Casting Off (8 page)

The fishermen led the way to a beach and we tied our dinghy next to their boat and followed them along a rough path through the jungle to the sekolah, a series of one-storey pre-fab rooms that
were deserted. An Indonesian teacher there spoke some English and Steve enthusiastically handed over the globe and he accepted it graciously, if slightly bewildered. To get back to the beach we
took a different path that led us to a village, with more wooden stilt houses arranged more randomly than in the first kampong I’d seen. Big handsome cockerels strutted around like they owned
the place and three tiny girls watched us with wide eyes from the front step of their home. John took their picture and no one ran over screaming ‘paedophile’. It was a peaceful place
with not many people about. Those that were smiled and waved at us and carried on with their laundry-wringing or cigarette-smoking. At the jetty John got chatting to a Filipino immigrant who had a
newborn son and Steve took pictures of the animals on the beach. I watched the cows chewing lazily on coconut husks while ducks and skinny cats zigzagged across the white sand. To my British eye
they looked ridiculously out of place, as if a whirlwind had picked them up from a farmyard and transplanted them on to a beautiful tropical beach.

When we got back to the dinghy our original ‘guides’ were waiting for us and asked us for petrol. Steve said he’d give them two litres but when he checked the tank it was
nearly empty. Then they asked for money. ‘Ringgit. Ringgit.’ I gave them 10 (£2); they asked for 20. John said it was all the money we had. Ten ringgit should have bought them five
litres of fuel; maybe four and a half at over-inflated island prices. I began to worry things were going to turn nasty.

‘We never should have offered them money for the coconuts,’ Steve hissed at me under his breath.

Thankfully the men took off in their boat and we motored back towards
Kingdom
but a few minutes later, presumably after refuelling, they caught us up. What had seemed like friendliness
two hours earlier was now bordering on being menacing. They made us follow them in a more circuitous route back to the yacht and broke away as we approached the boat, only to return a while later
to try to sell us some fish that looked a few days old. We fobbed them off with a couple of beers. The lack of a shared language and assumptions on both sides had caused the confusion and we still
weren’t entirely clear about what they had wanted or if we had offended them by offering money in the first place or by not giving enough in the end.

The incident took away our enthusiasm for the fresh coconuts. Rolling about, unopened, on the floor of the cockpit they remained – at 3.33 ringgit a pop – probably the most expensive
coconuts in the world.

T
he thing with drinks like Dr Pepper is that the sweetness can quickly turn to a bad taste in your mouth. John left us in airless Kudat to meet a
friend in the Philippines earlier than expected and Steve and I were alone. Tempers were frayed in the heat and, without the cushioning effect of John’s presence,
alone
seemed
suddenly like a big deal. Steve seemed very happy that it was finally just the two of us. He became even more tactile, more coupley. With every approach he made I could feel myself backing away,
mentally and physically.

It’s a funny thing, gut instinct. The moment I saw him for the first time, that night I arrived in Borneo, I knew he wasn’t the one for me. All those times he’d tried something
on during the race I’d known it, too. But something had compelled me to overlook that gut instinct: sailing, living on a yacht, exploring the world. Steve and I shared this dream. We got on
as friends, he made me laugh.
Maybe the rest might come,
I’d try to convince myself as I lay awake in his bed while he snored in the cockpit where he had fallen asleep, drunk, after
another heavy night with John
. If I can suppress that little shudder, maybe the rest
will
come in time
.

I had always rejected men in the past if I deemed them not 100 per cent perfect. And that philosophy hadn’t netted me the things I’d wanted. And rejecting this man just because
sometimes I was embarrassed by him or thought him camp wasn’t going to help me achieve this new dream, either.
You need to grow up
, I told myself firmly, yet again.
You’re
not exactly perfect yourself. Just loosen up, be less of a worrier and see what happens
.

As we weighed anchor and left Kudat, the tension – both between us and within me – dropped with the mercury. We sailed to Pulau Bangii, the nearest island, and wandered around the
kampong, with its village green surrounded by thatched huts. Back on the yacht I had my first naked on-deck shower and we hung from the swim ladder off the back, letting our bodies float behind us
in the 2-knot current stream. At night I did yoga on the back deck, my nose in chataranga inches from the (stinky) cat litter tray, using the starlight and lightning flashes going off all around me
to see by as I changed asanas.

Conversation turned to future plans. Steve wanted to know where I wanted to travel to. I was still desperate to visit Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, which were the same
places he was planning to go with the boat. He asked me how much time I had to do it in.

‘Oh, I don’t know – six months?’ My only previous experience of long-distance sailing was crossing the Atlantic Ocean with the Clipper race and we had done that in nine
days, so six months seemed a reasonable amount of time.

Steve was thinking more along the lines of two years.
Two years!
I explained that I had a finite amount of time and money, that I wanted to try to make it to my brother Tom’s
wedding in December and that at some point I would need to find work. He knew a woman in a marina in Thailand, he said, who could help me get a job as crew on a superyacht.

‘And, if you want, I’ll stop cruising for a few months while you work and I’ll just concentrate on doing jobs around the boat,’ he offered.

I didn’t know what to say to that. It seemed a very over-the-top gesture to make – I had left the UK just three weeks before and had been sharing a bed with this man for only a week
or so (and was already having doubts about that) and here he was offering to make long-term plans with me. I felt guilty that he saw this as a committed partnership while I just viewed it as a
fling. Now John was gone, Steve wanted to pick up where he thought we had left off.

It was windy where we were anchored and the wind roughed up waves that hit us on the beam (side) of the yacht, so that we were rolling over and bouncing up again like a weeble, the glasses and
crockery clinking in their cupboards. A look at the chart showed us a shallow, protected anchorage nearby, called Mitford Harbour. It was surrounded by coral and we had to creep our way in, Steve 8
metres up the mast sitting on the first spreaders, keeping a good lookout for large coral heads, or bommies, and me on the autohelm and throttle, creeping us forward and adjusting our heading on
Steve’s directions to sneak us slowly and carefully along through the deepest water.

Inside the harbour it was magical. There were no other boats and no signs of human life. There was an awful lot of animal life instead. Every few minutes a shoal of tiny silver fish performed a
spot of synchronised swimming, leaping out of the water to avoid a predator. From a distance I couldn’t tell they were individual fish; their timing was so immaculate that they looked like
one large spurt of water from a fountain. We took the dinghy ashore in the afternoon and immediately spotted monkey footprints in the sand, about the size of a toddler’s but rounder and with
clear imprints of opposable big toes. The only human footprints were those Steve and I left.

The white beach was dotted with tiny pearls of sand, thousands of them, stacked up next to holes about the size of a pea. I bent over to look at one more closely and caught some movement in my
peripheral vision. Turning my head, I saw a little translucent crab. This was his hole he had dug out, working the discarded sand into ball shapes with his pincers. Once my eyes adjusted I could
make out hundreds of these ghost-like crabs all over the beach. Despite their near-invisibility I didn’t have to worry about stepping on one for as soon as my flip-flopped foot came anywhere
near they darted off across the sand at incredible speeds and shot down into the safety of their holes.

Steve had reached the few scattered mangrove trees across to the right so I walked over to join him.

‘Any luck with monkey sightings?’ I asked.

‘No. You?’

‘No. Only the tracks in the sand.’

‘Shh!’ he said, holding up one hand. ‘What was that?’

‘What?’

‘Can’t you hear it? A kind of squealing.’

We held our breath, listening intently. And there it was, like a quieter version of a pig’s squeal, followed by a splashing noise.

‘Monkeys?’ I whispered.

‘I don’t think so. Come on.’

We climbed over the exposed mangrove roots, following the sounds and scanning the surface of the water. I spotted something, a head, but it wasn’t a monkey. Then I saw another sleek black
head and another.

‘They’re otters,’ Steve said.

There was a family of eight of them and they were having a whale of a time playing in the water, swimming, diving and calling back and forth to each other with their squeaky squeals. We watched,
enchanted, for a few minutes, taking photos, until one of them saw us and stood up on its hind legs, front paws dangling. Suddenly it herded up its companions and they dived under the water and
were gone.

In the absence of man-made sound, the jungle was creating music around us. The sounds were distinctly tropical and nothing like what I had heard back home: cicadas singing, geckos calling and
unseen monkeys chattering. I heard a woodpecker drilling away at a tree and the repeated cries of what I termed the Laughing Policeman Bird. Its call was a cross between the unnerving guffaws of
the model constable in the penny arcade and the sarcastic laugh of Nelson from
The Simpsons
. ‘Haa!-ha! Haa-ha! Haa!-ha!’ it cried, over and over, rising in pitch. Even the
plant life on the edge of the rainforest was noisy – the coconut palms rustled scratchily in the breeze and the driftwood cracked as it dried.

Feeling more in tune with Mother Earth and taking advantage of the slower current in the protected harbour, I decided to have another go at swimming. I jumped in from the yacht and started
breaststroke, up and down the 46-foot length of the boat, concentrating on my breathing and on keeping count of the number of lengths and total distance covered to crowd thoughts of biting,
nibbling, fishy things out of my brain. I was doing OK, just about managing to push down the fear, when I reached the stern of the boat and saw something in the water about a foot or two in front
of my face. It was brown, long and thin and its head was raised above the surface, moving from side to side. I screamed and splashed my way towards the ladder to get on to the boat and to safety.
Steve heard the commotion and came to see what all the fuss was about but froze when he saw the look of terror on my face.

‘Emma! What is it?’

I couldn’t speak. Time had slowed down and my progress was agonisingly slow.

‘Tell me. Then I can help you.’

‘S-s-snake!’ I managed to stutter. A few more strokes and I was at the ladder, adrenaline helping me haul myself out by my arms faster than I’d ever managed to before. My legs
were shaking as Steve handed me my towel.

‘A snake?’ he asked. ‘In the water? Wow – that’s really rare.’

‘It was there, I’m telling you. I wasn’t just imagining it. I even looked at it twice to make sure it really existed. That’s it. I’m not going back in the
water.’

He was comforting but disbelieving and, once I’d started to calm down, his incredulity was infectious. I began to doubt myself. Was it really a snake? I could have sworn I’d seen it
raise its head out of the water, like a cobra about to strike, and turn towards me. Now, on the safety of the boat, I wasn’t so sure. When Steve returned to his work, I wandered about the
deck of the boat, looking into the water for an infestation of snakes. I couldn’t see any. But what I could see, just off the bow, was the seed pod of a mangrove tree being carried slowly
along in the current. I frowned and leaned over the rail to get a closer look. Hot embarrassment crept up my neck and into my cheeks. The pod was brown coloured, long and thin and stood vertically
in the water, its tip slightly curved over. As the gentle waves pushed it along, it bobbed up and down, rotating slightly from side to side. As they say, you can take the girl out of the
city… but you can’t put her in one of the wildest places on earth and not expect her imagination to go into overdrive.

That afternoon we were trying to repair the leech line, the rope that runs through the back of the mainsail, when Steve said: ‘This is doing my head in.’ I thought he was referring
to the sewing.