Charles Wilkins tackles the Atlantic

A momentous trip.  Thunder Bay's Charles Wilkins rows across the Atlantic as one of the crew of the Big Blue, a boat built for the trip.  And he lives to tell a tale that is harrowing, cringe inducing and of course, being Wilkins, funny as hell.  Read on....

The Big Blue

By Charles Wilkins
From Explore Magazine, Spring, 2011

It was to be an expedition like no other—a run across the Atlantic from Morocco to Barbados, aboard an experimental rowboat the likes of which no one had ever seen. Powered by a crew of 16, backed by the westbound trade winds, the radically designed catamaran, dubbed Big Blue, would be capable, it was hoped, of making the 5,000-kilometre crossing in record time: max 33 days. The boat’s crew, the largest assembled on the Atlantic since the days of the Norse longboats, included several veterans of U.S. college rowing, a number of triathletes and a woman who had rowed both the Atlantic and Indian oceans. There would be no support vessel, no stored water, no sails or motor.

Because the boat was the first of its kind, there would be no safety certificate or assurances.

The venture, to be sure, was no laughing matter.

Well, unless you consider that one of the crew members was a scrawny and bespectacled sexagenarian, the pinnacle of whose sporting career had been a season of hockey with the Forward Pharisees of the old Toronto Church League. This notable human blight on an otherwise durable roster had, until recently, never swung an oar in earnest or even sat on a proper rowing seat—indeed, did not know the names of even the commonest parts on a competitive rowing vessel. It is worthy of Mrs. Malaprop that, on training manoeuvres, when a reference was made to “the riggers” (the mechanisms that hold the oars in place), the tyro in question assumed it was the rigours of the anticipated crossing that were under discussion.

I am speaking of course of myself, C.E. Wilkins, galactic expeditionist, and must reluctantly report that when I stepped on deck during the earliest hours of the voyage I was told by one of our toughest rowers, Ryan Worth of the University of Tennessee, that I looked as if I were on my way to the library.