Alone Read online

  Alone

  Alone

  The True Story of the Man Who Fought the Sharks,

  Waves, and Weather of the Pacific and Won

  Gerard d’Aboville

  Translated from the French by Richard Seaver

  Introduction by Paul Theroux

  Copyright © 1992, 2011 by Editions Robert Laffont, S. A. Translation copyright © 1993, 2011 by Richard Seaver Introduction copyright © 1993, 2011 by Paul Theroux

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-112-2

  Printed in the United States of America

  Of all the creatures on the face of the earth, humans are those who adapt most easily, not only to the most extreme temperatures and climates but also to the most arduous conditions that life imposes on them.

  — Henri de Montfried

  To these words I would simply like to add that humans derive this capacity to adapt through a characteristic that is theirs alone: the ability to dream and to hope.

  I dedicate this book to all those men and women for whom this adventure — this ocean voyage — may serve to rekindle in their hearts a spark of hope.

  — Gerard d’Aboville

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: With a Big Roll of Dreams under My Arm

  Chapter 2: “Good Luck”

  Chapter 3: Ahead of Me, an Enormous Void …

  Chapter 4: “Rowboat Calling Okera”

  Chapter 5: With My Head in the Stars

  Chapter 6: And If All This Were Really Pointless

  Chapter 7: Survival

  Chapter 8: Typhoons

  Chapter 9: Indelibly Inscribed

  Chapter 10: Do You See the Coastline?

  Chapter 11: The “Heavenly Bum”

  Chapter 12: One Second Longer ...

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the friends, colleagues, and business associates who helped make this adventure possible:

  Sector Sport Watches • Transpac • Accastillage Diffusion •Air France • Air France Cargo • P.L.B, • Capitarne Cook • Eurest • Go Sport • P.N.B.

  as well as:

  Audiophase • All Nippon Airways • Jean Barret • B.N.P. Issy-les-Moulineaux • Cabinet de Clarens • Le Cercle de la Mer in Paris • Le Borgne Navy Yard • B. & B. Navy Yard • The Hydro Technique Company • C.R.M, • Damart • Dif Tours • Elite Marine • Fédération francaise des industries nau-tiques • F.F.S.A. • France Info • Garage Arcillon • Garbolino• Hertz • Hesnault • International Airfreight Services Co. • J.C.D, • Ken Club • Lestra Sport • Lyophal • Mat Equipement • Mecanorem • Nautix • Neste • O.I.P. • Plastimo • Port de Plaisance La Trinité-sur-Mer • Ramtonic • Regma Systèmes •Sail France • Semari • Société Ono • Sofomarin • Sony • T.B.S. • 3 M • Transparence Production • U.S. Coast Guard • Veillet International • The City of Issy-les-Moulineaux

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The French Embassy in Tokyo • The French Consulate in New York • The French Consulate in San Francisco • Tokyo Power Squadron • Astoria Maritime Museum

  Laurent de Bartillat • Charlie Cronheim • Commander Blan-villain • Eddy Zimansky and his YL • Georges de Marrez • Dr. Chauve • Olivier de Kersauson • John Oakes • Bruno de La Barre

  Christophe • Louis-Noèl • Claude Arnoult • Jean-Claude Dufour • Thomas’s Scooter • Benoit and Philippe • Beatrice • Pierre Yvan • Didier and François • Moze • Mr. and Mrs. Takasse • Yagi Mitsuru • Charles and Thibault • Laurence and François • Raymond • Philippe • Renaud • Sophie • Arnaud • Vincent • Nathalie “the wonderful,” and so many others

  And Cornelia, for her patience …

  Introduction

  When my French publisher, Robert Laffont, asked me whom in the whole of France I wished to meet I said, “D’Aboville,” whose book Seul (Alone) had just appeared. The next day at a café in the shadow of Saint-Sulpice, I said to d’Aboville’s wife, Cornelia, “He is my hero.” She replied softly, with feeling, “Mine, too.”

  It is a commonplace that almost anyone can go to the moon: you pass a physical and NASA puts you in a projectile and shoots you there. It is perhaps invidious to compare an oarsman with an astronaut, but rowing across the Pacific Ocean alone in a small boat, as the Frenchman Gerard d’Aboville did in 1991, shows old-fashioned bravery. Yet even those of us who go on journeys in eccentric circles, simpler and far less challenging than d’Aboville’s, seldom understand what propels us. Ed Gillet paddled a kayak sixty-three days from California to Maui a few years ago and cursed himself much of the way for not knowing why he was making such a reckless crossing. Astronauts have a clear, scientific motive, but adventurers tend to evade the awkward questions why.

  D’Aboville was forty-six when he single-handedly rowed a 26-foot boat designed especially for this unique voyage from Japan to Washington State in 1991. He had previously (in 1980) rowed across the Atlantic, also from west to east, Cape Cod to Brittany. But the Atlantic was a piece of cake compared with his Pacific crossing, one of the most difficult and dangerous in the world. For various reasons, d’Aboville set out very late in the season and was caught first by heavy weather and finally by tumultuous storms — 40-foot waves and 80-miles-per-hour winds. Many times he was terrified, yet halfway through the trip — which had no stops (no islands at all in that part of the Pacific) — when a Russian freighter offered to rescue him, “I was not even tempted.” He turned his back on the ship and rowed on. The entire crossing, averaging 7,000 strokes a day, took him 134 days. I wanted to ask him why he had taken this enormous personal risk.

  D’Aboville, short and compactly built, is no more physically prepossessing than another fairly obscure and just as brave long-distance navigator, the paddler Paul Gaffyn of New Zealand. Over the past decade or so, Gaffyn has circumnavigated Australia, Japan, Great Britain, and his own New Zealand through the low pressure systems of the Tasman Sea in his 17-foot kayak.

  In a memorable passage in his book, The Dark Side of the Wave, Gaffyn is battling a horrible chop off the North Island and sees a fishing boat up ahead. He deliberately paddles away from the boat, fearing that someone on board will see his flimsy craft and ask him where he is going: “I knew they would ask me why I was doing it, and I did not have an answer.”

  I hesitated to spring the question on d’Aboville. I asked him first about his preparations for the trip. A native of Brittany, he had always rowed, he said. “We never used outboard motors — we rowed boats the way other children pedaled bicycles.” Long ocean crossings interested him, too, because he loves to design highly specialized boats.

  His Pacific craft was streamlined — it had the long seaworthy lines of a kayak and a high-tech cockpit with a roll-up canopy that could seal in the occupant in rough weather. A pumping system, using seawater as ballast, w
as designed for righting the boat in the event of a capsize. The boat had few creature comforts but all necessities: a stove, a sleeping place, roomy hatches for dehydrated meals and drinking water. D’Aboville also had a video camera and filmed himself rowing, in the middle of nowhere, humming the Alan Jackson country-and-western song “Here in the Real World,” D’Aboville sang it and hummed it for months but did not know any of the words, or indeed the title, until I recognized it on his video.

  “That is a very hard question,” he said, when I asked him why he had set out on this seemingly suicidal trip — one of the longest ocean crossings possible, at one of the worst times of the year. He denied that he had any death wish. “And it is not like going over a waterfall in a barrel.” He had prepared himself well. His boat was well found. He is an excellent navigator. “Yes, I think I have courage,” he said when I asked him point-blank whether he felt he was brave.

  It was the equivalent, he said, of scaling the north face of a mountain, typically the most difficult ascent. But this lonely four-and-a-half-month ordeal almost ended in his death by drowning, when a severe storm lashed the Oregon-Washington coast as d’Aboville approached it, upside down, in a furious sea. The video of his last few days at sea, taken by a Coast Guard vessel, is so frightening that d’Aboville wiped tears from his eyes watching it with me. “At this time last year I was in the middle of it.” He quietly ignored my questions about the 40-foot waves. Clearly upset at the memory, he said, “I do not like to talk about it.”

  “Only an animal does useful things,” he said at last, after a long silence. “An animal gets food, finds a place to sleep, tries to keep comfortable. But I wanted to do something that was not useful — not like an animal at all. Something only a human being would do.”

  The art of it, he was saying — such an effort was as much esthetic as athletic. And that the greatest travel always contains within it the seeds of a spiritual quest, or else what’s the point? The English explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard would have agreed with this. He went to Antarctica with Scott in the ship Terra Nova and made a six-week crossing of a stretch of Antarctica in 1912, on foot, in the winter, when that polar region is dark all day and night, with a whipping wind and temperature of 80 below.

  “Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised” are the first words of his narrative. On this trek, which gave him the title for his book, The Worst Journey in the World, he wrote: “Why do some human beings desire with such urgency to do such things: regardless of the consequences, voluntarily, conscripted by no one but themselves? No one knows. There is a strong urge to conquer the dreadful forces of nature, and perhaps to get consciousness of ourselves, of life, and of the shadowy workings of our human minds. Physical capacity is the only limit. I have tried to tell how, and when, and where. But why? That is a mystery.”

  But there is no conquering, d’Aboville says. Je n’ai pas vainoti le Pacijique, il m’a laissé passer, “I did not conquer the Pacific,” he said afterward. “It let me go across.”

  Paul Theroux

  Alone

  They say that with the passage of time the worst memories have a way of turning into positive memories. I know that these will never change; they were, and will always remain, terrible and terrifying.

  I’ll never forget the many times the boat capsized, especially the one when it turned a complete somersault, throwing me against the bulkhead. Then, with my frayed nerves stretched to the breaking point, I kept waiting for the final blow, the blow that would end it all, and let out a primal scream, like some wild beast.

  Nor wilt I ever forget those other times when I battled for my life, feeling my strength waning minute by minute. And the taste of seawater in my mouth, in my lungs. The taste of death,

  And all that alone, alone, alone.

  1

  With a Big Roll of Dreams under My Arm

  I love to poke around in shipyards where boats are put out of commission and dismantled. The artifacts you often come across charm and bewitch me, and give me the same sort of pleasure as an adult that I experienced as a child exploring in our attic. Not to mention the added enjoyment I derive from such places simply because they thrust me into the midst of my abiding passion: boats and ships.

  Ancient teak doors of the fore and aft gangways remind me of their counterparts on the old cargo ship on which I went around the world when I was twenty, closing the book on my youth and marking my passage into manhood. Massive portholes, with their heavy brass fittings and thick glass, their extraordinarily stout hinges, make me think of the cyclones I lived through in the Indian Ocean and the gigantic tidal waves that went head-to-head with those incredible winds. A tall, well-pitted smokestack is all my mind needs to conjure up a turn-of-the-century fishing boat laboring through the heavy swells of the North Sea.

  It was in one of these demolition shipyards, not far from Anvers, Belgium, on one fine day in 1984, that my eye was drawn to a photograph, yellowed by the passage of time: a picture of a crew posing proudly in front of the gangway of a banana boat, their captain sporting a tropical pith helmet… . Also in the shipyard, between two straw mattresses, lay a pile of navigation charts and another pile of pilot charts, both long out of date. Their only hope for survival, assuming the mice did not get to them first, was to be reborn as recycled paper.

  Pilot charts are large documents on which are plotted — and superimposed on corresponding navigational charts — statistical information concerning prevailing winds, ocean currents, paths taken by cyclones in a given area, and other such capricious meteorological data. After a great deal of rummaging through the Anvers shipyard, I managed to put together a full collection of the pilot charts for the North Pacific — that is, twelve, a chart for each month. I then headed back to Paris with a big roll of dreams under my arm.

  At that point, I had absolutely no idea that I might one day set out to row across the Pacific Ocean. Four years earlier, in my successful conquest of the Atlantic, I had given my all, both physically and mentally, and had called on everyone I knew to help make it happen. In the course of that adventure — or, more precisely, that ordeal — which lasted seventy-two days, I thought I had pushed my abilities to the limit. Not to mention that I had doubtless used up a fair amount of my reserve of luck, since in the course of that crossing my boat, the Captain Cook, had capsized no fewer than five times.

  Every now and then I would think about those North Pacific charts, take them down, and pore over them — at first out of a sense of curiosity more than anything else But I knew I was playing with fire, and before long I had taken the final, inevitable step: I switched from dreaming to thinking. Now, if I ever were to do it, this is how I would go about it. ...

  To cross an ocean with a pair of oars as his only means of propulsion, the navigator has to be constantly aware of the prevailing winds as well as the ocean currents, which generally are related to those winds. There is no way any rowboat, especially one with a heavy cargo on board, can prevail against the winds and the power of the sea. Thus, the point of departure and the route to be taken are decisive.

  For the Pacific, the longest route but also the most “comfortable” for a rowboat, or even a small sailboat, would be from east to west. Departing from either California or Mexico, the aim would be to pick up the trade winds as soon as possible, for the simple reason that the trade winds are fairly reliable and move in a favorable direction, storms are few and far between, and the climate is pleasant.

  Such an east-to-west crossing, by rowing, was successfully undertaken in 1982 by the Englishman Peter Bird, who departed from San Francisco and arrived ten months later in Australia. But my idea, which was slowly beginning to take shape, was to do what I had done for the Atlantic — that is, row from west to east, across the northern Pacific. There the movement of barometric low pressure systems and frequent high winds held the promise of a potentially faster crossing. On the other side of that coin, I knew the sea would be m
uch rougher — and far more dangerous. For me, it was the maritime equivalent of scaling the north face of some mighty mountain.

  Years went by. I went back to sailing. I crossed the China Sea on a tiny racing catamaran. Then, having discovered in the Philippines the world’s most extraordinary nautical paradise, I organized a series of long-distance catamaran races. Here, the adventure for me was making sure the course was plotted correctly and that the logistical support for two hundred competitors was forthcoming during the three weeks that they were totally on their own. Meanwhile, on the top shelf of my office, almost beyond reach, my antique charts awaited their appointed hour.

  1990: A feeling that I was not getting any younger, a general sense of wear and tear on mind and body, business ventures that had turned sour, plus, I had to admit, an overall feeling of boredom. I vaguely knew that I needed to cleanse my mind, refocus my priorities, engage in some real combat. A combat in which I would invest all the daring, tenacity, and courage I could muster; all my considerable experience; all my profound knowledge of the sea, A combat into which I would throw myself body and soul, its success dependent solely upon me.

  On my table, the pile of charts was now spread out before me.

  By the fall of 1990, I still had not told anyone about my idea of rowing across the Pacific. Yet the idea had solidly taken hold. In my leisure moments, I found myself making rough sketches of the boat I had in mind. One of my friends, Louis-Noel, told me about a Swiss company, Sector, which manufactures sports watches. The firm’s motto is “No Limits” — they champion the twin virtues of challenge and pushing yourself to the limit. The company’s directors were always on the lookout for people with an international reputation who could concretely illustrate their motto and principles. Sector was already well entrenched in both the American and Japanese markets and was about to launch its products in the French market. I had a feeling Sector was tailor-made for me.