakness, she somehow looked so strong, so feminine, so pretty. Not animalistic. I was
witnessing so much more than the birth of a child; I was also watching the birth of a woman. Shara.
This was my family, all I had ever dreamed of, and the two of them both looked so frail as they lay there wiped out, exhausted. We had always wanted to call him Jesse. Shara said it was after
King David’s father in the Bible. King David had been quite a player. He even killed a giant called Goliath when he was only a kid. I liked the name though because it reminded me of Uncle
Jesse in
The Dukes of Hazzard
– in dungarees, with a big white dirty beard.
But Jesse also means ‘God’s gift’. That felt so right to us.
As I watched them both sleep in the hospital, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of protectiveness. I would do anything for them; I would even die for them. I had never felt that before.
And right here, in the pitch black of the storm, utterly drained, sodden and frightened, I felt as though I was being asked, ‘Could I now live for them?’
‘Come on, Bear,
we’ll get through this,’ Mick shouted in my ear, thumping me on the back. ‘We’ve been through worse than this and come out
alive. We’ll do it again. We’ll just get through this . . . then we’ll never go anywhere again!’ And he slapped me once more.
Then Mick rummaged through the sodden food sack and pulled out another can of Red Bull. He swigged at it, then lifted my visor. I opened my mouth and tilted my head back so he could pour the
liquid caffeine down my throat. It went everywhere.
‘Come on, Bear, you’re doing great, keep going! We can do this, buddy. Just keep going.’
Adrenalin was still surging through our bodies as on and on, through the night, we kept shouting at each other, punching each other, encouraging each other. And somehow we kept going.
Ever since Mick and I were eight years old, playing around in the Isle of Wight, there has been a bond between us. That bond was built through school, strengthened on the cold south-east ridge
of Everest when he so nearly died; and now it was being reforged in the icy, choppy waters of the frozen North Atlantic.
While we were fighting our own battles at the console, there were three other men on that boat, huddled in the sardine tin, desperately trying to cope with their own worlds of terror inside
their heads.
Charlie recalls:
For ten hours or so, I was absolutely convinced I was going to die. It was not just a question of being afraid; rather, an utter conviction that I was near the end.
It was not a question of ‘if’; it was rather a matter of ‘when’, because I really believed the boat was going to flip.
Strangely, I had thought about this kind of near-death experience in advance. Before the expedition, I would get fit by running in the streets around my home in Manchester and, whenever I
needed to motivate myself to push harder, I just imagined I had been thrown into the freezing water and I was swimming to get back to the boat. That image was very clear in my mind, and now it
seemed to be about to happen, for real.
In some ways, the thought of drowning had always sounded quite relaxing. That’s a bit morbid, I know, but the idea of being in the water, floating away, being numb to everything,
thinking how nice it was not to have to worry about the bank manager – I must admit that I found that whole concept to be quite relaxing.
However, when it came to the crunch, the human instinct for preservation did kick in. I remember deciding I really did want to do quite a lot of things before I die. I didn’t want to die
here and now. I was not going to give up lightly. I was quite surprised by this. I thought of my immediate family: that kicked in, and very strongly. It was practical, not emotional. It was my
decision: I didn’t want to die. I wanted to get through this.
For me, time passed quite quickly. If you tell someone to sit in the corner, the first ten minutes go slowly, but then the hours pass quickly; and I wasn’t really aware of Bear and Mick
although I could see them hitting each other and shouting at each other. When things had started getting serious, they had gone all military; they were both practical and impressive, but I was
still terrified.
Huddled beside Charlie, almost indistinguishable in a cold, wet heap, Nige shook with the cold and with his thoughts.
He recalls:
I understood Bear’s decision to helm through the night. He felt that was what he had to do in the circumstances, and, from my point of view, well, it meant I
didn’t have to move – it was a bit of a result.
My main concern, though, was that the boat would flip, and I was trying to plan how I would get out of the boat from where I was lying. I imagined it would happen very quickly, and my strategy
was to get myself around the back of the boat, pull the life raft out from where it was stowed and then help any of the guys who might be caught inside. We would set off our EPIRB distress
signals, and call for help on the VHF radio.
This was my plan, but, lying there in the sardine tin, I knew it would be futile. If that boat flipped, there was no doubt at all that there would have been five dead bodies in the ocean. That
is for certain. We were more than 200 miles from land, and there was no sign of any other shipping in our vicinity.
I didn’t know exactly what it would take to make the boat go over, but it felt as if it was going to go over at every wave. It was going upright, and slamming down; then we would get hit
from the side. I have never wanted to be somewhere else so much. I’m not religious, but I did find myself asking for someone to help us.
I prayed. We all prayed. We were praying for our lives.
And, somehow, we kept the boat upright.
Dawn seemed never to arrive. It was the blackest night I had ever seen. Mick and I would imagine the dawn ahead of us, to the east. We would then be convinced we could see it. But it was always
an illusion; or worse, another wall of white water.
We knew that dawn would bring the light with it, and that would mean we would be able to read the seas once more.
Finally, though, the night sky began to brighten in the east. Together, shoulder to shoulder, Mick and I watched as dawn crept slowly over the distant horizon. The wind was just as strong, and
the waves were just as menacing; we were still in danger, but we knew that our greatest enemy, the darkness, was disappearing before us.
My eyes settled on one of the laminated sayings stuck around the boat. It had been placed on the console just beside the photograph of Shara and Jesse and read, ‘Each day ends so that a
new beginning can be made.’
As the early morning of Friday, 8 August 2003 dawned over the Denmark Strait, it was indeed a new beginning.
I asked Mick to get all the guys up and huddle round. I wanted to encourage them. We could get through this now. There was hope. We had been through hell together, but I felt we were emerging
out the other side.
So we cramped together, all of us freezing cold, the others squatting behind us on the edge of the sardine tin. I felt the cold chill of dawn on my face as I turned to them. It was 5.15 a.m. We
were all exhausted and bedraggled, wearing full gear and helmets, squashed on this small boat in the midst of a still-heaving ocean.
‘OK, guys,’ I began, shouting again to make myself heard. ‘First of all, I am sorry that I broke the rota. I found a way of handling the boat, using the bucket to control her,
so I wanted to keep going rather than stop in the middle of the night and have to explain how we could each do this.
‘I know it’s been a tough and bloody cold night for everyone, but we’re going to get through this. It’s daylight now. The sea has just lost its greatest ally – the
darkness. There is no reason why we shouldn’t make it out of this. We’re going to reach Iceland.
‘Only two things will stop us.
‘The first is that we run out of fuel. But there is no need for this to happen. Andy has control of this, and we have enough to reach Iceland. But, Charlie, help him. Look out for him. Get
him something to eat. Help him manage the fuel systems. Andy, we need all your skill and attention for these last few hundred miles.’
Andy nodded.
‘The second is that we flip the boat. But I am telling you, we will not flip her if we concentrate and helm her correctly. We
will
flip if anyone loses concentration. Whoever is
helming needs to be 120 per cent alert. There was margin for helming error before; that does not exist in this sea state.
‘From now on, we go back to the rota. Everybody will helm for only half an hour at a time now, and we must help each other. We must all dig deeper than ever before. If we do this, we
will
reach Iceland before nightfall.’
Then I took a couple of minutes with everyone in turn, to show them how we could minimize the slamming by adjusting the position of the bucket over the jet. They all saw our defiant, plucky RIB
respond, hugging the breaking waves as she punched through them.
Charlie later described my whole speech as ‘almost Churchillian’. I’m not sure that’s quite true, but I was just trying to keep everyone hanging on in there, just a
little bit longer.
Mick and I were exhausted by now, and we collapsed into the sardine tin. Nige and Andy began to share the helming. Charlie had told me he didn’t want to take the responsibility at this
stage. I respected him for saying that. It was time for Andy and Nige to become the most important men on the boat, with our lives in their hands. And Charlie, as ever, kept their spirits up by
feeding them chocolate and water.
Together, we had survived our longest night.
Back home in England, our friends and families were starting what would very soon become their longest day.
Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you, wherever you go.
Joshua 1:9
We had said
we would call the base team at 8.30 a.m.
This was impossible.
As we had feared, the physical battering had taken its toll on our equipment, knocking out the compass, the radio and the SAT phone. The five of us had somehow survived the night of Force Eight
gales, but, one by one, our carefully installed electronic systems had packed up and died.
By dawn, only the Simrad plotter and the Caterpillar engine were still in working order. And without the power to charge the SAT phone, we had no way of making these vital calls back to the UK.
Our families, friends and our UK base would hear nothing, and there was little we could do.
The waves were still dangerous and wild, and the wind was still holding at gale strength; even in the daylight, when we could see the waves, we were fighting to survive.
Without precious
electrical power, we had no way of telling if our tracking device was working.
It wasn’t. We had dropped off the screen completely. Just like that.
It subsequently became clear we had lost power at 3.16 a.m.; that was the time when the tracker unit had stopped transmitting the signals, indicating our precise position and speed.
We knew that many people, up to 30,000 a day, and most importantly our friends and families, had been following our progress, live, through the website. They had grown accustomed to logging on
and checking our latest position, as broadcast by the tracking unit every thirty minutes. At 3.16 that morning, the blips stopped and we effectively disappeared.
Back home, people were waking up and could see clearly that there was some kind of problem.
Shara recalls:
I had become obsessed with tracking Bear’s position on the Internet. I was staying with my mother in the country, and she had become obsessed by it as well. So we got up
at about quarter to eight on the Friday morning, and logged on as usual. But something was wrong. Their position had not been updated since 3 a.m. I thought that was a bit weird, but then there
had been the odd little gap before, so I didn’t panic.
I called Chloë, and she said not to worry. She told me Mick had called at two thirty in the morning, and had promised they would phone her again at eight thirty. She didn’t say what
Mick had told her about the storm. So I assumed all was OK. Chloë promised she would give me a call as soon as she heard from them.
I was busy getting Jesse ready because we were driving up to London for his eight-week check-up, but I noticed half past eight come and go with no call from Chloë. I didn’t want to
be a nuisance, but I was just beginning to get a bit concerned, so I called her at nine thirty. She told me they had still not called.