The As It Happens Files (7 page)

Derek Hatfield did manage to get a new mast and gear—thanks, he said, to the amazing outpouring of support he got from folks back in Canada—and made it home in one piece.

As for Tim Harvey and Colin Angus, the Vancouver-to-Moscow trekkers, in September 2004, after taking a month to cross the Bering Sea, our lads made landfall on the coast of Siberia, at Provydenya. The townspeople made them welcome and gave them a small apartment, where they spent a couple of weeks building up their strength and provisions for the next leg of the journey. Until this point, although there had been difficulties, the voices on the radio still conveyed some of the exhilaration and optimism we’d heard at the outset. But somewhere between Provydenya and Anadyr, their next stop, things started to go a bit sour. On October 11th, Canadian Thanksgiving, Colin described a frustrating daylong hike down the length of a spit on the Siberian coast and a two-day hike back up after they found they couldn’t get to the mainland that way. We also heard the first mention of Yulya, the Russian interpreter who had joined them.

Tim reported that it was overcast and grey, with blowing snow. No trees or bushes, just gravel and tundra. He also talked about the wildlife they’d encountered—walruses, grizzly bears, a wolf—and sent Happy Thanksgiving wishes to his grandmother and granddad in Shawville, Quebec. I felt thankful not to be in Siberia.

After that things got worse. A warm spell turned the tundra into mud. Colin developed a severe urinary-tract infection and had to fly home to Vancouver for treatment. At Christmas Colin was still in Canada, and Tim was still waiting for him in Siberia. Colin rejoined Tim in January, but something (or someone?) seemed to have come between them. When we reconnected on February 17th, they told a harrowing tale of nearly having lost Colin in the Siberian wasteland.

Colin had left Tim and Yulya to make his own way to a shelter they were aiming for at Kilometre 86—about two hundred kilometres east of Egvekinot. Along the way, he got lost in a blizzard. Just as darkness fell, he came across the “86” marker he was looking for, but there was no hut. Suddenly, he felt very, very scared.

Alone now in the freezing darkness, the Siberian wind shrieking, Colin began to contemplate his death and how sad it would make his fiancée and his mother. Then, like Ignacio Siberio, the man who wouldn’t drown, he focused his will on how to make it through the night. First thing, dig a hole in the snow and get out of the wind. This he did with the aid of a penknife. For the next eight hours, he alternated between huddling in his cave and jumping up and down in the wind to restore his circulation. At around 1:30 a.m., when he emerged from the cave to revive his limbs, he thought he saw a faint glow in the distance.

What to do now? It was an agonizing decision: whether to strike out toward that faint glow in the hope that it was coming from the hut he was looking for, or stay where he was until daylight. If there was no hut, he would certainly die. He struck out.

Luckily for Colin, it was the right move. Tim and Yulya had organized a search party, but they had almost given up on
Colin when he staggered into the building, half-frozen and looking like the Abominable Snowman.

Getting separated was a mistake, they agreed. “You gotta stay together as a team,” they told us over the phone. But that was the last time we spoke to Tim and Colin together; shortly afterwards they parted company for good. Tim and Yulya went one way, Colin another. Colin kept the sat phone, and we were able to stay in touch with him. Tim kept the camera, and Yulya. In the office, we speculated about the possibility that three had become a crowd, but perhaps the guys would have split up anyway. Our producer Kevin Robertson reported that on their website and in the Vancouver papers, the two adventurers and their respective allies and supporters had taken to bickering and hurling insults at each other.

Having abandoned their original mission—to trek together from Vancouver to Moscow—the travellers did all reach Moscow eventually. There they regrouped and made separate plans to continue the man-powered journey all the way back to Canada. Man-and-woman-powered. Colin acquired another camera and a female partner, his fiancée, Julie Wafaei. When I last spoke with Colin and Julie, they were a thousand kilometres off the west coast of Africa, breathing a collective sigh of relief after weathering two tropical storms. They’d been rowing for 65 days and had found about 50 ways to cook dorado. Julie said they were getting on very well, which we were glad to hear, as they had another two and a half months of rowing ahead of them before making landfall in Miami.

Tim Harvey, meanwhile, had got himself a new phone but had lost Yulya—some problem with her travel papers, I think—so he had a new travelling partner as well, a chap by the name of Erden Eruc. When we last spoke, they were about 80 kilometres off the Moroccan coast and making a beeline for shore in the face of an approaching storm. They’d
already been held up for weeks by high winds and waves, but Tim said, “Today was great. We’ve seen whales and sea turtles and dolphins, beautiful sunset.… There’s nothing I’d rather be doing.”

Everyone made it back to Canada eventually, and you can learn more about the adventures of Tim and Colin and Julie and Yulya and Erden by checking out their own accounts on the web or on film or in their own books. Last I heard, Colin and Julie were planning a trip through the canals of France, and I thought,
The food will be much better there!

A few weeks after we talked to Derek Lundy about the Vendée Globe, we heard of another adventure on the high seas. This one involved a Russian sailor who was taking part in the 1998 Around Alone race. Russian sailor Victor Yasekov was about 950 miles west of Capetown when he radioed for help. His right arm had got infected; it had turned red and yellow and was badly swollen. Boston physician Daniel Carlin was one of the doctors on call for the Around Alone sailors, and as he tells the story, he answered Yasekov’s call for help and proceeded to tell him, via email, how to operate on his arm. Yasekov had to lance the abscess with a sterile scalpel, pour iodine into the wound, insert a drain and then dress it.

The operation seemed to go well, but when Yasekov sent another message a few hours later, the news was not good. Now his arm was white and limp and utterly useless. Carlin figured it this way: Yasekov had probably taken a lot of Aspirin to ease the pain in his arm, which had led to profuse bleeding after the operation; then, in trying to staunch the bleeding, he had bound his arm too tightly and cut off the circulation. Carlin was worried that the sailor might now lose his arm. He
told Yasekov to remove the tourniquet, and Yasekov reported that he had started to get some feeling back in his arm, but it still wasn’t much use. He ended up sailing pretty much one-handed all the way to Capetown.

Daniel Carlin had a different answer when I put the question to him on the radio:

“These people are nuts, right?”

“Yeah.”

He, it turns out, is a fine one to talk. I was curious about whether Yasekov’s arm ever did heal completely and also about whether Dr. Carlin was still practising long-distance medicine, so one day I tracked him down to a clinic in New London, New Hampshire. We didn’t know it at the time, but our interview had caught Carlin in the middle of his own adventure, and his journey was just as exciting in its way as the Around Alone race. He began by telling me how important the Yasekov case had been for him.

At the time he treated Victor Yasekov, Dr. Carlin told me, he was just finishing a long-distance medical project in
Ghana—part of what he was now calling his World Clinic—and he was working out of the New England Medical Center in Boston. Three weeks later, they let him go. Carlin believes that some of the older doctors there didn’t understand what he was trying to do, marrying medicine and the Internet. Maybe, too, they resented all the publicity he was attracting. Ironically, his face was on the cover of
Tufts Medicine
the very day he was clearing out his office.

Whatever the reason, Carlin was reduced to running the World Clinic out of his living room, which he did for about five weeks. Then he forged a new association with the Leahy Clinic on the outskirts of Boston. He also landed some private funding for his World Clinic experiment, and for about 20 months, the business grew nicely. Then, in April 2000, the tech market crashed, and his investors pulled up stakes and fled. In June he started laying people off, and by the following April, he was almost back where he’d started: a one-man company running everything from his own computer.

Except that his experience had taught him that the service he was trying to offer was really needed. So Dr. Carlin reclaimed the company’s title for himself, determined to keep it going. From 7:00 in the morning until 3:15 in the afternoon, he told me, he would work on his World Clinic practice; from 3:30 to 3:50, he would nap; and from 4:00 p.m. until 1:00 a.m., he would work as an emergency room doctor. This is what he did for two years to support his wife and kids while he was putting his World Clinic on a solid footing again.

This ability to focus and to make it past the most horrendous obstacles was something Daniel Carlin had in common with the sailors he liked to help, I observed, and he agreed.