My Sunday ended without even being able to touch the oars. I had tried to begin work early, but waves were crashing in from all sides, suggesting that it would be more prudent to spend the weekend at home. Fine. I decided to rest a bit and, who knows, start organizing the mess in my bags and in the small ship compartments I hadn’t dealt with yet.
Spending the whole day holed up in a place where I could barely sit, and where I had to open the vents every hour to bring in fresh air, should have been miserable, but strangely I was happy there.
The sea looked like a feverishly busy quarry: all gray with constant explosions and deafening machinery. But the wind was blowing steadily from the south-southwest, and it threw me in a favorable direction. I knew that even without rowing I would move forward during the bad weather. Although I remained hesitant, I decided to pull up the sea anchor for the first time. Without it, I risked being sideswiped by a wave and capsizing, but I decided to take the chance.
Balancing like a mountain goat, the boat began to glide with the storm, unbothered by the waves crashing on deck. I enjoyed the sensation. During the night, I tucked the anchor away inside an external rowing compartment, which I had nicknamed “Bodega 5” in homage to the Santiago del Estero’s main hold.
I kept replaying the previous capsizes in my mind, fearful of it happening again. Lying down, I couldn’t stop running the numbers: if in three days I had capsized three times, now, after twenty-two days at sea, I had an outstanding balance of nineteen capsizes that sometimes left me tossing and turning. However, the sensation of making progress, even accompanied by a storm, was satisfying. Despite my anxieties, I fell fast asleep.
The alarm clock rang at dawn, telling me it was time for breakfast, and I got up eager to get to work. But the weather had worsened. The wind whistled over the little VHF antenna that struggled to stay upright, reminding me of a passage from La Fontaine that I’d read as a boy: the fable of “The Oak and the Reed.” The powerful oak never bent to the wind and scoffed at the fragile reed that flopped to the ground with each gust. Then, on an especially windy day, the stubborn oak tree refused to cede to a force stronger than itself and fell to the ground, uprooted. The reed, on the other hand, got right back up after the wind passed and continued to grow.
I had no reason to resist the sea’s violence. The barometer, which had been very low since the night before, slowly continued to go down, indicating that the weather conditions weren’t going to get better anytime soon. I was being overtaken by a low-pressure center. I knew that there was nothing to be gained from arm-wrestling a force so much greater than my own. Instead of fighting with the weather and running the risk of damaging the boat, I should be patient and wait for the right moment to go forward.
By negotiating with bad weather without losing sight of my goal, I would get through this. So one more day lying down in my waiting compartment was called for. What I never could have guessed was that the wait would be so long. Seven full days passed before I could get back to rowing; seven days stuck inside the cabin, battered by enormous waves, bobbing in the froth of an angry sea. Locked in. Trapped. Just waiting. Listening to waves crash far away without knowing if they would reach me, or being surprised by the sea’s blows that came out of nowhere at night. A terrible situation, a real tragedy!
Except it wasn’t. It’s funny, but I admit I get nostalgic thinking about that week. It might seem ridiculous, but there have been few times in my life when I felt so happy.
My anguish passed after those first days, and I convinced myself that not even the worst storm would capsize the boat again. Choppy, difficult waves of seven, even eight meters tall revealed a sea even more agitated than on the sad day of the capsizes. But by distributing the weight better and making use of the internal ballast tanks, the ship’s behavior remained exemplary, and I never had to drop the sea anchors to stabilize the drift.
With the centerboard fully retracted and the ballast tanks filled with saltwater, I realized it was unlikely I’d find myself lying on the ceiling again, watching fish through the hatch as if I were in an upside-down aquarium.
Over those seven days, I didn’t have a single moment of boredom, sadness, or despair. For nothing is more certain than the arrival of good weather after a seemingly endless storm.
Far worse than the outrageous storms were the periods of tension and expectation provoked by eerie calm, when flat seas and dead wind brought with them the certainty of changing weather and rough seas ahead.
That Tuesday, July 3, I made a perfect QSO with Brazil and my suspicions were confirmed. The sea would not improve soon. Donald, PY1 E MM from the Naval Academy in Rio de Janeiro, gave me a pessimistic weather forecast: winds from the southwest to the northwest of thirty to thirty-five knots, and a cold front at 23° latitude south, 8° longitude east—that is, just below where I was—and moving in my direction.
It was odd to get a weather forecast when nothing could be done to avoid the coming storm. But the simple fact of knowing what would happen in the next few hours was hugely reassuring.
I took advantage of my free time by getting the house in order. I stayed busy all day with small tasks and didn’t notice the hours fly by. First, I sorted my clothes, which were in a large bag. My stash of dry clothes was already dwindling, and I had to save the ones that weren’t already covered in salt. I put the remaining fresh clothes in a separate bag; these I would only use while sleeping or staying inside the cabin now. The “salty” ones, as much as possible, would be left out to dry; and since salt prevents fabric from drying completely, they would only be used for working on wet days. A third bag would be reserved for soaked clothes, bad weather overalls, and the heroic red jacket.
I tried to make a pillow (the only item among all that equipment that I had forgotten to bring, and perhaps the one I needed most), but without much success. The boat’s rocking was so violent that within a few minutes the weight of my head flattened even the fluffiest prototype. I set up a stationery shop with pencils, pens, and navigation material in a small cardboard box inside the radio compartment. I filled the office with documents, money left over from Africa, some obsolete Brazilian cruzeiros, and all my books and navigation tables. The power room served as a corner store behind the batteries, where I kept spare batteries, a flashlight, lightbulbs, and the additional electronics. I set up a data processing center consisting of only two electronic calculators, indispensable for quickly calculating my position. The pharmacy, due to lack of use, would be transferred to the supply compartment in the bow when the weather permitted. I stored the spare pans and other infrequently used objects that weren’t particularly affected by moisture outside in “Bodega 5,” which was already full of water. In the bottom of it, I kept an iron anchor that had been used before departure and that I intended to drop into the sand when I finally reached the Brazilian coast. Along with it were three harpoons, 250 meters of various lines, and spare hoses for the tanks. I didn’t want to remove the water that was coming in through the hatch cover, since its weight would help stabilize the boat when I wasn’t rowing.
I found time to read some passages from One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, a gift from Anne Marie when I left Lüderitz. Among my favorite classical and MPB tapes, I discovered a ridiculous German “hard rock” recording that hijacked the cassette player (normally accustomed to softer music). Without realizing it, my musical preferences had begun following the rhythm of the sea: harsh and loud like at that moment, or sad and quiet when I was lost in thought, crossing doldrums.
One morning, still stuck inside and with no prospect of better weather, scanning the frequencies on my receiver, I tuned into a Brazilian radio station and couldn’t contain my excitement. It was a Rádio Globo program from Rio de Janeiro, hosted by Paulo Giovanni. Targeted at housewives, the format was completely new to me: horoscopes, recipes, “real-life stories,” advice about husbands who stayed out all night. Man, it was entertaining! For the first time on my journey, I was hearing news in Portuguese. Supermarket deals in Baixada Fluminense, bad traffic in downtown Rio de Janeiro; I felt so connected to Brazil. I wrote down the frequency on the cabin’s white wall: 11805 kHz. And I started to follow the amusing program every day. My excitement didn’t last long, though, since the radio signal died down after 9:00 am Brasília time. I turned the radio off.
The sixth day ended, and still nothing. It was incredible how quickly time passed. I was entering the twenty-sixth day of my trip, and the menu was undergoing some small modifications. I started to experiment more in the kitchen, and I realized that I could come up with new dishes by using different combinations of spices. Eating became the most exciting activity on board.
I had been interested in the issue of diet at sea for a while now. By studying other sailors’ journeys, I observed that little attention had been paid to nutrition. In all the accounts I read about long stretches at sea, there were frequent digestive issues, difficulty healing wounds, boils and skin problems, and the loss of physical endurance.
When I spoke with d’Aboville in Paris about his North Atlantic crossing, he admitted that it was the most serious problem he’d faced; in the middle of the ocean, what almost forced him to give up wasn’t storms or sharks, but a simple and terrible case of constipation. Listening to the details of the painful enema he had to undergo, I decided that under no circumstances would I go through the same ordeal. Why not develop a properly balanced diet plan adapted to life at sea?
Rob, my faithful collaborator during the preparation phase, introduced me to a nutritionist named Flora Lys Spolidoro, who didn’t fear or laugh at my plan. Flora was passionate; even more important, she was extremely competent. She convinced the board of the firm where she worked, Nutrimental, that my idea had scientific value. Then she pulled together a group of nutritionists to design and execute a complete nutrition program that was flawless.
Those seven marvelous women spent eight months doing research and hard work—winning over my heart by tending to my stomach.
My diet of dehydrated foods met a number of strict requirements: not spoiling in extreme temperatures and moist conditions, low volume and weight, well-balanced, easy to prepare, and, above all, having the consistency, appearance, and flavor of home-cooked food. The individually wrapped packages were numbered 1 to 119; this indicated the order they were to be eaten in to keep my diet (which required an average of 4,200 calories per day) balanced. If I wasn’t hungry on a particular day, I would discard that day’s menu and jump to the next numbered package the following day. The same menu would only repeat in two weeks’ time. That way, it would be almost impossible to get sick of the food, and I didn’t have to eat if I wasn’t hungry.
But the big secret of the project was that, for logistical reasons, I would only cook with seawater—preserving my limited supply of drinking water and saving an unnecessary weight: water for cooking. To do this, all my foods were dehydrated without salt and combined in such a way as to cancel out the excess salinity added during the preparation stage. It was a complete success.
Flora calculated that the first days of my journey would be more difficult, so the first twenty-five menus were faster to prepare and had slightly more calories than the other ninety-four. There were also specific menus for diarrhea, emergencies (these could be made without a stove), and even survival (these were concentrated and freeze-dried). One hundred and fifty days of rations in all.
By the time I got to number twenty-six, having worked my way into the regular menus and feeling more comfortable with the stove, I began to achieve true culinary feats—accompanied by exuberant desserts that, sadly, ended with the unpopular chore of washing the dishes and pan.
It was while I was trying to wash the small pressure cooker inside the cabin that I first felt a violent scrape coming from underneath the boat. A shark’s rough skin was rubbing against the bottom, making a startling sandpaper noise. The “visits” had begun again, and this time they provided me with an hour of tense companionship. The waves beating down from above and the sharks scraping from below consoled me: at least the bottom is getting a good cleaning, I thought. The submerged part of the hull was painted with a special antifouling paint that prevents barnacles from forming but not the build-up of slime. I hadn’t done any bottom inspections since my departure. I decided that if the weather was good, and if the “visits” stopped “helping,” I would dive down and see how the special paint was holding up.
There was nothing to do besides accept my temporary situation and wait for the weather to improve. After so many days lying down, I was restless and missing the oars—who had also spent a week in bed, tied to the deck.
Finally, on the eighth day, the sky cleared, and the sea began to calm down. It was Sunday, marking my fourth week at sea. I rowed for seven hours despite the waves still being a bit choppy.
The next day there was a clear sky and defined horizon, so after carefully cleaning and adjusting the sextant, I was able to observe the sun at the meridian passage. My afternoon sun sights would produce a second straight line crossing the first at an angle, so I would finally have my position. I had completely lost track of the boat’s course, and had no idea where I was. I was sure that I had progressed in latitude, but in which direction? North toward Africa, or toward St. Helena, as I intended? Anything was possible after so much time. Now, thanks to the sun, I would finally have the answer.
I went into the cabin with the observed heights written down in my little navigation notebook and I ran the numbers through my electronic calculator. I was nervous, anxious to know the results. When it was time to press the last key, touching it as tentatively as someone brooding over a card in a high-stakes game, my finger hovered in anticipation of seeing the difference between my calculated and estimated position. If the difference was positive, I had made progress. If it was negative, I was screwed. I slowly pressed down the key and . . . hurrah! Out came a positive result, much better than I had even hoped for. I was more than four hundred miles from the African coast! Ecstatic, I ran outside, looked at the horizon, and let out a long whoop of joy. “It’s really happening!” I shouted. “I’m almost there! St. Helena, here I come!”
Alas, only the sharks heard me.
I was still more than three thousand miles away from Brazil, but now I was certain that I was on the right path. There was nothing else tying me to Africa. Or, almost nothing.
Hanging from the water pump’s internal lever, close to my bed, dangled a piece of smoked oryx meat—a present from Günther that I was waiting for a special occasion to eat. I looked at the meat and, for reasons I couldn’t explain, was suddenly overcome with the urge to offer it to the sea. I tossed it into the water like a sacrifice. From that moment on, the sea calmed and the weather improved. Superstitions aside, I am certain that the oryx meat was well received.
