Wild Waters in the Roar

DAY  41 - Friday 31^st May

Location: 23:07:745S  91:25:974E distance covered: 1631nm 

   Two men in a boat. OK, it was a rowing boat, but apart from that, our adventure bore little resemblance to Jerome K Jerome’s comic masterpiece.  Rob and I weren’t pootling around the waterways of Britain – we were over 1,700 miles out into the Indian Ocean, in the middle of a violent storm that was quite outside our worst nightmares. Three men would have been useful.  

   We were rowing from Western Australia to Africa and outside our survival cabin the wind howled and the waves pounded the sides of our boat TRANSVenture.

   We lay in our stern cabin ironically called the ‘coffin’ dozing in and out of sleep. Condensation dripped from the ceiling and mixed with the sweat drenching our clothes.  We were constantly jolted from side to side. It was like a screen theme park cinema, where the seats move to the motion of the film and there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop the ‘ride’.  We both felt helpless, but a desire to keep our macho counsel stopped us from discussing our fear. It was only later, when we were safely home that we admitted how scary and claustrophobic the coffin was just then. We were cowering from the storm in a space that was just 6 foot 2 inches long by 4 wide at its widest end, tapering down to 2 foot at the back of the boat. The roof was only 3 foot off the floor –sitting upright was laughable. 

     We had expected bad weather after our ‘met’ update some 12 hours previously. We had battened down against the forecasted 25 knots of wind and up to 7 metres of swell.  Unfortunately for us, the weather system bearing down on us exceeded our worst fears and we were gripped by a violent storm that raged for another 24 hours. 

   Eight thousand miles away in the USA, our trusty weatherman, Lee Bruce studied satellite photography and foresaw the approaching nautical nightmare.  He tried calling our satellite telephone, but we had switched it off to save power. He called our project director in the UK to see if he could warn us, and finally, unbelievably in the circumstances, he tried to reach us by email.  What he saw on the satellite was pretty bad – gusts topping 40 knots and ocean swell increasing to 9 metres. In short, a tropical cyclone. That’s a dangerous, unpredictable weather system by anybody’s book, even the most experienced and well-equipped of sailors.   

   Our 21 foot rowing boat was about to be put through a grueling test of its seaworthiness. Tony Bullimore, a vastly experienced round-the-world yachtsman suffered conditions like these in the Southern Ocean off the coast of Australia several years before our row. The result was a complete capsize of his boat (three times the size of our craft), irreparable damage and a massive rescue operation to save him from drowning. 

   A huge wave rushed in on us like a steam train.  There was a second of silence followed by an enorm