Free Rowboat in a Hurricane by Julie Angus

big outboard?”
    “Maybe an outboard and a bigger boat,” I said.
    “Damn,” Colin laughed, “we should have got a big power boat with a bunch of servants on board. That’d be the way to cross the Atlantic in comfort.”
    “God help us,” I said, glancing over our submersible-cum-rowboat. “Why did we do this to ourselves? We’ve put a man on the moon, and yet we two morons decide to step back a few millennia in technology and row across an ocean.”
    I was feeling good now. Somehow, making fun of our enterprise was delightfully satisfying, especially with the prospect of my shift about to end.
    “Yeah, but those astronauts could barely walk when they got back from the moon. Just think how much exercise you’re getting. In three or four months when we get to the other side, you’ll be looking like the Governator.”
    Three or four months! I still had trouble comprehending this reality and would have been really disturbed if I knew the journey would take even longer. I tried not to think about it, and instead pondered what I would make for breakfast.
    Unfortunately I was feeling just as nauseous as the day before, and my appetite was weak. Seasickness is an insidious condition brought about by contradictory sensory stimuli.
    Normally the information from our eyes and inner ears that we use to maintain our balance matches, but in a boat, all that arithmetic goes out the window. The boat appears to be still, so our eyes tell us we’re stationary, while the receptors in our ears report vigorous motion. The brain has trouble interpreting this conflicting information, and the result is a feeling of extreme nausea, lethargy, and sickness—like a bad hangover without the fun of the night before.
    I’d spent the previous day hoping that mental fortitude could conquer seasickness. Now I relinquished that misguided theory and took a double dose of dimenhydrinate (more commonly known as Gravol). This drug suppresses feelings of nausea and sickness by blocking histamine levels. For good measure, I added a painkiller to quell my caffeine-withdrawal headache.
    Colin, too, opted for treatment and applied a medicated patch behind his ear, where it would release a continuous stream of scopolamine for three days. Scopolamine is a drug derived from plants in the nightshade family; it works by interfering with certain nerve receptors in the ear. How it works is not fully understood, but the theory is that the slight interference in balance receptors helps the brain to better cope with the conflicting signals.
    After half an hour, I felt marginally better. I was still far from completely recovered, but the rest of the day progressed with less discomfort. The day blurred by in a medley of rowing, eating, and sleeping. Our last ties to land and civilization quickly faded. I could no longer see the coastline of Portugal or the lights of Lisbon. We saw no fishing boats, only the occasional outline of a larger boat far in the distance. Nature was gradually replacing the creations of humankind. We watched birds soar on air currents, and in the sea we saw infrequent glimmers of silver—the majestic tuna.
    It was exciting to see the tuna jump, and the first few times I yelled for Colin to come on deck to watch. A few different kinds of tuna live in these waters, including bluefin, bigeye, albacore, and skipjack, and it is possible to distinguish between the different types by their coloration, size, and length of dorsal fin. But I wasn’t able to, and since Colin had spent time working on a B.C. fishboat, I hoped he would have more success than me. Unfortunately, the fish were too far away, and he could only guess. Given that we were still in subtropical waters not far from the Mediterranean, we hypothesized that some of the tuna might be Atlantic bluefin, which spawn in the Mediterranean and then migrate across the Atlantic. These fish can travel up to seventy kilometres per hour and cross the Atlantic Ocean in less than sixty days. I