Page 117 - The Light Dragoon 2024

Halfway looming, and the weather was warming in to the thirties. Fine when on deck, but we were now also riding warm currents and the cabins started heating up a lot. Before long we were missing the cold where there was always a jacket or warm sleeping bag to look forward to. Now we were down to wearing just thin sun protective layers and a regular routine of dousing our sunhats and shirts with water every 30 minutes... the cabins however turned into sweltering furnaces.
One midday shift, we were all chipper and chatting away; I was awake sat in the cabin in vibrant debate with Barney who was rowing on the rear position with Paris behind him. ‘Goodbye My Lover’ by James Blunt came on the speakers and Paris seemed to go quiet before letting out an audible whimper. Barney and I wrote it off as a weird noise initially but on a cursory check over Barneys shoulder I could see Paris in sobbing tears! The song had unleashed a buried memory of an ex-girlfriend who had unceremoniously dumped him. The general level of tiredness combined with a deep comfort and bond between the four of us meant that at a lot of emotional barriers had dropped. We talked it out and threw out a bunch of platitudes along the lines of, ‘there are plenty more fish in the sea’ (seemed fitting considering where we were), before a barrage of jokes and jibes were unleashed and we were all laughing hysterically. It was wonderfully cathartic and later that day on my commute to the bucket I took a moment to put my arm around Paris. James Blunt was subse- quently banned on the boat although we soon reneged on this because we love him.
Food was getting tastier and we were getting hungrier. Where we had struggled to force down the 6 meals and the 2,500Kcal snack pack in those first few days, we were now eating every morsel of food we could get our hands on including the ‘Biscuit Browns’, which, thanks the assistance from the LD QM, we had plenty of. Our main food source was the lightweight freeze-dried food, but in our reserves were the coveted ‘wet meals’ from the Army ration packs. These meals were traded like high value commodity items. I had managed to convince the crew that ‘Chicken Sausage and Beans’ was the worst option and I was ‘taking one for the team’ in eating them... but the cat was out of the bag and someone had realized that it was in fact the best meal and I had lied through my teeth. I had a serious talking to from the crew and my Chicken Sausage and Bean stash confiscated – this was a dark day for me. To add salt to the wound someone had been stealing my Tabasco and was now having to ration it but I was comforted by the fact that I still had enough tinned Mandarins, rationed at one per week, to get me to the end. On about day thirty we thought it was an appropriate moment to bring out the reserve chocolate supply of 100 mini KitKats and Twirls but Oli,
who had packed them, couldn’t find them anywhere! Another argument ensued and our kangaroo court convicted Paris of eating the entire stash; the evidence being that he appeared not to have lost ANY weight after a month at sea. His innocent pleas turned out to be justified when in Hawaii emptying the boat’s rubbish we found the entire stash nestled under the rubbish bag in a porthole – we’ve since apologized.
The days continued to get hotter but at least now we were really gaining speed and momentum. Spirits were high until about 5 days out from Hawaii when we received notice that we were on a collision course with a fast moving extremely high pressure system. Since our tough start we had become quite complacent, and we were filled with a mild sense of dread that we were going back into an even bigger tropical storm. Acknowledging the seriousness of what was on the horizon, we took a moment to assemble on deck and go through our emergency drills and SOPs and chat through a few likely scenarios. We then made sure all our safety gear was to hand, checked the sea anchor, and rigged up the ‘drogues’ ready to deploy, which would slow us down and keep the boat from twisting side onto the breakers and capsizing.
Like clockwork the storm hit us just after midnight on the thirty seventh day with Oli and I on the oars. Unlike the swell off the Californian coast which was pushing us sideways, this swell came up from behind. The speedometer on the boat was cruising in the high sixes and the wind was whistling ominously. Shortly after, the auto-tiller failed to keep us straight on the waves and we aggressively twisted before we could grab the manual steering lines, exposing us side onto the swell, and the whistling wind shifted to a deafening roar. We tried for a few minutes to manually correct the course using hand and oar steering when a jolt yanked an oar out of Oli’s hand pulling his shoulder out with it and Oli yelping in pain. We then threw the drogues out which quicky brought the stern back in line and we were momentarily secure until the larger of the two drogues ‘popped’ before wrapping around the other drogue and collapsing it. The boat twisted side on again and in the process of trying to pull the drogues back in they got twisted around the rudder and we lost steering all together. The name of the boat, ‘Goodbye My Rudder’, named on a social media poll on James Blunt’s Instagram, suddenly wasn’t so ironic! Desperate to untangle the drogues and regain steering we toyed with the idea of Oli getting in the water. Thankfully, and correctly, we decided to throw the sea anchor off the bow to bring us nose into the weather and safe from capsize. It worked, we were safe and the drogue lines went slack so we were able to pull them back into the boat. We then re-jigged our one working drogue, brought
the sea anchor back in, and were back on course!
When day broke the wind and swell had dropped but we were still zooming along. We pulled in the small drogue and spent the day rowing at breakneck speed. In one 2 hour shift we rowed 10NM the biggest so far and by sunrise on the last day we worked out that in a 24 hour period we had rowed 92NM (105miles). We’d had an incredible day and now we were only 60NM from our families. We found out once we hit landfall that the cyclone had been big enough to be been named Storm Kalvin and wind speeds had hit 80mph in the eye of the storm. It was a hell of an experience that preceeded our best day on the water - a wonderful reminder that it is often the most serious challenges can propel us forward in life.
We searched the horizon for signs of land all day, arguing with each other that shadows within the low lying cloud MUST be mountain tops but it wasn’t until after midnight that we spotted a single light on the horizon appearing and disappearing in the ebb and flow of the waves. Then as first light loomed and we looked over our shoulders all we could see was a giant vertical green wall of jungle, strewn with countless waterfalls, jutting out of the ocean and into the clouds above. We were only ten miles from the finish and mountains of Kauai were spectacular. The sun rose from the skyline as it started to rain and multiple rainbows appeared to the West where we’d come from. We weren’t unaccustomed to rainbows, they are a regular feature when crossing the Pacific, but in the yellow light, warm rain, and with our families only miles away, this moment was something special and we were overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude for the experience we had had.
Turning the corner in Hanalei Bay we were greeted by a flotilla of surfers and Hawaiian see kayaks; the first human faces we’d seen other than each other’s ugly mugs for 39 days. They cheered and chatted with us for the final stretch towards the pier in the middle of the bay which was strewn with Union Jacks and a local crowd had assembled with our families. As we arrived in the beach shallows our boat was steadied by members of our land support team and
The Regimental Journal of The Light Dragoons
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Light Dragoons at Invictus