Green Ghost, Blue Ocean

by Jennifer M. Smith

  We arrived in Diego Suarez with three reefs in our mainsail and both of us exhausted from hanging on tightly for the three days and two nights it took to get there. Navigating into the harbour was made challenging by the fact that our charts were off by more than half a mile – the worst error we’d ever encountered on electronic charts.

  We had only a short rest in the well-protected harbour because the opportunity to round the cape presented itself more quickly than we expected. The guide books tell you to round the point of land “with one foot on the shoreline” – in other words, stick close to shore. It was an exhilarating ride up and over the top and fantastic sailing down the northwest coast, where the winds remained very strong but the seas were magnificently flat, giving us great speed and big distance, and allowing us to make the anchorage at Nosy Hara by nightfall. We were the only boat in the anchorage and we planned to spend a day there, doing nothing, resting up, reading books, and relaxing.

  In the morning, we were approached by a small boat carrying five young men. One spoke French very well. He told us that the island was a park and we would have to pay a 15,000 ariary entrance fee per person. He had a cash box and a receipt book that he waved around, but he wore no uniform. We explained that we were not planning to go ashore and therefore we would not be entering the park and we would not pay the fee. He argued hard, arm-waving that the whole area was a park, a marine park, and that the charge applied even for anchoring. Suspicious, we disagreed with him and insisted that we would not pay. When his friends started asking us for whiskey and cigarettes, the legitimacy of the cash box and the receipt book evaporated. We held our ground and they eventually let it go and went away.

  Once again, we were left in a quandary. Had we been right to stand our ground? In a country where the average annual income was around US$400, asking for a little money from someone who likely had an income one hundred times greater probably seemed like a pretty reasonable thing to do. The amount they’d wanted was only about C$5, but, again, it was the principle of the thing. We couldn’t go through Madagascar handing out C$5 to every person we met – could we?

  Later we learned from an Internet search that a marine park had been created in the bay at Nosy Hana. It was a project between WWF and the local communities. We felt terrible. We eventually learned that three other boats that stopped in the same bay later in the season were not asked for payment. Perhaps we’d put the young park officer completely off his job.

  We moved on to another difficult-to-pronounce location, Andranoaombi. We chose to anchor well away from the village, hoping to give them some privacy and have some of our own.

  Chief Mohmeen and his son came out in their dugout canoe. Mohmeen’s French was good enough for us to converse at a basic level. He wondered why we’d anchored so far from his village. Our choice of location was less respectful than we’d hoped. Never mind privacy, we’d forced the chief to paddle a long distance to perform his duties.

  Realizing we were receiving a formal welcome from the chief, we offered him a small gift and handed him a T-shirt. He thanked us and took a papaya out from under his seat, handing it to us in return. He asked us if we had any school supplies that the children of the village might use. We’d prepared for this before departing the Mascarene Islands and we were pleased to hand over a stack of notebooks and a box of pencils. Chief Mohmeen thanked us profusely.

  We looked for something for his son and found a smaller T-shirt. Tomatoes appeared and were handed to us. While Nik asked the chief about his family, I went below to rummage through some second-hand clothing we had on board specifically for this purpose. I managed to find something for each of his other children as well as a dress of mine for his wife. He smiled broadly and suddenly bananas and mangos appeared from the dugout. It was a beautiful interaction, so gently conducted, the most amiable trading I’ve ever done. We were not at all offended when Chief Mohmeen asked shyly if by chance we might have some sugar on board.

  “Oui!” I said and went below again. It was easy for me to get more sugar – we’d be in town within the week. It was not so easy for him. I poured most of the sugar I had into a Ziploc bag for transport.

  “C’est parfaitement blanc!” he said, eyes wide as I handed it to him. He’d never seen sugar so highly refined, so perfectly white.

  His final request was for power. He hadn’t thought to bring it with him, but back in the village he had a cell phone with a drained battery. The village had no electricity, so he asked us, if he brought the phone to us, would we be able to charge it.

  “Certainement,” Nik answered. It seemed such a small request.

  Mohmeen and his son paddled off. He never did return with his cell phone. I guess we’d anchored just too far away.

  There was plenty of trading to be done in Madagascar. At Nosy Mitsio many local canoes came out to us at anchor. All wanted to trade lobster, not for cash, for goods. It made sense. There was only one shop on Mitsio, so trade goods were more useful than cash. T-shirts, shorts, fishing line, swim fins, masks and snorkels, hooks, school books – all were valued items. We had lobster for dinner four nights in a row.

  Our interactions with locals were becoming more pleasant. As we travelled south down the northwest coast we were approaching the island of Nosy Be, the largest and busiest tourist resort in Madagascar, a hot spot for South African vacationers. Perhaps our interactions were improving because we were dealing with locals who had more experience with foreigners and were better skilled at bridging the culture gap.

  An exotic sounding place, the words Nosy Be mean only “big island” in the Malagasy language, but the main town bears the more evocative name of Hell-Ville. The place was named for Admiral de Hell when the French colonized Madagascar in 1840, not for any more apt reason. Indeed, we found there was nothing hellish about it. In the anchorage off town, we were immediately adopted by boat boys Jimmy and Rasta John, who charged a couple of dollars a day to procure just about anything for us. They arranged laundry, propane, and diesel and they kept an eye on our dinghy and on our boat when we went ashore.

  After a pleasant time in Hell-Ville, we continued south, making stops in every location that was noted for interactions with lemurs. We couldn’t get enough of the gentle primates. Whether engaging with a semi-tame animal taken in as a pet in a local village, or watching wild sifakas, a lemur with black hairless faces framed by silky white fur, we thrilled at every moment with this most remarkable species.

  Farther south, we stopped at the Alcatraz of Madagascar, Nosy Lava, a former island prison. We took a walk through the prison ruins and were soon joined by two teenagers, a young boy and an older girl carrying a baby on her hip. With a few words of French and a good deal of arm-waving they showed us around the place, taking us to see the stone-walled damp prison offices where we were fascinated to find the prison records, dumped from the rusty filing cabinets and strewn about on the floor.

  An older man appeared out of nowhere, telling us he was a prison guard (unlikely) and that we had to pay him (also unlikely). He disappeared when we gave him a pack of the Malaysian cigarettes we still had in our trading stores.

  After a tour around the prison and much picture taking, we went back to the beach and our dinghy, thinking about heading home to rest from the heat of the day. The teenagers remained with us. The young man was quite interested in our inflatable and our outboard.

  We didn’t make a habit of inviting local people on board. The reasons were manifold; we liked our privacy and we didn’t want to create temptation or stir up envy by flaunting our comparative wealth. But these teenagers were charming, their enthusiasm affected us, and we did something we’d rarely done before – we invited them out to the boat.

  They enjoyed the speed of the dinghy ride and the cool shade of the cockpit. We showed them around inside, indicating where we slept, pointing out the small toilet and shower. We showed them our instant flame on our propane stove, how water poured freely from our taps, then we pulled cold drinks from our ti
ny refrigerator. I imagine it was a lot to take in. I had one last piece of baby clothing on board, a tiny T-shirt that read, “I’m the little brother.” Although the wee baby was a girl, I gave it to the eighteen-year-old mom, who was thrilled to have something new for her daughter. I gave the fifteen-year-old boy a spare pair of sunglasses.

  With the visit over, we offered to take them back to shore. They didn’t want to go back to the prison. They wanted to be taken to the far northern end of the beach where a couple of dugouts were pulled up on the sand. En route, Nik allowed the young man to drive the dinghy, which pleased him so much. With his new sunglasses on, he stood up and struck a pose of great confidence, roaring up to the beach with his hand on the throttle, showing off his piloting skills to the local fishermen on shore. We landed and they disembarked, heading up the path and over the hill with the fishermen who were carrying buckets of sea urchins back to their fish camp.

  So often we heard stories from other cruisers who boasted of their interactions with local people. So often we asked ourselves why we didn’t try harder to be more open, more welcoming, and more relaxed with the people we met on our voyage. Pleased with ourselves over the enjoyable contact we zotted back to Green Ghost to idle away the afternoon reading and drinking cool drinks in the shade.

  An hour later we heard a noise against the hull. Our young friend was back. Alone, he’d paddled out to us in one of the dugout canoes. He no longer had the sunglasses I’d given him. With an earnest look on his face, he wasted no time tying up to our boat. Then he hopped up on deck without need of invitation.

  I stepped out of the cockpit to sit on the coach house roof. Nik stepped out as well. We didn’t know why he was back, but we thought it best to have our discussion out on the side deck, not in the cockpit.

  “Je couche ici,” he told us.

  “I think he wants to sleep here,” I said to Nik.

  “Je couche la-bas,” he said, pointing below decks.

  “Non, pas possible,” Nik responded. “Parce-que, demain, nous allons,” Nik used short bursts of carefully enunciated French.

  “J’irai avec vous,” he came back.

  “Is he saying he wants to go with us?” I asked Nik.

  “I think so,” Nik responded to me. Then to the boy, “Non, non, pas possible, pas possible. We go very far. Um, nous allons tres, um, tres … what’s the word for far? Beaucoup de miles. Nous allons beaucoup de miles, demain.”

  “Je viens avec vous,” he insisted.

  “Oh, my goodness,” I said to Nik. “Now what do we do?”

  The young man went on to speak at length in Malagasy. A French word popped up here and there. It was something about his mother, and something about Mahajanga, a settlement farther down the coast. We tried to explain that we were not going there, that we would be travelling far away, to South Africa and then, all the way to Canada. He was persistent, but of course he could not win the argument. Thwarted, he eventually climbed down off our deck into his dugout, utterly dejected. We waved him goodbye, trying to sound cheery and encouraging, but we were both feeling much the way the boy looked.

  Madagascar. It was like no other place we’d ever been. Our very existence there unleashed a series of butterfly effects. Our impact, however small, threatened unforeseen consequences at every turn.

  I went to bed thinking of our adoption file, closed so many years ago. Nobody had chosen us. And here was this young man, desperate to paddle out of his own life, ready to jump on board, grab a berth, and go to sea. “Beaucoup de miles” was no problem for him – he relished the thought. I wondered what would become of him, what prospects he had. I wondered what would’ve happened if we’d simply said, “Okay.”

  By late September we’d made our way south to Moramba Bay, the jumping-off point for many cruisers planning to cross the Mozambique Channel. It was a lovely protected spot to sit and wait for weather. The shore was lined with baobab trees and inhabited by shy sifakas. We delighted watching them in the trees, where they leaped athletically, always maintaining an upright position. On the ground they moved more comically, hopping sideways in an upright galloping motion, bouncing along on their hind legs with their arms held up for balance.

  A walk on a nearby island led us to a massive baobab tree that was reported to be fifteen hundred years old. Nature was a balm for us in Moramba, just what we needed to combat the rising tension in the growing fleet.

  On a world map, Madagascar looks like it is tucked in beside Africa, but the channel is wider than it looks. It is a 1,200 NM journey to Richards Bay, South Africa. Like any offshore passage, choosing the right weather window was imperative.

  Several other boats already in the bay had sailed south from Nosy Be earlier, hoping to get a jump on the crossing. While we’d idled our way down the coast, they’d been waiting, kicking at the stall for departure. But no weather window had materialized. As a result, when we arrived in Moramba Bay, there was an air of impatience in the fleet.

  Fortunately, the small group of boats was well provided for by young men from the nearby village who came out in canoes offering items for trade: mangos, bananas, papayas, tomatoes, eggs, fish, and lobster. We were surprised at the prices being paid. It was the last stop in Madagascar for every boat in the anchorage and it was well known that Malagasy currency was worthless outside the country. Cruisers tossed their big bills at the locals without much thought and in some cases, sailors handed over the last of their Malagasy currency outright. By the time we turned up in the bay the economy was well out of whack. The local salesmen were so enamoured with their big-spending customers that not a single canoe approached us, the unknown newcomers.

  When the weather cleared for a go, our fellow sailors departed. Electing to let the seas in the channel calm down before we set out, we chose to depart a day later. After the mass exodus, micro-economics took over. The market demand dropped instantly. The vendors rushed in, oversupplied. We were canoed six times that day – and prices for everything had plummeted.

  It was a delicate economic system and it made me reflect on the country itself. In Madagascar, I felt that every action I took or didn’t take set off a ripple of consequences both in the place I was standing and in myself. Corrupt officials had caused my mistrust of all Malagasy and it followed that I treated honourable people with suspicion, preventing them from doing their job. A gracious village chief restored my faith in humanity, but petty thieves stole it back again. We were satisfied and generous in one moment and displeased and guarded the next. We couldn’t settle on a way of being in Madagascar. It was a precarious existence, swinging on the end of a pendulum between trust and treachery. I sensed that in Madagascar, no one is ever just passing through. Every person tips the balance and leaves the place changed. Maybe the same can be said of everywhere you go. In many places we’d visited I felt like a drop in a bucket, but here, I felt like a drop in a teaspoon.

  In the end, we left the anchorage with Ar25,000 in our coffers, equivalent to about C$12. Those three folded bills still rustle around in my travel kit. They do me no good at all. Perhaps it was stupid of us not to toss our last currency into a passing dugout as we departed. Perhaps it was a missed opportunity: the very best kind of ripple effect that we failed to initiate.

  CHAPTER 25

  Africa

  (October 2013 – February 2014)

  We departed Moramba Bay with strong easterly winds that made for beautiful sailing on our first day out. The wind was aft of the beam and the seas were flat as we charged southwest, hugging the northwest coast of Madagascar and heading toward Cap Saint-André. From the cape, our destination was Richards Bay, South Africa, about a thousand miles on a diagonal path across the Mozambique Channel at a bearing of 218 degrees.

  The channel was notorious for the fronts that marched across it and for its strong and unpredictable currents. After departing the Madagascar coast, the goal was to get to Richards Bay before the next front came in. If you didn’t make it, there were few places to hide. To cro
ss it, you needed a strategy. First and foremost, you had to avoid getting caught in a big southwesterly blow, particularly once you were on the west side of the channel in the fast south-flowing Agulhas current. Our charts indicated twenty-metre seas could form in such conditions. These were dangerous waters.

  As the wind became southerly, we found ourselves beating into a brisk fifteen to eighteen knots, spray a-flying as we punched into two-metre seas on a westerly course. When conditions eased and backed to the east, the sailing was easier and we enjoyed a more comfortable ride. But the currents confounded us.

  “That’s strange,” I said to Nik. “The compass on the binnacle shows us on a perfect southwest heading of 225 degrees, but the autopilot says our course over ground is 168 degrees.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Nik answered.

  “I know,” I said as I looked around for metal objects hanging off the binnacle, thinking something magnetic was interfering with the compass.

  Although our bow was pointed in a southwesterly direction, because of a strong current, we were actually moving in a direction that was east of south – we were sailing sideways.

  At another point on the journey, we noticed that our speed over ground read 0.0 on the knot metre, while the boat knots read 3.0. In other words, we were sailing forward at three knots into three knots of unfavourable current and although our heading was perfect for a Richards Bay landfall, we were standing still. In both cases, in order to get through the strong eddies, the foresail was furled and the engine went on.