Rowboat in a Hurricane (12 page)
A few other things seemed different, too. The sky was a kaleidoscope of alternating cloud formations, rapidly changing from cirrocumulus, to cumulonimbus, and then to stratus. The sun burned red and unnatural. And without a breeze, the air was muggy and oppressive. The currents had also stopped, and the ocean became a pool of mercury with an oily swell that lifted and dropped our boat so gently that it didn’t rock. Even though I enjoyed rowing on such a smooth surface, something seemed almost sinister about the lifeless, overheated state of the ocean.
Colin seemed unconcerned, and I took comfort from the statistics offered by the pilot charts. Our latitude was now low enough that we wouldn’t be affected by the fall and winter tempests that form off Europe. We were, in fact, in an area of the Atlantic Ocean that almost never has storms of any sort through the fall. And, of course, we were still thousands of kilometres from the eastern edge of the hurricane belt.
THE MORNING OF
October
8
marked our seventeenth day rowing and my thirty-first birthday. Instead of our usual breakfast of oatmeal or rice pudding, Colin undertook the laborious task of making pancakes. We had no syrup on board, so he caramelized sugar in a pan above the single burner and added a splash of water. A scent more like fresh doughnuts than pancakes filled the boat. I peered into the galley and noticed my chef was cooking the pancakes in a quarter-inch of oil. He was deep-frying them! He then topped the crisp, golden morsels with syrup, strawberry jam, and some of the whipped cream from the Tetra Paks. Then Colin stacked the finished product on a plate, topped it with a candle, and sang the full chorus of “Happy Birthday.”
“You shouldn’t have,” I crooned, not meaning a single word of it, before blowing out the candle.
“Did you make a wish?”
“Of course, but I’m not telling you, otherwise it won’t come true.”
I had wished for better winds. The previous day the winds had started to blow from the south, which, according to our pilot charts, was quite rare. At first the winds had been very light, but the night before the headwinds had strengthened to force three and our progress had ground to a halt. Now the contrary winds were even stronger, and the waves had grown to nearly two metres. It looked like it would be another day without rowing, another day stuck in the cabin, slowly drifting backwards.
Faced with a tower of pancakes, I momentarily forgot my disappointment. I dug my fork into the scrumptious, crispy pile of sugar, flour, and grease. Now that we were over our seasickness, food had reached an almost godly status. It was our reward, a distraction, a moment of bliss in a difficult day.
“Mmmm, thank you,” I murmured.
“These are good,” Colin enthused. “And there’s still more to your birthday celebration; wait until tonight’s dinner.”
“It’s a date.”
When the excitement of my birthday breakfast was over, we climbed back into the cabin to ride out the heavy headwinds. The day dragged by. It was too rough to read, so we whiled away the time telling each other stories from the past. Colin regaled me with tales from his days sailing alone in the Pacific. He told me about his parrot named Pirate, and about how he had climbed coconut trees, gone spear-fishing, and sailed through storms. While Colin was adventuring and trying to spread his
DNA
—albeit without biological intentions—I had been at university studying genetics. As our rowboat drifted slowly backwards, I told Colin about life at universities in Hamilton, Victoria, and England. Our conversations swung from the past to the future. We talked about the home we would buy one day and about all the meals we would cook in the kitchen—Thai coconut lemongrass curry, eggplant in black bean sauce, deep-fried bananas with coconut ice cream . . .
“Do you feel that?” Colin suddenly asked.
“Feel what?”
“I’m not quite sure. It’s kind of like a subsonic sound—you can’t quite hear it, but you just know it’s there—maybe through the vibration on your skin,” Colin said, cocking his head as if to improve his hearing. “But it’s not sound, it’s more like pressure—fluctuating air pressure,” he added, looking slightly puzzled.
“No, I can’t say I do. I do have a slight headache. I think it’s caused by the heat, combined with your farts.”
Colin didn’t answer this with the wisecrack I expected. Instead he had a slight frown of concentration.
“I’m going to check for boats again. Maybe it’s the rumble of a diesel I’m feeling,” Colin said.
He opened the hatch, climbed outside, and stood for about five minutes, ducking on occasion to avoid spray coming over the boat. Finally he returned to the cabin.
“Nothing. We’re definitely alone on the sea right now. You know, there’s something really weird about this weather. I wish we had a barometer. And what about all these bugs we’ve been seeing flying around? During my years sailing, I never saw insects this far from land,” Colin said.
I ran my fingers through his greasy, salt-encrusted hair. “Don’t worry, honey. I’m sure it’s nothing. We’re just getting a couple days of headwinds. Soon it will all go back to normal. I bet we’ll be able to row again by this evening.”
As the day wore on, my optimistic words rang empty. The headwinds picked up and, by evening, conditions were so rough that Colin had to cancel the romantic birthday dinner he had planned. Instead, we had crackers, cheese, and a chunk of dry meat.
The following morning we were greeted by an awesome spectacle. As the sun lifted above the horizon, the sky turned a red so vibrant that it looked like an accident in Photoshop. But I couldn’t help feeling concerned, even as I looked at such a beautiful sunrise. There was no story Colin liked to regale me with more than the reliability of the ancient expression, “Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.”
Versions of this proverb have been in existence since biblical times. (In Matthew
XVI
, Jesus says, “When it is evening, ye say, it will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, it will be foul weather today: for the sky is red and lowering.”) The colours we see in the sky depend on the composition of the atmosphere. When the atmosphere is packed with water vapour and dust, only the longest wavelength, red, penetrates the particulate and is visible. The shorter blue wavelengths are scattered and less apparent. In the evenings and mornings, the sun sits low on the horizon and transmits light through the thickest part of the atmosphere. A red sky therefore means more dust and water in the air. Since storms tend to move more from west to east (predominant wind directions play a role in this), red at night means the storm has passed and a high-pressure system is moving in, while in the morning, red announces an arriving tempest.
We spent the day in discomfort. My nightly journal entry was tellingly brief: “Too rough and contrary winds to row. Lost the second and final drogue. The swivel broke. Left the chain and rope in the water—hopefully it’ll have some effect.” The winds and waves had continued to build throughout the day and, without the sea anchor, we were even more at the mercy of the waves. It was too rough to cook, and running the desalinator was impossible. We had nothing to do but wait. We lay in the cabin, uncomfortable, hot, sore, and nauseous. Our chores were reduced to keeping watch and pumping out the bilge. Occasionally, we opened one of the hatches in the cabin, which was airtight and made it not only hot but suffocating.
How long does it take to develop bedsores?
I wondered. I felt like I had been lying in this cabin for years. I slipped in and out of dreamless sleep, wishing for time to speed up. The bad weather continued to escalate and, by the time night arrived, the winds blew at what we estimated was fifty kilometres per hour. The winds had changed direction gradually, and were now coming from the west. Confused waves seemed to come from multiple directions, occasionally colliding to send a column of water into the air.
The waves looked like they had grown overnight, and we guessed the conditions were now force eight. Our boat lay in disarray. We were being beaten into a semi-comatose state of submission. Waves shuffled the contents of our cabin; cracker crumbs and milk powder dusted us, and water leaking through the roof saturated us and everything else inside. I could barely remember how it felt to stretch my legs. When we lay down, which was most of the time, agitated seas rubbed our heads against the mattress. My hair had become an oversized dreadlock, and Colin’s was even wilder-looking. This was our third day of cabin confinement, and it did not seem like relief was around the corner. In the afternoon, I mustered the energy to make a phone call. I took the satellite phone from its waterproof case, positioned the antenna near the hatch for the best reception, and dialled my Dad’s number. I thanked God, or more accurately, the technical genius of Iridium satellite telephones, for the ability to call home from the mid-Atlantic. As the phone rang, I imagined my father getting off the couch in his suburban Toronto home and padding across the living room to pick up the handset.
“Hello,” he said, right on cue.
“Hi Dad, it’s me,” I said, happy to hear his voice. “Things are going well, and we’ve made it almost eight hundred kilometres from Lisbon . . . ”
My father cut me off. “Honey, things
aren’t
going well. I just heard on the news that the most northeastern hurricane in history has formed—Hurricane Vince. I looked up its coordinates on the National Hurricane Center website, and it’s only six hundred kilometres away from you.”
I was stunned. Maybe there was a mistake. “Which direction is it heading?” I finally asked.
My father was silent for several seconds before he replied, “Straight towards you.”
H
OW COULD THIS
be happening to us? It wasn’t right; it wasn’t fair. Never in history had there been a hurricane on this area of the Atlantic, and even the likelihood of a regular storm at this time of year was low. Why now? Was it global warming, natural weather quirks, or just bad luck? Was it something I did? Perhaps it was Nature’s way of saying:
You wanted to experience the ocean? Well, here it is.
Asking why didn’t help our situation. My one hope was that my father was mistaken—perhaps he had misread the news report or assumed we were elsewhere. I decided to get verification and called my friend Mary. Her delight in hearing from me evaporated as she relayed the latest information on Hurricane Vince from the website of the National Hurricane Center, a government-run organization that monitors and predicts hurricane activity in the Atlantic Ocean from its base in Florida. Hurricane Vince had formed several hundred kilometres away from us in a part of the ocean thought to be too cold to support hurricanes. The Hurricane Center stated it was the most northeastern hurricane in history, a complete anomaly. The worst part was that Vince was tracking straight towards us, just as my dad had said.
Colin and I stared at each other in shock. A heavy silence was punctuated only by the raucous roar of waves and the dishevelling impact that followed. I just wanted to close my eyes and pretend this wasn’t happening.
“Do you know what my birthday wish was?” I asked, finally breaking the silence.
“What?”
“For better winds,” I said, trying to hold back my tears and anger at the irony of it. “All I wanted was for the headwinds to stop.”
“Wow, it’s like some evil entity pricked up its ears when you said that. I thought those clouds looked peculiar, but I didn’t want to worry you. See those rows of wispy ones?” Colin said, pointing to high clouds that looked like white unfurled cotton candy. “They’re cirrus—quite rare to see on the ocean, except before a big storm.” Before this we had seen mostly cumulus, big puffy white clouds that begged you to find shapes in them.
“So I guess that nice weather we had a few days ago was just the calm before the storm,” I said.
From the Hurricane Center we found out that three days before, on October
6
, when we had been revelling in pleasantly calm conditions, a frontal low from the northwest had swept over the Azores Islands seven hundred kilometres to the northwest. Meteorologists called it occluded and deep-layer; the wave of low pressure had brought thunderstorms and foul weather. Over the next two days, the storm had intensified and, on October
8
, just as I was waking up and looking forward to celebrating my birthday, it became a subtropical storm. At that point the unusually placid waters we’d been experiencing were forming ripples from a stiffening westerly breeze, but we still thought little of the change. Tropical Storm Vince continued to intensify, and when winds speeds reached
120
kilometres per hour, it became a hurricane.
The formation of a hurricane in the cool waters above the Canary Islands seemed impossible. According to the National Hurricane Center, the temperature of these waters was only
23
to
24
degrees Celsius; hurricanes are generally thought to need surface temperatures of at least
26
.
5
degrees Celsius to form. The Hurricane Center doubted the likelihood of a hurricane so much that they held off a full day before bestowing Vince with his name (only cyclonic storms are named). In a written discussion dated October
9
, it stated, “if it looks like a hurricane . . . it probably is . . . despite its environment and unusual location.”
For most people, the fact that Vince was a freak was nothing more than academic. Newspapers around the world used this interesting tidbit to fill tight spaces between ads. The most northeasterly-forming hurricane in history made for a catchy headline. But all the articles stressed that there was nothing to worry about; it was far out at sea.
The Edmonton Journal
reassured readers with its story “Hurricane’s No Danger to the U.S.”