The As It Happens Files Read online

  ML: And the weather’s not nice.

  DH: Well, when we started, it was dark and it went down to—we recorded minus 55. Well, we think it was minus 55, because we could only record minus 55; it was right on the backstop, so it might have been lower. You got open water and wind, so the actual winds will take the windchill factor much lower. But it warmed up. We were picked up on a beautiful day; it was minus 20, no wind.…

  ML: You probably had your shirt off at minus 20.

  DH: You could certainly feel the difference, because by that time, we’d got acclimatized, of course, and we used to have two sleeping bags [each] and we threw away the inner sleeping bags, so, yeah, it was much warmer.

  ML: What did you eat?

  DH: Well, we had to get in six thousand calories, because we were burning twelve thousand up.

  ML: Every day?

  DH: Yeah. Good place to go for a diet. I lost about 24 pounds. But in any event, we had dehydrated food and what you do is you mix a lot of oil with it to try and get the caloristic value up, and it was the same food every day, so it got pretty hard to eat in the end.

  ML: You fell in the water at one point.

  DH: Yeah, that was probably the lowest point of the whole trip.

  ML: No kidding!

  DH: I thought, Boy, you know, this is it. It wasn’t a problem falling in the water, but I had my skis on as well, and I didn’t want to lose my skis, so I was lucky Rune was there to fish me out. And we had to start walking pretty quickly, and what happened was, the water freezes and then you just crack the water off, but you just have to get going quickly to get the heat back into your body.

  ML: You must like the cold.

  DH: Uh, I don’t—I’m just not smart enough to realize that I don’t like it. I seem to keep coming back here, but it’s a beautiful area, I have to say, and this thing that you just can’t describe to people—it really is a wonderful place.

  ML: Try.

  DH: Well, you’ve got this raw beauty. You’re on the limit, basically. You’ve got the mountains—so beautiful—and very few people visit them. The nicest thing about Canada, it’s so big; up in these national parks, you see these mountains that have never been climbed before, that are just stunningly beautiful. And then you’ve got the different colours of when the sun starts to come back in the North here—these oranges, and mauve and purple skies … it’s beautiful. And then you’ve got the sheer beauty of the sea ice itself that’s always moving and changing shape and consistency, and every day is different, completely different.

  And then you can get the raw savagery of it with the wind blowing 30 miles an hour. So it goes from one extreme to the other, and we’ve always said it can be hell and heaven in one hour, the weather changes so quickly. And the conditions as well. If you’ve got a lot of rubble and you try to pull your sleds through, it can be hell, and then you get a pad of ice which you could land the Concorde on, which is heaven, of course.

  ML: I don’t need to ask you why you do it—you’ve already said you’re crazy—but have you done it all now? What challenges are left for you?

  DH: Well, there’s always a challenge for man. I think Browning said, “A man’s reach should be beyond his grasp,” and I think he meant it doesn’t matter what you do, be it trying to get to the top of the stairs for the first time or walking down to the end of the street for the first time. Man has to have a challenge. I think maybe now I’m 41 and I’ve got young children, I have to start slowing down. Hopefully, there’ll always be some challenge, even if it’s going down to the local pub. I owe Rune a few pints, so I suppose that’ll be the next expedition.

  The next time we talked, in March 2004, David had just set a new world record, flying a balloon 13 kilometres into the atmosphere above Colorado, so I guess he did find another challenge after leaving the pub. It was cold up there, too, he said—minus 70 degrees.

  David’s countryman, or rather-woman, Fiona Thornewild, also walked into the history books in 2004 when she became the first British woman to walk solo to the South Pole. She walked a thousand kilometres in 42 days, dragging a 130-pound sled behind her. She had a radio phone for company for the first 10 days; then it conked out and she had only herself to talk to for the rest of the journey. The lowest point for her, she told us, was when her GPS directional device broke down and she couldn’t immediately lay her hands on the spare.

  Why go through it? She said it was because it was the biggest challenge she could set herself; because of the sense of personal satisfaction it gave her; and because after her first husband had been killed in a car accident at the age of 26, she’d promised herself to live life to the limit.

  We talked to people who’d made their way across the great Arabian desert known as the Empty Quarter—the name tells you all you need to know about that particular piece of real estate—and people who have kayaked and rowed and paddled their way across oceans, or tried to, and people who prefer to travel by balloon, and whenever I talked to these men and women, I reflected on how nice it was to be warm and dry and cozy in the studio. But if I had to choose from among these torturous adventures, I’d probably opt for being baked in the sand or frozen on a mountaintop over being smashed around in a cold, dark sea at the bottom of the world or sinking to a watery grave. Maybe that’s why the sailing stories thrill me most. When Adam Killick joined the programme, I had a new ally in my quest to get more sailors on the air. An enthusiastic sailor himself, Adam was keen to have us follow the progress of Derek Hatfield aboard Spirit of Canada in the 2003 Around Alone race, which is like the Vendée Globe, only you’re allowed the occasional landfall. The low point of Hatfield’s passage came when he lost his mast while rounding Cape Horn. We heard all about it when we reached him a few days later in Ushuaia, Argentina.

  DH: It started with a hailstorm and a big black cloud—blew 60, 65 knots out of the west—and that was approaching the Horn.… I arrived on the shoals of the Horn with waves up to 45 feet breaking. I battled the storm all Thursday night and into Friday and actually battled my way all the way around the Horn, and mid-afternoon on Friday, was struck by this really difficult wave that, in hindsight, was kind of an odd thing—one of those things that obviously had the Spirit of Canada’s name on it. It picked up the back of the boat—what we sailors refer to as a semi-pitch-pole—and the boat went vertical. The bow went down, and the boat basically stood on its head, then fell off to the side and was rolled upside down by this wave, which wasn’t particularly big—20 feet or so, I guess. I’d been dealing with those waves all day long.

  ML: But you didn’t have your harness on? How did you manage not to get thrown overboard?

  DH: It was one of those—I want to make it clear that I always wear the harness, especially when I’m sailing in conditions like this—but I had just come up from down below. Because I’d been hand-steering the boat through these big waves all day long, I was dashing down below in the lulls. In this case, the wind was going from 65 to 70 down to 40—to me that was a lull—and I was grabbing some quick energy foods and trying to get a little bit warm and rushing back on deck for the next blast of wind. But I rushed back on deck just as the wave hit and before I had a chance to clip on and—bang! The boat went over. I went across the cockpit to the far side up against the lifelines. It was the lifelines that saved my life. I guess that’s why they’re called that—

  ML: You managed to grasp the lines.

  DH: Well, no, I didn’t have a chance to grab anything. It’s one of those situations similar to a car crash; you really don’t have a chance to do much.

  ML: They just caught you.

  DH: They just caught me and kept me on board. I was under the water momentarily, and I could hear the gurgling of the water, as I was not really swimming, just kind of floundering around under the water there and—the real memory that I have is the splintering carbon of the mast exploding. I think it broke in three or four places. By the time I came to my senses and back inside the boat, the mast was gone over the side b
ut still being held on to the boat with the rigging. The mainsail and all the lines and the halyards and everything were still attached, so the boat is going sideways in 55 to 60 knots of wind with these huge monster waves trying to roll the boat again. But it didn’t roll, and it took me about 45 minutes to go around and systematically cut all the lines and pull all the pins on the rigging and let the rig go. Then I started to motor—and luckily, I was not far from the coast—and motored straight up the Beagle Channel here to Ushuaia.

  ML: Your engine was still working!

  DH: Yeah. Miraculously. But the inside of the boat was total carnage. Everything that was in the boat, in the back or in the main salon, the cabin, landed in the nav station because the boat stood on its bow, smashing a lot of the instruments and, at that time, took out the sat [satellite] phones, basically. The one sat phone continued to work for a little while, but the charging system was not working, so the battery went dead very quickly.

  ML: We think that’s what happened to Gerry Roufs back in 1997, huh?

  DH: Yes.

  ML: That he was thrown out of the boat in a storm. Did you think about him at all?

  DH: I remember Gerry a lot. I’m not sure how close I was to where he was lost, but I sailed through that part of the world as well. Because of that incident with Gerry, the boats are much safer now. I suspect that if my boat had stayed upside down, I wouldn’t be talking to you today.

  Derek Hatfield did manage to get a new mast and gear—thanks, he said, to the amazing outpouring of support he got from folks back in Canada—and made it home in one piece.

  As for Tim Harvey and Colin Angus, the Vancouver-to-Moscow trekkers, in September 2004, after taking a month to cross the Bering Sea, our lads made landfall on the coast of Siberia, at Provydenya. The townspeople made them welcome and gave them a small apartment, where they spent a couple of weeks building up their strength and provisions for the next leg of the journey. Until this point, although there had been difficulties, the voices on the radio still conveyed some of the exhilaration and optimism we’d heard at the outset. But somewhere between Provydenya and Anadyr, their next stop, things started to go a bit sour. On October 11th, Canadian Thanksgiving, Colin described a frustrating daylong hike down the length of a spit on the Siberian coast and a two-day hike back up after they found they couldn’t get to the mainland that way. We also heard the first mention of Yulya, the Russian interpreter who had joined them.

  Tim reported that it was overcast and grey, with blowing snow. No trees or bushes, just gravel and tundra. He also talked about the wildlife they’d encountered—walruses, grizzly bears, a wolf—and sent Happy Thanksgiving wishes to his grandmother and granddad in Shawville, Quebec. I felt thankful not to be in Siberia.

  After that things got worse. A warm spell turned the tundra into mud. Colin developed a severe urinary-tract infection and had to fly home to Vancouver for treatment. At Christmas Colin was still in Canada, and Tim was still waiting for him in Siberia. Colin rejoined Tim in January, but something (or someone?) seemed to have come between them. When we reconnected on February 17th, they told a harrowing tale of nearly having lost Colin in the Siberian wasteland.

  Colin had left Tim and Yulya to make his own way to a shelter they were aiming for at Kilometre 86—about two hundred kilometres east of Egvekinot. Along the way, he got lost in a blizzard. Just as darkness fell, he came across the “86” marker he was looking for, but there was no hut. Suddenly, he felt very, very scared.

  Alone now in the freezing darkness, the Siberian wind shrieking, Colin began to contemplate his death and how sad it would make his fiancée and his mother. Then, like Ignacio Siberio, the man who wouldn’t drown, he focused his will on how to make it through the night. First thing, dig a hole in the snow and get out of the wind. This he did with the aid of a penknife. For the next eight hours, he alternated between huddling in his cave and jumping up and down in the wind to restore his circulation. At around 1:30 a.m., when he emerged from the cave to revive his limbs, he thought he saw a faint glow in the distance.

  What to do now? It was an agonizing decision: whether to strike out toward that faint glow in the hope that it was coming from the hut he was looking for, or stay where he was until daylight. If there was no hut, he would certainly die. He struck out.

  Luckily for Colin, it was the right move. Tim and Yulya had organized a search party, but they had almost given up on Colin when he staggered into the building, half-frozen and looking like the Abominable Snowman.

  Getting separated was a mistake, they agreed. “You gotta stay together as a team,” they told us over the phone. But that was the last time we spoke to Tim and Colin together; shortly afterwards they parted company for good. Tim and Yulya went one way, Colin another. Colin kept the sat phone, and we were able to stay in touch with him. Tim kept the camera, and Yulya. In the office, we speculated about the possibility that three had become a crowd, but perhaps the guys would have split up anyway. Our producer Kevin Robertson reported that on their website and in the Vancouver papers, the two adventurers and their respective allies and supporters had taken to bickering and hurling insults at each other.

  Having abandoned their original mission—to trek together from Vancouver to Moscow—the travellers did all reach Moscow eventually. There they regrouped and made separate plans to continue the man-powered journey all the way back to Canada. Man-and-woman-powered. Colin acquired another camera and a female partner, his fiancée, Julie Wafaei. When I last spoke with Colin and Julie, they were a thousand kilometres off the west coast of Africa, breathing a collective sigh of relief after weathering two tropical storms. They’d been rowing for 65 days and had found about 50 ways to cook dorado. Julie said they were getting on very well, which we were glad to hear, as they had another two and a half months of rowing ahead of them before making landfall in Miami.

  Tim Harvey, meanwhile, had got himself a new phone but had lost Yulya—some problem with her travel papers, I think—so he had a new travelling partner as well, a chap by the name of Erden Eruc. When we last spoke, they were about 80 kilometres off the Moroccan coast and making a beeline for shore in the face of an approaching storm. They’d already been held up for weeks by high winds and waves, but Tim said, “Today was great. We’ve seen whales and sea turtles and dolphins, beautiful sunset.… There’s nothing I’d rather be doing.”

  Everyone made it back to Canada eventually, and you can learn more about the adventures of Tim and Colin and Julie and Yulya and Erden by checking out their own accounts on the web or on film or in their own books. Last I heard, Colin and Julie were planning a trip through the canals of France, and I thought, The food will be much better there!

  A few weeks after we talked to Derek Lundy about the Vendée Globe, we heard of another adventure on the high seas. This one involved a Russian sailor who was taking part in the 1998 Around Alone race. Russian sailor Victor Yasekov was about 950 miles west of Capetown when he radioed for help. His right arm had got infected; it had turned red and yellow and was badly swollen. Boston physician Daniel Carlin was one of the doctors on call for the Around Alone sailors, and as he tells the story, he answered Yasekov’s call for help and proceeded to tell him, via email, how to operate on his arm. Yasekov had to lance the abscess with a sterile scalpel, pour iodine into the wound, insert a drain and then dress it.

  The operation seemed to go well, but when Yasekov sent another message a few hours later, the news was not good. Now his arm was white and limp and utterly useless. Carlin figured it this way: Yasekov had probably taken a lot of Aspirin to ease the pain in his arm, which had led to profuse bleeding after the operation; then, in trying to staunch the bleeding, he had bound his arm too tightly and cut off the circulation. Carlin was worried that the sailor might now lose his arm. He told Yasekov to remove the tourniquet, and Yasekov reported that he had started to get some feeling back in his arm, but it still wasn’t much use. He ended up sailing pretty much one-handed all the way to Capetown.


  Daniel Carlin had a different answer when I put the question to him on the radio:

  “These people are nuts, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  He, it turns out, is a fine one to talk. I was curious about whether Yasekov’s arm ever did heal completely and also about whether Dr. Carlin was still practising long-distance medicine, so one day I tracked him down to a clinic in New London, New Hampshire. We didn’t know it at the time, but our interview had caught Carlin in the middle of his own adventure, and his journey was just as exciting in its way as the Around Alone race. He began by telling me how important the Yasekov case had been for him.

  That was the sentinel case for a sweeping change in medicine. That was the first time, basically, that the Internet came to someone’s rescue very quickly and that there was actually an infrastructure—my practice—built around that capability. Back then I had really high hopes for this. I had been a refugee camp doctor and had lived overseas and I thought, Holy cow. If I make this work on a simple practice basis, then it’s just purely a question of scaling this up in the years ahead and recruiting medical centres to participate so you could have a portal like my practice and use that portal to focus real expertise on some distant patient or clinic to the benefit of that patient.

  At the time he treated Victor Yasekov, Dr. Carlin told me, he was just finishing a long-distance medical project in Ghana—part of what he was now calling his World Clinic—and he was working out of the New England Medical Center in Boston. Three weeks later, they let him go. Carlin believes that some of the older doctors there didn’t understand what he was trying to do, marrying medicine and the Internet. Maybe, too, they resented all the publicity he was attracting. Ironically, his face was on the cover of Tufts Medicine the very day he was clearing out his office.

  Whatever the reason, Carlin was reduced to running the World Clinic out of his living room, which he did for about five weeks. Then he forged a new association with the Leahy Clinic on the outskirts of Boston. He also landed some private funding for his World Clinic experiment, and for about 20 months, the business grew nicely. Then, in April 2000, the tech market crashed, and his investors pulled up stakes and fled. In June he started laying people off, and by the following April, he was almost back where he’d started: a one-man company running everything from his own computer.