Charles Wilkins - Little Ship of Fools: Sixteen Rowers, One Improbable Boat, Seven Tumultuous Weeks on the Atlantic

IT WAS TO BE an expedition like no othera run across the Atlantic from Morocco to Barbados aboard an experimental rowboat the likes of which no one had ever seen. Powered by a crew of sixteen, backed by the westbound trade winds, the radically designed catamaran, dubbed Big Blue, would be capable, it was hoped, of making the 3,200-mile crossing in record timemax thirty-three days. The boats crew, the largest assembled on the Atlantic since the days of the Norse longboats, included several veterans of U.S. college rowing, a number of marathoners and triathletes, and a woman who had rowed both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. There would be no support vessel, no stored water, no sails or motor. No certification or assurances.

The venture, to be sure, was no laughing matter.

Well, unless you consider that one of the crew was a scrawny and bespectacled sexagenarian, the pinnacle of whose sporting career had been a couple of seasons of high school basketball and a season of hockey with the Forward Pharisees of the old Toronto Church League. This notable human blight on an otherwise durable roster had, until recently, never swung an oar in earnest or even sat on a proper rowing seatindeed, did not know the names of even the commonest parts on a competitive rowing vessel. It is worthy of Mrs. Malaprop that on training maneuvers, when a reference was made to the riggers (the mechanisms that hold the oars in place), the duffer in question assumed it was the rigors of the anticipated crossing that were under discussion.

I am speaking of course of myself, Monsieur la Mer, Charles Wilkins, dad of three, fervent narrator, aging expeditionist; and I must reluctantly report that when I stepped on deck wearing my glasses during the earliest hours of the voyage I was told by one of our toughest rowers, Ryan Worth of the University of Tennessee, that I looked as if I were on my way to the library.

I suffered but did not protest the appraisal, and a mere eight hours later, as I came off the 2 a.m. watch, had a chance to reassess it with a vengeance. For at that point I would willingly have traded the last shreds of my dignity to have indeed been on my way to the libraryto have been pretty much anywhere on earth other than where I was.

If I could claim one rueful victory as I settled to my bunk, it was that I no longer looked like a guy approaching a library. For one thing, every item of clothing on my carcassball cap, socks, sneakers, plus several layers of warmth beneath my rain gearwas oozing sea water. My newly cropped hair was the itchy amassment of brine and microorganisms that it would remain for days, and my hands and toes (the latter from being wedged into my salt-soaked shoes) were a bleached mess of tortured skin and broken blisters.

I was cold, I was exhausted, I was starved. Dinner, many hours earlier, had been a bowl of partially rehydrated macaroni and cheese followed by a cup of greenish pond muck (the latter cleverly presented as Wilderness Kitchen no-cook key lime pie). And yet I had no inclination to fiddle open the all-organic GREAT TASTING one hundred percent natural protein bar that was left from the days snack pack. Even had I been ravenous for this questionable pretense to food, its unwrapping would have required a modicum of coordination from hands that had been reduced to crooks and were temporarily useless for small-motor chores.

Whats more, I had been beaten upslapped around by waves that sometime before midnight had started coming hard out of the northeast onto our port flank. Many of them had broken over the gunnels into our laps, onto our chests, into our faces. At one point, when for the briefest of moments my focus had lapsed (my brain having detoured into fantasies of my former life as a human being), a wave had snatched my oar, driving the handle into my chest, pinning me with savage efficiency against the bulkhead that defined the prow end of the rowing trench. My right ear had taken so much salt water that it had effectively gone deaf.

As if it all werent enough, for perhaps twenty minutes toward the end of the watch I had experienced a running hallucinationa sense that a monstrous rusting scow, the SS Apocalypse, perhaps the moldering container vessel we had seen at dusk, had reefed out and sunk and was somehow lying just beneath us, or was about to surface in the mists off our bow.

I had been told that at times like this I would be unable to remember my own address, or my mothers name, or where I had gone to school. Or who loved me.

I could remember it all just fine.

Unfortunately, I no longer cared.

Meanwhile, if I was lucky, I had ninety minutes to sleep before being jarred awake for my next two-hour stint on the oars. That was the dealtwo hours on, two hours off, for whatever number of days it took to get from Africa to North America. When you werent in your bunk, somebody else was: in my case a mindfully ambitious emergency room physician named Sylvain Croteau from Gatineau, Quebec. Such were the good docs focus and self-possession that a week earlier, in Agadir, when he got news that his dad had died, he had, rather than wilting or packing up, taken an hour in the boatyard where we were getting Big Blue ready, reflected on the life of his estranged papa, and gone industriously back to work.

As for the rest of the crew, I can say now that if we had known what lay ahead, some of us mightnt have been there. In the desultory losses and recrimination that would ensue a couple of weeks hence, one or two considered putting ashore at the Cape Verde Islands. I believed at the time, and said so, that if anyone wanted to go, he or she should get in a lifeboat and do it. And good riddance.

Which isnt to say I did not have traitorous thoughts of my own, among them a scorching heresy that, had I divulged it at the time, would have had me vilified, if not shunned, by some aboard: Namely, that my one-time interest in establishing a world record (the very reason for the voyage) had largely been displaced by a fascination with the journey itselfwhat it would require of me, what I could give to it and what it might give back. At the same time, there is a competitive and cement-headed part of me that would have reveled, have danced naked on the roof, to set a world record. One of my sustaining fantasies during the endless weeks of training was a mental projection of the last hours into Barbados, the old guys saving the day, persisting through the night, winning the battle against the clockthe lot of it an echo of my own internecine war, the one in which, as Mr. Donne put it, we are all finally trumpeted from the field.

As for what the journey would require, on that first night out of Agadir it was demanding everything I could offer in the way of wits and sanity. I had determined days ago that if I was to fulfil my duties to the boat during those early hours aboard, my biggest responsibility would be to myselfspecifically to establish sleeping and eating patterns. Suffice it to say, my survival plan had already gone to hell, replaced by lesser, stupider efficiencies. I imagined, for example, that to save time as I came off the 2 a.m. watch that night, I would attempt simply to sleep in my wet clothes.

First, though, I had something to attend to in the darkness of the cabinand must at this point grant a moments shore leave to anyone of delicate nature. For even so early in my story, I must thrust into the limelight a part of my anatomy typically off limits to non-professionals or to those whose house key does not match my own. By which I am referring to my ass. To what was left of my ass.

My problem astern, I am embarrassed to report, had begun earlier that evening, barely out of Agadir, when, in a moment of distraction and weariness, I had dropped my precious gel seat cushion overboard into the sea. It was an item that had taken me weeks of sampling and experimentation to decide upon and buy, and as I stood on the bridge watching it disappear into the depths, a little part of my optimism for the trip disappeared with it.