Rowboat in a Hurricane (32 page)

But things had changed, and it looked like Colin’s expired passport might prevent us from completing our Atlantic row. We had contacted the Costa Rican Canadian Embassy, who, in turn, had consulted the Costa Rican immigration authorities on our behalf. Unfortunately, Costa Rica is a very bureaucratic nation; they make few exceptions to their rules. They informed the Canadian Embassy that if Colin arrived without a valid passport, he would be jailed and deported. We tried to explain that we’d come to Costa Rica only because we were blown off course by two hurricanes and two tropical storms, but they remained firm: “You need to get a valid passport before you arrive in our country.”

I hung up the phone, dejected.

“What are we going to do?” I asked. “We’re less than two hundred kilometres away from Limón—we’re going to be there in three or four days whether they like it or not.”

“Well, they can’t exactly turn us away,” Colin said. “Unless they donate a big outboard motor. We’ll be rowing on the spot as we try going back against these winds. But I guess they could confiscate the boat and deport us.”

“What do you mean,
us?
” I said in mock outrage. “
I
have a valid passport and the boat
is
in my name.”

“Will you wait for me?” Colin said, fluttering his eyelashes in a pitiful mockery of feminine persuasion. After that failed to elicit a response, he shrugged his shoulders. “Besides, there’s nothing I could have done—I’ve been on an expedition for the last two years.”

“I know, and I’m not blaming you. I just wish we could find someone with the power to help us.”

SOMETIMES WISHES DO
come true. The Discovery Channel wanted to film our arrival for their television show
Daily Planet,
and they had been in touch with port authorities and the Canadian Embassy to make arrangements. Word soon spread. The government must have decided that shipping Colin off in handcuffs as he reached land was not the image it wanted to broadcast. Instead, Colin would be issued an emergency passport just before he stepped ashore. The Canadian Embassy kindly agreed to assist and promised to send two representatives from the country’s capital, San José, to Limón to meet us as we arrived.

With that problem almost resolved, we had just two hundred more kilometres to row. I studied the marine charts while Colin rowed. Although we didn’t need to worry about reefs here, our approach would be hampered by strong currents parallelling the land. To combat these southward flows, we decided to voyage northwards of Limón. It was like swimming across a river in which you need to aim upstream of your final destination.

As we closed in on Costa Rica, the skies turned dark and brooding, and an unmarked current began flowing against us. Our speed continued to decrease, and torrential rains began to fall.

“I’m not even doing half a knot,” Colin yelled.

I peered through the hatch, out to a gloomy, rainy world. On my shift I had averaged only half a knot, but conditions had since worsened, and Colin was now rowing frantically.

“The winds are against us, too; I don’t think we’ll be able to make progress much longer going solo,” Colin said. “We need to row together.”

I joined Colin at the oars and our speed increased to almost one knot. We rowed five nautical miles in five hours. We still had more than fifty nautical miles to Limón.

“I don’t know if we can make it,” Colin said, echoing my thoughts. “If these currents don’t change, we’ll die of exhaustion before reaching land.”

We were exhausted, and it showed in our eroding pace. We were so close to finishing our journey, but it wouldn’t be over until we powered through these countercurrents. At this rate, it would take fifty hours of non-stop tandem rowing to reach shore. I felt like a starving person who could see a plate of food just beyond my reach.

For the next forty-eight hours we rowed non-stop. During the day we rowed in tandem, and at night we took turns, so that each of us could catch a bit of sleep. When we rowed alone, we barely held our ground; only when we rowed in tandem did we move forward. We were miserable. No words were spoken, except for those of sheer necessity.

When a waterspout erupted in the distance, I called Colin out of the cabin. “We’ll be fine as long as it doesn’t hit us,” he said flatly.

A waterspout is a spiralling vortex of water that connects the ocean to a dark blanket of cumuliform clouds. These tornados on the sea suck water and, occasionally, fish and boats, upward at wind speeds of
100
to
360
kilometres per hour. They sometimes take fish up into the clouds, and winds carry the fish until eventually, they fall out of the sky. The United States, Mexico, India, Brazil, and England have documented cases of raining fish (and frogs). Waterspouts can be extremely hazardous to boats, and some say they are responsible for many of the mysterious disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle. We desperately wanted to avoid the waterspout, but as always, our slow movement put us at the mercy of the weather. I continued rowing at a right angle to the swirling vortex and anxiously watched it in the distance until it dissipated several kilometres from our boat.

ON THE OCEAN,
the air is largely odourless (we had become desensitized to our own stench), making the slightest change noticeable, and now we noticed something new. A deep, rich smell like freshly overturned earth filled our nostrils and reached the most primal part of our brains. We later learned that heavy rains had just caused massive landslides in Costa Rica. Whether this was what we smelled or not, the powerful, singular scent filled me with longing for terra firma. I wanted to kneel on the earth, to dig my hands into it and bring fistfuls to my face so that I could inhale its distinct aroma. I was ready to return to the world that evolution had equipped me for.

“It’s land!”
Colin yelled.

I turned around, searching for an aberration on the horizon. I saw a thin line of blue sky sandwiched between the low cloud ceiling and the ocean, and in it the shadow of distant land.

As we continued rowing, we realized we were approaching a busy shipping port. We cowered among giant freighters plying the waters around us. The occasional cruise ship, lit up like a colossal Christmas ornament, filled us with a mixture of dread and envy. We kept our
VHF
radio and flares handy in case of pending collisions and continued rowing uneasily.

Strange, low, choppy waves made tandem rowing difficult, and we found that rowing individually in sprints was faster. One of us rowed intensely for half an hour, as though in an Olympic race, before we quickly swapped spots. By continuing this relentless routine through the night, we travelled against the current at one knot. Torrential rains soaked us to the bone. Rowing quickly warmed us, but our teeth chattered between shifts. Huddling beneath a wet blanket didn’t help.

The navigation lights of Limón’s port beckoned through a minefield of anchored freighters as we neared shore. The current finally released its hold on our boat.

“We made it,” Colin said quietly.

It seemed unreal. I had just completed something momentous, and the next morning we would step onto land. I should have been in a celebratory mood. But the last three and a half days had been the most trying of my life. We had barely eaten or slept. I shivered in the cold. I wanted to vomit. The most exciting thing at the moment was that I could finally rest. We dropped anchor in the shallow waters between moored freighters and fell asleep.

WHEN I OPENED
my eyes, it was still dark, but I could smell coffee. Colin was already making breakfast.

“Good morning, Tiger,” he said. “How does it feel to have rowed across the Atlantic Ocean?”

“Amazing,” I said.

We were scheduled to arrive at the port in two hours. We would be greeted by the Discovery Channel film crew, officials from the Canadian Embassy, customs and immigration authorities, and local media. It would be a dramatic contrast to the solitude of the ocean, and we both needed a bit of time to prepare. As we sipped our coffee, we reminisced about moments at sea and watched our piscine pets swimming beneath us. Fred and Ted were still with us. We recognized Fred from the thin scar that marked his back and Ted by the notch out of his tail. We had named others, too, but Fred and Ted were dearest to us because of all the experiences we shared. They had been with us for most of our ten-thousand-kilometre journey.

“We could take them back to Canada with us,” Colin said, half-seriously. “You know, put them in a plastic bag and ship them home.”

“I’m going to miss them,” I said, knowing that taking them home was impossible.

Fred, Ted, and the other fish had been more than just companions. They had helped sculpt my experience on the ocean. In a way, they had been our guides across the sea. They did not lead the way, but their presence opened my eyes to a world I wanted to understand. So often, when I struggled with my own insecurities and doubts, I peered into the waters at their tiny bodies wiggling furiously to keep pace with us and laughed. They reminded me to pay attention to the here and now, to observe the world instead of getting caught up in a frenzied rush to nowhere. On the ocean, just as in regular life, it is possible to become self-absorbed and lose sight of what’s important.

For me, this journey had started twenty years before, when I stared into my aquarium, wishing I could live in a fish’s world. This voyage had taken me as close to that childhood fantasy as I could imagine. When we began, I thought of the ocean as a separate world from the one we live in, but throughout the journey, I discovered just how interconnected we are. The health of life on land depends on the vitality of the seas, which cover over
70
per cent of our world. Yet, because of our dependency on it and activity in it, we’ve caused fish stocks to dwindle, turtles to become endangered, and coral reefs to die. It’s a very delicate balance, and we need to learn much more about it. We have mapped the moon better than we have the sea floor, and even though we discover hundreds of new ocean-dwelling species each year, an estimated one million or more species remain to be found. It can be hard to cherish something we do not understand.

I joined Colin outside and we slid both pairs of oars into the water. We rowed the final hundred metres of the Atlantic in tandem, not because rough weather required it, but because we wanted to celebrate this event together. During these past six months we had shared an incredible array of experiences. For the rest of our lives, we would reflect on the Christmas we had spent in the middle of the ocean, the hurricanes that had submerged us in five-storey waves, the colossal turtle that had loved our boat almost to death, and the great white shark that had peered up at us from an arm’s length away. These moments united us and changed our perspectives. They exposed us in our rawest element and brought us closer together. We began this journey worried about all the things that could go wrong between us, but instead we discovered how to work as a team in even the most dismal conditions. We both knew now, more than ever, we had found the right person to spend our lives with.

EPILOGUE

C
OLIN AND I
spent two weeks in Costa Rica, devouring fresh fruits and vegetables and spicy Caribbean dishes. Although we’d completed our Atlantic crossing, we had one last leg to finish—an
8
,
300
-kilometre bicycle journey back to Vancouver. Conveniently, friends flying to Costa Rica on vacation brought us two lightweight bicycles from home. We arranged to store
Ondine
in a secure compound in the Port of Limón and prepared to depart.

We pedalled out of Limón considerably plumper than we’d been on arrival, and made our way through Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States and finally into Canada. After two months of steady cycling, we reached Vancouver on May
20
,
2006
. A crowd of cheering friends and family greeted us; music played, cameras snapped, and I cried. It was a great homecoming. For Colin, it was the completion of a long-held dream; he had travelled 43,000 kilometres around the world to complete the first human-powered circumnavigation. And I was thrilled to have journeyed halfway around the world from Moscow using only a bicycle and a rowboat.

As Colin and I adjusted to the regular world, people often asked me if I now found life mundane. Surprisingly, I didn’t find being home boring at all; on the contrary, it was an adventure of a different sort. On the rowboat we had dreamed of living in a quiet country home on Vancouver Island, so when we returned we set about doing just that. We retrieved our belongings from the storage locker in Vancouver and moved to the beautiful Comox Valley. Colin finished his book
Beyond the Horizon,
which detailed his circumnavigation and went on to become a national bestseller. Together we produced an expedition film that won several film festival awards, including Best Adventure Film at Taos Mountain Film Festival. We then organized a film tour that took us from Victoria to Halifax, and spent two months meeting almost seven thousand Canadians who came to our presentations.

Perhaps the most rewarding experience has been creating this book. The process has allowed me to reminisce and revisit a journey that has changed me immeasurably. When I think back to the Atlantic row now, it has the hazy edges of a vivid dream; it seems like an experience from another world. The girl who pulled so hard on those oars and who struggled against hurricane-force winds seems to be a character other than myself. But reliving the events in the pages of this book has added tangibility to my memories.