The question no one dared ask during the days leading up to our departure was whether our trust was justified. Would the spidery and eccentric vessel Dave had built hold up on the Atlantic? Would the beams connecting the hulls do their job? Would the boat surf, as any rowboat riding the trade winds has to do?
At least one person, a naval architect in Agadir, had been decidedly non-committal in assessing Big Blue’s seaworthiness. When asked, as he was several times, he would roll his eyes, shake his presumably knowledgeable head, and allow that he would certainly not want to be aboard.
In effect, we were test pilots for a boat that might at best become a model for the future of the sport—or at very least an honorable experiment. At worst, Big Blue would end her days as a scattering of expensive flotsam amidst an array of kit bags and life preservers on the lonely and heaving surface of the Atlantic.
MY FIRST AWARENESS of this fanciful experimental rowboat had come sixteen months earlier, during late August of 2009. On a visit to Thessalon, Ontario, to lead a weekend of writing seminars, I had an opportunity to catch up with my old friends Steve Roedde and Janet McLeod, whom I had met nearly a decade earlier while I was on a sixty-three-day solo hike from Thunder Bay, Ontario, to New York City. At the time, they had hosted a dinner for me at their home on St. Joseph Island, in Lake Huron, east of Sault Ste. Marie. Like any number of generous and adventurous irregulars whom I met en route, they eventually became characters in the book I wrote about the walk, and we kept in touch. By August 2009, however, we had not seen one another for several years. So we enjoyed a welcome reunion, over dinner with others, and eventually got to questions about what everybody had been up to in recent months.
“Welllllllll...,” said Janet, when it was her and Steve’s turn, dragging out the syllable as if hesitating to announce, say, that they had turned to gambling and lost everything, or had bought a herd of rhinos and it wasn’t working out.
“I’ll let Steve fill you in on the details,” she said after a few seconds, “but he and Nigel are in training to row across the Atlantic Ocean.”
Nigel is their twenty-three-year-old son, and as Steve took up the tale, I heard, as if through radio static, the phrases “crew of fourteen”... “world-record attempt”... “four months from now”... “tropical Atlantic.” By the time he had uttered half a dozen sentences it no longer seemed as if anyone was actually speaking to me, answering my questions, attempting to impart information. It was rather as if a kind of force field had descended, reducing me first to defenselessness, to purest susceptibility, then to a single evolving compulsion. During the minutes that followed, every other thought in my head was displaced, if not eradicated, by an outlandish inner hankering to be part of the remarkable expedition Steve was describing. I love boats, particularly those without motors; love outdoor adventure. I had in fact been stirred in recent months toward what I felt might be a last grand attempt to do something extraordinary in the realm of travel, something that would push me hard up against my limits, perhaps even my mortality. What that might be, I didn’t know, and could never have named it as specifically as it had just been named for me. Beyond my private ambitions, the writer in me was fascinated by the idea of being out on the ocean, at sea level, in a rowboat of all things, and of having to be fit enough to power such a vessel across an ocean.
When later I cornered Steve about the possibility of my being included, he allowed that there happened to be an opening on the crew and a very remote chance I might be taken on, although probably not—the cherished record was more likely to be broken with young titans at the oars than with skinny old writers.
Nevertheless, I got the name and phone number of the boat’s builder and captain, Roy Finlay, and a few nights later found myself on the phone with him explaining in immodest bursts what a sterling chap I was, exemplary in the clutch, durable, disciplined—how I had once walked 1,400 miles from my home in Thunder Bay to New York City, overcoming poor training, infirmity, injury, blizzards, heat waves; I had written a book about it! I would send him one! He could read for himself about the extraordinary creature I am!
For reasons too trifling to mention, I hesitated to note that I am an arthritic and near-sighted rack of bones, who had done nothing aerobically challenging for three or four years and, at the time, would have been hard-pressed to row across the St. Lawrence River, let alone the Atlantic Ocean.
SIXTY MAY WELL be the new fifty, as the culture-clappers would have us believe. At the same time, I am deeply aware that if there is an axiom for self-deceit among guys my age it is that somehow we can forestall the diminishments of time—or even reverse them—and rise to physical demands that would have defeated us at thirty or forty.
This is perhaps why, when the captain called eight or ten days later and announced to me that I would be allowed to come along as a writer, provided I could row, I hung up the phone not, as one might think, gripped by elation or a sense of triumph but in a welter of ambivalence—excited, yes, but appalled too over what I had gotten myself into. For the first time it occurred to me that at my age I couldn’t possibly get fit enough to row day and night on the high seas—to keep up with a dozen or more tough athletes, most of whom were less than half my age and either elite rowers or front-line endurance competitors in other sports.
His belief, the captain told me, was that I would have a stabilizing influence on temperamental young crew members (a first, let it be said, in that for years I have more often been cited as a destabilizing influence on the orderly progress of the universe).
If my skepticism needed burnishing, it got it a few days later, when, en route from my cottage in Muskoka to my home in Thunder Bay, I stopped overnight at Steve and Janet’s on St. Joseph Island. Steve had a rowing machine in his basement and was going to show me a few things about technique.
“Promise me no tests at this stage,” I told him, to which he responded that I should “just get on for a while—see what it feels like. No numbers.”
The Concept2 rower is a long, Inquisitional-looking contraption with a flywheel, pull chain, and sliding seat—and a computer. And as soon as I saw it, I realized in dismay that anything I did on it in terms of speed, power, or distance would be recorded, almost certainly exposing me as a fraud, perhaps even a fraud with a defective heart (to go with what was rapidly being exposed as my defective brain).
To this day, it is a reminder to me of how badly I wanted to do this that as I got onto the rower I found myself thinking and not particularly caring that if I was going to show Steve and the others I had the mettle to go out on the Atlantic with them, I would need to push myself to where I would unquestionably be risking a heart attack (heart attacks being what happen to out-of-shape sixty-two-year-olds who push their tickers up to 85 percent of capacity and attempt to hold them there for... well, the time it takes to row across the Atlantic Ocean). My best chance of surviving the next hour, I suspected, lay not in the resilience of my arteries but in the fact that Steve and Janet were both practicing emergency room physicians.
And so I rowed. And my heart pounded. And my lungs wheezed. And my heart pounded harder.
When it was over, I am relieved to report, I had not only survived but had put up numbers that moved Steve to enthuse that I was “probably going to be okay” and that he would hasten to let the others know that I would at least be able to lift my own oar onto the boat.
Later, in Steve’s absence, Janet told me how utterly relieved she had been to see me row, surely feeling that had I wobbled or begun to complain after a few minutes, the voyage, not to mention the lives of her son and husband, would have been that much further compromised and at risk.
And so began my training—the run-up to an adventure for which I still believed I had just three months to prepare. Throughout September I spent four or five hours a day at the Canada Games Complex in Thunder Bay, jogging on the track, lifting weights, pumping the rowing machines... and further pumping them... and pumping them some more. Part of my challenge was that the rest of the crew, already far stronger than I, had been training for nearly half a year. The previous February, a kind of cattle call had gone out over an array of rowing and sporting websites. The message was that Captain Roy Finlay, boat designer extraordinaire,