Rowboat in a Hurricane (13 page)

But for two Canadians in a quarter-inch-thick plywood rowboat sitting directly in the hurricane’s path, Vince definitely was a danger.

It was surreal to look through the salt-crusted Plexiglas hatch at the spirited waves slapping our boat. The ocean conditions were still reasonable, but the new information set off an emotional tempest in our hearts and minds. A storm with the strength of a ten-megatonne nuclear bomb exploding every twenty minutes was moving implacably towards us across the open ocean. I felt like a prisoner in a penitentiary about to be consumed by flames. There was no way out. All we could do was sit in our tiny cabin and hope we would survive. I tried to calm myself through rationalization and ponder how we could prepare for the storm. Really, though, I felt the chances were quite high that we wouldn’t survive, if the hurricane hit us square on.

“Well, I guess we’d better clear the decks and get all our safety equipment as handy as possible,” Colin said in a flat voice. “We can move the life raft a little closer to the entrance hatch, at the expense of some shoulder space.”

“Have you noticed that we haven’t seen any ships since that fishing boat four days ago?” I said. Before then, the seas had been quite busy, and usually we saw several freighters each day.

“Yeah, undoubtedly all shipping is being routed away from the hurricane’s path,” Colin said. “I strongly suspect we’re the last boat in this neck of the woods.”

We clambered onto the deck and began readying it for the storm ahead. We double-checked the lashing of the spare oars and stowed the working oars. We removed the stove from its plywood recess and stuffed it into the adjacent locker. We double-checked the bilge pump, made sure all hatches were secured properly, removed and secured the rudder, and coiled loose ropes. Finally, Colin and I returned to the cabin, dripping with ocean spray, and began preparing it. We nailed down all the plywood lids for the compartments beneath our bed. This would prevent the huge mass of food and equipment stored beneath the mattress from becoming a lethal avalanche if the boat capsized.

Colin checked the batteries in the handheld
VHF
radio and
GPS
, and I organized our emergency supplies. We had a grab bag that contained what we’d need if we were forced to abandon ship and climb into the life raft. This yellow dry bag held flares, a handheld
VHF
radio, a
GPS
, high-energy food, a small amount of drinking water, the hand-crank desalinator, a signalling mirror, a small first aid kit, and other important items for survival. I added some additional chocolate, and then, thinking back to Colin’s earlier story about the crew member on the capsized trimaran and her baseball-sized turd, tossed in a handful of prunes.

Once the boat was ready, we went through verbal drills for different disasters. We would abandon the rowboat only if it was completely destroyed. If the boat was holed or taking in water, we would fight to stop the inflow and then bail or pump out the brine. If we capsized, we would wait for the boat to right and, if it didn’t, we would sway our bodies back and forth in unison to rock it back upright.

I called the Hurricane Center for an update, praying that Vince had changed course or dissipated. They relayed Vince’s coordinates, speed, and predicted path. The news was not good. The hurricane was still moving towards us and the eye was now only four hundred kilometres away. We could expect the weather conditions to degrade significantly, and within twenty-four hours, we would be in the centre of the storm.

I plotted the hurricane’s present position on the chart, and it looked frighteningly close to the little X that marked our position. I still struggled to comprehend the significance that these markings represented. One X was a small plywood rowboat, our home. The X with the circle around it was a full-fledged hurricane. We were already in the perimeter of the hurricane, and it was predicted to keep moving towards us at twenty kilometres per hour.

I peered out the hatch. Suddenly, the sea was formidable, savagely powerful. All around us, the waters heaved and surged. The crests of giant aqueous mountains collapsed in great foaming avalanches. Winds blasted spray and foam horizontally across the sea’s surface. It had only taken a few hours for the sea to transform from moderate swell to total chaos. This morning the winds had been force seven on the Beaufort scale, which would have elicited a small craft warning. Now they had intensified to force nine—gale-force. We could expect conditions to escalate to force twelve or greater (off the scale) when the hurricane was on top of us.

These conditions were beyond anything I had imagined before embarking on this expedition. I couldn’t even begin to conceptualize the state of the ocean in a force-twelve storm. Already conditions inside our boat were unbearable. Colin and I slammed against each other with every breaking wave. I was bruised and in pain. My seasickness had returned, and I was unable to eat or drink.

I broke the silence and articulated the question that hung over us. “How bad do you think it’s going to get?”

Colin looked more worried than I had ever seen. “I once had two cyclones simultaneously heading towards my sailboat in the Coral Sea in
1997
—cyclones Harold and Gillian . . . ”

I had already heard this story, but now I listened with a renewed, grim fascination. Colin had been en route to Papua New Guinea from Australia when he heard on the shortwave radio that not one but two cyclones were forming on the Coral Sea. Neither of the storms had hit him square on, but his boat sustained significant damage and he barely made it through. He and two Danish backpackers he had taken on as crew bailed the boat throughout the storm using buckets after their bilge pump broke. They had barely kept the boat from sinking.

“I expect it will be a lot worse than that, and that was bad,” Colin said. “After that final sailing voyage in
1997
, I vowed never to sail in a cyclone zone again.”

He exhaled a long, deep sigh. He looked defeated. “But here I am once again, sitting in a small boat with a hurricane closing in.”

Although the malevolent clouds and torrential rain already blocked most of the sun’s glow, I became terrified when all the light from our shadowy world was extinguished at
6
:
30 PM
. I felt I was in a coffin and somebody had just closed the lid for the last time. According to all reports, the hurricane’s strength would be at its peak shortly after midnight. If disaster struck, we would have to function in complete darkness. I shivered and squeezed Colin close.

The wind created a permanent high-pitched shriek as it whipped through the lifelines. Breaking waves roared and gurgled—at times sounding almost guttural, like the voices of old men. I wished for my earplugs to block out the sounds. Giant waves slammed into the boat, launching us sideways down their faces at frightening speeds. Sometimes our vessel was pushed onto its side as it catapulted forward. Inside the cabin we smashed against the thinly padded walls and each other. I was tired, exhausted, and scared. I needed time to rest and recover, but the ocean wouldn’t allow it.

It was now
9
:
00 PM
and the cabin was completely dark, except for the bright flashes of our strobe light and the frequent lightning strikes. I tucked my head into the narrow stern and felt Colin’s feet pressed against my neck. Lying head to foot seemed safer because it gave us each room to brace ourselves for the impact of the waves. I listened intently to the ocean, trying to discern the size of the waves from the thunderous bellows that heralded their approach.

The biggest waves were always preceded by a moment of silence, as though they sucked the life from the neighbouring swells to gain their power. While Colin struggled to secure the life raft that had come free of its mounting, a sudden quiet caught me by surprise. The only noise was the incessant shrieking of the wind. Even the boat had momentarily stopped moving. Suddenly our boat began rising, and I could hear a deep rumbling that quickly increased in intensity. Instinctively I knew this would be the biggest hit yet, and I braced my shoulders against both sides of the boat. A small squeak of terror escaped my lips.

An intense force threw the boat onto its side while water surged over the deck and cabin. We landed on the starboard wall, and I could feel Colin’s teeth digging into my feet. The life raft, encased in a hard plastic shell, had slammed into his back and was pinning him momentarily against my legs and the wall. The boat teetered for a few seconds on its side, and I was sure we were going over. A second explosive wave hit the boat and, thankfully, knocked it upright.

I pulled the life raft away from Colin and was relieved to see he was all right. We worked quickly to lash it down before it caused real damage. A loose fifty-two-kilogram object inside the boat’s cabin was dangerous and I wasn’t in the mood to appreciate the irony of being killed by our life raft.

“It’s
2
:
00 AM
,” Colin said. “This is when the storm was supposed to peak.”

Although the hurricane’s force was far from over, this was excellent news; we would have to wait only a few more hours before conditions started to subside. I patted the wooden walls of our boat and quietly thanked her. When I had first laid eyes on
Ondine,
I’d had a good feeling about her. I now felt that she would take us through to the other side of Hurricane Vince.

I was still tired, but most of my fear had been replaced with guilt. I felt terrible for all the worry I caused my parents. It was my decision to be here and I accepted the risks, but my parents didn’t have a choice in the matter. They had raised me in a protective environment, but now that I was an adult, they could only voice their displeasure at my life choices and eventually accept them. Every time I spoke to my mom, she’d say, in parting, “I pray for you every night.” It gave her piece of mind that I was in God’s benevolent hands (except she worried I wouldn’t go to heaven because I wasn’t Lutheran). I don’t know if my dad prayed for me, but he did tell me that I had given him more than a few grey hairs and sleepless nights.

When Colin was rowing across the Bering Sea nine months before I joined him in Moscow, I realized just how difficult it is to be at home while the one you love is in danger. The Bering Sea contains some of the world’s most dangerous waters, and conditions were so severe that the U.S. Coast Guard requested I relay Colin’s coordinates to them twice a day. With nothing to do but wait, I felt powerless. That horrendous feeling influenced my decision to row across the Atlantic. Instead of helplessly waiting and worrying while Colin rowed across the Atlantic as part of his circumnavigation of the world, I wanted to be absorbed by my own exciting challenge. And although I could think of a million places I’d rather have been now, if Colin was facing this hurricane, I didn’t want to be anywhere else. At least whatever happened would happen to both of us.

I prayed we would be able to endure the storm and watch the rising sun, but my words felt hollow, directed to a nebulous, omnipotent being I didn’t fully believe in. For me, religion has always been a source of confusion and disruption. As a child, each of my parents tried to convince me of the merits of their respective religions, Islam and Lutheranism. I went to a Catholic high school because my parents worried the public school was crowded with hoodlums. I attended church, mosque, Sunday school, and Islamic teachings. I was baptized, and I owned a prayer rug, a head scarf, a robe, the Koran, and the Bible.

I didn’t mind learning about different religions, but I loathed the strife and turmoil they caused in our home. My parents fought bitterly about religion and how I should be raised. My mother slyly served my father pork while my father scolded my mother for not converting to Islam. “A Muslim man must have a Muslim wife,” he’d say. “What’s wrong with pork?” my mother would ask. She just couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t eat a nice German bratwurst or schnitzel. And I couldn’t understand how something that was supposed to promote peace and love could foster such insensitivity and animosity.

My parents tried hard to make things work, but I knew from an early age that they stayed together mostly for me. So when I was fourteen and my dad told me he was divorcing my mom, I wasn’t surprised. In a way, it was almost a relief, an unburdening of guilt stemming from my belief that I’d caused my parents to sacrifice so much of their lives to a relationship that made them unhappy.

My mom seemed to take the news fairly well. It wasn’t a traumatic affair—she just accepted it, and the divorce was more of a slow transition. My mom and I continued living on the Trenton base in military housing, while my dad moved to Oshawa, a city an hour and a half away, and remarried. My mom and I eventually moved into low-income housing in Trenton, and after I left for university, she relocated to Hamilton, where she still lives now. Meanwhile, my father went through another divorce and now lives in Toronto, married to a sweet Syrian woman with whom he has two lovely children.

BY 6:00 AM THE
energy of the storm had decreased noticeably. The rays of the rising sun pierced through tattered holes in sullen clouds, illuminating spray that glittered as it was driven by forty-five-knot winds. Small rainbows formed and vanished, a moving kaleidoscope of colour.

“I think we’ve done it,” I whispered. “We’ve made it through the hurricane. Just a few more hours and things should be getting better.”

Colin nodded. His eyes were bloodshot, and his body was marked with bruises. I’m sure I looked no better. I had just experienced the worst three days of my life. But now, the prospect of the hurricane passing provided immense relief. I rolled onto the sweat-soaked duvet and snuggled my head into the pillow. For the first time in two days, I fell into a deep, peaceful sleep.