Chicken Soup for the Ocean Lover's Soul (23 page)

It was nearly noon when he heard something again. “Dad! A plane!” They soon spotted it—a Coast Guard jet. As it got closer, they splashed and waved.

The jet was about a mile away when it abruptly banked to the west. Sperber lowered his arms. “It didn’t see us,” he said flatly. “It’s just flying a grid pattern.”

Matthew’s heart sank. Then his father shouted, “Look! A boat!”

A huge sport-fishing boat was cruising toward them, sending a faint sound of music across the water. Soon it was close enough for them to see a man and woman relaxing in lounge chairs, drinks in hand.

“Over here!” Stephens bellowed.

Matthew put his fingers in his mouth and let loose an ear-splitting whistle.
If they didn’t hear that,
he thought,
they’re deaf!

The boat, now just one hundred yards away, showed no signs of slowing down. “Stop!” the four screamed. “Help us!” The couple never looked up as the boat cruised away.

They fell silent after that, too miserable even to talk. No other planes or boats came near. As the sun dipped below the horizon and the ocean cooled, they all started shivering uncontrollably. The night before, they had still had energy to fight the cold; now they were weak and dehydrated. How could they stand another night in the dark water?

Matthew was drifting along, only half-awake, when something hit his left arm like a hot razor blade. He screamed as slick, stringy tentacles drifted across his arm—a Portuguese man-of-war! The purplish, balloonlike creature floated along, trailing poisonous tentacles to sting and paralyze its prey. Matthew sobbed with fear and pain as his father and the other men pulled him away.

“Dad,” he cried hysterically, “I’m cold. I’m tired. I want to go home. I don’t want to die!”

Sperber pulled him close. “None of us is going to die.
They’re going to find us.
You hear me?”

Matthew looked up. In the moonlight, his father’s face was tinged with blue. “Matthew, I . . .” Sperber’s voice faltered. “I never really tell you, but I hope you know I love you.”

Matthew drew a shaky breath. “I know,” he said, calmer now. No matter what happened, at least they’d be together.

Over the next few hours, they drifted in and out of a miserable half-dozing state, too cold to sleep and too exhausted to stay awake. Langford, the weakest of the four, wasn’t going to last much longer.

Early Tuesday morning, the sun peeped weakly from behind dark storm clouds. Soon the wind picked up, and the sky darkened. Whitecaps began to form, leaving them bobbing in increasingly rough seas. Matthew got a better grip on the injured pilot.

Langford turned his blistered face toward the others. “Maybe we ought to pray,” he said hoarsely. As the storm swept upon them, the frail pilot offered a simple prayer for their rescue.

Betty Sperber woke Tuesday morning, feeling a restless urge to get out of the house. She dressed quickly and called a neighbor. “I want to go to church,” she blurted out.

A few minutes later they pulled up to the church, and Betty quickly found the pastor. “I’ve been praying at home,” she said, “but I just feel it isn’t good enough.”

The minister took her hand and bowed his head. “Lord, you see the tiniest sparrow that falls from the sky,” he prayed. “I ask that your eyes will be on Mrs. Sperber’s loved ones, wherever they are.”

The storm burst in all its fury upon the four in the water. As heavy raindrops pelted them and cold waves tossed them up and down, they clung together. Desperate for a drink, they tried to catch rain in their mouths.

At last the storm swept past, and the sun appeared. Suddenly, Matthew’s head jerked up. “I hear a plane,” he
announced. Search planes were returning to the area.

They tensed. This might be their last chance. Sperber collected watches and other metal objects, hoping they might be picked up by radar.

The jet was almost upon them. Sperber held the metal bunched in one hand and used his other hand to tilt his credit card, hoping the shiny hologram might reflect the sun. Yelling, Stephens also flashed his credit card. Langford used both hands to wave. Matthew thrashed the water with his life jacket.
Maybe,
he thought,
the white foam
would catch the pilot’s eye.

Seconds later the jet screamed above them and disappeared. Two minutes passed, then three. Nothing.

“It’s coming back!” Matthew yelled. “Everybody splash!”

Once again, he thrashed the water into a white foam. The others joined in. When the jet got closer, Sperber cried out triumphantly, “They see us!”

The four erupted in cheers as the jet dropped a canister that hit the waves and sent a streamer of smoke into the sky. Soon a helicopter raced toward them. It landed on the surface about fifty feet away. A crew member held a chalkboard with the words, “ONE AT A TIME!”

Slowly, they swam toward the helicopter, the two men helping the injured Langford along. After two long days, it was over.

The sun-blistered survivors were taken to St. Mary’s Hospital in West Palm Beach. Betty Sperber greeted her husband and son with a joyful cry. “Thank God you’re alive!” she sobbed. “I’ve been praying . . .”

Mike Sperber smiled. “We did some praying out there, too,” he admitted. “And this kid—he really handled himself out there.” He looked at Matthew. “I’m proud of you, son.”

Deborah Morris
Adapted from
Real Kids Real Adventures
series

One Hundred and One Atlantic Nights

C
ourage is like love; it must have hope to
nourish it.

Napoleon Bonaparte

I arrived home to a message light flashing on the answering machine. Nothing really out of the ordinary, and yet I had an uneasy sense about it. I pushed the button and listened to the devastated voice of my twenty-one-year-old son, Daniel:

“I’m guttered, Mum. Jaish can’t do it!”

I gasped, feeling his disappointment and my own as well. Three months before, in the fall of 1995, Daniel’s old school chum Jaishan had asked Danny to team up with him and enter the Great Atlantic Rowing Race and row from Tenerife, Canary Islands, to Port St. Charles, Barbados. He had accepted with great excitement. They paid the entrance fee, and planning began immediately.

I was excited to be able to use my background in public relations to help promote them, get the specially designed rowing boat custom built and raise the needed funds. We had two years.

Both boys were British army cadets and needed permission for the time off. Danny’s request had been accepted. Now we knew Jaish’s request had been turned down. I reassured Daniel that he would easily find
another partner.

“It’s not that easy, Mum. I need someone who can commit the next two years to promotion, fund-raising, training and skills acquisition. But mostly it has to be someone I can spend three months alone with on a twenty-three-foot boat!”

I’m not really sure what happened next. I don’t know whether he asked or I offered. All I know is that at the end of the conversation, I had agreed to become his new partner and row across the Atlantic with him—we were a team!

My beloved second husband, Keith, had died of cancer a few years before, and my old life was gone. I was fifty years old and a widow. My life felt empty and had no direction. The prospect of spending the next two years preparing for an adventure was very exciting, and the opportunity to share this unique experience with my son was irresistible. Once I had decided, there was no going back. He was offering me a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,
and I was going to seize it.

The commitment to row the Atlantic had been made. Now came the logistics. Money was a major issue. I had a marketing job, but there was no way it would begin to finance this project. So off I went to the bank.

As the former mayor of my hometown of Chipping Norton, I was fairly well known, so I did have some hopes. But when all was said and done, my presentation still sounded like a fifty-year-old widowed woman asking for a loan so she could row the Atlantic with her son. Right!

So I mortgaged my home, my two-hundred-year-old little stone cottage.

We were officially a team.

When our custom-built, ocean-going rowing boat was completed, we ceremoniously named it
Carpe Diem—
Seize the Day! We began training sessions, mostly on the Thames. Daniel began to feel quite guilty because of the financial burden he felt he had placed on me. At one point I realized,
My God, if this doesn’t work, I could lose my house!
But we didn’t have time for thoughts like those. We each brought our own unique skills to the venture. I knew it was my job to get us to the starting line in the Canary Islands, and Captain Daniel would get us to the finish line in Barbados.

When I finally got up the courage to tell my own mum of our plans, to my delight she offered no guilt, fear or negativity. Instead her response was: “The years between fifty and sixty go like that!” and she snapped her fingers. “DO IT! And I’m utterly behind you.”

October 12, 1997, finally arrived. After two years of hard work, we departed Los Gigantes Tenerife along with twenty-nine other teams. At fifty-three, I was the oldest participant, and we were the only mother-and-son team. Our boat was designed with two rowing seats, one behind the other. For the first six hours we rowed together. After that, we began the routine we would maintain for the next one hundred days. Two hours of solo rowing, and then two hours of sleep in the tiny cabin in the bow. For the first week out, Danny was sick with food poisoning, and I had to be captain and in charge. It proved to us both that I could in fact pull my own weight on the water.

Once Daniel was better, we fell into a comfortable routine that bonded us together in a wonderful new partnership. Sometimes he would be sleeping so soundly that I would row for another hour or so. Often Dan would do the same—row for another hour or so and let his mum sleep. Our obvious kindness toward each other was awesome, and I found my son’s kindness toward me to be overwhelming. We were a rowing team, yes, but in the larger picture we were still mother and son, loving and caring for each other unconditionally. If either of us could have given the other a full eight hours’ sleep, we would have done so in a flash.

The constant rolling and heaving of the boat, the constant dampness and humidity, the lack of sleep and comfort and, of course, the heavy rowing all began to take a toll on my body that deeply worried us both. My hands were red and raw and stiff like claws. I had boils on my bottom, and I began to suffer from sciatica. There was swelling in my hip from a muscle I had torn prior to departure, and my shoulder was injured from being thrown across the boat in high seas. Danny was worried that his drive to achieve his goal was going to permanently damage his mum, and I was worried that the frailty of my fifty-three-year-old body was going to destroy my son’s dream. I suddenly felt old and a burden on the venture. But then Daniel began to experience many of the same pains, and I knew it wasn’t just me, but the extraordinary conditions we were living under.

Throughout the trip, there were many things that made us think about giving up. There were the hard days when we blamed each other. “How could you do this to your poor mum?” I would shout. “This is all YOUR fault!” And Daniel would yell back, “I didn’t expect you to say ‘Yes!’” But in truth, we decided that the only thing that would have really made us give up was if a whale had smashed our boat. Daniel laughs now and says, “And, oh my God, how many times we prayed for that!”

We were astonished as to how something as small as a rainbow or a fish leaping out of the water could instantly cheer us up when we were low. In addition, before we left, we had all our friends and relatives write poems and letters to us, and seal and date them. That way, we had mail to open on each day of our journey. The humor and love in these letters picked us up and carried us when times got really rough.

We also had on board a radar beacon that allowed us to be tracked exactly. Each night the positions of all the boats were posted on the Internet, and our friends and family were able to track us. My own sweet mum rowed the Atlantic with me every night in her dreams. My stepfather drew a map to scale on the wall, and each night friends would call and report our position to my mum. They would then plot our course on that map. In a way, it was three generations rowing the Atlantic.

Both Daniel and I took a careful selection of books and taped music along. If you think rowing the Atlantic is boring, you should try not rowing! After a while, for variety, we began to trade books and listen to each other’s music. Daniel began to appreciate my classical choices, and I began to enjoy listening to his reggae and UB40!

Every team in this race had its own reasons for participating. Some were committed to winning. We, however, were doing it for the challenge and the opportunity to spend this unique time together. Knowing we would not win, we took two hours off each night, sat and enjoyed dinner, and talked. We told each other the stories and anecdotes of our lives, things that might not otherwise have been shared over a lifetime. One night over dinner I said, “This is a little bit like Scheherazade, you know, the story of
A Thousand and One Arabian Nights!
” Daniel replied, “Yes, Mum! Perhaps we should call our book
A Hundred and
One Atlantic Nights!
” By complete coincidence (or was it?), that’s exactly how many nights it took to cross—101!