Casting Off (2 page)

That experience helped to nourish the seed of an idea that was now germinating in my brain. If I was looking for something new to do with my life, something that would give me that buzz and make
me feel alive again, why not go sailing? I already knew I loved it more than most other things in my life. I even knew – sort of – how to do it. Plus, sailing was fun, you could do it
in sunny, exotic locations like the Caribbean and sailors were often pretty hot. It seemed like a win-win situation. Being on a boat seemed to be able to offer everything that a life stuck behind a
desk could not: excitement, freedom, fresh air, movement, being outdoors, using my body as well as challenging my mind as I learned new skills like sail trim and navigation. The old excitement I
used to feel when I got an exclusive story I now found in almost everything I learned on a boat – there was immense satisfaction in changing an engine impeller or parking in a difficult
berth.

The planning commenced. I signed up for membership of an online site where boats advertised for crew. I fired off emails to lots of skippers, most of whom I never heard back from. It
wasn’t dissimilar to internet dating. I ended up in conversations with three men (for some reason, women very rarely seem to own boats). The first was Philippe, a 40-something Frenchman
who’d got out of the New York finance world in the wake of 9/11 and had gone to live on a catamaran in the Caribbean (hello, exotic sunniness). In his Facebook profile photo he looked like
Captain Jack Sparrow and he told me he’d just come out of a relationship. Alarm bells rang. I didn’t fancy being some kind of emotional prop – that might kill the mood of the
adventure. Vernon, in his sixties, was a British retiree with a yacht in Madeira, a Jaguar in the UK and a wife who didn’t like sailing. He was trying to crew up his 32-foot Hunter for a
six-week cruise around the Azores islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. He’d built the boat for £50,000 and spent double that on kit for it. I drove out to Surrey to meet him for
lunch one Tuesday. He seemed very organised, even precisely fixing the dates of the cruise and giving me information on which airline was cheapest to fly with, yet I didn’t feel the necessary
spark of excitement when I thought about going sailing with Vernon.

I did get that tingle of promise when I received emails from Steve, the skipper of a 46-foot yacht currently in Borneo, which he shared with his cat. His plan was to join a regatta for two weeks
in Borneo – hello, more fun racing! – then cruise slowly eastwards to New Zealand, taking in the Philippines, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. Steve was a
British guy in his forties and his emails made me laugh. He said he liked a drink and a party, used to teach sailing for a living and was looking for crew. In his emails he was casual and friendly,
and we became Facebook friends, which meant I had access to lots of photos of his wonderful-looking life on his boat in the tropics. He mentioned he and an ex-girlfriend had sailed with other crew
before and he wrote that the sailing scene in Malaysia was pretty sociable, so it’d be easy to meet other boats.

Jane declared him ‘fit’ from his photos and practically married us off then and there. I wasn’t as enthusiastic but tried to keep an open mind. I was already sure that
we’d be friends.
And who knows – maybe I will like him
, I reasoned with myself.
After all, he’s a sailor, a traveller. He’s living this dream life that I want
to try
. He offered me a two-week, no-strings-attached trial. I was sold.

Over the three months that I worked out my notice period at the
Independent
, I researched and planned for my trip. I didn’t know how long I would go away for but I wanted to put
some kind of a number on it so I looked at my bank statement, did a bit of arithmetic and was pretty much forced by the result to decide on one year. Phase two of the planning commenced. I bought
my flight and travel insurance, booked in for my injections and sold my bike and car. I packed up my books, clothes, plates and duvet, kicked out my flatmate and handed over the keys to an agent so
someone else could sleep in my bed and cook in my kitchen while I camped at a friend’s place for my last few weeks. Surprisingly, it was just like planning a holiday. The hardest part had
been making the commitment to myself to do it. Even leaving my flat didn’t bother me – the draw of exploring far-flung desert islands and sailing through crystal-clear waters easily
outweighed the advantages of a comfortable and familiar home.

In the southern Indian Ocean a 16-year-old American girl who was attempting to break the world record for the youngest person to solo non-stop circumnavigate broke something else instead –
her mast. It didn’t put me off.

At work the paper was still riding high on a circulation rise during the build-up to and aftermath of the 2010 general election. BP was being censured for the massive
Deepwater Horizon
oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico that had been dominating the front page for what seemed like weeks and at the same time former ‘first lady’ Sarah Brown was being told off for tweeting
about her forthcoming memoirs before their official publication. The Isle of Wight festival was on and the new government’s economic forecast was set to be worse than the ex-Chancellor
Alistair Darling’s projection of three per cent growth for the next year. The editor, Roger Alton, was replaced by his predecessor, Simon Kelner, and a new era of stress and hassle dawned.
The deputy news editor was told in morning conference that there was ‘too much passive news editing’ going on and the news editor kept disappearing into secret meetings. The paper was
sold, after nearly two years of rumours and counter-strikes, to the Russian Lebedev family.

It was an exciting time at the newspaper. But I no longer cared. My mind was on other, more fun things. I felt no fear, no trepidation about heading off alone into the great, wide world, to live
in a 46-foot space with a man I’d never met. A year or so before I’d never have thought that this would be something I would ever do. My family was
very
surprised. But it just
felt right to me. It was
exciting
. I had a fun-filled send-off party, drunkenly told all my friends and family that I loved them and toddled off to Stansted to begin my adventure.

N
one of the tips about beating jet lag worked on my cramped long-haul budget flight to Kuala Lumpur. I considered not eating the meals, to trick my
body into lacking energy so that I just fell asleep. I tried putting my watch ahead eight hours as soon as I boarded the plane in London and immediately adjusting to the new time zone. I attempted
to keep track of what hour it was in the country we were currently flying over and going with that. Then I remembered that I’d paid extra for those tiny foil-packed meals and was determined
to get my money’s worth. There was no entertainment system so no graphic of the aeroplane arcing its way across the world to give me a clue about where we were. And by trying to jump forward
eight hours using an analogue watch, I was a bit confused about whether it was 4am or 4pm, so by the time we landed at Kuala Lumpur Low Cost Carrier Terminal I was a spaced-out, sweaty wreck.

I knew the temperature in Malaysia would be 30°C+ and the humidity high, yet I was dressed in jeans, mid-calf Gore-Tex sailing boots and a T-shirt, with both a cardigan and a waterproof
jacket tied around my waist. Why? Certainly not for the style. Simple – excess baggage. When I booked my ticket I opted for the 20kg option, reasonably assuming that when I went away on a
two-week holiday I only ever packed about 12kg and never used most of it, instead living in the same four or five items. But then, like a good little journalist, I started thoroughly researching
things one might need to pack on one’s back when going travelling. Once I’d thrown in stuff I might need for an off-the-beaten-track, who-knows-where-I-might-end-up sailing adventure
– life jacket, boots, waterproofs, thick, padded mid-layers and woolly hat in case I found myself somewhere colder than the equator, months’ worth of contact-lens solution, a mosquito
net, medication, make-up, high-heeled sandals for nights out, a sleeping bag, and sterile needles in the event I needed to go to some godforsaken hospital in the jungle – I was struggling
with the pre-booked 20kg limit. Then I had to add some apparently essential items that my host was having trouble finding in Asia – a home-brew beer kit and a cat flap – and I busted
the maximum 30kg limit. It cost me £93 in excess baggage for the first flight and about £13 for the internal one and was a lesson sorely learned. Especially as it happened I would never
use most of it – including, thankfully, the sterile needles – and would instead mainly recycle the same four or five items of clothing. (Neither, it would turn out, were the beer kit
and cat flap actually essential – the beer would not be drunk and the cat would never pass through the flap.)

At baggage collection at Kuching airport in Sarawak, Borneo, I waited an age for my two pieces of luggage, until it was just me and a pair of Malaysian girls left. I began to worry that bringing
a 40-pint IPA home-brew kit into a Muslim country was a crime and that the cat flap Steve had had delivered to my office and that I hadn’t bothered checking was really choc-a-block with
drugs.

I was contemplating my impending incarceration when my bag finally appeared. All OK.

The only instructions I had about where to go from here were in the form of a text message from Steve telling me to get to somewhere called Santubong, so I paid my 70 ringgit (£14) up
front at a kiosk and got into a slightly shabby looking red and yellow taxi for the one-hour ride. We drove past palatial homes: white and square, with balconies and tall iron gates closing them
off from the street. Not quite the jungle shacks I’d imagined for Borneo. Next came rough-looking collections of concrete shops like I’d seen on holiday in Mexico and Egypt, and then an
out-of-town Pizza Hut and KFC complex and a suburban area that reminded me of Oxford’s inner ring road. All the cars on the road were boxy in shape, with matt paintwork. Oxford’s inner
ring road in the early 1980s.

Steve had told me by text message to go to the police station as it was the nearest landmark to where he was anchored. The driver looked at me doubtfully as he pulled down a dirt alleyway. There
were no houses in sight, only the police station set in a garden dotted with rusting cars. No people, either. I rang Steve while my bags were being unloaded.

‘See a white gate at the end of the hill?’ he asked.

‘Yep.’

‘Go through there, along the road and I’ll jump up and meet you.’

The taxi driver still looked dubious but drove off and left me there anyway.

I propped my wheelie case against the bars of the police station fence, imagining vicious police dogs running out at any minute, while I climbed, tortoise-like, under my rucksack, staggering a
bit beneath the weight. I strapped my hand-luggage backpack on to the top of the wheelie case handle and, with another bag in my free hand, I set out.

‘Private property. Keep out,’ declared a sign on the gate. I hesitated. But the gate was open and this was where Steve had said to go. On the other side was a wide, tree-lined
avenue. That was as much as I could make out in the dark.

I decided to dig out my head torch. I knew it was somewhere in my rucksack. I went back to the police station fence, propped up the unbalanced wheelie case again, put down the small bag in my
hand, struggled out from under the heavy rucksack, dumped it on to the dusty floor and fumbled with the combination lock using what little light there was coming from the windows of the police
station to see the numbers. Lock off, loosen straps, unzip, unpack, root around, find torch, attach to head, switch on, repack, zip, tighten straps, lock on, stand up, hoist on to back, bend over
under extra weight to retrieve small bag from floor, take handle of wheelie case and start again.

So now I was through the gate and trudging, in the dark, up a path, imagining more guard dogs, rapists and robbers in the bushes, with a 25kg weight on my back, dragging a wheelie case not
designed for off-roading and with two items of clothing tied round my waist, a head torch that did little besides illuminating the bats swooping between the trees above me and an ever-increasing
sense of fear. Sweaty does not even cover it.
What on earth am I doing here?
I repeatedly asked myself but I didn’t turn round. There was nowhere else to go anyway.

I kept walking for about another 100 metres or so until I reached a farmyard or garden of sorts. Here there were lights and, a little way ahead, two men who saw me. I stopped, remembering the
Keep Out sign, and propped my wheelie case against my thigh to free up my right hand so I could call Steve on my mobile.

‘I’m not sure I’m in the right place,’ I said, keeping one eye on the men. Were they security guards about to shout at me for trespassing? One of them got on to a moped
and started coming towards me.
Shit
. I took the phone away from my ear before I could hear Steve’s reply. The guard pulled up a few metres away and said something in English that I
didn’t quite catch.