Casting Off (30 page)

For two days we motored on, filling the off-watch hours with jobs like polishing the steel, gluing patches on to the sorry-looking shredded mainsail and varnishing the wooden fixtures. We had
adopted a rota of two three-hour watches each during the day and one two-hour watch at night. With a new person on board, there was an expanded repertoire of meals and we ate everything from
freshly baked cinnamon buns to hand-cut chips. Food, water and electricity supplies were plentiful with just three people for a two-week crossing.

On the third day the wind grew steadily to 10 knots, still with a flat sea, and we had the most perfect downwind sailing conditions a sailor could ever wish for. With a new spinnaker up that
Tyrone had bought in Thailand, we fairly shot across the ocean. That morning a school of young tuna swam alongside us for hours, matching our speed and staying within a couple of metres of the port
beam. Later in the afternoon we realised why – they were using
Gillaroo
to hide from a team of dolphins that was hunting them. No sooner had the dolphins appeared in our bow wave
than the tuna disappeared, abandoning their cover and taking their chances in the wide blue yonder. With the dolphins came a sail fish, a magnificent giant that swam to the surface of the water
just in front of the boat to get a better look at us. As Moe and I stood on the bow, watching the dolphins play, we saw a flash of iridescent purple as the fish’s huge back fin broke the
surface. The sail fish tilted slightly to one side to raise an eye to see us, weighing up what danger we posed, and, clearly deciding we were likely to win in a fight, it was gone, curling its body
sharply to shoot off in a flash far, far away.

It was almost a magical time, that first week of crossing the Indian Ocean. Once the sea sickness was over and done with, it was perfect. Even the weather was sunny and steady and the only
frightening thing we had to face was the flying fish. They actually do fly, spreading their fins and soaring right out of the ocean to heights of two or three metres. They might be good at flying
but they are hopeless at direction – they will smack into anything that gets in their way. One sailor I know got whacked in the face by a flying fish when he was steering a boat across an
ocean. And they stink to high heaven. ‘I was scrubbing my cheek for a week, trying to get the smell off me,’ he said.

For some reason known only to the underwater world, the flying fish of the easternmost reaches of the mid-Indian Ocean decided to unleash an attack against
Gillaroo
. They bombarded us.
In the mornings, the deck was littered with their stiff, shining bodies. At night, I’d hear the thwack of them hitting the fibreglass. One watch I was sitting at the helm in the pitch
blackness, minding my own business, when something landed with a thump on the canvas awning above my head. It had been so quiet and the thump was so loud and unexpected that I jumped out of my
skin. A foot or so above my head, the noise continued. Thump! Thump! Thumpety-thump!
It sounds like a large bird walking around
, I thought.
It must have landed on us for a rest
. I
punched the underside of the awning with the side of my fist, expecting to scare it off. But it carried on bouncing loudly around. I was just getting out of the seat to go and shoo it off when
– bam! – a fish came leaping through the open window space in front of me, rebounded off the chair and landed on the floor. If I’d still been sitting at the helm, it would have
landed slap in the middle of my lap. I let out a girly yelp and skipped backwards. The flying fish, having recovered from its shock landing, writhed, flipping and jittering, around the footwell.
It’s OK
, I told myself, while waiting for my heart to resume its normal rhythm
, it’ll suffocate in a minute and I can chuck it back into the sea
. But the slippery
sucker wouldn’t die. It bounced and flounced and did the hokey cokey for what felt like hours.

One of the tasks Moe had signed up for was the daily radio net. Any sailing boat crossing from Sri Lanka, Cochin in India or the Maldives to Salalah or Muscat in Oman could tune into a certain
SSB frequency at two set times of day. Using a kind of code, each boat reported its distance from and bearing to an agreed waypoint, which all yachts held the co-ordinates for. It was relief to
hear each crew checking in – or, even better, arriving safely in Oman – and a gentle kind of camaraderie grew from our sharing little bits of information: what the wind conditions were
like, who had celebrated a birthday, how long until you reached your destination. It helped break the feeling of isolation. In addition to that, Tyrone had registered
Gillaroo
’s
passage plan and crew details with various maritime organisations, who had promised to track us and pass on any information they had about pirate activity. Two cargo ships had been hijacked on 8
and 9 February, a few days before we left Galle, and we had received no notifications since. We were running without any lights at all at night – if a sail needed changing, we did it by
starlight. We continued like this until we reached the halfway point of the crossing, a week or so away from land in either direction. And then the news came.

I got up from my morning sleep, ready for my 10am–1pm watch, feeling slightly groggy. Tyrone and Moe were at the saloon table, as usual for this time of morning, finishing off the SSB net
and a round of checking the emails and trying to get hold of a weather forecast. Moe was the first to tell me.

‘We’ve had an email,’ she said. I was only half listening as I concentrated on making a cup of tea. ‘A BBC report about a boat that’s been taken by pirates.’
Tyrone started to tell me about the article, mentioning ‘SV
Quest
’. My stomach flipped and I stopped what I was doing to look at Tyrone and Moe.

‘SV? Sailing vessel?’ I asked. They both nodded, their faces set into grim expressions.
Shit. It’s happened.

I moved from the galley to the saloon and asked to read the article. An American-flagged sailing vessel, it said, called
Quest
, had been taken off Oman two days earlier, on Friday
morning. It was now Sunday morning and this was the first we’d heard of it. I read on. The boat had been hijacked just 400 miles from where we were now, according to the report, and only 200
miles north-east of our intended track. There was an older couple on board and two crew, the story said. There was no further information about what had happened to the crew, boat or pirates
since.

I looked up from the computer. Tyrone and Moe looked as panicked as I felt, although they were both trying to be brave and remain calm.

‘Where did this email come from?’ I asked Tyrone. He explained that a friend of a friend, Lucy, was keeping track of any pirate reports on the web and sending them to him while we
were on passage. There had been nothing from EU NAVFOR, Marlo, UKMTO or any of the organisations who had promised us that they would let us know if anything had happened, so that we could alter our
course if needs be. Two whole days had passed since the
Quest
hijacking and we’d received not once piece of information from any of them. Tyrone was furious.

I clicked on the MaxSea window and opened the chart so that I could understand where we were and where
Quest
had been when it had been taken. I drew a straight line from the boat icon
that represented
Gillaroo
to Salalah; about 800 miles. Tyrone had already marked the co-ordinates of the attack with a shipwreck symbol. With the whole of the Indian Ocean on the screen,
the hijack seemed horribly close to our line.

‘What if the pirates cross our path?’ Moe said quietly. ‘Or what if they hang around in the area, waiting to see if any other yachts come past? We’d be a bonus then
– two for the price of one.’ I didn’t answer her. The pirates could travel at 20 knots or more, I knew. If they were 200 miles off, they could be just 10 hours away. We
wouldn’t know whether or not they were in the area until we saw their skiffs on the horizon and, by then, it would be too late to do anything about it. We were closer to Oman than we were to
Sri Lanka now, Tyrone said, especially with the wind in this direction. Our only option was to carry straight on and just hope that nothing happened. We were helpless.

It was 10am and I went to sit outside for my watch, scanning the horizon first for any sign of boats. There was nothing, only clear sky, bright sun and blue sea. It felt so surreal.
This
can’t be happening
, I repeated to myself, over and over. After a short time the disbelief passed and the shock set in, sending my whole body into fits of tremors as the adrenalin went to
work. I caught a glimpse of movement in my peripheral vision and leapt out of the seat, my heart racing. It was just a bird. I worried about us but, more so, I worried about family and friends back
home. If they had heard the news they would be terrified for us, and probably more than we were – at least we knew we were safe so far. As the three hours of my watch ticked by, I gradually
began to calm down. There was nothing we could do. We just had to carry on.

One of the main principles of journalism is revealing unfairness and wrongdoing. So, despite moving away from newspapers, it was to them that I turned for help. In an unjust situation they can
help garner a solution. In stressful times, we all resort to the familiar. To me, that meant writing. I wrote an article about the situation and Tyrone emailed it, via the SSB link, to my contacts
at the
Independent
and the
Daily Express
. We were hoping that my critical remarks about how we had had no information from any of the authorities might shame them into action.

Apart from that, the three of us didn’t talk much about it at all. For the rest of the day we were very quiet, I think because we all recognised that if we started to verbalise between us
all the ‘what ifs?’ then we would hype ourselves up into a seriously frightened state. So we read and ate, we checked the email for any other reports, and we sailed
Gillaroo
onward towards safety.

An email came through from Lucy making mention of a ‘situation’ in Aden but not what it was. Apart from that there was nothing. We continued our duties, ignoring the simmering
tension on the boat, until we heard an engine.

We all freaked out for a second before realising it was an aeroplane. Tyrone switched on the VHF while Moe and I dashed out into the cockpit. The plane was pale grey and flew over us twice,
low.

‘Sailing vessel overflown, sailing vessel overflown, this is coalition forces airplane, over,’ came an American man’s voice over the VHF.

Tyrone grabbed the mike and replied. ‘Coalition forces plane, this is sailing vessel
Gillaroo
, over.’

They wanted our boat name and our last and next ports of call.

‘Can I ask you,’ Tyrone said, after he had reported the information, ‘is the area clear?’

‘Yes, all clear, as far as we can see, sir, over,’ came the reply. So we knew we were safe for a while at least.

‘And do you have any information about Sailing Vessel
Quest
, over?’ Tyrone asked.

There was a pause. Then: ‘I do not have any information, sir.’ I thought that the pause meant he probably did but that he wasn’t allowed to say. ‘Have a safe trip,’
he said, before signing off. Never before had those innocuous words meant so much to me. It was such a comfort to know someone was looking out for us.

Moe reported back to me what had come from the afternoon radio net. ‘Obama has made a statement on the situation,’ she said, relief evident in her voice,’about taking action
against the pirates.’ She spoke to
Senang
, a Dutch boat with a couple and two young boys on board, who were 60 miles away from us, about the possibility of a rendezvous. Tyrone and
the
Senang
skipper agreed to monitor each other’s progress for now – we could sail faster; they could motor at higher speeds. The wind was due to die that day or the next and
one would have to wait for the other if we wanted to team up and waiting was not ideal – everyone wanted to get to port as quickly as possible.

Tyrone made an English breakfast for dinner, which proved a big morale booster, and we went into our night watches, which were even more frightening. Every time I saw a dot on the radar, my
heart skipped. After a while, I turned it off. If they came for us, there was nothing we could do anyway. We couldn’t outrun them – they could do 20 knots+ to our 7 knots under sail or
4 knots under engine – and we had no weapons. They would have machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. I started to fantasise about what I could do – drop the dinghy into the ocean
and speed off; hide in the small storage space underneath my bed. But I realised they could easily outrun me in the dinghy, I couldn’t get very far with just a couple of litres of petrol
anyway, and they would search the boat thoroughly, perhaps hurting Tyrone or Moe to find out where I was hiding. From what I had read during my research in Galle, the Somalis were often wildly high
and hyped up from chewing a narcotic plant called qat. There would be no reasoning with them. If the worst came, I would just have to accept it.