Casting Off (26 page)

Vicky realised something was up and came back to find me. Ahead, the guys were shouting things like ‘Come on! We want to get to the restaurant. What are you doing?’ They
couldn’t see me in the dark. Vicky rubbed my arm.

‘I’m sorry,’ I sobbed, my voice wobbling. ‘It’s the dogs. I’ve got this stupid phobia and there’s so many of them and I can’t see them.’ I
cried some more. She put her arm through mine and started to slowly walk forwards, towards the others, taking me with her.

‘Keep looking straight ahead,’ she said, in calm tones. ‘Keep walking. Don’t look at them. They’re just marking their territory, they won’t come over.’
She was right, of course, and she kept repeating these things to me until we were past the worst of it and standing outside a hostel called Blue Planet.

In making this unscheduled stop at Long Island, and enduring the Dog Walk of Death through the woods, we had unwittingly stumbled across one of the only other places in the Andamans, apart from
Havelock, where backpackers could stay. The ones camped here were fully fledged crusties. All eight or so of the hippy men sitting around the dirt-floored courtyard were bearded; the two women wore
shapeless long sack dresses they had evidently chosen for their authentically ethnic vibe. (Funny that we never saw any local women wearing them, though.) They had their own tiny travelling
paraffin camp stoves with them which were so inefficient that, in the time it took for us to order our ‘Is it spicy?’ curry dinners from the hostel’s kitchen and eat them, they
had still not managed to finish boiling pasta. They were not the friendliest bunch of people, either. Tyrone, always keen to make new pals, tried to start a conversation with a few of the men but
they were not interested, giving him single-word answers. I got the feeling they weren’t happy to discover other Europeans – Europeans without matted beards or dreadlocks, who
didn’t have multiple piercings and who were wearing high street clothes – had turned up at their little camp. The Indians who ran the place were much more welcoming.

There was a wooden shelf wedged between two trees that served as a library of sorts. It held mainly German books but, as I rifled through the stacks, I found some loose pages about the Andamans
that had been photocopied from the
Lonely Planet
guide to India, and some printouts of articles posted on the website of an NGO called Survivor. I looked over the printouts while Pablo and
Libertad, black heads bowed together, studied the
Lonely Planet
and a map someone had hand-drawn of the island. The article was about the Jarawa tribe of the Andamans, who were part of the
first successful wave of migration out of Africa and into Asia 30,000 years ago. About 250 Jarawa remained today, it said. They were a black-skinned hunter-gatherer people who lived in the jungle
in the same way they had done for millennia: they built communal thatched huts, wove baskets, hunted for fish with spears or bows and arrows, and wore no clothes apart from headdresses or a thin
string belt around the waist and biceps. They only first came out of the jungle to ‘mix’ in 1998. I was fascinated. I read on.

Diseases like measles could kill them easily, I learned, so reserves had been set up that were no-go areas to outsiders – until the government built a trunk road right through the centre
of one reserve on Middle Andaman. Now various unscrupulous tour operators had been discovered, the article proclaimed, offering illegal ‘human safaris’ to see the Jarawa and take
pictures. Some Jarawa, having been given a glimpse of modern-day civilised life, begged by the road or tried to entertain the tourists for money. There were two other surviving tribes in the
Andamans, I read, the Onge and the Sentinelese. The last Bo man died a year or so ago, bringing his tribe to an end.

I was enthralled. In 2011, there were people in the world who were still hunter-gatherers, who continued to live as our ancestors did 30,000 years ago. I wanted to know everything about them:
Where did they sleep? Did they make bread or cultivate rice? What did their language sound like? How did they celebrate? Did they believe in romantic love, in the way we did? Who were their gods?
Were they happy? The article had no more information for me. Mainly it was designed to expose and shame these evil ‘human safari’ operators. I wanted to – whisper it – go on
just such a human safari. But at the same time I respected the Jarawas’ decision to, in the main, remain cut off from the world. And yet to meet one, to have a discussion, to learn about a
world so far removed from my own it was difficult to comprehend we were of the same species – well, that would be beyond words, a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

S
ince we had already deviated from our ‘strictly enforced’ itinerary and not been thrown into an Indian prison, we decided to take a
chance by visiting out-of-bounds Interview island, which was said to be very beautiful, with fantastic coral and fish to see, and hope that we weren’t caught.

It was a long sail, past mile after mile of jungle, beach and rock, and we saw not one house, nor one road, electricity pylon or telecommunications mast. Even in the remotest South Pacific
islands Tyrone had been able to visit villages and barter for fish or buy meat preserved in freezers powered by electricity generated in some kind of civilisation. Here there was nothing.

At only a couple of hundred metres wide, Homfray Strait, a narrow channel between two islands that we had to navigate, looked more like a river than a stretch of sea, not dissimilar to the
entrance of the Kinabatangan. Finally there was an indicator of human life: power lines strung across the water and a small ferry. We were unsure how high the power lines were and whether we could
pass safely underneath them or would be zapped by a huge zing of electricity straight down the mast. Tyrone had asked the harbour master back in Port Blair what the height was but he hadn’t
known. Ever the maths teacher and problem solver, he donned his going-ashore khakis and he and Ben went over to work it out. He did something tricksy with the sextant and pacing out distances. What
was Pythagoras’s theorem? The sum of the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the force with which your head implodes under the pressure of trying to recall complicated maths equations you
haven’t used since you were 14 years old? I think we all uttered a little silent prayer that Tyrone’s careful calculations, otherwise known as an educated guess, would be correct, as we
squeezed underneath.

We were through and then – bang! – we hit a reef. The strait had widened into a circular bay that narrowed ahead of us, with a small gap between rocky outcrops to get out to sea
again. Tyrone had been heading straight for the gap – and so was the coral growth. The water was clear but with the low angle of the gleaming sun we couldn’t tell where the reef was,
and we needed to find a path through. Ben and I got into the dinghy and I drove ahead of
Gillaroo
while Ben checked the depth, dipping an oar into the water to see how far down he could
push until he crunched into rock or coral. The catamaran’s draft was 1.8 metres. Feeling our way blindly like this, we traced the outline of the reef and crossed to the other side of the bay
to do the same thing, until we had mapped out a clear area and Tyrone could motor through. As I zapped along, going fast enough to make the dinghy rise up out of the water and plane along the
surface, I felt fantastic, really sure of myself and with – quite literally – a steady hand on the tiller. I thought again about option 1 – getting a job as paid crew on a
superyacht.
Surely this is the life for me?
Half an hour later, back on the yacht and in open sea, I was having hot flushes and feeling shaky: seasickness.
Maybe this isn’t the
life for me.

Sunset was fast approaching and I left the others doing the anchoring while I went inside to make a dinner of aubergine stew, flat breads and rice. For the first time in ages, we had company:
two small fishing boats were at anchor near some rocks. Tyrone, Libertad and Vicky went over to talk to them and returned with a gift of four small fish: a grouper, two snappers and a coral trout.
Vicky cleaned them off the back steps and I sprinkled their descaled and gutted bodies with olive oil, salt and pepper, wrapped them in foil and put them in the oven, keeping my fingers crossed
that they wouldn’t turn out to be as horrible as the tuna Steve had caught in Borneo. Like a gentleman, Tyrone removed the head and spine before handing me the plate so that I only had a pile
of innocuous white meat to look at. It actually tasted nice.

Libertad, Pablo, Tyrone and I threw caution to the wind the next morning and went ashore, even though we weren’t allowed to. There was nowhere to land the dinghy so Vicky dropped us off
and we arranged for her to come back to meet us two hours later at the same place. Interview island had a steep bluff on one side of it and a rough beach made of exposed, dead coral. So much for
the beautiful underwater coral gardens we’d been expecting; El Niño had wreaked its havoc here. Millions upon millions of spiralled cone shells, each about 3 inches long, covered the
ground so thickly that we couldn’t see the sand beneath. Beyond the beach was dense forest. It would have been very easy to lose our way so we stayed within sight of the boat, picking our way
through the dead detritus of the sea.

A couple of days later I was sitting in the cockpit, reading, when Ben, who had been in the water trying to catch lobsters but had so far only managed to surface with one sacrificial antenna,
shouted my name.

‘Emma? Where’s Tyrone?’ he said, a funny tone having entered his voice.

‘Inside, I think,’ I called, putting down my book and standing up so that I could see him. ‘Why, what’s up?’

‘You’d better tell him he’s got a problem. Actually we’ve all got a problem.’ He pulled his rubber mask off his face and tossed it on to the step.
‘We’ve got no port rudder.’

Tyrone, after he had jumped in and swum around, confirmed it. ‘We’ve lost our port rudder.’

I was sitting sideways in the helmsman’s seat, facing the back of the boat, staring at him in disbelief as he climbed up the ladder and on to the port steps. ‘What do you mean
we’ve lost it? How?’

It had sheared off somehow, right through the vertical steel shaft that held it in place. The rudder had completely vanished. It wasn’t bobbing along on the surface a little way off from
the boat; it wasn’t sitting on the bottom, waiting to be picked up. It was gone. And we couldn’t figure out how it had happened. When we hit the reef in Homfray Strait it was with the
front of the starboard keel, not the port keel or rudder. Tyrone hadn’t noticed a difference in the steering between then and Interview and neither had Ben, who had been at the helm when we
anchored. Since then we’d been in calm waters for three days with barely any waves. How could a 2-inch wide, high-grade stainless-steel pipe just snap off without anyone noticing anything? It
was a mystery.

When I was little – and, actually, even now – my dad used to crack one of his many repetitive jokes whenever my brother, sister or I hurt a hand or a foot and went to him, howling
for sympathy. ‘What are you complaining about? It doesn’t matter,’ he’d deadpan. ‘You’ve got a perfectly good one on the other side.’

‘Oh Da-ad,’ we’d moan, desperate to appear cool in front of our mates, while secretly thinking he was funny. Whether it is nature or nurture, now I’m getting older, I
find myself turning gradually into my father, so here it comes: the thing about being on a catamaran was, we had a perfectly good rudder on the other side.

Gillaroo
had sailed several hundred miles before, in the Pacific, with one working rudder, Tyrone said during a team meeting he called in the cockpit, and we could use the two engines
to help steer, so we could easily make it back to Port Blair. But if we couldn’t get a replacement made there, he wasn’t sure he wanted to sail on to Sri Lanka, across 800 miles of open
ocean. We’d have to look at going back to Thailand instead to get a replacement, which was four days away and in the wrong direction.

The mood was subdued, to say the least, as we started our journey back to Port Blair. We still had ten days of our allotted Andaman permit time left and, Port Blair and Aberdeen being as
backward as they were, we couldn’t see how we’d be able to get a rudder made fast enough to give us time to continue to cruise the islands, if we could find someone capable of
manufacturing one at all. No one wanted to spend over a week in Port Blair, at anchor in the dirty harbour alongside the oil tankers. Ben and Vicky had to be back in the UK by mid-February, so a
delay made things awkward for them. And our leave to remain in the Andamans expired soon and everything we had read said there were absolutely no extensions to be had. Ever.

Depressed, I looked through the pilot guides that night for Oman, Yemen, Eritrea and Sudan, working on my big plan. It sounded like the Red Sea was a horrible upwind trip with short, steep waves
and very cold water. The guides were quite old, dating back to before the days of cheap flights, and they made it sound very expensive and difficult to fly to the UK from Sudan and virtually
impossible from Eritrea. We had no internet signal so I couldn’t look for more up-to-date information online. I started to think that maybe I should be aiming to leave the boat even earlier,
in Aden in March, pretty much as soon as we arrived there, forgoing any sightseeing I had planned.

Our route to Port Blair was to take us back through Homfray Strait – avoiding any coral reefs – allowing us to stop overnight at anchor by Passage island and then to sail on in the
morning to reach the harbour by nightfall. No one was speaking as we motored into the strait, keeping our port side closest to land, only about 100 metres offshore to avoid the uncharted reef,
everyone lost in their own disappointment. I was sitting at the table, chin in my hands, staring idly at the passing trees.

‘Is that a boat over there?’ Vicky asked. ‘With a man in it?’

Coming across other people was rare so I was intrigued enough to stand up and look at where she was pointing. Ahead of us and to the left were a few rocks jutting out of the sea, then a short
beach that was quickly swallowed up by thick, tall jungle. Vicky offered me the binoculars and I looked through them as we moved closer. It was not a boat but a long, flat rock, with someone
sitting on it, and another person squatting just behind them. We got closer still, expecting it to be a couple of Indian fishermen casting hand lines into the coral. But we were wrong.