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 and archived by an English organization called the Ocean Rowing Society, which logs the details 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