of all crossings, sets the rules, and keeps the record books. Those rules stipulate among other things that boats must be self-sustaining from start to finish, must touch neither land nor any other vessels en route, and must run entirely without motors or sails.
Big Blue, I had realized by now, would be running not just without a motor or sail but without a toilet—the absence of which was apparently to be addressed by a handle astern, to which one could cling while dangling one’s posterior above the ocean. During my training, I read numerous accounts of excursions such as ours, at least one of which mentioned the unsettling sight of sharks, big ones, that occasionally surfaced as someone was doing his or her business over the rail. Beyond the risks of being lost at sea and the (admittedly slim) threat of having one’s hindquarters removed by a man-eating fish, the hazards of ocean rowing, as I was able to assess them, ran to sunstroke, dehydration, exhaustion, malnutrition, extreme weight loss, supertankers in the shipping lanes, salt sores, mid-Atlantic delirium, breakdown of navigation and desalination equipment, antipathies among crew members, and bad weather.
There were also, I came to understand, great pleasures to be anticipated on such crossings: parades of porpoises, pods of whales, glorious night skies, intense camaraderie, the satisfactions of high-level fitness. One crew member from a previous crossing described his boat surfing for miles at a stretch—“as thrilling as a rollercoaster”—on twenty-five-foot waves sent up by the trade winds, which would be of primary importance to us as we made our way across. Or so we believed.
3
AS THE WINTER DEEPENED, Roy’s communication with the crew became increasingly fitful. There were stretches when we didn’t hear from him for weeks. He had taken time away to build another rowing boat, a smaller craft, for a team of British rowers—three of whom, ironically, had in recent months departed our own dwindling crew.
Roy’s own abrupt departure from the expedition in the late spring of 2010 might have been predicted. By that time, he had apparently fallen out with David, and the project was sinking into debt. The boat was far from ready for the ocean. No one knew quite what to do or think about Roy’s going. On the downside, we had lost our captain, a mercurial mastermind who had brought multi-hulled boats to ocean rowing and in so doing had revolutionized the sport. What we had gained, meanwhile, was the freedom to reshape the adventure, free of the singular fixations of an increasingly unpredictable leader.
Until now, the greatest mystery for the crew had been the nature of David and Roy’s connection, and of David’s connection to the boat. In the early days, David had been pitched to the crew as an engineer who would be aboard but not rowing, presumably as Roy’s assistant. Steve believed David was the money man, and that Shelter Island Boats was Roy’s operation. But with Roy’s departure, it quickly became clear that David, a man with the subtlest of egos, owned not just the boatyard but the boat and that he knew a good deal more than we had imagined about boatbuilding. Indeed, with a gaggle of his Long Island pals, two of whom were fellow Georgians, he was prepared now to take over the project. His motivation compared to Roy’s (whose was creative and competitive, as well as financial) was largely a matter of integrity. He and Roy had accepted money from those who had signed on, and David was not about to stiff them if he could help it.
Almost immediately, Steve, who with Roy’s departure was back in the fold, broadened his influence on the voyage. My own hope was that he would assume the captaincy, which would have been his for the taking. But he didn’t want it. He was an experienced Great Lakes sailor but did not feel confident in his navigational skills on the Atlantic. I think he believed too that the captain of an ocean rowboat should have made the crossing at least once as a crewman. However, he did set about bringing new people to the expedition, as did Nigel—an effort that would eventually put seven Canadians, a modest plurality, aboard an essentially American boat.
For the moment there were twelve of us. David wanted sixteen. Steve’s foremost acquisition, as it turned out, was not a Canadian but a Californian whose route to Big Blue was more circuitous, unlikely, and coincidence-ridden than the plotting of a Victorian novel. It began perhaps three months after Roy’s resignation, when a Thunder Bay skier and endurance cyclist named Frank Pollari, a friend of mine who is legally blind, had an inkling he might like to join our little band. He began to train. However, before he committed to the voyage he wanted to test himself on the ocean, in particular to see if an old vulnerability to seasickness still existed. Through Google, he located a veteran female rower in Long Beach, went out to see her, went rowing, and spent much of his time aboard with his head over the rail, puking into the Cali-fornia surf. And came home. And more or less forgot about ocean rowing.
Until a day in late September, when he received an email from Steve, who knew of Frank through me and wanted to know more about this mysterious, good-natured woman who had taken Frank rowing on the Pacific. Steve could not help but notice on her blog that she had rowed both the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, and had returned recently from a triumphal row around Great Britain.
The question was: Would she row for us? Might she accept the vacant captaincy? There is in the sport a prestige in being at the helm, where she had not been on any previous row. Plus, it was assumed that the boat’s experimental design and the desire for a world record would interest her. Steve petitioned her in an email—and received an answer the next day. And sent word to the rest of us that she was at least open to the idea.
We held our breath as she flew cross-country to New York to meet David and to check out the boat. And celebrated quietly as news came down, beneath the radar, that she had liked what she’d seen.
So it was a week or so later that the soft-spoken grandma from Xenia, Ohio, via Long Beach, was introduced to the crew, via email, as our new commander, Cap’n Angela—excited, as she put it, to be part of “this historic ocean row.”
MEANWHILE, in Thunder Bay, not everyone was as magnanimous about my decision to row the Atlantic as I might have liked. “Are you doing this because you want to die?” I was asked at one point by a smart-aleck acquaintance—to which I responded, in finest mock Confucianism, that I was doing it “because I didn’t want to die.”
“But what is the meaning of it?” I was asked by a nettlesome neighbor.
“Discovery,” I thought to tell her, adding that I assumed I would be better able to report on such abstractions when I returned.
“And if you don’t return?” she said slyly.
For now, I told her, I had discovered meaning in my training, which, happily, in mid-June, moved outdoors onto water—at Clear Lake, in the Muskoka region of central Ontario, where the family keeps a summer cottage. What a relief it was to be splashing, to be moving, to see shoreline passing, after ten months indoors on the old black C2 torture machine. My outdoor rowboat, it needs be said, was not one of those spiffy needle-nosed skiffs that you see rowers using in the Olympics but an old Norwegian sailing vessel—a Gresvig 5—given to me by my parents on my twelfth birthday. With a tuck here, a tap there, I converted it into a rowboat that worked the muscles of the upper body and abdomen to the point where several times that summer I was approached by people speculating on how youthfully and seductively “ripped” I must be somewhere beneath my T-shirt. And of course I was. Profoundly. However, as you might imagine with a guy of my age and inclinations, mine was more a metaphysical ripping, an inner muscularity, than one merely of the flesh.¹
And the ripping did not stop at my pecs, nor in the well-lit recesses of the chi. A further feature of this dutiful if moldering craft was that its old centerboard slot, which transected the seat directly beneath my hard-working glutes, regularly ripped holes right through my pants and on into what was left of the underlying muscle. To someone
