Salt, Sweat, Tears: The Men Who Rowed the Oceans - Softcover

Rackley, Adam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143126660 ISBN 13: 9780143126669

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2014

Synopsis

A riveting first-person account and history of rowers who have attempted to navigate across the Atlantic

More people have climbed Mount Everest than have rowed across the Atlantic. For more than seventy days, Adam Rackley and his rowing partner ate, slept and rowed in a boat seven meters long by two meters wide, in one of the world’s most extreme environments. This is his story of adventure, endurance, and self-discovery.

They were following in the wake of pioneers. In 1896 George Harbo and Frank Samuelsen, a pair of Norwegian fisherman, crossed the 2,500 miles in a wooden fishing dory––and their record stood for 114 years. John Fairfax, a smuggler, a gambler, and a shark hunter, was the first to complete the feat singlehandedly in 1969. Others have followed; some have not survived the attempt. This is their story, too.

About this title

About the Author:

Adam Rackley is a former Platoon Commander with the British Army, has worked as a fund manager, and lectures on finance at the BPP Business School. Salt, Sweat, Tears is his first book.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Adam Rackley was born in the Netherlands in 1981. He studied at the University of York and received a degree in finance and financial law from the University of London. He was a platoon commander with the Black Watch at Fort George in Scotland before working as a fund manager and lecturing on finance at BPP Business School. He lives in South London with his wife, Alice. Salt, Sweat, Tears is Rackley’s first book.

Equipment on a Modern Ocean Rowing Boat

Glossary

AIS – Automatic Identification System. A system which shares information between vessels within a short range of each other over the VHF radio system. AIS information can be programmed to display on a vessel’s GPS screen.

ARGOS – Satellite beacon-system which can be used to track vessels anywhere in the world.

Autohelm – GPS-controlled steering system.

Backstops – The point at the end of a rower’s stroke when the legs are fully extended, shoulders are back and the handles of the oars are pulled back towards the chest.

Beam sea – Waves coming in to the side of a boat. A beam sea may cause a boat to rock violently or capsize.

Bow – The front of the boat. Rowers face away from the direction of travel and so row with their backs to the bow.

Bow rowing position – The foremost rowing position in the boat. The rower in the bow seat steers the boat using a footplate which is linked to the rudder by steering lines.

Cam cleat – Spring-loaded mechanism which uses friction to stop a rope pulling through in one direction, but allows the rope to move freely when being pulled in the opposite direction.

Cleat – Fitting onto which a rope can be tied off.

Dory – Small, flat-bottomed fishing boat.

Draught – Vertical distance between a boat’s waterline and the keel.

Drogue – A funnel-shaped device deployed underwater from the bow or stern of a boat to keep her facing into the weather, reducing the likelihood of capsizing and slowing her drift.

EPIRB – Emergency Position-Indicating Rescue Beacon. A small device mounted on the outside of a boat that is activated manually or after prolonged submersion in seawater in order to request a rescue. The EPIRB sends a satellite message and emits a radio signal, allowing rescuers to pinpoint the boat’s location.

Gunwale – Top edge of the side of a boat. On a rowing boat this is a flat surface for sitting on, jumping off, or pulling yourself back into the boat after a swim.

Keel – ‘Spine’ of a boat, running along the length of its hull. A deep keel reduces the effect of the wind and swell, allowing the boat to hold its course more easily, while also making the boat more stable by lowering its centre of gravity.

Knots – A knot is one nautical mile per hour.

Nautical mile – A measure of distance used by mariners equivalent to one minute of arc at the equator. (There are sixty minutes of arc in one degree.) One nautical mile is equivalent to 1.15 land miles.

Port – The left-hand side of the boat when facing in the direction of travel.

RIB – Rigid Inflatable Boat.

Sea anchor – Parachute that opens under water to keep the boat facing into the oncoming weather. This reduces the likelihood of capsizing and slows the boat’s drift.

Slide – Narrow track that the rower’s sliding seat rolls along. The seat runs on four small wheels.

Starboard – The right-hand side of the boat when facing in the direction of travel.

Stern – The back of the boat. Rowers face away from the direction of travel and so row facing the stern.

Stroke rowing position – The rearmost rowing position in the boat. Called the ‘stroke’ position because the rower in the stroke seat sets the tempo of the rowing stroke for the rest of the boat.

Two-up – Both members of an ocean-rowing pair on the oars at the same time, as opposed to one crew member rowing and the other resting.

Prologue

The packet contains fifty-six jelly beans in six different flavours. I remove a bean and inspect it closely. I try to imagine what it will taste like, before putting it in my mouth. There is a tightening along the inside of my jaw and the bottom of my tongue as my taste buds respond to the tanginess of the sweet. I roll it around my mouth, savouring the flavour and the changing texture as the hard, smooth shell dissolves, leaving the soft, thick centre. For a while this sticks to my teeth and the roof of my mouth, but soon the residue has dispersed and I am left with a lingering sweetness. I repeat this exercise fifty-five times.

In an hour the jelly beans are gone and I feel a sense of loss. In my hand is the empty packet, which I now consider closely. I reread the list of ingredients and look at the branding and the manufacturer’s address. I study the picture of each flavour of jelly bean and try to remember what it tasted like. I become aware that I am running my tongue across my teeth and in the cracks between them, looking for a crumb to savour.

From the angle I am lying at, it is possible to look out through a thin opening in the main hatch at a slice of cloudless, ethereal blue. My mind leaves the stimulation of the last hour behind and drifts in the empty sky. I’m reminded of a line from a book I once read. ‘Whither are we moving? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space?’

Every few seconds I feel the gentle, rhythmic acceleration as Jimmy drives on the oars. My ears are filled with the trickle of water on the hull of the boat, the splash of the oars, the roll of the sliding seat and the occasional creak of an oar gate. My view of the deck, through the perspex hatch, is blocked by a towel, which serves to keep the sun out of the cabin. But the air inside is still and the heat is oppressive.

I look at my watch. It reads 15:51. My watch is set to GMT, which means it is nearly 1 PM local time. This is the hottest part of the day. There are less than nine minutes until my next shift. I think through the things I must do before I am ready to take over from Jimmy on the oars. A muffled gasp from the deck reminds me that he is in a great deal of pain.

I shuffle around so that I am now sitting up, with my feet in the footwell, in front of the hatch. I slide my feet into a pair of red Crocs and open one of my water bottles. It is almost full. I pour in the remaining half of my isotonic powder packet. From the netting on my right I pull out my white legionnaire’s hat. Inside the hat are my sunglasses. I put both on. I pull the towel off the hatch and stow it in the overhead netting. Sun streams into the cabin and almost immediately I start to sweat. I unwind the cord which has been keeping the hatch ajar, and swing the hatch open.

Jimmy is sitting five feet away, facing me. He is wearing a hat and sunglasses that match mine and a pair of fingerless yellow DeWalt gloves. Black hair and a thick black and reddish beard of almost the same length cover his head and much of his face. When he sees me he pulls his right earphone out, without breaking his stroke.

‘How’s it going, Jim?’ I ask.

‘Feels like good rowing conditions, but the mileage isn’t great. I think there’s a current. We’ve done three miles. Is it hot in the cabin?’

The water is flat. There is a momentary hint of movement in the air, then it is still again. I shield the GPS monitor from the glare of the sun and look at the current speed and bearing and our remaining miles to destination. The monitor tells me that Antigua is 1,011 nautical miles away.

‘It’s really hot in the cabin. There’s just no breeze at all. How’s your bum?’

‘Bum’s OK. PvK’s lube is working well. But I’m having problems with my crotch.’

I nod, but I’m short of anything helpful to say. Jimmy has been working through the medical kit, looking for solutions to his crotch chafing. He has also been cutting his seat padding into smaller and smaller pieces to try and reduce the rubbing.

‘Ready when you are,’ I say.

‘Let’s do it.’

I lean through the hatch, take Jimmy’s water bottle and pass him mine. Then he hands me his seat padding. It consists of three layers of dense foam and a neoprene rowing seat pad, held together with Velcro strips. This padding sandwich is topped with a wool cover, which is thick with Sudocrem and Vaseline. I lay Jimmy’s seat padding in the cabin and hand him mine, which he places on the wooden seat. Then he gets up and moves down the starboard side of the deck, while at the same time I move up the port side. We are well practised and in a few moments we have swapped places. Jimmy is standing in the footwell inside the main hatch and I am sitting in the bow rowing position, adjusting the foot straps around my Crocs.

We have performed this routine every two hours for the last forty-seven days.

1.

The American Dream, 1896

On a crisp January morning in 1883, Howard Blackburn and Tom Welch stepped off their schooner and into a twelve-foot fishing dory. After a week of fishing by the Grand Banks off the coast of Newfoundland, the schooner’s hold was almost full and soon she would be making the journey back to the busy fish market in Gloucester, Massachusetts. While Welch pulled in and rebaited the cod lines, Blackburn sat at the oars, keeping the dory clear of drifting sea-ice. All the while the pair chatted about how they would spend their wages back on dry land.

That afternoon Blackburn and Welch missed the tell-tale signs of an approaching winter storm and, while the more experienced crews cut their day short and returned to the schooner, the young dorymen worked on. Soon the storm was upon them, accompanied by a thick, disorientating mist. Separated from the safety of the schooner, there was nothing they could do but spend the night bailing and knocking off the ice that was forming around the hull and threatening to sink their little boat. When dawn came and the weather finally cleared, Blackburn and Welch took to the oars and made for Newfoundland, but on the second day Welch stopped rowing, lay down in the bottom of the boat in despair, and died. Blackburn continued to row and after five days with no food, water or sleep, he carried Welch’s frozen body ashore. Blackburn had lost all his fingers and thumbs and most of his toes to frostbite.

Blackburn’s story was the talk of the town when George Harbo arrived in the New Jersey fishing village of Nauvoo. The stocky young Norwegian had just landed on a steamer from Brevik, where he had studied at nautical school. Norway had a proud naval tradition, once boasting the third largest merchant fleet in the world after Britain and America, but she had been left behind in the race to build bigger and faster steam vessels, and now the fleet transported only low-margin bulk commodities. Demand for Norwegian timber and fish was also in decline and, over the last twenty years, a fifth of Norway’s population had emigrated in search of a better life.

By contrast a million people were arriving in America every year, looking for that better life. The country was rapidly industrializing, jobs were plentiful and land was cheap. From the Old World of Europe, America was seen as a land of opportunity. Many of the Norwegians who arrived in New York made their home in the New Jersey fishing communities just across the bay. So it was for Harbo, who, after a brief stay in Brooklyn, made his way to Nauvoo, an informal collection of rough wooden huts built on sand dunes at the water’s edge. Shanty towns such as this one each housed a few hundred dorymen. Conditions were basic, but they provided a sense of community and an honest living.

The dorymen worked the waters around Sandy Hook Bay and sold their produce at Fulton Fish Market, at the foot of the newly opened Brooklyn Bridge. Harbo joined a crew and had soon made enough money to pay for a ticket to bring his wife, Anine, over from Brevik. The following August, their son, Andrew, was born and Harbo took his young family to Brooklyn to watch the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty. The sense of occasion gave Harbo confidence that he had been right to bring Anine to America. Here, with hard work, anything was possible.

But in some ways the New World was not so different from the Old. The New York metropolitan area, which encompassed a large part of the New Jersey shoreline, had hierarchies of its own, controlled by the Irish community through a political body called Tammany Hall. At local elections, their strategy was blunt and effective. In those wards that were predominantly Irish, the ballot often returned more votes than registered voters, while ballot boxes from other wards were stolen and thrown in the Hudson, or returned nearly empty, with voters having been prevented from attending the polling stations.

With their men in power, the bosses of Tammany Hall extended their grip across city life. Most notorious amongst them were Richard Crocker and Bill Tweed, both of Dublin stock, who controlled appointments to the city’s police force and access to lucrative contracts, such as refuse collection and public works. They created self-serving monopolies, like the licence to supply ice to the New York Harbor, and this in turn allowed them to amass huge personal fortunes.

For many of those outside the patronage of Tammany Hall, life was a struggle. In Manhattan, one and a half million people lived in dilapidated tenement blocks run by petty gangs who controlled pickpocketing, prostitution, extortion and murder in their respective areas. Having a trade and the benefit of an education, Harbo was in a better position than most of these unfortunates, but still he dreamed of something more than a simple fisherman’s life.

His hero was Henry Stanley, a Welshman who, like Harbo, had come to America as a young man in search of his fortune. While working as a reporter at the New York Herald, Stanley was sent to Africa to find David Livingstone. The expedition was a success, and Stanley became a household name. Harbo owned a copy of the book How I Found Livingstone, and knew that Stanley’s lectures had filled theatres on both sides of the Atlantic. In recounting the stories of his adventures, Stanley had become rich. If Harbo could accomplish something as notable as Stanley had, he would be able to give his family the life they deserved.

As time passed, and Harbo continued to bring home the same wage from the same hours of toil in the New Jersey surf, a creeping sense of failure grew within him. Anine had left her family in Norway to help him make something of himself in America, and this was not the future he’d had in mind for her. Anine respected her husband’s choices, but she never felt at home in America; a Lutheran upbringing in Brevik had not prepared her for the squalor and violence of New York.

Harbo’s nautical training and experience of the tides and currents around the channel into Manhattan meant that he was well ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0143126660
• ISBN 13: 9780143126669
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272