Casting Off (5 page)

‘Erm, where are all the hot men?’ Lizzie asked me as we took our seats. She evidently had the same theory as me about sailors being a handsome bunch – and apparently
didn’t consider Steve to be good-looking, either. We scanned the crowd. Old sailor, old waiter, Malaysian government official (old), ancient mariner. It seemed that all of the other
competitors were married couples in at least their sixties.
Blue Steel
, being all men with an average age of about 45, were the closest thing there was to boat totty. We sighed and got
stuck into the complimentary Carlsberg.

Then Adonis appeared in the room. Tall, blond, tanned, toned, square of jaw and green of eye. And way, way, below the age of retirement. Steve nudged Claire. Claire nudged me. I nudged Lizzie.
We all four, Steve included, stared, agog. We couldn’t take our eyes off his face. His were the kind of all-American, high-school-prom-king good looks that make Abercrombie and Fitch model
recruiters weep. And in his wake tiptoed a veritable princess: tiny body, blonde mane, white smile as dazzling as her dress.

Josh. His name was Josh. And she was Kristin. Steve stood behind them in the drinks queue and dug for information, acting like an honorary member of our new girl gang. Josh was the son of a
rancher who had sold off a lot of land to developers and made quite a bit of money. Kristin was freshly arrived from the US and was an actual beauty queen. They seemed madly in love, very nice
people and, for Americans, were surprisingly good at taking the piss.

The next few days passed in a blur of races: short ones, long ones, windy ones, becalmed ones. We tried as hard as we could, Lizzie and Claire still suffering from seasickness, and we varied
between coming third and falling back to ninth place. It was fun and exhilarating and I loved every minute.

While we were all together, Steve treated me no differently from Claire and Lizzie. The suncream applications became more clinical, and for that I was glad. But whenever we were alone, he would
seize the chance to flirt. As I washed up after lunch during one off-shore race, making sure to stick to the washing-up rules and put the pans back in their plastic wrappers, Steve said to me from
out of nowhere: ‘You’re much prettier than in your Facebook pictures,’ as he walked past. I didn’t quite know what to say to that but he’d wandered off again before
I’d had a chance to try to think of a suitable reply. It was another indication that he liked me in that way more than I liked him. But
I can handle this
, I told myself.
He’ll get the message eventually and stop trying
. (
OK, Miss Naïveté
, I’d tell myself now.)

When we reached Kota Kinabalu, exhausted and demoralised after being hit by the bad wind fairy on the 65-mile passage race from Labuan, Lizzie and Claire went ashore to look into booking a trip
to see orangutans, leaving Steve and me on the boat by ourselves. He was in the aft cabin, trying to sleep as he’d managed only 90 minutes over the past 36 hours, he’d been so busy
trying to squeeze every last drop of speed out of his boat and enthusiasm out of his crew. I lay down on my sofa bunk, desperate to get some rest. I heard him get up and come through to the saloon
and opened my eyes just in time to see his face approaching mine as he tried to kiss me. So much for getting the message that I wasn’t interested. Beer fumes from his breath flooded my
nostrils. I turned my head over towards the wall. ‘No,’ I said. He stopped and walked back to his cabin.

‘Are you coming for a cuddle?’ he called.

‘No.’

‘Sure?’

‘Yes.’ My pulse was racing and I felt quite vulnerable. It was weird – he was my skipper and my friend and I trusted him in those roles. But this was a different situation and
I felt unsettled. I was alone with this man, on his boat, which was also his home, anchored off, and I didn’t know how to use the dinghy to get to shore if I needed to. I sat up in the bed
and listened. He was still in his cabin and it didn’t sound like he was coming back through. My head felt cloudy and confused and I was very, very tired but I couldn’t sleep after that;
I just lay there, wired, until it was time to get up to go to an afternoon press conference that all crews were supposed to attend.

I still felt unsettled so when I climbed into the dinghy I decided to say something to clear the air.

‘I feel a bit funny,’ I started.

‘About what?’

‘About what happened earlier.’

He laughed. ‘You’ll get over it.’ And that was that as far as he was concerned. For the rest of the evening I kept away from him, trying to shake the uncomfortable feeling I
had in my stomach. It was not dissimilar to when someone tells you a big, shocking secret and you can’t tell anyone but have to process it by yourself. Lack of sleep was no doubt making me
more emotional but for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to tell Claire or Lizzie. Embarrassment that I’d got myself into this position, probably.

The last day of racing was much, much better. In our free Borneo International Yachting Challenge T-shirts we’d been given we looked a bit more like a crew for the two races in the bay
just outside Kota Kinabalu. There were no waves to speak of and – yes, thank God! – there was some wind. It was almost perfect. I had a good feeling about it until Steve said he wanted
to take me off bowman’s duties and put me on the helm instead.

‘What? Why? Am I not doing a good enough job?’

‘No, you’ve been fine. It’s just that I’d like a chance to work the bow and you like helming, you say.’

My feelings were hurt at the perceived demotion –
Has he done it because I snubbed his advances yesterday
, I wondered – but I took the helm, worrying slightly because
I’d never steered in a short, fast race before. He told me to watch the tell tales on the sails – ribbons that indicate how the air is flowing over the sail – but I was ashamed to
tell him that I didn’t know how to respond to them. My hands were sticky with sweat as we approached the starting line of the first of two races.

It was fantastically exhilarating. I concentrated on the feel of the boat and its speed while I got the hang of reacting to how the tell tales were fluttering and adjusting my steering angle.
Steve called it ‘getting into the groove’ – gathering enough speed to build apparent wind and heel the boat over.

As we approached the finish line of the first race we were between two boats with less than a metre either side, the crew of the leeward yacht yelling at us to come up and give them room.

‘We can’t come up,’ I shouted back. ‘There’s a boat on our windward side.’ We could have let the sails luff, lost speed and dropped back out of the way but I
wasn’t going to tell them that. I held my nerve – and my breath – and we slid forward between the two yachts and our bow crossed the line just ahead of theirs. We came fourth.

After that beautiful finish we cocked up our approach of the first mark of the final race, so we had to tack, tack, tack to get round it. All the jubilation after the day’s first race
quickly dissipated as our speed dropped to frustratingly low levels. Then another boat,
Pandemonium
, came up to the mark. I was waiting for Steve to tell me to turn and he thought I was
going to judge it by myself. We were too slow to tack away, too late to dip down and so – crunch! – our beams ‘kissed’. ‘Sorry!’ we shouted out to
Pandemonium
. ‘No damage done,’ they called back and very kindly didn’t protest us at the end of the race. We caught up under kite and overtook them and three others in
quick succession by stealing their wind, and crossed the line fifth.

We derigged and popped the Veuve Clicquot Claire had carried over from Singapore and celebrated with a lunch of cheese sandwiches. Steve was in his element as he posed for photos in the cockpit
surrounded by his crew of women, Layla in his arms. I was just as elated – I’d helmed us to victory (well, fourth place) and I’d held my nerve to steer us between those boats.
There were no worries about demotion now – I was pleased and proud that Steve had trusted me to steer.

After the champagne was gone we had some cava, then some more cava and then, when there was no more left, some very strong gin and tonics. There was music and dancing and general merriment.
Lizzie was doubly excited – she’d caught the racing bug and had conquered her seasickness.

I was sitting on the port side of the yacht, my legs dangling over the side, when Steve came to sit next to me, his shoulder touching mine. We talked over the race, the day’s highlights,
wondered about how we would be placed overall, whether we had a chance of a top position after handicaps were taken into consideration. It was all fairly innocuous stuff. As I stood up to get my
things together to go ashore for the final party, he gave me a sly look.

‘I’m not going to be able to stand up for a few minutes,’ he said.

It took a second for the penny to drop.
Oh my God. He’s telling me he’s got an erection. What do I say to that?

‘Oh. Errm,’ I eloquently stuttered before dashing away.

I am quite prudish – see earlier anecdote about struggling in the shower – and overtly sexual behaviour puts me off. I knew that Steve was much more open about his sexuality.
I’d laughed at tales of bedroom antics he’d related and I was getting (a bit) more comfortable with his ‘hands on’ approach to things. I had thought that I was relaxing a
bit more into my new life, becoming a bit cooler, less uptight, more assertive. My reaction to this comment of his, though, and my inability to say ‘Shut up. Stop being gross. It is never
going to happen, ever,’ showed me I was just as much the placid, timid sheep here in Borneo that I had been in London. And that was so disappointing. I’m not sure why I expected that
changing my surroundings so completely would correlate to a radical overhaul in personality in just three weeks. But I had expected that – and I cursed myself for my weaknesses when I saw
that it wasn’t the case.

We were anchored off Sutera Harbour Golf and Country Club, which was hosting the finale dinner and which had given competitors complimentary use of its facilities for three days. Lizzie, Claire
and I took full advantage of what are still, to this day, the nicest marina toilets I have ever had the pleasure of using. There were fluffy towels and mahogany lockers. There were limestone
cubicles and hairdryers, sachets of shampoo and conditioner and toothbrushes for the taking. Considering most showering facilities for sailors resemble the clinical bathrooms found in Soviet
government-run health saunas, but with less hot water, we were in heaven.

Our Malaysian hosts had pulled out all the stops for the final party. Our dinner was held in a marquee stretched out over the tennis courts with hundreds of strings of white lights dangling from
the silky white ceiling. It looked like the setting for an American movie wedding. Steve had packed a cool bag with bottles of wine and beers and I felt incredibly embarrassed that he had brought
it along – until I saw that the country club was charging 26 ringgit (£5) for a glass of wine and then I didn’t feel so bad.

June, a New Zealand sailor from one of the catamarans, stood up to make a brief speech, thanking the Malays for their generous hospitality in their language. She’d had some help
translating her words into Bahasa Malaya and stumbled over them a little but the officials were loving it. So, apparently, was Steve, whose eyes welled with tears that he dabbed away with the
tablecloth.

‘Steve, are you all right?’ I asked.

‘She’s so sweet,’ he sniffed. ‘It was such a beautiful speech.’ And the tears came again.

After we helped
Blue Steel
celebrate their overall first place win, while trying not to be too gutted that we’d not made the podium, we weaved our way to the dinghy. Steve was too
drunk to read the combination on the lock and, because it was upside down and he didn’t have his reading glasses on, confused the sevens with twos.

‘Ladies first,’ he said, after we’d taken the lock from his hands and sorted it out for him, and he stood aside, giggling. I’d started to notice that he almost had two
personalities, which I had nicknamed (not that originally, granted) Macho Boat Steve and Camp Shore Steve. When he was on the yacht, especially during the racing, he was a more masculine version of
himself, in control and running the ship, so to speak. He even dressed better and seemed more attractive. If he had had only this one personality I might have been interested. But when we went on
to land he camped up: his lisp, his facial expressions, his gait, his double entendres. He cried at speeches, for chrissake, with tears and everything.

He managed to drive us back to the yacht but when the three of us climbed aboard he stayed sitting in the dinghy, tied to
Kingdom
, bobbing about in the bay. ‘I just want a quiet
moment to myself,’ he said. I had my suspicions that he was still a bit tearful over June’s gesture. It took Lizzie a good 20 minutes to coax him out of the dinghy, crooning at him like
one would to a small child. He fell asleep at the nav station, lying foetal on the stool, his head under the table.