Rowing After the White Whale E-Book

James Adair

• Herausgeber: Polygon
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 324

Beschreibung

What's it like to be on a small boat with no power but oars, and over 1,500 miles from the nearest land? Two friends decided to find out... Over a boozy Sunday lunch, flatmates James Adair and Ben Stenning made a promise to row across an ocean despite having no sailing or rowing experience whatsoever. This is an account of their 116 days at sea as they undertook the voyage of a lifetime. From eerie calms to their capsize in stormy seas, their determination and perseverance pushed them through the relentless dangers of rowing and sleeping under sun, moon, wind and stars for day upon day. Their tale is one of moonbows and meteor showers, passing whales and thieving fish, lurking sharks and giant squid ... and a terrifying fight for survival.

Leseprobe

ROWING AFTER THE WHITE WHALE

This edition first published in Great Britain in 2013 by

Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.polygonbooks.co.uk

ISBN: 978 1 84697 250 8

eBook ISBN: 978 0 85790 599 4

Copyright © James Adair, 2013

Endpaper map is adapted from an original depicting the ‘New Island’ by Lee Mothes.

Section illustrations © Tory Adair, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

The moral right of James Adair to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

Typeset in Great Britain by Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Falkirk, Stirlingshire

Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

For Ben, thank you for sharing the adventure

Contents

Prologue

Part One: The Build-up

1. Beginnings

2. Interim

3. Mixed Motives

4. Monomania

5. A Bosom Friend: Ben Stenning

6. Preparations

7. ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’

8. A Brief Note on the Indian Ocean Rowing Statistics

9. The Shortest Possible Description of the Lead-up to Our Departure, Including a Brief Portrait of the Incomparable Simon Chalk

10. Australia

11. The Shelf

Part Two: All at Sea

12. The First Day

13. At the Mercy of the Shelf

14. Downing Tools

15. The Looming Seas

16. The Vortex

17. Surf’s Up!

18. ‘Water’

19. On Our Way

20. Swim

21. Another Rower

22. On the Personalities Drawn to Ocean Rowing

23. Timothy and the Filofax

24. The First Becalming

25. Fish

26. Storm

27. Catch 22

28. A Brief History of Ocean Rowing

29. The Thieving Dorado

30. Small Aliens from the Deep

31. The One Thousand Mile Mark

32. The Great Becalming

33. Gyres

34. Sea Stars

35. ‘If’

36. Whale!

37. Our Birds

38. Shark!

39. Drier than Being Dry

40. The Moon

41. Halfway Point in the Sea of Rainbows

42. Moby Dick

43. Passing Ships

44. Splendid Isolation

45. Reveries

46. The Fire Ship

47. The Great Independence Day Wave

48. From Bad to Worse

49. The Dark Boat

50. Recovering Under a Bright Sun

51. ‘The Most Wondrous Phenomenon’

52. On the Cultural and Natural History of the Squid

53. Para Anchor

54. Food, Glorious Food

55. Pain

56. One Hundred Days at Sea

57. Longest at Sea

58. The Silent Sea

59. The Beginning of the End

60. Second Storm

61. Pilot Whales

62. Lunar Rainbow

63. Nearing

Part Three: The Last Day

64. False Start

65. The Battle of Grand Port

66. The Final Furlong

67. Decisions

68. The Swim

69. The Reef

70. Rescue and Reunion

Afterword

Mauritius

Apologia

Meeting a Legend

On the Positive Benefits of a Brush with Death

A Lost World

The Final Swim

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Prologue 17.15, 14 August 2011 (Day 116)

Now we’re going to die, I thought as the wall of white water came thundering towards us. My heart thumped as my body started furiously pumping adrenaline in anticipation of the impact.

For a moment the sea in front of the wave looked still and pure, so peaceful and blue in contrast with the white rolling mass that was now seconds away. But already the flat in front of the wave was being disturbed and soiled by spitting shards of tumbling white water. The noise grew suddenly louder, from a rumbling hiss to a raging thunder as the turmoil of water reached us.

Now we really are, actually, definitely, after all of this, after everything, going to die, I thought. Typical. As for words, the only one I could manage in time, the only one that seemed appropriate, was: ‘Shit!’

I took a deep breath.

The wave hit us with a violent, sickening crash and everything went black.

PART ONE

The Build-up

1 Beginnings

‘Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul . . . and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.’

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

It’s no surprise that Ben and I decided to row an ocean when you consider our dissolute characters and unremarkable circumstances during the dark November of 2004. We had graduated from the University of St Andrews six months before and were struggling to readjust to city life. After four years of fun and games we had given up the freedom and fresh air of Scotland for the trudging London commute and a flat in which we, and the mice we lived with, were regularly plunged into darkness as the pay-as-you-go electricity ran out yet again. I had been talked into doing a law course, which I wasn’t enjoying, but Ben had suffered a worse fate. He was selling fully integrated accounting software in Lewisham. It’s not hard to see why we started dreaming of a big adventure and, as complete ocean novices, we settled on rowing the Pacific, which is of course the biggest of all the oceans.

The Pacific – the very word seemed to summon up the wide expanse of ocean, the equatorial sun beating down on the two of us hauling in another massive tuna for lunch. Yes, the daydreams were unrealistic but they were alluring and they had us hooked. Every time I rode the 59 bus or the tube, crammed in, standing again, wedged between ashen-faced salary man and morbidly obese tourist, accompanied by the sound of an aggressive track-suited mother chiding her toddler or the ramblings of some unwashed nutter; every time my mind would drift off to sea, to a place where you couldn’t see another human being in any direction. Space, solitude and silence, these were the things I craved – and, of course, a massive skive off work. Back in our flat we’d discuss the mad scheme over shepherd’s pie and red wine.

‘We really have to do the rowing, no matter what.’

‘Yeah, definitely.’

‘I’m not kidding Ben, we have to get out there as soon as we can.’

‘I’m ready now.’

‘No but really, we should really do it.’

‘Stop worrying Adair, we both know when we get out there I’ll end up doing all the rowing.’

‘Will you be bringing those mustard coloured corduroys of yours?’

‘Absolutely, will you be bringing your riding boots?’

‘There’s really nothing funny about my riding boots, they have a specific purpose, what’s the purpose of your mustard coloured corduroys?’

‘Primarily to keep me warm but their secondary purpose is to make me look good, very good.’

‘Every weekend you look sillier than the last, also you’re beginning to look quite, how do I put this delicately, fat.’

‘I have no time to eat properly, you can’t imagine what sort of demands selling fully integrated accounting software packages can put on a man’s body, they say most people burn out by the time they hit twenty five.’

‘Well, if we run out of food when we’re in the middle of the ocean I think it’s quite clear who’ll be eating who.’

‘Yes, in that scenario I will be over-powering and eating you.’

‘In which case you’ll just have eaten one of your two friends.’

‘Let’s face it, if we go missing at sea very few people are going to notice we’re gone.’

‘That’s true.’

Soon our nightly chats became more serious, we would row the Pacific, it wasn’t just empty chat, we had to row the Pacific, or it would become another dream that slowly slips away. We knew that a lot of people had rowed the Atlantic, on the well-travelled route from the Canaries to the Caribbean, but we wanted to do something different, something bigger, newer, more dangerous. And so we plumped for the Pacific. Our casual research showed that one man had rowed the South Pacific solo without stopping and two pairs had done it in legs. Fine, we would be the first pair to row the South Pacific without stopping.

2 Interim

‘Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.’

Ernest Hemingway

In 2005 we left London and went our separate ways. Ben made the logical step from fully integrated accounting software salesman in Lewisham to logistics and freight forwarding manager in Uganda (having grown up in Kenya, he was basically going home). I eventually got a job in journalism as editor of the Alderney Journal, probably the smallest paid-for newspaper in the world, serving a mere two thousand souls on the island of Alderney in the English Channel. The first thing I did on receiving my first pay cheque in Alderney was to set up a joint bank account so that we could start saving towards the row. It was the first step in making the dream a reality and it felt great. We were actually going to do it. Something was happening! The years went by. Ben moved to the Sudan and lived in a container while I moved back to London and became a shipbroker. More years went by. At this stage we were in what could be called the comedy planning phase; for example, we would exchange emails wondering if it was practical to take Ben’s Ugandan houseboy, ‘Mr Ben’, to sea. A sample email from Ben at this time goes: ‘Whatever happens . . . death, embarrassment, insanity . . . we must never sink to such lows as wearing Lycra.’

As the years went by we continued to save and to try to agree a date for Ben to come back to the UK so we could prepare for the row. Time passed and other people rowed oceans. One pair who finished the Atlantic in 2006 even had the same names as us. After Ben Fogle and James Cracknell did the Atlantic suddenly everyone knew about ocean rowing. ‘Weren’t you talking about doing that?’ people asked. More time passed and people stopped thinking that we were serious (if they ever had done). I started to become deeply frustrated. Ben moved to Ghana. Still nothing happened, but we continued to say to anyone who would listen that we would definitely do it. People now smiled indulgently in the same way they do if they hear someone is writing a book or becoming an actor.

By the summer of 2009 Ben and I had agreed that he would come back at Christmas with a view to setting off the following June. I needed time to train – time that my hours at HSBC wouldn’t allow, so I decided to resign. This might seem strange, but my greatest fear was that it wouldn’t happen, that it would simply be another idle dream. I felt that by taking the drastic step of leaving work it would somehow ensure that the row actually happened. My boss, Mark, and the CEO, Chris, were incredibly supportive and said that if I started earlier in the morning I could leave earlier to go to the gym. After all, they said, anything could happen: I could get injured or my friend could pull out. I assured them that the project was one hundred per cent, agreed to stay and started my new training routine the next day. Then in the autumn Ben pulled out. His girlfriend, Carole, had moved out to Africa and he said he couldn’t leave her now for what could potentially be ten months at sea. I was devastated. I couldn’t accept that the adventure wouldn’t happen after years of saving, dreaming and telling everyone I knew about it, including, now, my employers. I understood Ben’s reasons, but I felt I would have to go on and do the row somehow, even if it meant going alone, because it had taken on such significance to me over the years.

3 Mixed Motives

‘When he received the stroke that tore him, he probably felt the agonising bodily laceration, but nothing more. Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock . . . then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another.’

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

‘Why?’ is the most frequent question put to the would-be ocean rower. For me, the original inspiration was to have a wild and fun adventure, a sort of glorified fishing trip. Unrealistic perhaps, but this is what sparked my imagination. However, the motivation to actually do it, to actually go through with it despite the obvious risks to life and limb came from something else, something entirely different.

At the age of fourteen I collapsed, breathless, while playing football. Within twenty-four hours I was diagnosed with the rare illness, Guillain-Barre syndrome, rushed to London in an ambulance and hooked up to a life-support machine. When I came round a week later I could not see, breathe, speak, or move a muscle – I was totally paralysed. It was all hugely inconvenient. My immune system had mutinied, mistakenly attacking and destroying the motor nerves, which send messages through the body; although it did the decent thing of leaving the sensory nerves intact so I could feel the pain. There were complications and some close calls, but in the end I survived. The nerves started regrowing slowly, so that after a month I could breathe and see once more, after four months I could leave hospital in a wheelchair and six months later I was learning to walk again. That might have been the end of that – with six months of pain in Tooting being a good experience for anyone, especially someone who’d grown up in a Home Counties bubble. However, the nerves stopped growing and I was left, still am left I should say, with paralysed feet. The fuckers just don’t work. It was a brutal memento, especially during my teenage years when all I really wanted to do was play competitive sport and not have to explain myself every time I met someone new.

Anyway, time passed, as it always does, and to anyone who met me it perhaps seemed like a small thing; to walk with a slight limp is no big deal when compared with the horrors and depredations endured by others around the world. With various foot supports I made wholehearted but usually comedic attempts to play football, hockey, cricket, tennis, squash, to ride horses, scuba dive, hike, ski and all the rest of it. It could be frustrating, but I insisted on pushing myself, on getting a lot out of life. But by my mid-twenties all this effort had buggered my knees, and I was able to do less and less. Simultaneously I found myself becoming more sensitive to innocent comments from people who didn’t know me. The reason I took the lift down was to preserve my knees, but their thoughtless comments left me railing: how dare they suggest I was lazy, if only they knew how much effort it takes to walk with paralysed feet. While Tory and I were on a riding safari in Kenya, our guide remarked that, ‘James is so lame that if he was a horse he would be put out to pasture.’ I was out of earshot at the time but when Tory told me later, I was livid, despite knowing that if I was a horse I would have been shot fourteen years previously. If people wanted to judge me on their own terms, as a totally able-bodied person, then fine, I would do something that most of them would never dare. When I offered to resign in the summer of 2009, my then boss, Mark, asked perceptively if I was doing it to prove a point. He was the first person to ask me this and I’d never thought about it explicitly, but after a second or two I answered, ‘Yes’, because even then I was completely obsessed about proving that I could do it. It had become a point of pride and there’s nothing more dangerous or blind than pride.

4 Monomania

‘Considering that with two legs man is but a hobbling wight in all times of danger; considering that the pursuit of whales is always under great and extraordinary difficulties; that every individual moment, indeed, then comprises a peril; under these circumstances is it wise for any maimed man to enter a whale-boat in the hunt?’

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

The last word on monomania and obsession goes, of course, to Captain Ahab. He is the central character in Melville’s whaling classic, Moby Dick. The novel is ostensibly an account of a whaling voyage, although Melville includes many meandering factual deviations on whaling, whales and the sea. Ahab is the captain of the ship and is obsessed with avenging himself on Moby Dick, a white sperm whale that bit off his leg on a previous trip. Ahab ignores the fact that he only has one leg and is unsympathetic to the feelings and lives of others, including his chief mate, Starbuck, who warns him, to no avail, against his headlong pursuit of the white whale. As a model of selfish, relentless focus and unflinching disregard for personal safety, Ahab became a kind of hero to me. It is Ahab’s disability which drives him on and I, like the narrator of the book and others before me, was strangely drawn to this. As he says: ‘A wild, mystical, sympathetic feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine.’ Okay, Ahab ends up dead along with all of the crew, bar the narrator, and the white whale survives, but you have to admire the old man’s persistence.

With Ben out, I approached a number of friends about doing the row but for one reason or another it wasn’t possible or affordable for any of them. I therefore resolved to do it solo. My parents were deeply against the whole idea of me rowing an ocean, convinced that I would die or be seriously injured. I argued that, having felt for so many years like a prisoner inside my own body, it made sense to seek the absolute freedom of being at sea – even if that freedom resulted in death. But these arguments never wash with parents, who have a vested interest in keeping their children alive. With my family against and my friends disinterested the only wholehearted believer I had at this time was my girlfriend, Tory. Naturally, she was concerned but at the same time she could see how important it was to me. Perhaps, too, she suspected what a nightmare I’d be if I never did the row, and she was right – I would have been.

I knew that it would be very hard to get the project off the ground as an independent solo. The rowing fund had halved since Ben pulled out and the prospect of organising everything by myself, as a first timer, was daunting. I therefore turned to a company called Woodvale Challenge, which organises a race across the Atlantic every two years. They’d put on the races which Cracknell and Fogle and most Atlantic rowers had taken part in. For a fee they would oversee the safety and logistics of the race, offer training support and, vitally, lay on a safety yacht to come and rescue or resupply anyone who got into trouble.

With the Atlantic a well-worn route, I was still keen to do something else, something bigger and wilder – and so they offered this. They were gearing up to run a race across the Indian Ocean in April 2011. They had run an Indian race from Geraldton in Western Australia to Port Louis, Mauritius in 2009, in which only half the boats had made it. It sounded perfect. The Indian was longer and tougher than the Atlantic and virtually nobody had rowed it. There were around eight teams signed up, a mixture of fours, pairs and solos. I signed up as a solo.

Not long after this, Ben came back on board. An organised event like the Woodvale Indian race meant a safer, shorter trip and he and his girlfriend were keen to move back to the UK. We were back on! We would row an ocean together after all, and while it would be a different ocean than the one we originally planned, it would certainly be as much of an adventure. More people had walked on the moon than had rowed successfully across the Indian Ocean. We would be attempting something not far from unique and, going by the statistics, something very dangerous. But I would be doing it with Ben, as we’d always planned.

5 A Bosom Friend: Ben Stenning

‘He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead to mine, clasped me around the waist, and henceforth we were married; meaning in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me if needs should be.’

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Ben and I became friends immediately on meeting in the first week of university. By the end of our first conversation we were planning a drive from Cairo to Cape Town. By the end of the first term, when we discovered that we were being two-timed by the same girl, we were already good enough friends to laugh the whole thing off.

Ben and I often joked that with our boarding school educations, gap years and 2:1s from St Andrews, blond hair, blue eyes and instinctual familiarity with the Home Counties we were straight off the middle-class conveyor belt. But this was perhaps unfair as we had both seen a different side of life even before we pursued our unusual ‘career’ paths.

After moving to Kenya with his parents, Ben, at the age of seven, stepped on a stonefish. The year was 1987 and the location was a remote beach near the Tanzanian border. The stonefish is the most venomous fish in the world and, if untreated, people often die from the sting. So when Ben limped along to the local doctor with his mother it was not surprising that the medical advice was immediate amputation. Ben’s mum refused the offer and managed to get him onto a British Airways flight to London the same day. He was admitted to the Centre for Tropical Diseases where they managed to save his life, but complications with the infection meant that he remained there for a further two years while the doctors cut away at the tissue of his foot in an effort to save the limb.

Two years later and with one foot a few sizes smaller than the other, he was discharged and immediately set about taking up as many dangerous pastimes as possible. He later attributed his prodigious sidestep in rugby to having different-sized feet. In 1992, back in Kenya, he captained his school cricket team to the worst defeat in their history in which they managed to post only nine runs in total against Pembroke College, with Ben their top scorer on three.

Then it was back to the UK for secondary school and, after a gap year in Tonga, Ben headed to St Andrews, where we met. What happened over the next four years we would spend many hours trying to piece together while we were at sea; suffice to say we became friends and had lots of fun.

Then Ben moved into a flat in Brixton with me, which is where the dreams of ocean rowing were born. Bizarrely, for an English graduate who wrote his dissertation on post-colonial literature with particular reference to the works of V. S. Naipaul, Ben took a job selling accounting software. His heart wasn’t in it and before the year was out he had quit. After a brief stint working at the World Cheese Awards he went back to Africa and took a job in logistics.

Initially he was based in Uganda, where his recklessness was able to flourish with regular white-water rafting trips and frequent forays into the war-torn north. On one occasion he was imprisoned in the Congo on suspicion of spying, but managed to bribe his way out. Growing bored with Uganda, he got a posting to the Sudan where he lived in a container and had further accident-prone adventures, including having to be airlifted out with the dual afflictions of amoebic dysentery and Nairobi eye. My favourite of his misadventures was the time one of the company’s trucks broke down in a massive swamp the size of Belgium called the Sudd. Unable to bear the heat in the front cabin, Ben and the Indian driver were forced out onto the uncovered carriage. However, the mosquitoes were so thick that they blotted out the moon and the stars and they were soon feasting on Ben and the driver. Cursing his penchant for short shorts and sleeveless shirts he formulated a plan with his colleague. They decided to strip naked and cover themselves in diesel. They spent the rest of the night smoking and exchanging life stories in the nude.

After Sudan, Ben moved to Ghana, which was more civilised if less interesting. Three years later, Ben handed in his notice and came back to the UK to prepare for the row.

I never formally assessed Ben as a potential partner in our rowing enterprise. He’d always been my friend and we’d always planned to do it together as mates. Of course he was accident prone, reckless and had no sea experience whatsoever, but then I had exactly the same credentials. Both as bad as each other, we always seemed to compound the trouble that one or the other got into. But being as bad as each other can be an advantage – it assures parity. Also, these seeming negatives were far outweighed by Ben’s many qualities: his great sense of humour, his impulsive generosity, his polymath interests. Spending months at sea with a friend who didn’t take himself too seriously was far more important than setting off with someone who had all the right qualifications . . . even if the friend in question was insisting on bringing a pair of salmon pink short shorts.

6 Preparations

‘Why did I do it? Because at the end of my days, I’m going to be lying in my bed looking at my toes, and I’m going to ask my toes questions like “Have I really enjoyed life? Have I done everything I’ve wanted to do?” And if the answer is no, I’m going to be really pissed off.’

Chay Blyth

One summer’s evening at Gallions Reach Marina in east London we inspected a second hand boat which had crossed the Atlantic twice. Despite being a sturdy twenty-three-foot boat she looked impossibly small and slightly surreal sat, as she was, on a rusty old trailer in this forgotten part of London. Sitting on the sliding rowing seat, gazing at the glistening towers of Canary Wharf to the west, I found it hard to imagine what life at sea on her might be like. But we needed a boat and she was cheap and according to the owners she floated. We provisionally named her Brixton Dreamer and set about planning many modifications.

A friend, Christian, with an upmarket web design company called Marmalade on Toast, drunkenly agreed to do our website in the early hours at a wedding and so we were the proud owners of a swish new site. We chose charities to raise money for. Ben picked a Kenyan orphanage, Tumani Homes, while I went with the GBS Support Group. Training at the gym had begun in earnest and we were both getting stronger, building up to either a two-hour row on the machine or a two-hour swim in the pool six days a week. We agreed with my friend Adam, a producer, to make a film about the trip and started filming our training and preparations. We also managed to get a title sponsor, Baxter Healthcare UK, which gave our dwindling bank account a much-needed boost. They also ran a competition for naming our boat with the winner choosing Indian Runner, after the flightless ducks. Everything was looking good.

Then, around this time, I met up with two people planning on rowing the Indian in the same race as us. Ollie Wells was part of the four-man campaign aiming to break the four’s record and Rob Eustace was a solo who had rowed the Atlantic with Woodvale in 2007 as a pair. They had bad news. There were questions over Woodvale, and in particular over the feasibility of the 2011 Indian race. Rob said he had decided to do the race as an independent and he didn’t think any of the teams listed on Woodvale’s website would do it, apart from us. Ollie had read that Woodvale’s boss, a serial ocean rower named Simon Chalk, had been declared bankrupt. We had unthinkingly been paying our hard-saved money to Woodvale in instalments and had never questioned their viability as a company. I immediately emailed Simon to ask him how many people were taking part and if the race was definitely going ahead. Up until this point he had been quite elusive but he gave a long reply outlining the situation in response to my email. The only two teams definitely in the race were the four and ourselves. The event could go ahead, he said, but it wasn’t workable to have a support yacht. For a reduced fee Woodvale would still run an unsupported row. We were guaranteed a podium place, as long as we could finish. We agreed immediately, while the four-man team called a meeting with Simon and their families to discuss the proposal.

The meeting was held the day after the Four’s fundraising ball. It was a glittering affair in the Hurlingham Club. Everyone seemed to be there: friends of mine, ocean rowers, even the guys who’d sold us our boat. I called Ben in Africa halfway through the party to say that we needed to do more to promote ourselves. ‘Friends keep asking me why I’m here. I don’t think anyone has any idea we’re the only other team rowing across the Indian Ocean next year,’ I said. In the end we never did very well on that front. Anyway, I went to the meeting the next day with Tory and there we met Simon. He was shorter and fatter than you might imagine for someone who had rowed across four oceans, including the Indian, solo. But he was clearly experienced and had a softly spoken affability and calmness. He was a fascinating character. Every time one of the Four’s parents expressed a concern about the lack of a safety yacht, the organisation of the row or his finances Simon would allay it with calm confidence. But then, as they were nodding in relieved understanding, he’d follow up these reassurances with a story about a shark which followed him on the Indian for 50 days, or about the time he capsized during his 2002 attempt and had to sit on the upturned hull for a night while awaiting rescue. He’d then sit back with a mischievous grin, revelling in the new uncertainty, and wait for the next question. He advised everyone to not bother with the gym but to make sure instead that our boats were ready. He gave the impression that everything was under control for our Indian row and, after all the knowledge he’d shared, I was as sold as the Four, who now also agreed to go it alone without the safety yacht. I even phoned Ben again in Africa to say something along the lines of, ‘Don’t worry, we’re in good hands.’

We met Simon one more time in the UK, before leaving for Australia. Ben was back in December for our navigation course and we’d arranged for Simon to come and have a look at our boat. He turned up six hours late but stayed into the early hours. He gave us a slightly veiled piece of advice along the lines of, ‘Get cracking, you won’t have any help.’ We didn’t think to ask more, but then a week or so later we discovered online that Simon was about to set off and lead a crew of twelve pay-per-place rowers across the Atlantic. It would be his fifth ocean row. The secretary at Woodvale told us that Simon would see us in Australia three weeks before we set off for the safety checks and that was that. We’d signed up to Woodvale because of the promise of the safety net and logistical help, but we now found there was no support boat and that we were organising everything, such as the shipping, ourselves. We had arrived back at the independent row we were originally planning on, only with less money.

Ben came back to England for good in January 2011 and, having finished our jobs, we started a manic month’s work on the boat. We were storing the boat on a farm in Winchester, where a boat builder called Neil was constructing a forty-foot yacht. He had tools and experience. Patiently he explained the difference between bolts and screws and showed us how to do one thing or another before deciding that it would be quicker to do it himself. We must have bamboozled him somewhat; two massively impractical, office-working humanities graduates about to set off across the Indian Ocean with no relevant experience whatsoever. Still, we managed to get the boat finished in time to load it into a container in Southampton at the start of February, and booked our flights to Australia to coincide with her arrival in Fremantle. We would ship her across the Indian Ocean in a container and then row her straight back.

With the boat gone, we reverted to the more familiar territory of shopping and drinking. Sitting in the pub we’d enthuse about the voyage and agree that we were just aiming to make it across and have a great experience rather than break any records. The shopping was a necessary evil. One trip that stands out was a visit to Boots. We had been told by a watermaker expert to buy some condoms to cover a part of our desalinator. We decided to buy them in Boots along with some other essentials. We got to the checkout with ten bottles of sun cream, two tubs of Vaseline and a packet of condoms. The checkout girl looked at our basket and then at us and said, ‘Going on holiday?’ When we explained that we were going to sea together she seemed to understand.

I was quite stressed during this period: making lists, worrying, planning. Ben was a lot more relaxed about everything and always insisted on taking his afternoon siesta. This could be a comfort but aware that Ben knew as little as I did about boats and navigation it was also slightly concerning.

In March we had our leaving party. I was touched by the presence of our friends and family, who were there to help us fulfil our dream. Although, in among the games, which included Indian leg wrestling, I still managed to worry. In short, I was afraid of failure. All of our friends had sponsored us, had come to our party and it would be a disaster, I thought, if we were to only last a few days at sea for whatever reason. Having spent months planning and nearly every last penny on getting the boat out to Australia the idea of failure terrified me.

It was clear to me then that I had learnt, no doubt at school, one of life’s worst pieces of habitual thought, namely that effort is vulgar and that it’s better to make a mockery of something than to be seen to try and fail. I knew I would have to unpick this psychological knot eventually, but in the meantime I commanded myself to not bore anyone else with these worries.

7 ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’

‘Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though chequered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.’

Theodore Roosevelt, ‘The Strenuous Life’

My sister and her husband drove us to Heathrow on a cold March night. Saying goodbye to Tory was hard, especially with my brother-in-law filming us, but we had talked everything through and she’d selflessly told me to go, enjoy the adventure and not to think too much about home.

‘One last thing, if you’re ever in a dangerous situation in which you really have to fight to stay alive, promise me that you will, that you’ll never give up.’

‘I promise. Everything will be fine. I’m very hard to kill,’ I said, trying to make light of her fears.

For as long as we’d been together I’d talked about the rowing, so none of this was a surprise to her; she’d been a massive help at every step of the way. For years she’d enthused about the rowing and shared in the dream, and in a hundred practical ways she’d helped us, from painting the boat to helping us pack the food into the holds. I felt bad to be leaving her for so many months and no matter how much I played it down I knew there was a risk. I thought about Tory all the way to Dubai, but by the time we were flying down to Perth I was caught up in the excitement of it all again and intent on following her advice to enjoy the experience.

‘Where are you boys off to then?’ asked the customs official in Perth, eyeing our team jackets. We had a couple of very fancy sailing jackets sponsored by Quba Sails, which made us look a lot more professional than we really were.

‘We’re going to row from Geraldton to Mauritius,’ I said.

‘What, out there on the ogin?’ he said, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘Good on ya.’