ALTHOUGH WEATHER WAS
our biggest worry, Portuguese bureaucracy placed a close second. We’d ordered equipment from overseas—three-metre oars from Australia, freeze-dried foods from the U.S., electronic gear from Canada—and we struggled to retrieve it. We knew we could not buy these items in Portugal, so we had them shipped there while we cycled across Europe. Even that wasn’t easy because we didn’t have anyone in Lisbon to accept our parcels. General delivery at the post office wouldn’t work because many items were being shipped by courier. The Canadian Embassy in Lisbon flatly refused to accept anything on our behalf. Eventually, we found a hotel that would accept our packages and, after a longer search, we found Mario Almeida, a friend of a friend who lives in Lisbon, who would do the same.
“You must come to the airport to pick them up,” the shipping clerk said when the carbon-fibre oars donated to us by the Australian company Croker Oars arrived. We were thrilled that they had made it to Portugal safely. However, it took eight hours in four separate offices to complete the required customs paperwork. Two kind women from the shipping company patiently spent the day with us, walking from office to office, translating, and handing us documents to sign. They even organized a meeting with the manager so that our import duty was waived. And despite no import duty or shipping, it still cost us four hundred euros in administrative fees to retrieve the oars.
We soon learned that the procedure was different for each package that arrived, and that the oars had been the easiest to retrieve. We spent countless hours on the phone with each courier company, muddling through a minefield of bureaucracy. Sometimes we were told, “You can only receive packages in Portugal if you are a Portuguese citizen.” Mario, our new Portuguese friend, came to the rescue and claimed they were his. Slowly, we ticked essential items off the list: a
GPS
, navigational charts, underwater camera housings, a life raft, an emergency beacon (
EPIRB
), and various other odds and ends. But by our new hoped-for departure date, September
20
, we still hadn’t been able to wrest all our packages free from Portuguese customs. Boxes of freeze-dried food, sent from North America by sponsor Mountain House Foods, were still being withheld from us.
We could not find freeze-dried foods in Lisbon, so we had no choice but to outfit our boat with food from the supermarket. Freeze-dried food is lightweight, nutritious, and easy to prepare—ideal for a long journey where every ounce of weight matters. But instead we’d have to rely on heavier and more difficult-to-prepare ingredients available in local grocery stores. Also, since we didn’t have a refrigerator, we’d have to be careful to select items that could weather the tropical heat. We’d have to stow enough food to last the two of us for up to five months. It would barely fit in the boat.
We arrived at the wholesale supermarket Makro armed with a shopping list, or perhaps more accurately a shopping
book.
After mulling over our nutritional requirements, we’d done our best to itemize what would be required to get us across the ocean in good health. For breakfast we would rotate among four meals: rice pudding, tapioca pudding, cream of wheat, and oatmeal. Lunches would be dried bread with peanut butter, tuna, preserved meat, or cheese (while it lasted). Our planned dinners offered the most variety; each meal contained a carbohydrate (noodles, rice, mashed potatoes, and couscous), a protein (tuna, canned meat, beans), and, every other day, a can of vegetables. For snacks we decided on daily rations of half a pound of cookies, a handful of dried fruit, and five candies. Our goal was to bring foods that were easy to prepare, lightweight, dense, nutritious, and calorie-loaded. We each needed to eat about five thousand calories a day, about twice as much as we’d consume normally.
Colin pushed the cart through the aisles while I read off our shopping list. “We need
130
cans of tuna,
60
cans of beans,
35
kilograms of rice . . . Is
100
litres of powdered milk enough, or should I get two sacks? . . . These vegetables are too expensive; do we really need that many cans? . . . I think we should get extra candy instead of canned fruit, it’s cheaper . . . Should we get ten flats of Oreo cookies, or do you want some oatmeal crisps too?”
We spent hours wandering the supermarket aisles and were finally ready to check out with an obscene amount of food. Imagine a week’s total groceries for a typical person and multiply that by eighty (we were shopping for two for twenty weeks at double the caloric intake). The clerk’s eyes opened wide as we dragged one heavy cart after another up to the till. After almost an hour of scanning, the clerk finally gestured to the shocking figure displayed on the screen.
“I’ll pay by credit card,” I said, handing over my MasterCard.
A long queue had formed behind us, and the clerk’s expression transformed from shock to dismay. “We don’t accept credit cards. It’s cash only.”
We had become the centre of attention. Members of management had gathered around the perimeter of our shopping carts to see what was going on. Passing shoppers would momentarily pause, wearing the same guilty expressions as those going out of their way to view a gruesome car accident. I felt these nightmarish situations were becoming all too familiar.
“Uh . . . we didn’t know that . . . I guess we’ll go to the bank machine and come back in few minutes,” Colin said.
We walked hurriedly out the door, leaving the staff scratching their heads.
“Let’s just leave. We can’t get that kind of money from the
ATM
,” Colin said.
“We can’t just go. We spent the entire day collecting that food. We’ve got to get the money somehow,” I said, shocked at the prospect of just walking away.
“Well, the banks will be closed until Monday. What else can we do?” Colin argued.
“My bank at home is open on Saturday. Maybe I can call them and see if they can temporarily increase my
ATM
limit and place some money in my account from my credit card,” I said doubtfully.
It seemed a very unlikely possibility, but it was our only chance. I went to a public phone and made the call. Ten minutes later I received the news that they would do it. After a quick trip to the
ATM
, we returned to the cashier, our pockets bulging with euros. The patient, kind manager then offered to deliver our food to the marina to save us from having to hire a fleet of taxis.
Finally, on September
21
, just over two weeks after our arrival in Lisbon, we had our boat shipshape and packed with everything needed for the long journey across the ocean. The last two weeks we’d worked nonstop, from
5
:
30 AM
to
11
:
30 PM
, but somehow we had managed to transform an empty secondhand rowboat into one that was completely seaworthy and equipped with all the essential gear required to row across an ocean. We triple-tested all our equipment and had backups for all the critical gear, such as the desalinator and Iridium satellite phone, not to mention repair materials to deal with practically every emergency scenario. We had stocks of wholesome food, and even some fishing gear, just in case we wanted to fish en route. More than a few times, I had thought we might not be able to prepare our boat in time, but now we were ready to go.
“R
ISE AND SHINE.
High tide is two hours away,” I said, nudging Colin in the side with my elbow.
He issued the expected response: a dissatisfied grunt. It was
4
:
00 AM
on Thursday, September
22
. We’d had only three hours of sleep, and now we were embarking on a ten-thousand-kilometre row across the Atlantic.
We extracted ourselves from the snug rowboat cabin and began the final preparations for departure. We needed to leave with the outgoing tide, which was in three hours; otherwise we’d have to wait another day. Our boat was now in the water, tied to a pontoon at Doca de Belém, which was located on a two-kilometre-wide channel on the estuary of Portugal’s main river. The Tagus boasted currents so strong that they changed the geography of the river to form a partially inverted delta. The raised triangle of sediment that usually collects at a river’s mouth was absent. Now the incoming current—intensified by strong tides that accompanied the nearly full moon—was still close to its peak power; it would be impossible to row against. Within a few hours, however, this great force would work in our favour.
After storing the last of the food, repacking gear to make it fit in the cramped compartments, and filling water containers, we were ready to go. At least I hoped so. I was both terrified and thrilled that our trip was finally underway. We were setting off only a few days later than the target date we had set months ago. It was tempting to postpone our departure another day so that we could give the boat one more inspection and get a good night’s sleep, but we worried that the stable weather would soon deteriorate. The sooner we travelled south, the better.
“I can’t shake the feeling that we’re forgetting something,” I said.
“I’ve got the list here, and we’ve checked everything off,” Colin replied.
“It’s too bad we can’t get delivery on the ocean,” I joked. “It’d be great if we could call up a Lisbon restaurant and have them bring us a few meals of grilled fish and veggies.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” Colin laughed. “And we could be teleported to a soft bed every night.”
Our light banter only further emphasized the spartan existence we would soon be facing. A few hundred metres from our boat, cars and trains whizzed along the waterfront as Lisbon’s work force prepared for another day. Behind the busy street, old stone architecture stood bathed in city lights, and a predawn glow hinted at the city’s permanence. Only a few days before, I had been longing to escape this hectic world of noise, dust, and machines. Now I wasn’t so sure. In the other direction, towards the open Atlantic, the water absorbed and diffused what little light there was, creating a thick grey mat. I felt I was looking into a chasm of nothingness, a world yet to be created.
Once we pushed off from the dock, our world would be restricted to the space between the gunwales of our small plywood boat. Forgetting something that might normally be inconsequential, such as sunscreen lotion or a can opener, could lead to devastating consequences. So could many other things, such as miscalculating the amount of fuel we’d need for the stove, not bringing enough batteries for the backup
GPS
, or forgetting a crucial tool. The list of considerations was seemingly infinite. We had realized we must be able to remedy any problem that might occur—from a snapped oar to a broken bone. Self-sufficiency was paramount to survival.
“Wow, that is one packed boat,” Colin said, as he stood on the dock surveying the vessel.
He was right. The gear that we couldn’t fit in the storage compartments was lashed onto the deck or squeezed into the cabin. The sleeping berth, designed to be just wide enough for two people, was crowded with supplies that should have been stored elsewhere. Not only did our home look like a cross between a kayak and a dishevelled miniature houseboat, it also sat precariously low in the water because of this excess weight. The scuppers—openings on the sides of the boat that normally allow water on the decks to drain—sat barely above the water line. On the open ocean, the vessel would be sluggish and prone to waves sluicing over the decks. As we ate our way through the cargo, however, the boat would gradually become more manageable. Like a rocket heading into space, it would become faster and more manoeuvrable as fuel was consumed.
A shadowy cluster of five people huddled on the dock to see us off. Two sailors from yachts moored nearby joined Mario, his wife, and another friend. Although it was barely
7
:
00 AM
, they had forsaken the warmth of their beds to bid us farewell. They offered parting gifts and words of wisdom, hugs and promises to stay in touch, plus one bottle of wine “to celebrate your birthdays,” another “to bring in the New Year,” and a third “to mark the halfway point.” I happily stowed the additional cargo despite our weight concerns, thinking we’d drink all the wine within the first week.
We untied our rowboat, stowed the fenders, and pushed off from our berth. Colin steered us through rows of sailboats while I waved goodbye to our friends, to Lisbon, and to life on land. Within minutes we reached the main channel of the Tagus, and its strong tidal current doubled our speed to four knots, swiftly moving us away from the marina. Lisbon’s striking April
25
Bridge spanned the channel a few kilometres upstream and slipped into the distance. This long red suspension bridge reminded me of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, which I later found out is its sister bridge. Built in
1962
, it was later renamed to commemorate the day in
1974
that the Carnation Revolution—a two-year movement that replaced Europe’s longest dictatorship with a liberal democracy and culminated with crowds of Portuguese walking the streets, holding red carnations for peace—began.
Further down the channel towered the seventeen-storey concrete prow of a fifteenth-century sailboat called
Monument to the Discoveries.
Its deck was lined with illustrations of thirty famous Portuguese explorers from centuries ago; it was another reminder of the pivotal role Portugal played in mapping (and ruling) the world during the Age of Discovery. It was hard to believe that a country one-tenth the size of British Columbia was the first global empire, claiming territories that included Africa, South America, and Asia, but seafaring prowess had been its advantage.