Even if he could patch things up with Roy, there was the more concrete obstacle of the sugar bush.
We had barely absorbed this new and shattering reality, when an announcement came that it was now all off for a year. The proposed February departure could not be accomplished either, after which, for nine months, there would be too great a likelihood of tropical storms and hurricanes. For crew members such as Steve, this opened new possibilities—if and only if he could work things out with Roy. A new concern, however, was whether he could withstand another year of the sort of training that, at this point, had taken a toll not just on him but on his marriage.
For others who had stayed with the voyage, it was the last hatchet blow, and within days the crew was down to seven or eight committed rowers. One of them, fortunately, was Nigel Roedde, Steve’s son, who was determined to see the voyage through, thus significantly increasing the chances that Steve would find his way back aboard.
As rowers abandoned ship, my own sense of commitment deepened. By this time, I had borrowed a rowing machine and was often on it for three hours a day. At the height of Roy’s flare-up with Steve, I emailed them both, confirming my participation, hoping it would not be read as a betrayal of my friendship with Steve. Which clearly it was not. When I visited Steve and Janet at Christmas, Steve and I “raced” on a pair of machines in their rec room, after which he informed me that I was now functioning at “the fitness level of the average twenty-five-year-old” (he did not mention which species, although I assumed he was talking about human beings and on that basis permitted myself a moment or two of satisfaction over the progress I had at times doubted I was making).
If I had a training predicament it was this: that, while I was supposed to be putting on weight, the better to survive the physiological dunning of the Atlantic, I was actually losing it, couldn’t gain an ounce no matter how many gallons of oatmeal and pounds of spaghetti and handfuls of cashews I consumed. My intention was to get up to 180 pounds from my customary 160, but I knew from experience that I would have to put the weight on gradually—couldn’t hope to add that much muscle and lard during the last couple of months.
The other hitch in my training was my tendency to go too hard and thereby to risk injury, this against the advice of every knowledgeable athlete and trainer I encountered. My friend Peter White, a Thunder Bay lawyer and former competitive rower, would remind me every time I saw him that it was crucially preferable to under-train than to over-train, and that I should simply not allow myself to fall into the “harder, faster, longer” syndrome. Nevertheless, in February, while attempting to set a personal best for power and “speed” on the machine, I messed up a disc in my back—felt it pop—and for nearly three weeks could barely walk, let alone row. At the height of my discomfort, it took me ten minutes to get out of bed, another ten to get my pants on, another ten to get downstairs to the kitchen. Shortly after it happened, I attended a dinner party and spent the entire evening pitched forward at a forty-five-degree angle from the waist, as inflexible as a 5-lie hockey stick, explaining to stupefied friends that I would soon be reclaiming my youth by powering my way across the Atlantic. A week after that, still folded like a jackknife but gussied up now in an Italian tux, I lurched around a “grand” charity ball, a literary affair, at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto, explaining to writers who thought they’d seen it all that in tossing off the shackles of the years I would, among other things, be testing the resiliency of the human carcass.
Meanwhile, I learned what I could about the route, the weather patterns, the prospects. I also devoured anything I could find about modern ocean rowing—not as it is practiced by fishermen or lifeguards in wooden dories or double-enders off the coasts of, say, Newfoundland or Australia, but by the hardy extremists (“the global-village idiots,” as I have heard them called) who for nearly fifty years have made a kind of game of racing one another, or the clock, across the oceans of the world.
No one would have predicted much of a future for such a game when it debuted during the summer of 1966 (indeed, in considering its history, few free of dementia would predict much of a future for it now). On May 21 of that year, while others of their generation were rolling weed or stringing flowers in their hair in Kensington Gardens or MacArthur Park, a young British pair named David Johnstone and John Hoare, motivated by heaven knows what, left Virginia Beach, Virginia, aboard a craft named Puffin, rowed for 105 days in the direction of home, and on September 3 (as their recovered log revealed) disappeared forever from the face of the planet. A second British team, John Ridgway and Chay Blyth, set out from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, two weeks later than the doomed pair, and upon their arrival in Ireland on exactly the day their cohorts are thought to have gone to the bottom, became the first of the new-age rowers to cross the Atlantic.
In 1972, after three false starts, another pair of Brits, John Fairfax and Sylvia Cook, aboard Britannia ii, became the earliest to cross the Pacific (she the first woman to cross any ocean), rowing from San Francisco to Hayman Island, Australia. They did so in a sprightly 361 days, including food and water stops on a variety of shores and islands.
Of the thirty rowing crews that attempted ocean crossings between 1966 and 1982—attempts now referred to as “historic” ocean rows—just fifteen were successful, while three were lost entirely. The most compelling of the disappearances was that of an Englishman named Kenneth Kerr, who departed St. John’s, Newfoundland, in May of 1979, rowed for fifty-eight days on the North Atlantic, gave up, and was rescued by a passing cargo ship. He set out again several months later, this time from Corner Brook, Newfoundland, rowed for 108 days, and is believed to have been wrecked and drowned, possibly within miles of his destination on the English coast.
What distinguished those first thirty attempts from rows that have occurred since was that they were undertaken without life rafts, satellite phones, or desalination equipment—or any navigational conveniences such as an autopilot or a GPS (which had of course not yet been invented). A broken rudder or oarlock meant the end not just of the voyage but quite possibly of those aboard.
Peter Bird of the U.K. had already rowed both the Atlantic and Pacific when, in August 1982, he introduced modern desalination and communications equipment to the sport during his 294-day odyssey from San Francisco to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Between June 1992 and June 1996, Bird would make five more attempts to row the Pacific, all of them unsuccessful, invariably from the east coast of Russia with the hope of reaching the west coast of the USA. The fourth attempt lasted 304 days before he gave it up. On his fifth attempt, he rowed a couple of thousand miles east from Vladivostok, made his last contact with land on Day 69 of his voyage, and was never heard from again.
A pair of Soviet rowers, Alexander and Eugene Smurgis, embarked from Tiksi, Russia, on the Arctic coast, during the summer of 1993, and reached London, England, in 131 days. Less than three months later, Eugene, alone on a relatively straightforward run across the Atlantic, disappeared somewhere above the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and, like Peter Bird, was not seen again.
During the decade to come, Smurgis’s route, an approximation of our own, emerged as the standard transatlantic crossing, beginning either on the northwest coast of Africa or in the Canary Islands and moving westward for some 3,000 miles, aided by the trade winds, to the outer islands of the Caribbean. The less common and tougher Atlantic route, eastward from North America to Europe, is aided by the current of the Gulf Stream, which arcs north and east up the U.S. seaboard, past Newfoundland, and eventually across to Ireland.
While fewer than thirty rowboats successfully crossed any of the world’s oceans during the first thirty years of the sport, the next fifteen years—from 1997 to the present—witnessed so many attempts that successful crossings now number somewhere over 400. This is a result largely of the introduction of a transatlantic rowing race, the Atlantic Challenge, in 1997. In October of that year, thirty boats, all pairs, left the Canary Islands. Twenty-four of them eventually reached Port St. Charles, Barbados. In 2003, the race became the Woodvale Atlantic Rowing Race, a contest that every second year sends as many as forty boats out from Tenerife in the Canaries. The sport is regulated
