was infinitely better prepared for the salt and “rub” sores that accrue to all transatlantic rowers.
In contrast to the skepticism of my detractors, I enjoyed the acknowledgment and encouragement of, among others, bank executives, artists, politicians, lawyers, professors. Some said they’d love to be going with me. There were times when I wished they were going with me. Or going instead of me. For despite my anticipation and training, I harbored little in the way of certainty about the upcoming months. Which was preferable, I believed, to being too certain. Ricky Wallenda once told me that a wire walker is more likely to fall if he succeeds in overcoming his fears. So he nurses those fears as he weathers the improbability of his choices.
Likewise, I nourished my own modest fears and uncertainties, in the hope not just of weathering but of welcoming the consequences of this thing I had chosen to do. And therein I located both the thematic and narrative arcs of the next few months of my life—arcs animated increasingly by my improbable makeover as a high-stakes rower, an extreme athlete, or, more pertinently, an extreme convert to the uncertain art of keeping the adventure alive.
WHILE THE CREW trained, David and his Shelter Island kinsmen were at work on the boat—strengthening it, rebuilding parts of it, generally gussying it up and fitting it for the ravages of the sea. David believed that Roy, whose idea was to keep the boat’s weight down at any cost, had somewhat under-engineered the vessel, perhaps leaving it vulnerable to the tough going ahead. Roy’s earliest plan had not even included a cabin; crew members were to have slept in compartments in the hulls or on an open platform between them. In defense of Roy’s standards, it should be said that in 2006 he had built an ocean rowboat named Orca, a gorgeous tri-hull (two of the hulls were in effect sealed hollow outriggers) in which he and three others raced across the Atlantic against a boat named La Mondiale, piloted by the famed Scottish ocean rower Leven Brown. Coincidentally, it was La Mondiale’s crossing time of thirty-three days (Orca crossed in thirty-four) that established the world record we were about to go chasing.
But Big Blue was more vulnerable than Orca. As a catamaran, she would be subject to enormous structural pressures in that her hulls would be torqued hard and constantly in opposite directions by the waves. The cabin would be pounded from below. Her advantage was that her twin hulls would allow eight rowers to work at once, more than had ever rowed together on an Atlantic crossing.
From afar, Roy protested the contamination of his design, while David made it clear that it was his boat now and that the safety of the crew would not be compromised beyond the fateful compromises that were already intrinsic to such a voyage.
Impressed by Big Blue’s design—by “David’s vision,” as she put it—Angela nonetheless initiated two small changes: the addition of a toilet and of a small gas burner for heating water. Where there was a grandma on the raging main, there would also be a cup of tea.
SIX WEEKS LATER, in mid-November, fourteen of us flew or drove to New York City and rode in crowded vehicles out the Long Island Expressway, past Amityville and Fire Island and the Hamptons. Eventually, at Greenport, we caught the night ferry to Shelter Island, where, during a three-day trial, our experience of the Atlantic began.
At this point, I had not actually seen the already storied rowboat that had occupied my thoughts and dreams day after day for so many months. And I had developed a deep hankering to do so. And was not disappointed. As we spilled out of the van that had transported us from JFK, the boat sat dramatically before us in the lights of the boatyard, spidery and futuristic in its new coat of paint. For half an hour or more, we circled it in a kind of trance, patting and rubbing at it, tummying up to it, peering into its recesses, fiddling with its hatches and seats, unable to get the smiles off our faces. The $10,000 I had put in, which at the time had struck me as a chunk, seemed suddenly small, while the boat, or at least its aura, expanded like Topsy in our midst.
Structurally, Big Blue is a study in simplicity: two narrow hulls, each nearly forty feet long, joined by aluminum beams so they sit twenty feet apart. Each hull has four rowing positions, while the joining beams support a tidy little spaceship of a cabin.
“It looks big, but it’ll be very small on the ocean,” growled a low voice behind me. I turned and a man a few years older than myself was looking at me with drooping but animated eyes. He said, “You must be Charlie; I’m Tom Butscher.” He was one of Steve’s would-be recruits, as yet undecided, who had traveled by train from his home on Toronto Island in order to mingle with the crew, take a trial row, and make up his mind. (The following morning he said to me quietly, “Ya know, I don’t think I’ll bother making up my mind—too much pressure. I’ll just go.” And he committed to the journey then and there.)
In all, meeting the crew was like encountering the characters out of a novel I’d been reading for weeks: Ernst from Vienna; Sunshine Liz from the north side of the island; Aleksa the firefighter from Deer Park; Rowboat Ryan from Chattanooga; Louise from bluegrass country; Sylvain from Gatineau; Paul from Shelter Island.
Paul was not a rower but had our respect and attention because he had worked on the boat, as had the pair of Georgian expats, relentless smokers, who shook hands dutifully and went back to building the rudders.
And of course David—David—that most honorable of guys, who had picked up the pieces in Roy’s absence and had made a boat that with any luck would bear us all off to sea.
Of the lot, it was Angela who seemed most like a character who had somehow found her way into the wrong novel. More subdued, sweeter tempered, driftier than any of us had imagined, she was, at six-foot-two, an impressive assemblage of tree trunks and upholstery and scar tissue. Thirty years ago, as she had explained to us on the way up from JFK, several of her vertebrae had been smashed while she was playing basketball for the U.S. Marines. It was her first game; she was to have been a star. A dozen years later, the military’s best orthopedic surgeons had botched the operation that was intended to fix her up. “No hope, no recourse,” she shrugged—adding that, these days, with the exception of short hauls, where her leg braces were all the support she needed, she traveled in a wheelchair. “Or on a surfboard,” she brightened. Or on her beloved rowboat back home in Long Beach.
On the morning after our arrival, David hitched his wide burgundy half-ton to Big Blue’s trailer, and, following a police escort, pulled her ceremoniously from the boatyard. In our scarves and squall jackets, we fell in behind, pilgrims to Canterbury, chattering and laughing as we walked a mile or more of treed residential roadway to the launching ramp.
There, over a period of several hours, in the cold November afternoon, we attached the rudders and rowing riggers, ate lunch, kibitzed and fussed until, finally, at perhaps 5 p.m. we slid the boat ever so gently off its trailer into the shallows of the Atlantic Ocean. And watched in fascination as it floated free, seeming barely to create a ripple.
Off we rowed into a grayish and misty twilight—up the east side of Shelter Island, not far from East Hampton and Montauk, where my only previous look at the local waters had come from the Steven Spielberg movie Jaws.
For sixteen hours straight we worked exactly as we would at sea: two watches of rowers in two-hour shifts, alternating port and starboard hulls, in order to balance the strain on the shoulders, neck, and torso. During the year or more I had been involved in the expedition, I had been asked perhaps a dozen times: Why two hours—why not three, to allow a decent sleep? And the simple answer is that three hours (great for sleep) is too long a period for rowing. At least over a period of days—or in our case weeks. According to Angela, no crew that has tried has ever been able to stand such a schedule for more than a few watches.
My plan all along had been to position myself with the second watch. That way I could simply observe for the first two hours, after which I intended to row in the bow, so that nobody
