Rowboat in a Hurricane (14 page)
T
HREE IRREGULARLY
coloured clouds sat on the horizon. They were white and puffy on top, but dark grey underneath. They sat stationary in an otherwise clear sky. Despite their unusual colour, I wasn’t worried. In fact, I was quite excited by the presence of these clouds. Before the era of Global Positioning Systems and accurate charts, mariners relied on clouds to indicate land in the distance. That’s because warm air above ground rises to build clouds.
Since the passing of Hurricane Vince two weeks before, we had encountered fair weather conditions and made good progress towards the Canary Islands, two hundred kilometres off the shores of Morocco. We had not seen land since leaving Portugal almost a month before, and were excited at the prospect of viewing volcanic mountains rising from the sea. Our
GPS
indicated that the islands were still about a hundred kilometres away. These puffs in the distance had likely formed over the Canaries, and it was somewhat reassuring to have a natural verification of land in the distance, not just a digital readout.
I looked for other signs of land that the ancient mariners had relied upon. Were distant islands interrupting the pattern of the waves? I couldn’t really see any significant changes. I looked for non-pelagic birds in the sky, but just saw the usual shearwaters and stormy petrels. Recently, however, we had witnessed more bountiful wildlife in the sea. Yesterday had been particularly lively and we’d spotted a pod of more than fifty dolphins, a six-metre whale, a much smaller shark, and a hawksbill turtle. The Canary Islands are a world-class diving destination, and it made sense that the density of marine life would increase as we neared the shallow waters off the reefs.
I frequently peered over my shoulder as I pulled the oars through the relatively calm waters, anxious to catch my first glimpse of land again. The visibility wasn’t great because of a haze. At the end of my shift, as I stood up to get off the rowing seat, my increased vantage point allowed me to see farther into the distance. I could see a faint blue smudge rising from the sea, and I knew it wasn’t a cloud.
“It’s land!” I shouted.
Colin climbed out of the cabin, peered into the distance, and gave a whoop of excitement. We both stood on the deck, staring in awe at terra firma in the distance. When Hurricane Vince had borne down on us two weeks ago, I thought I might never see land again. Now, ensconced in a settled high-pressure system and stable weather, Colin and I entered the waters off the Canary Islands. I felt I had finally emerged from a very dark dream. I longed to set foot on solid ground again.
Tempting as it was, we had no plans of making landfall in the Canary Islands. The danger of landing on these islands, which are buttressed with high cliffs and crashing waves, was just too great. We couldn’t risk losing our boat on the rocks. Instead, we would stay well away from their churning shorelines as we passed between them. It would still be reassuring to be near civilization.
As the islands became more distinct, we could make out the two most eastern islands of the group, Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. Rocky beige slopes reached for the sea and volcanic cinder cones stretched skyward to create a pocked landscape. These two islands are the driest in the Canary archipelago, and the little rainfall they receive keeps their slopes devoid of greenery. There are no year-round streams on any on the islands; instead, a network of ravines occasionally drains rainwater and, at the higher elevations, snowmelt.
A large variety of animals make their home on the Canary Islands—including, not surprisingly, canaries. But the islands were not named after the bird. The ancient Romans encountered fierce dogs on one of the islands. They deemed the place
Insula Canaria
—Latin for “Island of the Dogs.” Eventually the name Canary came to be used to describe all of the islands in this group, and the bright yellow finches that flitted about the arid slopes were then named after the islands they inhabited.
The Islands are also known for their many microsystems. Hot, dry air from the Sahara converges with cool, moist air from the ocean to create seventy distinct ecological communities. The islands have broad-leaf evergreen forests, palm groves, pine forests, and high mountain vegetation, as well as deserts. Their laurisilva forests are living fossils, remnants of ancient trees that covered much of the planet
20
million years ago.
Relative isolation has given rise to a great number of creatures unique to the Canaries. With little interference from the mainland, birds, reptiles, plants, and mammals quickly evolve to adapt to their environment. Charles Darwin called the islands “perhaps one of the most interesting places in the world” in the diary he kept during his voyage on
The Beagle.
(Unfortunately, he was unable to explore the islands due to a cholera quarantine.) The Canary Islands have thousands of endemic species—animals and plants that do not naturally live anywhere else—and every six days a new species is found. The island of Tenerife has the highest concentration of endemic species in Europe.
Many of these endemic species are rare and critically endangered. Fewer than
400
El Hierro giant lizards remain. The sixty-centimetre dark grey or brown lizard with orange spotting was thought to have been hunted to extinction in the
1930
s—first by humans for its delicious taste and then by introduced rats, cats, and dogs—until a small population was rediscovered in
1974
. The blue chaffinch, a type of finch, is listed as near threatened; a subspecies that lives only on Gran Canaria has dwindled to fewer than
250
. These birds are quite picky about where they live—only in pine forests at seven hundred to two thousand metres above sea level—and much of their habitat has been destroyed by logging and forest fires.
The importance of conservation to islanders has soared. One of the biggest issues the Canary Islands face is the introduction of invasive species. According to government officials, a foreign species crosses their borders every seventeen days, and twice a year that invader grows to severely threaten indigenous plants and animals.
There would be no risk of us introducing foreign invaders to the Canary Islands: we would relish their beauty from afar. As the sun moved across the sky, I watched the changing hues of the reddish-brown slopes and scanned the waters for fishing or pleasure boats out for a day excursion. We were still too far from land to make out any communities, but we expected to see their lights after sunset.
Due to the spread of the Canary Islands and our slow passage, we remained in the vicinity for several days. We found the continual sight of land in the distance comforting. The winds remained calm, so we didn’t fear being driven into the distant cliffs.
On our third day among the islands, I sat perched on the gunwale, washing tapioca bits from the breakfast pot. Suddenly four trout-sized fish zipped around, sucking up the pieces of tapioca that drifted to the ocean floor. Colin joined me, and we watched the grey and black striped fish dart back and forth. We scraped pudding off the unwashed plates and held the creamy bits in the water. The fish nibbled the food fearlessly right from our hands. Colin reached his hand into the water and stroked the back of a fish while he continued to feed it with his other hand.
“I think we might have pets. Perhaps if we feed them regularly, they’ll stay with us,” Colin said, beaming.
“I’m naming this guy, here, Ned,” I said, pointing to the smallest fish of the group. “He looks like a Ned.”
“Okay, well, this fish with the scar on his back is Fred, then, and the guy with the chunk out of his tail can be Ted,” Colin volunteered.
The fish wriggled enthusiastically to keep up with our drifting boat.
“Ned, Ted, and Fred,” I said. “That sounds good. How about the fourth guy?”
“Dead?” Colin said.
“No, with a name like that he’ll be the first to be eaten by a shark. How about Oscar?”
“Sure,” said Colin. “Do you know what kind of fish these are?”
I pulled out our fish identification guide, and we learned that our new friends were pilot fish. I wondered how they came by their name, and whether it had anything to do with them “piloting” boats across the sea. Even if they didn’t have any ideas about the course we should take, it felt wonderful having them at our side—like having company after you’ve been alone for too long.
It wasn’t unusual for pilot fish to travel with company. In fact, they survive by following larger creatures, such as sharks, sea turtles, and rays, and dining on any leftover scraps from their prey, as well as on surface parasites. Sharks are extremely tolerant of pilot fish, even allowing them into their open mouths to pick scraps from between their teeth. We later learned that pilot fish loyally follow boats across oceans, perhaps in a case of mistaken identity. If the fish decided to follow our boat, we would make sure to reward them for their efforts. Just like a larger animal, we left a trail of edible leftovers and had enough barnacles growing on our hull to feed a pilot fish army.
The one thing we couldn’t provide to the pilot fish—something that comes with their symbiotic relationship with sharks—was protection. Predators generally stay away from the pilot fish while they swim beside sharks. We could only hope that Ned, Ted, Fred, and Oscar would be able to fend for themselves.
We were not the only ones fascinated by this fish. In his poem “The Maldive Shark,” published in
1888
, Herman Melville wrote of the “sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim,” describing how they found safety in the shark’s mouth:
They have nothing of harm to dread,
But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank
Or before his Gorgonian head;
Or lurk in the port of serrated teeth
In white triple tiers of glittering gates,
And there find a haven when peril’s abroad,
An asylum in jaws of the Fates!
In the days that followed, we learned to expect the splashings of our new quartet at lunch and dinner, when bits of leftovers went overboard and into their eager mouths. I crooned sweet nothings to our new friends as they bodychecked each other in enthusiastic attacks on my plate. Our companions brought excitement and a new topic of conversation to the boat. We fussed over them as if they were a litter of kittens we’d just adopted. When we rowed, moving at two to three knots, they would tirelessly swim after us, wagging their little tails to keep up. Unlike Colin and I, who received a break from the oars every two hours, our fish friends had few breaks from the toil.
OCTOBER 22 MARKED
the first day of our second month at sea. We were at just over twenty-eight degrees latitude, or about five hundred kilometres north of the tropics. A hot sun blazed from a cloudless sky, and I was sweating profusely as I pulled the oars. At the end of one of my shifts, I lowered the bucket over the side, scooping up several gallons of cool seawater. As Colin mumbled and bumbled his way out of the cabin, I poured the refreshing liquid over my head. Then, as I dipped the bucket back in for a few seconds, I noticed something flashing in the depths.
“There’s something big down below!” I yelled.
By now, Colin had made his way out of the cabin, and he stood beside me, peering down. A metre-long fish was emerging from the depths.
“That’s not big,” Colin said. “I thought you meant a shark or something.”
“He’s big enough to eat Ned, Ted, and crew,” I said nervously, as the sleek fish approached our hull.
“Hey, that’s a dorado. I used to eat those all the time in the Pacific. They’re great eating,” Colin exclaimed.
I grabbed the fishing rod, which conveniently had a rubber squid attached to the hook. I was motivated by both a hunger for fresh meat and a desire to protect our piscine pets from this marauding predator. As soon as the green rubber squid hit the water, the dorado dashed towards the lure, and its yellow colouring changed slightly to a less noticeable blue/ grey. At the last second, it veered away.
The dorado had a bulbous head with a long, tapered body. As I moved the lure back and forth across the water by moving the tip of the rod in sweeping arcs, the sleek fish dashed after it. It moved with incredible speed, and I wasn’t surprised to later find out that dorado—also known as dolphin fish and mahi-mahi—are even faster than some sharks, reaching speeds of ninety kilometres per hour.
After about four or five strikes, the rod jerked and the tip bent towards the water. The line began screaming out as the fish tried to make an escape. Eventually, after much leaping, the fish began to tire, and I was able to reel it in slowly.
As the exhausted fish neared the boat, I noticed Ned and crew emerge from the depths, and they approached with curiosity. Colin used a gaff to haul the dorado on board.
“Well done,” I said, in awe.
But our dinner was not yet guaranteed. The fish had slipped off the hook and was now careening around the deck, propelling itself by frantically flopping. If it got lucky, it might find an escape route down one of the scuppers, but we weren’t about to let that happen. I ran after it, trying to end its misery with a hit from the blunt end of the gaff. But I seemed to hit the deck more often than the fish and, by the time it was over, our boat looked like a slaughterhouse.
The dorado is beautiful, even in death. In the water, it shimmers bright gold with blue and green hues. But its colours are always changing, dimming, and brightening to facilitate hunting and communication. In death it runs through a palette of hues—silver, blue, gold, green, and brown—before becoming a final muted yellow.