Bear Grylls (52 page)

Every bag and tarpaulin was drenched. I opened the watertight zip of my grab bag to take another anti-seasickness pill, and a wave flooded the bag. The pills became soaked and crumbly. The zips
were going brown from rust after just a few days.

The sound of water was everywhere, an incessant dripping. It was like living in an open-top car in a car wash, in a washing machine, in a deep-freeze.

Icy water seeped down our arms into our gloves. These were properly sealed diving gloves, but still, after twenty-four hours of such conditions, they were sodden and cold like everything
else.

As we ploughed on through the night, some of us were starting to feel sick. Even Andy was struggling. The familiar cure of fixing your gaze on the horizon didn’t apply here because there
was no horizon, just blackness. Alton Rumbolt’s wife had kindly given us a round of crab sandwiches in St Mary’s, but the stench of them, soaked in diesel and salt water, made us all
want to retch. I threw them overboard, apologizing.

By morning, after twenty-four hours at sea, we were exhausted. We had set out from St Mary’s aware that we were trying to cross the Labrador in a tight window of decent weather. I still
believed we had made the correct decision, but the predicted wind direction had turned out to be wrong and that small window had been dramatically tightened.

I looked around the boat, at Mick and Andy, Charlie and Nige. Everybody was focused. We had one common aim: to reach Greenland and safety. But Greenland was still over 400 miles off and, on the
chart, Labrador still looked only a blip away. This was going to be a real struggle and every glance down at the chart-plotter while on watch told us the same story. We were making perilously slow
progress.

At times, you would come off watch and the estimated ‘time to destination’ dial would say ‘two days, eighteen hours and forty-one minutes’. By the next time you were
navigating, four hours later, you hoped that the time remaining would be significantly less. But often it was more. If our speed dropped only slightly due to the conditions, the ‘time to
destination’ dial would rise dramatically. It would now say ‘three days, eleven hours and ten minutes’. This was so demoralizing. We should have covered the dial.

In those dark hours curled up in a ball in the pouring rain, shivering, I often thought of home and our unseen crew, which for me was my dad. It wasn’t advice I was after, or even
guidance, it was just comfort, a familiar, warm hand to hold.

Mickey Grylls was
born on 21 February 1934, and he died on 7 February 2001, only a couple of weeks before his sixty-seventh birthday. He was a true gentleman: a family
man, a man of faith and a kind soul.

To me, he was always just Dad, and that was enough. And on this wild, grey, windy North Atlantic morning, 300 miles from anywhere, I peered from the sardine tin out across the endless sea and
remembered him.

Silly things, like the dewdrop that used to hang from the end of his nose when he was walking in the cold; the coarse stubble when he hadn’t shaved; the warm kiss; the smiling pride in his
eyes when I achieved something . . . anything. And his laughter.

There was that poem that my father loved so much, written by a soldier just before a battle during the English Civil War. ‘Oh Lord, you know how busy I must be this day,’ he wrote.
‘If I forget you, I pray do not forget me.’ I could see the poem where it always sat, wedged in the frame of his mirror.

The second verse of Dad’s favourite hymn, ‘I vow to thee, my country,’ said it all. It was him in a nutshell, although he never knew it.

I missed him so much. In these difficult moments particularly, I so wished he could be here with me.

It was early morning
at our barge on the Thames. We were just getting up. There was a knock on the door. It was a policeman. That was strange. Shara sat beside me as he
told me my father had died. My mother was many hours away and so the police were asked to tell me. The officer did so, and with great gentleness. I even thanked him for his time. I was completely
numb.

Then going with Shara to the funeral directors, to give them my dad’s favourite boxer shorts to be buried in. I held them in my hand feeling ridiculous. But I couldn’t even do it. I
was unable to go into the funeral parlour. I tried three times but instead broke down with Shara in the alleyway outside.

Then, at 2 a.m. at my parents’ home, sitting beside his coffin the night before the funeral, alone. Laying his old Royal Marine beret on the coffin. Afraid. Afraid of how I would cope in
this world without him.

Then finally, carrying his coffin down the aisle of the church, flanked by five of my closest friends in the world – Ed Amies, Mick Crosthwaite, Trucker Goodwin-Hudson, Charlie Mackesy and
Hugo Mackenzie-Smith – our arms linked, being literally held by their strength. How I needed them. All I could hear was the strange, hollow click of our shoes down the aisle. Dad felt so
heavy.

He had written a reading for me to do at Shara’s father’s funeral. I read it again at my dad’s funeral only a few months later. The words were so tender, and had turned out to
be so prophetic.

This was what he wrote:

The words were so simple: ‘When you are in pain, I am with you.’ But was it true? Even out here? When I was afraid?

The words ‘I am hand in hand with our Lord, yet I am with you.’ But would you hold my hand now? Could I really believe in this ‘Lord’ of yours? Would you give me faith
when it counted?

Andy was having
the same kinds of feeling midway across the Labrador Sea. He had lost his father as well, but at a much younger age. That is harder. But I understood.
Days later, he told me that he had asked his dad for help. He hadn’t done that in years.

‘Maybe that seagull is my dad,’ Andy had mused, looking at one of the birds following us.

He smiled at the thought, hoping he was right.

None of the crew was particularly religious. It was never really something that we discussed. Faith is very intimate, if it is to be real. For me, here on the Labrador Sea, alone and in
terrifying conditions, my Christian faith was all I really had; not some sort of blind, all-conquering faith, but an intimate, at times faltering faith. The sort that says I’m not quite sure
about everything, especially the very ‘religious’ bits, but I love the sound of this Jesus. The one my dad knew.

Faith is always a risk, just like love. It has taken me a long time to admit this, but I am no longer frightened to say I need it. I need that comfort. I often feel lost, but my faith says
I’m never lost to Him. That means the world to me, and faith is a risk I want always to take. At the end of the day, it’s all I have.

C. S. Lewis once wrote about this Jesus: ‘Safe? Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.’

Dad would have agreed with that.

To me, faith is not about us. It’s about Him. It is about being loved and about being held, unconditionally, regardless of how well or badly we may be doing.

This Jesus always seems so much bigger than me, so much stronger than all my self-doubt and fears. He has this habit of stealing in when I least expect Him, and always when I least deserve it.
When I am right at my wits’ end, when I feel I am losing the precious hope we all need so dearly. These are the moments when I sense Him near me, and I can never quite believe it. He never
condemns, He just sustains. He doesn’t judge, He understands. He gives me my hope again, and says be brave. He helps me when I most need it.

Why does this love mean so much to me? Maybe because I don’t expect it. Because I don’t deserve it. It just comes, regardless. It is like the sea and the waves and the tides.

You can’t keep God out. He’s all around us, if we’re just still enough to listen.

‘Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.’ A man called Joshua in the Bible heard God say that, and he went on to lead a
nation.

Faith does this. It hopes. It holds us. It feels like home and I’m lost without it.

Dad wrote that he was ‘with me’. I hope every night that this is true. Whether I am kneeling beside Jesse’s cot or out on the ocean or on some mountain, I pray for this always.
For Dad and my Jesus to be right beside me.

And right here, right now, in the waves and wind, I knew that, somehow, the unseen crew were at our side.

There can only be true courage when first there is genuine fear.

Dr David Livingstone

Andy was sitting
bolt upright in the sardine tin.

I didn’t know why.

More than thirty hours into this bone-shuddering, relentless storm, the winds were still at fever pitch, and the 20-foot waves were now coming at us head-on. Each wave was taking us further and
deeper into the heart of the storm. We had no choice but to hang on, clinging to the routine by which we would stay afloat and continue this painfully slow progress across the Labrador Sea.

But Andy sitting bolt upright in the sardine tin was not part of this routine.

In these harrowing conditions, we had adapted the rota so that while two of us would stay at the console, one helming and the other navigating, the other three would squeeze into the sardine
tin. We would spoon, body to body, trying awkwardly to get some rest and shelter beneath the tarpaulin sheet. Three of us in the sardine tin together meant we kept warmer.

But Andy was sitting bolt upright, staring out to sea. Water was still crashing over his head, but he hardly moved.

Something was wrong. I knew it.

A minute later I looked again.

Andy was up now, checking the fuel gauges, pressing the dial, taking a reading, looking up, checking the gauges again. I couldn’t see the expression on his face through his helmet, but his
slow, deliberate body language suggested he was agitated and concerned.

When Andy was happy, I knew it; he would be wearing his Peruvian woollen hat, eating with his green plastic spoon, cosy in his own cocoon, at peace with the world. That was a very different Andy
to now.

Still the wind licked across the boat, and the incessant waves were crashing over the bows and console every thirty seconds or so. The sea just didn’t seem to care. It had no regard for
our struggles. The waves just roared towards us with a deafening mass of white water; then our world would drop away under us. One wave was gone and the next would be upon us.

Looking behind me, I was stunned by the speed at which the waves were racing away from us, and the sheer energy and force by which they travelled, unhindered, unbridled. They were like wild
horses galloping.

Even the most basic kinds of communication and movement had become almost impossible. I wanted to turn to Andy and ask him if there was a problem. But this was not easily done. I could only
watch him through my visor.

Andy recalls:

I waited a further minute and then finally Andy beckoned me over. We stood side by side, braced against the constant pitching of the boat, shouting to each other to make ourselves heard above
the wind and waves.

‘Bear, we’re running short on fuel,’ Andy yelled.

‘How bad is it?’

‘Pretty bad. We’re struggling.’

‘Well, what can we do to reduce our burn rate?’

‘We need to reduce our speed. That’s the only way of making the fuel last longer.’