Facing the Frozen Ocean by Bear Grylls

Author:Bear Grylls [Grylls, Bear]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447227786
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Chloë was aware that Willie Pennefather was in Scotland, where, among other things, he was sorting out various aspects of our scheduled return to John O’Groats. She eventually tracked him down to Edinburgh.

Willie recalls:

I had left for Scotland on 2 August with a slight feeling of detachment from the expedition, although I had followed the crew’s progress every day on the Internet. I had been invited to be part of the official party attending the Edinburgh Military Tattoo. It was a very formal occasion involving drinks and a black-tie dinner, before we were to travel in official cars with police outriders to Edinburgh Castle, arriving in time to allow us to be seated in the Royal Box at exactly the start of the display.

At dinner, the sergeant came to tell me that Chloë Boyes was on the telephone for me.

I told him to ask if I could ring her after dinner. I assumed it was to discuss the plans for the crew’s return. The sergeant reported that after dinner would be OK, but said Chloë had sounded a bit alarmed.

I thought of leaving the table unseen, but my host General Nick Parker and his guests, General Sir Mike Jackson and Menzies Campbell among others, were not the type of people who would not have noticed. Thoughts of Sir Francis Drake and his game of bowls crossed my mind, but I eased out and called her back some fifteen minutes later.

She then dropped the bombshell.

‘They are 200 miles west of Greenland in a gale,’ she told me calmly, ‘and Bear says they are critically close to running out of fuel. I don’t know what to do.’

The next hour was frantic as I somehow tried to combine the jovialities and formalities of the Tattoo parade with also trying to instigate some rescue contingency plans. I found myself conducting analysis discussions with the London team at the desk of the GOC Scotland, then in the back of a car on the ADC’s mobile phone, with flashing blue lights all around, then at the back of the Royal Box at Edinburgh Castle with pipes swirling in the background. It was strangely surreal to know that at this precise moment of such pomp and ceremony here in Edinburgh, these guys were struggling for their lives in a lonely, terrifying sea.

I must say I could easily watch the Edinburgh Tattoo again, having had my mind so firmly elsewhere! On this occasion, I could only think of the boys and what they were going through out there.

Our task was to do everything possible to prepare for whatever fate would decide was to happen.

We knew we could do no more than alert the rescue services, keep them informed, and ensure Bear told us at least an hour before they ran out of fuel, so that they could be rescued from a boat which still had steerage – this could be critical if the weather was still atrocious. We also decided to keep the team’s families in the dark

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