Rowboat in a Hurricane (15 page)

I felt a pang of remorse at ending its life. Although the fish we’d just caught was swimming alone, dorados mate for life. Most likely, I’d made a fish out there terribly lonely. But I consoled myself with the fact that the U.K.’s Marine Conservation Society considers dorado to be one of the more sustainable fish (when caught by hand lining methods in small fisheries) because of their rapid development and short lifespan. It takes the fish three to four years to grow from eggs drifting in sargassum—a type of seaweed that grows mid-ocean—into thirty-pound adults.

“Do we have any lemons left?” Colin asked eagerly. “We could pan-fry him in olive oil with a little lemon squeezed on top and then have rice and maybe some vegetables on the side.”

I had never cooked a whole fish before and wasn’t exactly sure where to begin. How did the seafood counter transform this huge chunk of skin, bones, and guts into tidy fillets?

“I’ll clean and fillet the fish,” Colin offered.

“I’ll cook it, then,” I said with relief.

Colin used the sharp blade from our Gerber multi-tool to make a long slit along the belly, from the base of the head to the tail. He deftly reached in with his hand, pulled out the innards, and showed them to me.

“You can see what he’s been eating,” Colin said as he pointed to a tiny fish. “It’s a flying fish. They glide through the air using their fins. I used to see them all the time on my sailboat when I was on the Pacific, but I wasn’t sure if we’d see them here.”

The flying fish had not yet been digested, so I could clearly make out its features. It was small and unremarkable, except for its fins, which were enormous for its tiny size and spread out like an unfurled paper fan. They looked like wings.

Colin continued filleting the dorado. He made a longitudinal cut along the backbone to remove the first fillet, then flipped the fish over, and with a single cut he removed the remainder of the fish from the skeleton. He proudly handed the two fillets to me.

“You’ve done that before, haven’t you?” I said, admiring his work.

Fortunately, Colin had learned to fillet fish when he worked on a salmon troller. He’d perfected his technique in the five years he had spent sailing.

We placed the fillets into our aluminum pot and hid the pot away in a cool, shady corner. We washed the deck with seawater and threw the remains to our pilot fish. They frantically darted back and forth, trying to claim their dinner before gravity did. It was a happy day for all the fish, except one.

With only one single-burner stove, cooking a two-pot meal is challenging. I prepared the rice, removed the pot from the burner when it was two-thirds cooked, and wrapped it in a blanket to hold in the heat. Then I dipped the fish fillets in flour spiced with garlic powder, pepper, and salt, and dropped them into the hot frying pan. A rich aroma of frying fish and garlic permeated the air. When both sides were crisp and brown, I lay the fish on a bed of fluffy rice with cold chopped tomatoes and black olives from a can on the side. Then I drizzled lemon juice over everything.

“Dinner’s almost ready,” I said.

Colin quickly stowed the oars and wriggled his feet out of the rowing shoes. Dinnertime was always highly anticipated—we stopped rowing and ate our meal together—but never as much as tonight.

Colin clambered from the rowing platform and made a cushioned seat by placing a life jacket against the safety line. I stayed in the cabin, leaning out the open hatch.

“This is amazing. It looks like something you could serve at Thanksgiving,” Colin said as I passed him his yellow plastic plate piled high with food.

“Do you know what ‘dorado’ means in Spanish?” I asked.

“What?”

“Gold.”

Colin bit into one of the crispy chunks. It was cooked to perfection, and the flesh was tender yet firm.

“I see why,” Colin said, nodding his head slowly.

Their name seemed just as appropriate as that of the pilot fish who continued to swim with us. Though some know dorado as mahi-mahi, which means “strong strong” in Hawaiian, we always called them dorado.

With the occasional contented murmur, we finished the entire six-pound fish. In one meal, we had consumed more protein than we normally did in a week. Our overworked muscles would be grateful.

Although our regular meals were healthy and balanced, they were lower in protein than they should have been. This seemed to be reflected in the way our bodies responded to the strenuous exercise. I had thought that ten hours of rowing would add considerable muscle mass, but my muscles weren’t bulging and I still had enough fat to cushion me on the rowing seat. Perhaps our workout was akin to that of a long-distance runner. Few who win marathons resemble Schwarzenegger. Still, I hoped our added protein would help me gain
some
muscle.

THE FOLLOWING DAY
we were treated to favourable twenty-kilometre-an-hour winds from the northeast. Our boat slipped through the water at
3
.
2
knots and Ned, Ted, Fred, and Oscar wriggled vigorously to keep up. As our boat’s speed increased, they began swimming farther out along the flanks of our vessel. Eventually they swam right in the region where the oars dipped into the water. More than once I felt a little
thunk
as a fish took a paddle to the face.

I pulled long, easy strokes on the oars, and a small trail of bubbles followed our boat. Ahead I could just make out the smudge of Tenerife, the best-known island in the Canaries. Colin poked his head through the roof hatch in the cabin and observed the sea.

“Do you see that?” Colin said, looking dead astern.

I couldn’t see anything. “What?”

“It’s either a big fish or a dolphin,” Colin said.

An abrupt splashing erupted around the boat, and six or seven dolphins appeared. It was hard to tell if they were just playing around or if they were hunting. The scent of fishy breath filled the air.

Suddenly I was gripped by dread.

“Where are our fish?” I cried.

Colin was silent as he surveyed the cavorting dolphins. I stopped rowing and peered over the side. I could see nothing but a limitless chasm of blue and the occasional rocketing dolphin.

“Ned . . . Ted?” I called hopefully.

The dolphins vanished as quickly as they came, and our pets were nowhere to be seen. I tossed a bit of dorado meat into the water, a treat I had been planning to feed our fish at lunch. I waited, expecting them to dash out of the shadows, to peck voraciously at the food. Usually Oscar would be out first, followed shortly after by the others.

Nothing.

I watched the white piece of meat slowly spin out of sight on its way to the bottom of the ocean. Ned, Ted, Fred, and Oscar were gone.

In terms of rowing, we were making good progress, but I was despondent and sulky. The loss of our friends made our solitude more pronounced. We had failed to protect them. Evolution had honed the instinct that mistakenly drew them to us in search of food and protection, but we had not provided the latter. I felt guilty that we had been unable to help our naive little fish.

All day I peered into the blue waters, hoping to catch a glimpse of the quartet. But I didn’t see a thing.

TENERIFE IS THE
largest of the Canary Islands and we had spotted it from more than a hundred kilometres away, but it took us two more days to discern the features of the landscape. Like Kilimanjaro, Tenerife’s massive peak, Teide, is a freestanding mountain created from a volcanic eruption. It is the world’s third-largest volcano; the last eruption took place in
1909
. The eastern side of the island had steep brown slopes and folded valleys. We saw no snow on top of the mountain, but it does receive occasional dustings. We knew that once we passed Tenerife, we wouldn’t see land again for several months on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Although we continued in almost perfect conditions, I didn’t feel entirely happy. The disappointment at not being rejoined by our finned friends lingered. I missed dangling my hands over the side and having them nibbling on my fingers. And these feelings of sadness fuelled a growing dissatisfaction with our monotonous world. I stopped admiring the colours that played on the ocean’s surface at sunrise and the beauty of shearwaters that soared effortlessly in the overhead breezes. I no longer relished the feeling of well-worked muscles at day’s end or the refreshing sensation of diving into warm ocean waters. I was in a downward spiral that dredged forth my doubts and insecurities.

What was I doing here? Had I given up a world I was comfortable in and a career that I had worked hard to achieve for a trivial pursuit? I had spent seven years completing my undergraduate and graduate studies and several more interning and working entry-level positions before finally establishing a solid career, only to discover it wasn’t nearly as fulfilling as I had imagined. I clearly remember the words of a long-term boyfriend as our relationship began to fade: “You’ll never be happy with what you have. You always want change.”

Maybe that was true. Moving has always been a part of my life. I’ve lived in numerous cities, never in one place for more than four years. Since my first job—a paper route at the age of twelve—I’ve had more than a dozen jobs and a career that’s gone from research and teaching to business development.

I wasn’t entirely sure if my rowing odyssey was a fork in the road, or just a break from the path I was already on. I felt uncomfortable with the notion of abandoning my years of education, so it was easier to think of this trip as a long pause in my career—a chance to embark on a different kind of challenge. Unlike many of my peers, I had never taken a year off to go backpacking in Europe or Australia. I had always stared ahead with tunnel vision as I moved towards my distant career. Perhaps a year on the road (and on the water) would be a healthy change.

I grew up with the ingrained notion that life is meant to be hard work, not a pursuit of pleasures. Both my parents are immigrants who came to Canada to provide a better life for their children, and I was their only child. It was my obligation to take advantage of this land of opportunity.

My parents did not lead only through words; their lives exemplified hard work. My father had left Syria for Canada with only a pocketful of change. He worked nights as a waiter and days as a security guard, and somehow managed to get a university degree at the same time. He met my mother, a German immigrant, during his first year here. My mother’s life was also difficult. When she was seven months old, her mother died; she lost her father in the Soviet Union’s Gulag camps of World War
II
. Her family lived in East Prussia, but during World War
II
the country was ravaged and eventually divided between the Soviet Union and Poland. At the age of eleven, my mother, her aunt, and two cousins successfully escaped East Prussia on their third attempt; over five difficult months in the winter of
1946
, they travelled illegally and without money by foot and train, living in refugee camps and carrying all their meagre belongings on their backs, eventually reaching West Germany. In her early thirties, my mother immigrated to North America with her cousin in search of a better life.

Since I was young, I have noticed differences in the philosophies between new immigrants such as my parents and multi-generation Canadians who have always lived in a society free of war and starvation. The struggles my parents faced left them with survivalist attitudes and an outlook that emphasizes financial well-being. They don’t let their emotions show or talk about their fears or weaknesses. I was brought up in two worlds: one where being open about one’s emotions was encouraged, and the other where this was regarded as a weakness.

Whether I would go to university was never questioned—this was the only route to financial prosperity. I had little money to put towards my education, but I drew on loans, grants, and scholarships to supplement earnings from summer jobs. Before the ink dried on my Master’s dissertation, I had several jobs to choose from. When I decided I wanted to use my biotechnology education to develop therapeutics through business instead of research, I found individuals who were more than willing to mentor me. These opportunities were not available to my parents—or, for that matter, to
80
per cent of the world’s population living in less prosperous countries—and having them profoundly altered my view of life. Although a career was no less important to me than it was to my parents, a job that offered opportunities to learn and be challenged began to take priority over one with financial stability.

But now, as we bobbed on the open ocean, still seven thousand kilometres from our destination, I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d made the right choice. We would arrive home more than fifty thousand dollars in debt. I would have no job, and would face the struggle of getting back into the work force. The way things looked, we might both be facing personal bankruptcy. These financial troubles gnawed at me while I laboured at the oars. The world of banks and credit cards and creditors seemed another planet away, but we couldn’t forget about them.

Colin listened as I aired my worries and, as usual, helped to put things in perspective.

“You’ll never starve in Canada, and you’ll always have a roof over your head, which is much more than what many people in the world have,” he said. “It’s too easy to allow external pressures to dictate what we strive for, and not what really makes us happy. This row across the Atlantic Ocean will create memories that you will take to your grave. The dolphins, the sharks, the storms, the struggles—it’s all priceless. Your years of work will all blur into one another. But this year won’t. Believe me, forty years down the road, you’re not going to kick yourself for having rowed across an ocean.”