Little Ship of Fools. Charles Wilkins L.
a distress signal to computers ashore, showing their location on a life raft or capsized boat, or with a swimmer. As I understood it, at least a couple of our crew would be bringing EPIRBs of their own, while the boat too would have a pair.
Privately, my concerns were less about the uncertainties of our travels than about the fateful certainties: exhaustion, salt sores, inadequate nutrition, plus what was invariably referred to as “extreme weight loss.” I also admit quietly to a lifelong neurosis about storms on water, which I had so far managed to suppress (or perhaps to face, as Mr. Jung might have seen it); and to an all-but-daily paranoia over whether or not my many months of training would hold up once I got out there on the main.
If there was a hitch in the weekend, it was (seen in retrospect) that our new captain was perhaps a trifle remote, reluctant to take the initiative and gather us in a group so that we could raise questions and discuss issues or information pertaining to the weeks ahead. But having little perspective and not wanting to seem impatient or overanxious, we let it go, allowing that Angela probably had too much on her mind for now, and that the time for more detailed discussion would come.
More importantly, we left Shelter Island with the deeply heartening memory of how Big Blue had coursed along the island’s east side after being launched, sitting as high and light as a water spider, touching speeds of nearly four and a half knots.² And how the following day on the north side of the island, with a little current beneath her, she had clocked out at nearly seven knots, a speed we imagined she would touch again easily with the trade winds behind us and the equatorial current underneath.
Back home, satisfied that the adventure was a go, we bought our air tickets for Morocco and began buying food and kit. At Shelter Island, David and his lieutenants put the finishing touches on the boat. During the first week of December, having done what they could for now, they took Big Blue apart, packed her into shipping containers, and hauled her to the docks in New Jersey, from where she would begin her voyage to North Africa.
4
ON DECEMBER 23, I bid a quiet farewell to my children in Thunder Bay. Eden, who was fifteen and in Grade 10, had in recent months grown somewhat cavalier about any show of affection toward me and was brisk, even jokey, in her goodbyes. Georgia, my seventeen-year-old, had woven me a little gold bracelet, about the thickness of butcher cord, which she fastened to my wrist with instructions that if I kept it on she would always be with me and that I would have safe travels and a safe return. (In the weeks to come, as it wore thin, I would reinforce it with everything from electrical wire to fishing line to duct tape, increasingly paranoid that it would fall off and I would lose my angelic protection.) While I am anything but an ideal father, I am tearfully close to my children, and when I had exchanged hugs with the girls, Matt, my oldest, then twenty-two, asked me quietly if I was sure I was doing the right thing.
“No, I’m not,” I felt obliged to tell him, “but I’m going anyway,” to which he offered a rather pensive smile, not so much at me as at the floor.
“Well, good luck, Dad,” he said after a few seconds, “I understand.” And they hugged me and were gone out the door, clearly under the impression that they were unlikely to see me again.
The next day, Christmas Eve, I flew to Toronto and spent Christmas with my friend Trish, with whom I had had a close, sometimes fiery four-year companionship.
Five days after that, on the morning of December 29, Trish dropped me at Billy Bishop Airport on Toronto Island, where I rendezvoused with Steve and Nigel for our flight on to Montreal. For Trish and me, it was a landmark parting, uncharacteristically affectionate and gentle—in all a heartening sendoff. The previous afternoon, I had sat at her dining room table in east Toronto and penned a farewell to those who had sustained and befriended me during the long months of my training:
December 28, 2010
Hello again to all of you who, in your variety of ways, have so faithfully supported my Atlantic adventure! And goodbye, too—or let us say, farewell, as I count down the hours to my departure for Casablanca tomorrow, then on to Agadir the following day. With luck, Big Blue (which as I write is rocking her way across the Atlantic aboard a thousand-foot container vessel) will reach Agadir about the time we do.
We expect to have her reassembled, provisioned, and ready for the crossing by January 8 or 9, although the actual date of departure will depend on the weather.
Our route will take us about 400 miles south along the African coast from Agadir to the little fishing port of Tarfaya, in what was once the state of Western Sahara, now part of Morocco. After a stop there, we will continue southwest in an attempt to pick up the westbound trade winds and equatorial current, which, if our hopes are fulfilled, will carry us out to sea. I find it fitting that we should be starting this undeniably remote adventure on the coast of Africa, which to me has always seemed the “remotest” and most mysterious of populated continents.
Most of my food is already with the boat in the shipping containers, on its way to Morocco. It includes a lot of freeze-dried stuff: Thai noodles, stroganoff, macaroni and cheese, rice and beans, bacon and eggs, potatoes with ground chicken, plus dozens of half-ounce packets of powdered Gatorade, four boxes of protein bars (twenty-four to a box), and twenty vacuum-packed cheese and bacon sandwiches. These last delicacies are of a sort reputed to have been sent into space with the astronauts and have a “best-before” date that I will not have to worry about in this lifetime.
My kit, as prescribed by Angela, is a strange little doll’s closet of trinkets, electrical gadgets, and toiletries: headlamp, flashlight, pens, folding scissors, razors, a waterproof digital camera, waterproof containers of one sort or another, a sleeping bag, an odd little blue velour “traveling” pillow, a Moleskine notebook, reading glasses (two pairs), sunglasses (two pairs), a couple of plastic “sporks,” a water bottle, an insulated mug, a food bowl, sunscreen, various heady-smelling ointments (including diaper rash cream), sea soap, a “miracle” towel, mechanic’s gloves, half a dozen asthma inhalers, and clothes for a variety of conditions that will include daytime temperatures as high as 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the deep tropics and night lows of, say, 50 F, and, of course, rain and wind.
Most importantly, I have a seat cushion made of a thick honeycombed gel which took me weeks to decide upon and buy and which I have been using to magnificent effect on the rowing machine for the past ten days.
If you to go to bigbluerow.com or to rocexpedition.com, you will find photos of the boat and of our training, will get at least sporadic updates from the journey and will be able to follow our progress on a map of the Atlantic, where we will appear as a tiny dot. We will also appear as a tiny dot in real space and time on the actual Atlantic—but let us not get poetic. If all goes well, the dot will reach Barbados sometime around mid-February.
As you know, we will be chasing not just a world record but a fine six-person rowboat, a tri-hull named Hallin Marine (formerly Triton), which will be leaving the Canary Islands a week or more prior to our own departure and may well establish a new record before we get to Barbados. So in effect we will be chasing Hallin’s record, not the existing thirty-three days. A more conventional single-hulled rowboat named Sara G will also be setting out from the African coast at about the time we do. So we are braced for rivalry against muscular British rowers who I am led to believe carry far higher pedigrees than do we. Indeed, our respective crews remind me of those dog teams that compete in the Alaskan Iditarod or Yukon Quest dogsled races across a thousand miles of subarctic wilderness. Some of the teams are highly pedigreed purebreds, or carefully bred crosses, while others (the canine version of the Big Blue crew) are made up of strays from the pound and are apparently the more resilient for it.
All of this “racing,” I might add, is unofficial—a projection entirely of our being out there at the same time as the other boats and with the same ambition. Yet another vessel, Britannia ii, will be leaving Africa or the Canaries with, I believe,