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

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Big Blue, I had realized by now, would be running not just without a motor or sail but without a toilet—the absence of which was apparently to be addressed by a handle astern, to which one could cling while dangling one’s posterior above the ocean. During my training, I read numerous accounts of excursions such as ours, at least one of which mentioned the unsettling sight of sharks, big ones, that occasionally surfaced as someone was doing his or her business over the rail. Beyond the risks of being lost at sea and the (admittedly slim) threat of having one’s hindquarters removed by a man-eating fish, the hazards of ocean rowing, as I was able to assess them, ran to sunstroke, dehydration, exhaustion, malnutrition, extreme weight loss, supertankers in the shipping lanes, salt sores, mid-Atlantic delirium, breakdown of navigation and desalination equipment, antipathies among crew members, and bad weather.

There were also, I came to understand, great pleasures to be anticipated on such crossings: parades of porpoises, pods of whales, glorious night skies, intense camaraderie, the satisfactions of high-level fitness. One crew member from a previous crossing described his boat surfing for miles at a stretch—“as thrilling as a rollercoaster”—on twenty-five-foot waves sent up by the trade winds, which would be of primary importance to us as we made our way across. Or so we believed.