Chicken Soup for the Ocean Lover's Soul (25 page)

Giant waves crashed over the boat, again and again. The gale winds were pushing the little boat so hard that his pedals spun uselessly, unable to keep up with the furious propeller below. The winds howled harder. The waves towered higher. It would stay this way, a nightmare toboggan ride, sliding up and down thirty-foot waves, for four days.

When he’d been awake for two days straight, he could pedal no more. While he slept, a monster wave pitched Dwight out of his bunk and against the camcorder mounts. Then, as
Tango
righted itself, he was dumped on the deck.

His face bleeding, his eyes dazed, he asked the camcorder, “I’m not even halfway yet! What am I doing?”

When the storm subsided, he still had over twelve hundred miles of pedaling ahead of him. And he hadn’t gotten any use out of the little sunroof—there had been no sun. He had serious cabin fever.

The final insult was when his Walkman stopped working. Corinne asked Sony to airdrop a replacement to him, and they liked the idea, but the weather wouldn’t cooperate. Dwight resorted to building boats in his head to take his mind off the constant pedaling. He built his imaginary boat slowly, deciding with care what type of cabin and whether he wanted flush decks.

Minor mechanical problems cropped up, most of which Dwight was able to fix (except the Walkman). One was the microphone over which he talked to Corinne and his support team. The mike had gotten wet in the rough weather, and Dwight had it apart one night, trying to dry it out. “It was frustrating,” he says.

“I could hear Corinne and my brother transmitting to me, but I couldn’t say anything to them. I was pinching wires together, the boat was rocking, it was dark. I had the flashlight in my mouth. My brother kept saying, ‘What’s your problem? Over.’”

His nearest brush with humanity almost killed him. One night, his hands full of bearings, he was working on the cycle apparatus. “All of a sudden there was a bright light. I turned around, and there was this ship coming, right in my path. I dropped the bearings. I pulled out my flares. It came at me. I turned on my radio. I turned on my light. They were literally meters away, coming at me. Then
they put a spotlight on me, and they swung away.”

Finally, Dwight pedaled into some nice weather. He stretched on the deck and put his face in the sun. Corinne contacted the local wire service in Plymouth, England, and told them to expect a visitor shortly. They broke the story. “There’s a bloody wally bicycling across the pond!” the Coast Guard announced. The BBC sent helicopters out to report his progress. The
Daily Mirror
posed the question: “WHAT MAKES A MAN BATTLE 2,200 MILES ALONE ACROSS THE SEA IN A PEDAL BOAT?” Their answer: “Because Dwight is obsessed with the call of the wild . . . he cannot face life without proving his manhood . . . and that means staring danger and death in the face.”
Sheesh,
Dwight thought later when he read it.

On day thirty-nine—a beautiful day—he spotted the Scilly Islands at the southwestern tip of England. “I wouldn’t trade this for the world,” he said to the camcorder.

The next day, July 24, 1992, Dwight pedaled
Tango
into Plymouth Harbor, 2,250 miles from St. John’s. He had broken the record for the fastest human-powered Atlantic crossing by fourteen days.

“As I came around the bend,” he recalls, “there was a huge crowd of people, and everybody was clapping. My whole family was on the deck.”

Dwight pedaled up to the dock, and Corinne fell onto the boat, into his arms, though surely she must have been tempted to embrace his legs, which got him there.

Looking back now, Dwight admits that, yes, challenging yourself like this can be addictive, but he certainly can resist it. “This was just a thing that I wanted to do,” he says with finality. He’s done with such things as pedaling across the ocean.

Although, he does have another idea . . .

Jamie Kageleiry

Fear of the Unknown

“I’m going to try out to be a Laguna Beach ocean lifeguard, Mom,” Malea announced one winter day. She was a freshman at UCLA, home for the weekend.

“Wow, that’s great,” I said, hiding my apprehension. It sounded dangerous to me, but my daughter had always been a brave soul with a big heart, fierce focus and mighty determination. I had no doubt she would succeed at whatever she tackled.

“What does trying out involve?” I asked.

“Just some weekend training sessions,” she said, “then a tryout day.” She always made everything sound easy. “I’ll come home from school every weekend until it’s over.”

I quickly learned that my daughter’s definition of easy was very different from mine. Those weekend sessions were grueling—for both of us. Malea was no stranger to strenuous training, having been on the cross-country team and the swim team in high school, but neither of us had experienced anything like ocean lifeguard training.

Beginning in mid-March, she spent hours each weekend with the other contestants running up and down the beaches, up and down the stairs, and in and out of the chilly winter waters of the Pacific. It was physically painful and emotionally draining. Her feet blistered, and her muscles ached. Sometimes I would stand on the beach and watch her struggle to keep up with the rest, struggle to finish, struggle to keep from giving up. It made both of us cry. Hers were tears of exhaustion and frustration with her own physical limitations. My tears were a heart-wrenching mixture of pride and agony from watching her push herself beyond her limitations and beyond the pain. We longed for it to be over.

The night before the tryout, we sat together talking about the big day ahead. While it never occurred to me that she wouldn’t make it, I was surprised to find that she had her doubts. Something else was bothering her, something that she seemed reluctant to reveal even to me.

“Everyone else is so much stronger and faster than I am,” she said.

“It’s not always about stronger and faster,” I said, attempting to bolster her sagging confidence. “Sometimes sheer grit and determination will push you to the top. You’ve got heart, Malea. I know you’ll be right in there with the best of them.”

“It’s not just that.”

“Well, what else then?” I said. “It’s just you pushing yourself to do your very best. When you boil it all down, that’s all you have to worry about.”

“No,” she said quietly, her head bowed, hands clenched in her lap. “That’s not everything. . . . Mom, I’m afraid of sharks.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, puzzled. “What do sharks have to do with it?”

That’s when I found out that her final challenge would be to make her way alone on a giant paddleboard to a buoy just beyond the horizon, about one thousand yards offshore. Definitely potential shark territory. Once at the designated spot, she would lower herself into the water, swim about two hundred feet from the safety of the paddle-board, circle the board and swim back to it. Once back on the paddleboard, she had to stand up and shout a proclamation to the world. Only then could she return to shore.

All of the participants had been given the same instructions, and I wondered if they were afraid of sharks, too. I imagine most people harbor a deep fear of the fierce ocean predator. Malea’s anxiety was no different, I suppose, but the whole idea of facing her fear to complete the exercise was overwhelming. I could see she seriously questioned her ability to meet the challenge.

My daughter and I are not quitters, but at that moment I wanted to wrap her in my arms and tell her it was okay, that being an ocean lifeguard wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Couldn’t she just work at the Juice Stop this summer? Or some other nice, safe job? Instead, I took her hands in mine and said, “You can do it, Malea.” But I was scared to death for her.

The next morning was unusually cold, dreary and damp. Standing on the wet sand, I could barely see the ocean before me as all the kids stripped to their swimsuits and prepared for competition. The running, swimming, more running and more swimming portion of the tryout took several hours. I spent those hours with the rest of the anxious parents, wrapped warmly in my sweatshirt, sitting on the beach, trying to see through the fog. As each event ended, my daughter and I calculated her position amongst her peers. Then it was time for the final challenge. We sat on the shore waiting her turn, and Malea was quiet, working solemnly on her courage. I could see her struggling to find her focus. Finally, it was her turn, and as she approached the water’s edge, I felt myself losing my emotional grip. My heart was firmly planted in my throat. As she disappeared into the soupy, cold atmosphere, I held my breath.

I strained to see her, but I couldn’t make out a thing beyond the shoreline. Maybe that was a blessing. I would only have seen her swim out of range, past the horizon and into lonely, scary, black waters—shark waters. It felt as though I sat on that cold, wet sand for hours, barely breathing, heart pounding. When I thought I was going to burst, that I just could not stand it one minute longer, I saw the faint outline of the giant paddleboard emerge from the haze. Malea straddled it proudly and firmly, sporting a look on her face that comes only from having pushed oneself beyond all expectation. I ran to the pad-dleboard, grabbed my daughter and hugged her, both of us awash in tears as we held each other.

“I did it!” she cried. “I did it!”

I was so proud of her accomplishment. Not only had she successfully completed the training and now the tryout, but she had conquered her fears. Sheer grit and determination had paid off. After paddling out beyond the safety of the shore and swimming alone in the dark ocean, Malea got up on the paddleboard and shouted her proclamation to the world . . .

“I . . . AM NOT . . . AFRAID . . . OF SHARKS!”

Maggie Stapp-Hempen

Exploring the Sunken Wreck

We were about to take our first close look at the mighty
Bismarck,
unseen by human eyes for almost fifty years. Billy Yunck’s watch was on duty in the control van, and there were quite a few spectators. No one who was awake wanted to miss the show.

“All right, let’s see what kind of shape she’s in,” I said. “Billy, go down slowly.”

Billy pushed forward on the joystick, and the altitude reading began to decrease: fifty meters, forty-five meters, forty meters, thirty-five meters.

We were coming in directly over the wreck, like a helicopter dropping down over an enemy position. About thirty meters from the bottom, a ghostly gray form materialized dimly in the murky distance.

“Okay, bring her down gently.” The wind on the surface had been picking up for the past couple of hours, and
Argo,
our deep-sea exploration vessel, was rising and falling as much as several meters with each swell. The last thing I needed right now was a crash landing.

Gradually, the murk thinned, and the detail of the picture on the video monitors came into focus. First we saw an undamaged gun turret, then horribly mangled metal plating where a shell had hit.

Our goal was to videotape and photograph every inch of the sunken ship. As the hours passed, a clearer picture of the wreck began to emerge. It was a strange mixture of destruction and preservation. Many guns were still in place, but there were some huge holes in the deck, and some of the upper parts of the ship had been completely blasted away.

At 4
P.M.
sharp, Todd’s watch relieved Billy’s. In the three hours that we’d been working over the wreck, the surface weather had been getting steadily worse, and the flyer’s job was becoming more difficult by the minute. But Todd was an expert at counteracting the rise and fall of our ship, the
Star Hercules.
As the ship fell, he raised
Argo;
as it rose, he lowered it. This worked well until we hit a deep trough between waves where the ship fell and then fell further, instead of going up again. A few times we come close to crashing.

As we approached the rear gunnery control station, I sensed an extra level of anticipation in the can. We had all read the
Bismarck
story, and we knew that this was where Lieutenant-Commander Burkard von Mullenhim-Rechberg had spent the battle. This was also the place where so many of those who survived the sinking had sought shelter, including the three friends from the rear gunnery computer room—Adi Eich, Franz Halke and Heinz Jucknat.

The station was intact. It was amazing that it had survived the battle so well, since it was not a heavily armored structure.

Now we headed aft, past the round, gaping mouths where turrets Caesar and Dora had once sat. None of the four big turrets was still attached to the ship. Soon we were out over empty decking and approaching the stern.

“Stop! What’s that?” I said.
Argo
’s video cameras had just picked up some dark markings on the ship.

“It’s a cross,” said a voice behind me.

“No,” I said, looking intently at the screen. “No, that’s not a cross. It’s a swastika.”

“Of course, the swastika!” exclaimed Hagen, half to himself.

The van went silent. In our excitement we’d forgotten just what we were looking at: a Nazi warship. Suddenly, all the evil associations that went with the Nazi symbol ran through our minds: the invasions that led to the outbreak of World War II, bringing widespread death and destruction, the concentration camps and the millions of people murdered there. My mind went back to the day Hitler came on board to inspect his new battleship before her first mission. I wondered how differently the war might have turned out if the
Bismarck
had broken into the Atlantic to attack ships transporting food and supplies to the islands of Great Britain.