In the evenings Gede and Wanto joined the crew of Nanamuk and us in the cockpits of our sailboats. We grew to like them both enormously. With all the turmoil in Indonesia, Herbert and I considered the personal and economic sacrifice that these young men were making, purely out of their love for these animals, as something infinitely precious. After seeing the gold miners and the loggers and all the filth and floating garbage in Kumai, such dedicated and forward-thinking young Indonesians, who were willing to make personal sacrifices to help preserve their environment – our environment – felt like nothing short of a miracle. It seemed vital to us that such people be supported and nurtured if the natural world was to have any chance of surviving an onslaught of too many humans thinking only about short-term profit or day-to-day survival. That day, we made a promise to them that we would do our best to find a way for people outside Borneo to make contributions to their work and help provide the extra funding they so desperately needed. It’s a promise we carried through on, and we continue to raise funds for them to this day.
During the days we stayed at Tanjung Harapan, Michael Junior and Nyo began making themselves at home on our boat, darting inside to make raids on our fruit hammock, swinging boldly around the rigging, and generally turning Northern Magic into a primate playground. All five kids were in our salon, engrossed in the board game Risk when Nyo made one of her surprise attacks. Swiping up a handful of plastic Risk army pieces, she stuffed them into her cheeks the way a squirrel does, then leapt off the boat and scampered up a tree. There she sat, cracking the plastic artillery, cavalry, and infantry in her teeth as if they were nuts. Her bushy eyebrows bobbed up and down all the while, giving her an expression that looked alternately shocked and intent. Every few minutes, she would eject a few pieces of mangled plastic from her mouth, and they would tumble as colourful red, blue, and green crumbs into the water below her perch. Nyo did this with tremendous satisfaction and much eyebrow waggling all evening long – and even the next morning still had a few unchomped pieces in her mouth.
Michael Junior’s naughty tendencies weren’t as destructive and tended more towards the stealing of food and the receiving of attention. He succeeded admirably at both. By the time we left, Michael had turned every last one of us into gibbon fans for life. As we sat in our cockpits in the evening with Robert and Grace from Nanamuk, and Gede and Wanto from the station, little Michael would curl up in someone’s lap and happily fall asleep. They were golden moments, and they bound our hearts even more firmly to this place.
14
Water Spouts and Lightning Strikes
We departed Borneo for a two-day sail, enlivened by the discovery of jumping maggots in our Kumai cucumbers and a violent rainfall and thunderstorm. In company with our Canadian friends on Nanamuk, we paused at the island of Serutu, almost half way to Singapore. Although there was a village nearby, the bay we chose was uninhabited and beautiful. The pristine waters were crystal clear and full of transparent, undulating jellyfish and masses of small squid. Parrots and monkeys roamed the trees of the jungle that crowded up against the sandy beach. In a freshwater stream perfect for swimming, we soaked off weeks’ worth of Borneo grime in the most refreshing cold bath imaginable. There were no people around. This undisturbed piece of paradise was exactly what we needed.
As we bathed, tiny tropical fish such as you might find in a home aquarium darted around us. Those strange air-breathing fish we called mud skippers frolicked on the rocks at the water’s edge, squiggling and jumping around as we came near. By following the stream upriver, we discovered a small waterfall under which we could take an actual shower. Sitting half-submerged in the pool under the waterfall was like being in a cool Jacuzzi, with tiny bubbles from the waterfall making us tingle all over. We wanted to stay forever.
Herbert and I brought all the dirty laundry from the boat and washed it in the stream, rinsing the clothes luxuriously and lavishly. On the boat, we were normally forced to use and re-use washing water until it was a dark and murky grey. Immersing our sweaty bodies in the water as we washed was almost nice enough to make me wish for even more dirty laundry to appear. Never have I enjoyed the washing of laundry as much as I did on that steaming hot day near the equator.
The next day we bade farewell to our little paradise for a three-day sail to Batam Island, our last stop in Indonesia and just around the corner from the great city-state of Singapore. The winds were again light and the seas calm, and Northern Magic was chugging along peacefully under a spinnaker when we crossed the equator and entered the Northern Hemisphere again for the first time in eighteen months. At virtually the same time, we achieved another milestone, for we were now exactly halfway around the world. From now on, every mile we covered would be bringing us nearer to home.
We were heading now through a particularly bad area for piracy, where a boat in our group of friends had actually been attacked. We had banded together with Nanamuk for safety against pirates, but we had never imagined that Robert and Grace’s alertness would save us from a very different kind of danger.
It was mid-morning, my watch, the day after crossing the equator. I was very tired from a poor and sweaty sleep the night before and had asked the boys to keep watch in the cockpit while I grabbed an hour’s rest. Increasingly, as Michael and Jonathan got older, we had been asking them to take short periods of watch. I was thus happily snoozing down below in the navigation station when the VHF radio crackled to life beside my ear. It was Grace on Nanamuk, sailing a quarter mile away off our port side. She curtly instructed me to get outside, quickly.
The kids were still in the cockpit, playing cards on that hot and windless day, and dutifully keeping an eye out for oncoming ships. But what they had not noticed was something emerging from inside a dark, low cloud to our starboard side. It was a waterspout, a large and ominous-looking one, and it was less than a mile away.
We’d seen a waterspout once before, a rapidly spinning air mass that sucked water up into the sky, but it had been a thin and ephemeral thing, more of a curiosity than a threat. This one was different. It truly was a tornado, swirling up the ocean in a thick grey column that reached all the way into the cloud above. What really gave us an idea of its tremendous force was not only the diameter of the main spout, but the secondary circular wall of water being churned up around its base, spun hard by the tremendous centrifugal force at the centre. The base of the spout looked to be perhaps half as big as our boat. It was heading across our stern, in the direction of Nanamuk.
I gave more juice to the engine, hoping to increase the distance between us and the spout. With some luck, we would be able to outrace it. For a short time, it looked as if we might. But no sooner did we tuck in our tail and begin to scoot away, than the spout appeared to notice us for the first time. It abruptly changed direction and veered directly towards us. All of a sudden we realized the danger we were in. We practically threw the three boys into the cabin, followed in quick succession by two bags of sails and our cockpit seats.
We had no time to do anything more before scrambling inside ourselves. If the spout passed directly over us, there was no doubt we would lose our sails, which were flaked loose on the boom, and quite possibly much more. For all we knew, it might rip away our dinghy and life raft, and everything in the cockpit lockers besides. If it was powerful enough, it might even suck open the main hatches and strip the inside of the boat, too. We had no idea what kind of chaos might soon envelop us. Waterspouts can sometimes severely damage or even sink big ships.
The safest thing we could think of for the children was to have Jonathan and Christopher huddle together in Jonathan’s well-enclosed bunk, with the leecloth tied up to protect them from flying objects or, God forbid, from being sucked up themselves. Because Michael was now as strong and almost as big as I was, he stayed in the salon with Herbert and me to help.
We closed the two open hatches into the cockpit. Then we pulled the curtains aside and watched with horror as the waterspout continued to move towards u
s. It was now only a few hundred metres away. In the few minutes that had passed, it had grown much bigger. The sight of that churning wall of water being spun out from the centre of the spout still had me transfixed. My heart was thumping painfully in my chest.
Suddenly we realized that although we had shut the hatches, we hadn’t done anything about the open windows. The three of us rushed around anew, making sure all the ports were tightly closed. When we had done all that we could do, we returned to the big salon window, where for a few seconds I tried to videotape. My legs were shaking hard as I tried to film the advancing spout. I could hardly hold the camera still. The sight of that thundering, churning wall of water around the spout’s base is what continued to scare me the most. It, more than that column of water reaching into the clouds, gave the sense of the power of this awesome, awful thing.
All we could do was wait. Even during our storms, I had had the sense that we were in some kind of control, that we had the ability to manage our boat and thereby influence the outcome. But now, in these few brief minutes, we were truly helpless.
The spout was directly beside us, less than a hundred metres away. Its base was broader than ever. Suddenly, it seemed as if the force of the tornado couldn’t support its enlarged base. Right before our eyes, the waterspout lifted from the sea. Then it evaporated, with the middle collapsing first, then the top and bottom. In seconds, the spout was nowhere to be seen.
For an instant we couldn’t believe our eyes. We wondered if it had somehow jumped over us. We rushed over and tore open the curtains on the other side of the boat to see. But it was gone. Miraculously, it had dissipated just a stone’s throw away.
We had barely enough time to catch our breath when the weather disturbance that had created the spout hit us with a fury. The sky turned dark and we were slammed with a deluge so heavy that we were completely blinded. All the water that the spout had sucked up was now being returned to the sea. We were being drowned in it. The radar was useless.
At first we just sat there as if stupefied, trying to get our nerves back after the close call of moments before. Then we made contact with Nanamuk on the radio and got their position, allowing us to compare it with ours and make sure we didn’t run blindly into each other.
In fifteen minutes the deluge passed. Eventually our hearts, too, returned to their normal rhythms. Even now, I still periodically have a horrifying picture run through my mind, the scenario of what might have happened if the spout had really hit, and if Nanamuk had not been there to alert us. The thought of our three boys being sucked up by the spout freezes my blood every time. The worst of it was that it was my watch, when it was my duty to be alert. For me, waiting for that waterspout to hit was the single most terrifying moment of our voyage.
The next day, recovered from the excitement of the waterspout, we arrived at our last stop in Indonesia, Batam Island, at a lovely, empty, marina and resort. Apart from a handful of yachties and a few dozen staff, it was completely deserted. The Asian economic recession of 1997 and 1998 had left this resort high and dry. It was almost eerie to swim in the glorious swimming pool at night when it was beautifully lit only for us, with dutiful staff in their white uniforms standing nearby in the glaringly empty restaurant, hoping against hope that some actual people might arrive for them to serve. We never enjoyed staying at a marina more than we did at this sadly expectant island resort all dressed up but no place to go.
Then we crossed the Singapore Strait for Malaysia, which is a modern, sophisticated country with every possible service, product, and convenience. The kids were particularly fascinated by modern shopping malls completely filled with little stores selling pirated computer software and the latest movies. You could find any computer program or movie you wanted for a flat price of two dollars a disk.
Although predominantly Muslim like Indonesia, Malaysia also has a large Chinese population. This meant we were able to buy pork again for the first time since Australia. But when we brought our pork chops to the checkout counter of one large supermarket, it posed a major dilemma for the cashier, a demure young woman wearing a traditional Muslim head covering. She was obviously new to the job and had never come face to face with a pork chop before.
Her distress at our arrival was clear. As we unloaded our purchases at her counter, she began making frantic motions as if to send us to a different cashier. In our ignorance of both her customs and her language, we didn’t understand at first what the problem was. We stayed there, in some confusion as to what was going on. It took us a few minutes before realizing that it was our little plastic wrapped package of pork chops that was causing all the fuss. To Muslims, pork is an unclean food. This young girl couldn’t bring herself to touch even the plastic covering of our meat, nor the two cans of cooked pork we had innocently laid before her. Finally, she called over her supervisor, who showed her how to take a double layer of plastic bags to cover her hands. Only in this way, safely protected from any contact with the unclean meat, was our poor cashier able quickly and distastefully to spirit the offending pork into our bags and out of sight. Her disgust at our dinner left us feeling rather sullied as well.
On the other hand, Malaysians love some foods that we found repulsive. One of these is the durian, a large, green, spiky fruit whose smell can only be compared to that of raw sewage and whose taste isn’t much better. But despite durian being prohibited from many public places, due to its smell, it is eaten in large quantities and in many unusual forms.
My vote for the most creative use of a noxious fruit was the durian mousse cake I spotted at a fancy bakery. In the disgusting snack food category, however, I would definitely vote for that ubiquitous Malaysian favourite, dried jellyfish on a stick.
It rained almost every day in Malaysia, and during most of these storms there was a terrific show of thunder and lightning. Many boats had come to grief in these waters on account of lightning, which usually results in extensive damage to the boat’s electrical systems. We know of people who were forced to delay their trips the better part of a year and spend $70,000 or more repairing lightning damage. While some boats carry insurance for just such an eventuality, we did not. In fact, like a significant proportion of long-distance cruisers, we carried no insurance of any kind; it’s very expensive and, in our case, because of our lack of experience we had found ourselves to be uninsurable.
Herbert and I had left the kids playing on board with Alan, the thirteen-year-old boy from Nanamuk, one muggy afternoon while we went to pick up a few groceries. While we were gone, there was a brief but violent electrical storm. A mile away, Herbert and I were loading wet groceries into a taxi when we saw the lightning and simultaneously heard a tremendous crash.
“That one’s not that far away,” remarked Herbert.
Grace, on Nanamuk, anchored about thirty metres away from Northern Magic, at first thought Nanamuk had been hit. Later she told me she had actually felt the electricity surge through her body, standing all her hairs on end. But nothing seemed to be wrong, so she heaved a sigh of relief.
Then a loud siren started blaring. It was the intruder alarm on Northern Magic, signalling to all the world that something was wrong. Northern Magic had been hit.
Someone on another boat witnessed the bolt of lightning as it hit our main mast. The lightning had actually changed direction in mid-air, doubling back from its original oblique course away from our boat to strike us. I got shivers up and down my spine as I heard the story; it sounded all too similar to the way that waterspout had changed its course to intercept us just weeks before.
The four boys later couldn’t recall if it was the enormous bang or some surge of electricity that made them all jump together, but jump they did. Then they heard a clattering sound: the wind indicator mounted at the top of the mast had crashed to the deck. Jonathan ran out and picked it up, still hot. Now they knew for sure lightning had hit. But before they could do much more, the alarm started shrieking, and somehow they had to find a way of turning it off. Although M
ichael found the key to disable the alarm, it didn’t work; no matter what he did, the siren continued blaring.
After Jon went outside to yell over to Nanamuk to turn on their radio, Alan called his parents on VHF to tell them everyone was fine. Amazingly, even though its antenna had been blasted off the masthead, the VHF radio still worked. It was up to the boys to figure out how to silence the alarm. Michael and Alan traced the alarm wire all the way to the fuse box and, using a screwdriver, managed to disconnect it. At last, after ten minutes of screaming, the alarm was silent.
A few minutes later, Herbert and I arrived, totally unaware of the drama that had taken place in our absence. As soon as we pulled up to Northern Magic, four boys began excitedly jumping around the cockpit, brandishing the poor blackened wind instrument and proudly relating how they had handled the crisis.
Herbert immediately swung into action. “Have you tested anything?” he asked. “Is anything broken?” This was his worst nightmare, and he ran all over the boat, looking for signs of damage.
But just as someone had been watching out for us that day of the waterspout, our guardian angel must have been looking over us during the lightning strike too. Although it turned out to be an expensive event, the vast majority of our electronics were undamaged. Possibly because Northern Magic was a steel boat, well grounded to the water, most of the current went around the outside of the hull rather than through crucial electrical systems. In any event, here is what happened when a couple of hundred thousand volts of electricity went through Northern Magic.
The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey Page 20