Casting Off (16 page)

‘To the shop.’ He was very young – maybe 19 or 20 – and quite slight and harmless enough. We kept walking.

Again he said something in Bahasa, then checked whether I had understood him.
Why are you speaking to me in a language I don’t understand?
I thought.

‘I finish job,’ he announced, ‘and now I go my home. You wan come?’

‘No, thank you. I have to go do my shopping.’

That Bahasa phrase again and a raising of the eyebrows. Then: ‘Is OK. Is nobody there.’

Now I understood. He was propositioning me. He probably couldn’t believe his luck, coming across an English woman walking down the street on her own, showing a little ankle and a bit of
collarbone. I mean, everyone knows British girls are easy, don’t they? Even at 11am in the morning when they are clearly doing the supermarket run. I imagined that that phrase in Bahasa was
something dirty like: ‘You whore infidel. Look at you walking around in your sexy baggy T-shirt and your provocatively shapeless pants. You are obviously gagging for it and I will fuck
you,’ and that’s why he kept checking whether I understood him.

‘OK. I go to do my shopping now,’ I told him again, firmly. ‘Terima kasih. Jumpa lagi.’ I used my two Bahasa phrases and crossed the road. He shrugged in a ‘nothing
ventured, nothing gained’ kind of a way and kept on walking home.

I
was woken at midnight by the sound of the newly fixed outboard starting. Chris must be back, I realised, and got up to greet my new crewmate.
From what I’d heard of him from Tyrone and Hugo, Chris was the most outgoing and chatty of the three and liked a drink and a party. I was looking forward to getting to know him. Tyrone
arrived back with the dinghy, ferrying a cross between a scarecrow and a beanpole who, when he stepped into the saloon, had to duck his head to fit through the doorway. We said quick hellos and
shook hands then it was back to bed ready for an early start.

We left at 6am for Langkayan, the turtle island Debs and Greg had told me about, and I got to know Chris a bit better. In appearance he was a little like an Elizabethan playwright: long, shaggy
hair, pointy nose, quick and intelligent eyes, a thin moustache and goatee beard. He wore trousers he’d cut off halfway up the calves and raggedy shirts he left unbuttoned to let the air
circulate round his 25-year-old lanky, hairless body. He was proud of his straw hat he’d got in a New Zealand $3 shop, even though it had clearly been sat on many a time, and, when he
wasn’t reading books on world economics, wandered around the boat strumming his guitar or blowing on a mouth organ. He’d been travelling for about 18 months since he had been made
redundant and had decided to learn how to sail. He’d taught himself and to a pretty high standard, too – he’d learned astro navigation from a book and could pinpoint our location
with the sun or moon, a sextant and a watch. He tried to teach me and was very patient, twisting his beard hair between thumb and forefinger, the very picture of a philosopher, while my brain
turned to mush at all the complicated mathematics. Like a true American, he lived off peanut butter and said ‘Y’all’ a lot.

Chris and Hugo had gotten into a routine when it came to putting the anchor up and down, so I watched and learned from them. Sailing a catamaran, it turns out, is not that different from sailing
a yacht. There are the same lines to pull and sails to hoist but they have slightly sillier names, like reacher and screecher. The main difference is that when you have the sails up you don’t
heel over, so your drink stays where you put it on the table and you can walk from A to B without holding on to anything. There are two engines, and so two throttles to control, and a V-shaped
bridle – a rope with a hook on the end – has to be attached to the anchor chain to keep it in between the two hulls, but that is about as tricky as it gets. Being on deck on a cat is
fabulous – there’s all that cockpit space for lounging around in and you don’t have to sit with your face inches away from someone else’s feet. On
Gillaroo
there
was plenty of shade if you wanted it and plenty of sun if you didn’t. And I haven’t even got to the best part yet, my home away from home – the trampolines. On the bow were two
large nets made from strong woven nylon webbing. Despite the name, they aren’t for bouncing on; they are strong enough for crew to walk on while working but help reduce the overall weight of
the catamaran and its windage. As long as it wasn’t too wavy, which made the water splash up through the nets and drench me, I would lie for hours on those tramps, reading, listening to
music, watching dolphins swimming underneath me and getting a wicked suntan. I can’t explain to you how wonderful it was and how happy I was. In photos from that time I have an almost
beatific glow (or maybe that was sweat and salt water?). Despite being in the sunshine the tramps were the coolest place on the boat, much cooler than inside, where the daytime temperature in the
saloon resolutely sat at 36°C. The only downside to them – and it never put me off – was that if I dozed, I’d end up with a criss-cross pattern imprinted on my face/back/bum,
depending on what position I’d been in when I’d fallen asleep, and two dead arms.

We stayed only one night in Langkayan before we started our passage straight to Kuching. I got the impression that Tyrone and the boys weren’t overly enamoured with Borneo and were keen to
leave Malaysia behind. I thought it was a shame they’d not had the chance to enjoy everything that I had, but maybe if you’ve just come from the tribal wilderness that is Papua New
Guinea, everything else pales in comparison.

As the sun set, I did all the preparations I’d been shown for my first night watch, switching on the navigation lights, illuminating the instruments and changing the interior lights to red
so they wouldn’t affect my night vision when I went inside to check the computer and fill in the log book. As the sky darkened I was able to see lightning going off all around me, which was
usual for Borneo. During the passage on
Kingdom
from Kuching to Miri we had seen lightning all night, every night, while we were offshore. I wasn’t too worried about it. Until Tyrone
stuck his head out to double-check everything was OK.

‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot of lightning about.’

‘Yeah,’ I replied, ‘but it seems to be always like that round here.’ I watched him watching the sky. It had started to rain. There were more flashes, doing little other
than making the sky look pretty and angry at the same time – but then came a fork that speared its way down to sea level. Tyrone’s eyes did the extreme widening thing I’d begun to
notice and he dashed inside, came out with a rucksack and went on to the starboard bow. He stayed up there, fiddling with something, for what seemed like an age. In the dark, I couldn’t see
what he was doing but from time to time lightning flashes illuminated his bent back. The storm was getting closer. While I was waiting for him to finish, a bolt struck the sea directly in our path
and at what I estimated to be only a few hundred metres from the boat. I stifled a little scream.

‘What were you doing?’ I asked, trying to sound nonchalant, when he came back into the cockpit.

‘Putting up the lightning conductor.’ The calmness of his voice was at odds with the agitation evident in his body language. We were both pretending to be cool.

I tried to keep calm as I sat, on my first night watch, on a stainless-steel chair (good conductivity, that stainless steel), by the stainless-steel helm, outside on a boat miles away from land
and in the open sea. And with the storm getting closer and the lightning more frequent.

‘What happens if we do get struck?’ I asked Tyrone, all casual, like. I was determined not to seem like a big, fat wuss.

‘Then it’s game over,’ he said. Thankfully he was referring to the boat, not to our losing our lives. ‘I can’t afford to replace all of the instruments. I just
don’t have the money. So it’d be the end.’

Subtly, I moved my fingers off the steering wheel and lifted my feet from the floor
. Is it better not to be touching the floor when your boat is struck by lightning?
I wondered.
Or
should you stand on one leg? Should I be wearing rubber shoes or would that make things worse? And it’s a fibreglass floor but a metal chair with a foam cushion on it. So am I better off
remaining sitting or getting up and standing? Shall I put my trainers on?
I didn’t know enough about the physics of it all. My knowledge was limited to urban myths of parachutists
dangling from electricity wires but surviving because they were mid-air and something vague about trees and golf courses. Chris would probably have known what to do but Chris was asleep and so now
was Tyrone, on the sofa in the saloon.

So I sat there, helpless, my feet lifted and my hands tucked firmly into my pockets, awaiting my fate. And the storm passed and we were fine. Come 9pm I woke Tyrone and he took over, leaving the
conductor dangling in the water, just in case. I went to my cabin and lay on top of the throbbing engine and tried to get some sleep before my alarm went off at 5.30am.

We sank into the easy rhythm of the watch system, each doing our six hours a day on the helm, sleeping when we could, eating, reading, chatting and generally lazing about. There were squalls
with 30mph winds and heavy rain to disturb us from time to time – the temperature dropped to a chilly 29°C at one point – but otherwise it was pretty relaxed
. I
was
relaxed. All the watchkeeping left a lot of time for contemplation and navel gazing and I could see, now I was on
Gillaroo
, how wound up I’d been on
Kingdom
. OK, so
Kingdom
was a nice boat to look at, with a fair few mod cons, but on
Gillaroo
I had more freedom to do what I wanted to, without the constant fear that I’d done something
wrong. I got used to the quiet – no loud music blaring, no man (or cat) demanding to be entertained, pandered to or loved. It was as if I’d moved from a bustling city street into an
empty sound-proofed room and it wasn’t until the door closed behind me that I realised how chaotic and stressful it had been. With no rent to pay on board the catamaran, money was no longer a
worry. And everyone on board was single and seemed happy to be so, so there was none of that pressure I’d felt back home. It was just about living in the moment and only thinking about the
immediate task at hand, which was the journey we were making. Plus, with a boat weighing only four tonnes, we were doing a lot of sailing. If the big flappy things being filled with wind
weren’t a dead giveaway of that, the facts that I hadn’t showered for two days, that absolutely all of my clothes were wet and that I was feeling sticky, salty – and gloriously
happy – definitely were.

On the fourth morning of the week-long passage I came up into the cockpit from my afternoon snooze to find a couple of guests on board with us. Two egrets, tired of flying, had decided to hitch
a ride on the boat and find what shelter they could from winds of 20 knots.

‘That’s Henry,’ Hugo said, pointing to the bird on the coach roof. Henry had hunkered down, his chin into his chest, and braced himself, knees splayed backwards, talons
slipping on the solar panel and eyes blinking against the wind. Handily for us, he had a habit of turning his head directly into the wind, so with one glimpse at him we could tell what the apparent
wind angle was.

‘And that’s Morgan,’ Chris added, pointing behind me. I looked down on to the steps of the port hull at the back of the boat. There, on the middle of the three steps, stood an
identical bird: white, about a foot and a half tall, with a yellow beak and suspicious eyes. Morgan had picked a more sheltered spot so he was more sure-footed and able to extend his long neck and
turn his head to get the best view of us.

‘Morgan?’ I asked. ‘As in the Captain’s rum?’

‘As in the Captain’s rum,’ Chris nodded. As I watched, we bounced on a large wave and Morgan was flung into the air. But he wasn’t giving up his comfortable perch that
easily: he flapped his wings, hovered above the boat and lowered himself back into his favourite spot again. Later in the day a flock of six egrets circled overhead, getting a better look at us.
Tyrone didn’t want any more of them. ‘They’ll shit everywhere,’ he said.

They were both still with us the next morning when I came on watch but Morgan had inched his way forward into the cockpit itself. He was getting braver. Henry, who had an identifying yellow mark
on his forehead, remained stubbornly in his precarious, slippery position. We had a go at feeding them, tossing them tuna and bread, but they weren’t interested. I tried tempting Henry with a
flying fish I’d found on deck. I swear his eyes lit up when he saw it and he took half a step towards me but when he realised it was dead he turned his beak up at it. No one saw him move but
Henry appeared in the cockpit, too. Morgan clearly didn’t like this encroachment on his territory and attacked him; Henry retaliated and they had a pecking fight, flapping their wings and
circling each other. They backed off and stared beadily at each other and then launched into their scrap again, pausing for breath with their heads and beaks entwined, like boxers falling into a
clinch after a particularly strenuous bout. They started up again. ‘Boys!’ I chided them and they stopped immediately and moved apart. They must have declared a truce.