Читать книгу Little Ship of Fools. Sixteen Rowers, One Improbable Boat, Seven Tumultuous Weeks on the Atlantic онлайн

12 страница из 92

I could remember it all just fine.

Unfortunately, I no longer cared.

Meanwhile, if I was lucky, I had ninety minutes to sleep before being jarred awake for my next two-hour stint on the oars. That was the deal—two hours on, two hours off, for whatever number of days it took to get from Africa to North America. When you weren’t in your bunk, somebody else was: in my case a mindfully ambitious emergency room physician named Sylvain Croteau from Gatineau, Quebec. Such were the good doc’s focus and self-possession that a week earlier, in Agadir, when he got news that his dad had died, he had, rather than wilting or packing up, taken an hour in the boatyard where we were getting Big Blue ready, reflected on the life of his estranged papa, and gone industriously back to work.

As for the rest of the crew, I can say now that if we had known what lay ahead, some of us mightn’t have been there. In the desultory losses and recrimination that would ensue a couple of weeks hence, one or two considered putting ashore at the Cape Verde Islands. I believed at the time, and said so, that if anyone wanted to go, he or she should get in a lifeboat and do it. And good riddance.