Rowboat in a Hurricane (25 page)

I suddenly realized my last sentence sounded ridiculous and probably didn’t reassure my father. Nonetheless, I could do little to offer him comfort. I did my best to explain we were well-prepared and experienced in handling heavy weather. We’d made it through two big storms already—Hurricane Vince and Tropical Storm Delta—and we could make it through one more.

But my father countered my attempts to remain positive by explaining why we wouldn’t make it. Our boat was too slow, he said, and even if we did make it through the storm, if we kept up this pace we wouldn’t reach Miami until the spring.

After I hung up, I felt even worse than before. I knew he was worried and that I had caused him a lot of grief, but I couldn’t help wishing he had have offered a few words of support.

As Epsilon surged towards us, Colin and I spent much of our time reflecting on our lives. In my journal, I wrote:
We contemplate our own mortality as the hurricane north of us decides its course. As the skies darken, and mountainous swells slide down from the north, I wish I were anywhere in the world but here. I fear death, and that terror now permeates every cell in my body. This voyage reinforces the philosophy that life itself is a journey—a journey without a known destination. Even though it is not length that makes it good or memorable, I hope we won’t reach our final destination in a few days.

We continued rowing southwest. The waves had started to crash over the deck, drenching me as I tried to keep the oars steady. Dorado rode the cresting waves as they followed us, seemingly content in the turbulent waters. An enormous school of flying fish took to the air. Dozens of glimmering bodies with fins spread like wings soared above the waves, travelling incredible distances and speeds to escape the predators that chased them below. I found it somehow comforting that for the fish, life went on as normal.

By nightfall, we’d travelled an astonishing fifty-six kilometres. This was excellent speed, considering Epsilon was closing in on us and the weather was degrading quickly. At
9
:
00 PM
, Colin clambered into the cabin. It was my turn to row.

“Maybe we should stop rowing,” I said.

Colin stared at the wrinkled chart spread across the bed. I’d just marked our latest position and the coordinates of the hurricane that Dean had relayed an hour earlier. The storm was now
550
kilometres away.

“The Hurricane Center is now forecasting that the storm is going to start travelling southwest. If it does that, we’re going to be rowing straight into its course,” I said.

Colin shrugged. “They’ve been wrong about every aspect of this storm. What’s to say that it’s not going to continue coming straight towards us? At least we’ll be moving out of its way then.”

We discussed the possibilities for more than an hour before finally deciding the most prudent choice would be to stop rowing. We hoped the latest weather prediction was correct. It would be a stressful night, but we could do nothing more than sit and wait. We lowered the drogue, secured all loose on-deck items, and locked ourselves in the cabin. This routine, unfortunately, was beginning to feel normal.

“It’s going to be a rough night,” Colin said.

“Sleep tight. I love you,” I said.

“I love you, too.”

I rolled over onto my side. Just another night in the rowboat.

The breaking waves that smashed into
Ondine
woke me up several times throughout the night, but surprisingly, I got a few hours of sleep. At
6
:
00 AM
my alarm summoned me back to the oars. I clambered out of bed and began putting on my rain gear.

“What are you doing?” Colin asked.

“Getting ready for rowing,” I replied.

“We’re not rowing. Don’t you remember? There’s a big hurricane coming our way and we’ve elected not to row in the hope that this will somehow save our lives,” Colin said.

Reality came crashing back into perspective. In my groggy, exhausted state I had blanked the hurricane from my mind and stumbled ahead with the morning routine. The momentary relief of having to climb out into the gale to row was quickly overshadowed by the pending hurricane.

“There should be an updated report on the hurricane,” Colin said, glancing at his watch.

He picked up the phone and dialled the number we now knew by memory. I listened carefully to his words, praying for some hint of positive change. Colin suddenly smiled. “Excellent,” he said, jotting down some coordinates before turning off the phone.

“Good news,” Colin said. “We made the right decision in not rowing. The hurricane has indeed veered to the southwest and is no longer aimed directly for us. At its current direction of heading it should be four to five hundred kilometres to our west. Right now it’s only five hundred kilometres away, so things shouldn’t get much rougher.”

I looked through the Plexiglas hatch out to the grey, windy world. Waves towered around us, their peaks tumbling to create whirlpools of froth. The deck was awash with spray, and waves frequently surged right over it. Nonetheless, our vessel could easily handle these conditions. We had been spared once again.

From the cabin, we continued to monitor Epsilon’s progress. It continued moving in a northwest path, and we almost laughed when Dean read us the written reports on the National Hurricane Center’s website: “The end is in sight. It really, really is,” followed six hours later by “The end is in sight . . . yes . . . but not quite yet. I thought I was going to find a weakening system and instead I found that Epsilon is still a hurricane.” Finally, on December
8
, Hurricane Epsilon weakened enough to lose its hurricane title. It had the distinction of being the twenty-seventh storm of the season, one of only five hurricanes to form in the month of December, and the longest hurricane this month had ever seen. No one could have asked for a more unique birthday present.

Although Epsilon had weakened, the waves were still too big for us to comfortably row, and the currents were not in our favour. We took solace in knowing that the ocean would soon return to a more benign state, and we did our best to power through the waves. We returned to a reduced rowing schedule, rowing only during daylight hours and harnessing ourselves to the boat whenever we were on deck. Finally, two days after Epsilon ceased being a hurricane, the waves stopped crashing over our deck, and we resumed rowing during the night. After more than a week of tumultuous weather, we were finally rowing eighteen hours a day again.

Now, more than ever, we felt that we’d had our fair share of bad weather and that good times lay ahead. Whether that was misplaced optimism I didn’t know, but it sure helped keep our spirits up.

12
A BLUE CHRISTMAS

“W
HAT ARE THE
symptoms of scurvy?” Colin asked.

He was massaging his wrist, which had been bothering him for the last few days.

“I think your teeth start falling out, you bleed profusely, and then you die,” I said flatly. “I’ve never heard of sore wrists being attributed to scurvy.”

“My gums are feeling a little tender,” Colin said, squirming. “How much vitamin
C
do you need to prevent scurvy?”

I shrugged. Until now I hadn’t even considered scurvy as a potential concern. It’s not one of those things you think of when planning a first aid kit. We had medication for diarrhea, allergic reactions, and nausea, but somehow, scurvy had slipped under the radar.

“I’ve read a few stories about sea journeys from the
1500
s,” Colin continued. “Scurvy decimated their boats—it was the biggest killer. ‘Plague,’ they used to call it.”

I was listening intently. “How long were they out at sea for?”

“A few months, maybe more.”

“Hmmm, we’ve been out at sea for almost three months now. It
has
been a while since we’ve had any fresh fruits or veggies.”

“Do you know if we have any foods with vitamin
C
?” Colin asked.

I thought for a moment. Citrus fruit would have been ideal, but our bag of lemons had transformed into mouldy balls in the first week.

“The canned vegetables will have some vitamin
C
, but not as much as fresh ones would. The heat from the cooking and canning process can destroy the vitamin by denaturing it,” I said.

“Denature?” Colin asked, looking at me quizzically.

“It just means that the heat breaks down the vitamin
C
molecule, or changes its form so that it’s no longer active.”

I pulled back the mattress and opened the hatch that contained our weekly food supply. Crackers, peanut butter, sardines, potatoes, rice, milk—it didn’t look promising. Suddenly a little sachet of drink crystals caught my attention. I scanned the nutrition information panel.

“Cplus, fortified with vitamin
C
,” I announced proudly.

“But we have enough for only twenty litres.”

But Colin wasn’t listening to me; he was staring at something in the water. “What about plankton?”

“That’s a great idea. Phytoplankton is supposed to be a miracle food—full of vitamin
C
, fatty acids, minerals, and a bunch of other good stuff.”

In Lisbon, a German sailor named Ollie had told us to “get your greens from the sea” as he handed us two pairs of pantyhose. “All you have to do is pull these behind your boat. The fine weave acts like a sieve, and it will strain the plankton right out of the water.”

I found the pantyhose in a little-used locker, tied three cords to the waistband, and threw it overboard attached to a thin rope. After a few adjustments, the stockings ballooned open like parachutes. Now all we had to do was row and wait for them to fill with nutritional goodness.

Phytoplankton live in all oceans; they are the building blocks for marine life and create
50
per cent of our oxygen. You can’t see these single-celled organisms, but they drift across the oceans (
phyton
is Greek for “plant,” and
planktos
means “drifter”). They live in the top layer of the ocean, where sunlight penetrates. Occasionally their density becomes so great that the ocean is discoloured. These algal blooms can even be seen from space, and they’re not necessarily a positive phenomenon. In fact, the only algal blooms I have seen were in British Columbia, when “red tide” spread a rusty hue across the water, and phytoplankton released a toxin that made shellfish poisonous. Even though these blooms can be harmful, the survival of most ocean life depends on phytoplankton. They provide food for the smallest fish, which, in turn, sustain the hierarchy of predators above them—all the way up to the largest mammal, the great baleen whale. I just hoped the plankton we brought in would be a healthy addition to our diet.

“This is exciting,” Colin said as he rowed with extra vigour. “I’ve never gone salad-fishing before.”

“Hopefully we’ll catch a big one.”

An hour later I pulled in the stockings.

“Nothing!” I scoffed. “The pantyhose parachute is slowing our speed, and we’re not catching anything.”

I wasn’t sure if the density of plankton was too low, or if the sieve in our stockings wasn’t fine enough. Either way, it wasn’t working. We decided to give up planning plankton plates, and instead opted to ration our juice crystals for the rest of the voyage. I then remembered the big bottle of multivitamins I’d tossed into the super-sized shopping cart in Lisbon. After an hour of searching, I found it tucked under the spare flares. I ran my finger down the list of supplements. Vitamin
C
—
60
mg. To double-check we phoned Dean’s girlfriend, Sarah Evans, who was studying to be a doctor, and she assured us we would not be getting scurvy.

We still weren’t sure why Colin’s wrist hurt, but it was probably a result of rowing. Rowing is an extremely repetitive sport, especially when you’re pulling on the oars for eight or more hours a day. We had already adjusted our rowing technique to minimize this strain, but that probably wasn’t enough. The usual rowing technique is to feather the oars—turn the oar blades as the oars leave the water to reduce wind resistance and prevent them from catching water—but we found that repeating that slight twist of the wrist thousands of times a day gave us both tendonitis. Although we had stopped feathering, we suspected it had already done some damage.

WE WERE MAKING
better progress now, but the trade winds still hadn’t fully recovered from the instability left in Epsilon’s wake. They continued to push our boat southward, despite our efforts to regain latitude and to position ourselves for Miami. After several fruitless weeks of struggle, we reassessed our final destination.

“Our efforts to climb northward against these winds are really sapping our westward progress,” I said. “Maybe we should consider arriving somewhere south of Miami.”

Colin was out on the oars, and our speed was only
0
.
5
knots. If we angled the boat forty-five degrees to the southwest, our progress would quadruple. I unrolled our chart of the Atlantic Ocean, and we pondered the possibilities. Just south of Miami, the Caribbean Sea presented a labyrinth of reefs and islands that would be dangerous to navigate.

The low power of our rowing would leave us at the mercy of the weather, and we didn’t want to end the voyage by being blown onto a reef. Much further south, however, the Caribbean Sea was open, with easily navigable waters. If we changed our destination to Costa Rica—
2
,
500
kilometres south of Miami—the elements would be much more in our favour, and the route looked manageable.