by Josie Dew
So, with Gary long gone, I’m now camping on the beach beside an edgy sea just south of Tauranga at Papamoa (‘fatherly lawn-mowing services’). Back in Auckland I had gone wandering around the harbour and port trying to find a boat to take me to Australia with my bike. But, as I had discovered when I’d been in search of a ship to take me from home to New Zealand, things aren’t like the good old days when you could just turn up at any port and work your passage. Unions, insurance, the ease at which people will sue, not to mention the fewer ships there are with the exponential increase of airlines, mean that it’s a struggle now to find any captain who will gladly have you on board. Even if you’re not fussy with your destination and don’t mind which country you end up in, it’s still not easy. For days I kept being greeted by lots of shaking heads and people rubbing their chins telling me that there was no way I would find a boat to take me to Australia any more – not when it’s so cheap to fly and everyone now goes by plane.
Consistent pestering has its uses and after persistent talking and asking, someone gave me a number of someone they thought could help, and then that person gave me a number of someone else who they thought could help more than they could, and so on until finally I ended up here in Papamoa waiting to cycle up the road to the port in Tauranga where I’m supposed to be scooped up by the Direct Kestrel, a container ship to sail me to Melbourne.
Only trouble is the Direct Kestrel seems to be more like an Indirect Kestrel, as it was supposed to have picked me up about three weeks ago, but owing to a massive shortage of labour in ports up and down the west coast of America (Los Angeles, for instance, has taken on an extra 3,000 workers but that’s still not enough to clear the backlog of cargo) my lift is now running well behind schedule. That, though, is the fun of travelling by boat. It’s a hit and miss affair which only adds to the enjoyable uncertainty of it all. And if the Direct Kestrel had left Tauranga on time, I would never have seen the pod of five pilot whales heading south past my tent door this morning at dawn.
There again, if the Direct Kestrel had left on schedule I would now have a knee that works. As it is, I’m hobbling again. This is because the beach I’m camping on is an infinity of crisp and powder-crumb sand a good 20 km in length. While I’ve been waiting for the boat, never knowing whether it’s going to be today or tomorrow or the day after, I’ve been walking about fifteen miles a day along it from the Maketu area in the east up to Mount Maunganui in the west. The trouble is people like walking their dogs on this beach. And the trouble with dogs is that they seem to be able to smell a bicycle on me a mile off even though my bike is nowhere to be seen. It was one of these dogs, a snarling brute the size of a small horse, that came charging towards me at full pelt bearing its fangs. So in order not to take the impact full frontal when it inevitably crashed into me, I swivelled at the hips to receive it broadside, but in doing so something went crack in my right knee and I’ve hardly been able to put any weight on it since.
That’s the woeful news. On the happier side of things, I’ve got to be up at 5.30 tomorrow morning to pack up the tent and to cycle one-leggedly up to the port, as the Indirect Kestrel is on board for heading directly for Tauranga.
Somewhere in the middle of the Tasman Sea in a Force 10 gale, 7 October
New Zealand summertime began last Monday. Not that you would have known it. After days of camping on the beach in the sun, the morning that the clocks went forward an hour to recognise summer officially was the morning that a ferocious storm with tearing winds and torrential rain that caused flooding within moments threw itself upon Tauranga and my tussling attempts to dismantle my tent without being blown halfway across the Pacific. With a pain in my knee that felt as if a knife was being twisted deep under my kneecap, I rode through the storm to the port where I dodged among the container trucks and straddle-carriers rushing about the dockside like headless chickens.
The Direct Kestrel is a large 18,000 tonne lump of battleship-grey metal with a few incongruous primrose yellow bits for good measure. As with most container ships these days, the Direct Kestrel is a hotchpotch of nationalities. It was built in China at the end of the nineties, is registered in Monrovia, flies the flag of Liberia, is owned by the Germans and chartered by an English company based in Ipswich. Although the captain is called Norman, he answers to the name Ben, was born just north of Liverpool in Southport, but is of New Zealand nationality. He doesn’t sound like a Kiwi, though. More like Eric Morecambe – and behaves like him too. A definite comedian. I keep imagining he’s going to be caught on stage when the curtains close and grabbed from behind by an exasperated Ernie. He also has a whole vocabulary of words I’ve never heard before. Mutton birds, which are also known as salty shearwaters, he calls shit-hawks. Motor launches that many a Kiwi buzz around their shores on, he calls stinkpots or Tupperware fizz boats. As for yachties, he calls them WAFFIES – Wind Assisted Fuckwits.
The chief engineer, Arne Hinz, is from Germany, though he now lives in Nelson in the South Island. The rest of the twenty-one-strong crew is either Filipino or Kiribati with fantastic names like Bakoauea Timwemwe, Buenaventu Saluta, Nomeriano Liwag, Tiotaake Tiote and Toaitaake Tarakai.
There are four other passengers on board, all hovering somewhere in the hinterland of their sixties. Angela, originally from Buckinghamshire (and she even lived in Guildford for a while), now lives in Australia with Ed. Ed, born in Shanghai, was interned in China during the war. When he was eleven he moved with his family to America. For twenty years he worked for the Bank of America in Hong Kong (where he met Angela). It gets a bit complicated but Ed’s previous wife was Angela’s best friend, but then she died and he married Angela. Ed doesn’t have Australian citizenship so the maximum amount of time he can spend at their home in Newcastle, just north of Sydney, is three months. ‘The rest of the year,’ said Ed, ‘we follow the sun around the world.’ Ed’s favoured ship wear seems to be an LL Bean sweatshirt, whereas Angela is wandering about in flip-flops and three-quarter-length trousers, pale blonde hair harnessed beneath a headscarf. They both joined the ship in Los Angeles after visiting family in California.
The other couple, David and Diana, are originally from London but have, as David puts it rather sinisterly, ‘west-country connections’. David is a chemist (‘not pharmacist,’ he said very definitely) and he and Diana lived in Holland for ten years before moving to New Zealand, where they’ve lived mostly in Auckland for the past thirty years. And gone nowhere. ‘That’s because David hates travelling,’ Diana told me. ‘He never wants to go anywhere. But I would love to. I tell you, when I’m a widow, I’m off!’ They now live out in the wilds of the wopwops in the north of the Coromandel Peninsula. Seems I cycled right past their door back in January. They’re off to Australia for the first time ever to visit their son and his young children in Melbourne.
Despite having lived for so long in New Zealand, David still speaks like a rather well-to-do Englishman. He’s a big talker with a no-messing attitude and a very dismissive opinion of Blighty. ‘The British are lazy people,’ he said. ‘And dirty. And there are far too many Pakistanis, blacks and Welsh. In New Zealand I like the entrepreneurism – the “can-do” mentality of the place.’
Seems he doesn’t have much to do with the Maoris either. One of his stories was about how he was once almost struck by lightning when out clipping the hedge at home on the Coromandel: the bolt threw him off the ladder and put out the water pump and phone, but not the computer. Diana said she heard a big bang and flash and as she couldn’t see David when she looked out of the window she presumed he was dead, so went to her cupboard to get out her black funeral dress (which I told her I thought was a bit premature). David thought someone had taken a pot shot at him with a shotgun. ‘There’re a lot of marijuana fields around where we live,’ he said by way of explanation, ‘owned by Maoris. If you see one of “The Growers” crossing your land you turn your head and look the other way. If you ignore them, they ignore you. No, we don’t mix with the Maori. If we pass th
em in town we say good morning or hello. But we don’t socialise.’
David has a full set of charts of our intended route across the Tasman so he can do his own course plottings (‘He likes to be in control,’ Diana said to me on the quiet) and he strides about the bridge in jeans and deck shoes and a sort of Musto sailing jacket. ‘We didn’t know the sea existed until we got to Auckland,’ he told me. Since then they have had their own motor launch and been part-time coastguard radio operators as well as being on the call-out team. One time they took their boat out to Waiheke Island to pick up a woman in labour and transport her to a hospital in Auckland. ‘We hoped she wasn’t going to give birth on board,’ said Diana, ‘but she held her breath.’ They’ve been called out on all sorts of missions, from unmangling the hand of a child who had got his fingers caught in a winch, to helping comb stretches of sea searching for wreckage of a suspected plane crash.
‘People will call up the coastguard for anything,’ David told me. ‘One time a man on a yacht just wanted to know what day it was. Another person rang up in a fraught state and said, “Someone’s stolen our parrot!” They kept a parrot on their boat but whenever they reached an island they would release the parrot so it could get some exercise. It turned out someone on the island had spotted it and, thinking it lost, rescued it. Then there was the time we had a call from a man moored off Little Barrier Island who told us that the only creek where you could get fresh drinking water had a dead cow lying in it. So we spent five hours trying to contact the only farmer on the island (there were no telephones on the island) to tell him to remove his dead cow from the creek.’
The trouble with David is that, along with his interesting stories, he also launches into long-winded jokes or tales. Every mealtime so far all conversation has been put on hold for a good five to ten minutes while he rambles away on one of his stories. As soon as he starts on one, Captain Ben catches my eye and looks heavenwards (there’s no hierarchy on this ship – we all mingle with the crew) and I say, ‘Oh no – you’re losing me already!’ Last night’s story revolved around a man falling off a balcony, angels, the pearly gates of hell and being found naked in a freezer. Apart from that I lost the gist. I did keep up with another of his stories, which was surprisingly short for David and went something like this: An old boy was lying in bed in hospital, a visitor sitting beside him in a chair, when a nurse came in to give the old boy two pills. The visitor asked what the two pills were for. ‘The first pill is to help him sleep,’ said the nurse, ‘and the second pill is Viagra so he doesn’t roll out of bed.’
Soon after I joined the ship my bike was swung on board by crane and I tethered it securely to the floor in my cabin. Just as well I did, as the weather from the start has not been promising. On my visit up to the bridge Captain Ben handed me the weather fax that showed we would have storms and winds against us all the way. He said the time of our arrival in Melbourne depended on how many ‘pot holes’ we fell into on the way. Captain Ben has been at sea since he was sixteen. During this time he has seen his fair share of storms. In one storm in the Atlantic he saw a man washed off the bow before being washed back on board further down the ship by another wave. ‘He went straight out and bought a lottery ticket after that!’ said Ben.
Things are not looking so good for us at the moment. After leaving Tauranga we plunged straight into a Force 9 storm. This felt bad enough with the ship slamming into the waves before sagging and staggering through the troughs. (Although I wasn’t seasick once during the two-month voyage to New Zealand on the ex-Russian ice-breaker, I’ve been badly ill on board the Kestrel and have lost 4 kilos in as many days – this boat travel lark is a good diet if nothing else.) But now, out in the middle of the Tasman, one of the stormiest stretches of sea in the world, we’re being hit by depression after depression and are currently in the middle of a Force 10 (classified on the Beaufort Scale as a ‘whole gale’) with winds of over 100 km/h. Thirty-foot waves are charging at the bow, though a few rogue ones are taking us from the sides. The ship is hogging over the crests, surfing down the watery slopes, sending masses of water boiling across the deck – which, among other things, has ripped the fire hoses from the side decks, never to be seen again. Even from the height of the bridge, the waves look alpine. Water is also reportedly getting into the holds. Bilges are working full pelt. The great patches of foam from the waves’ long overhanging crests is being blown in dense white streaks along the direction of the wind, transforming the surface of the sea as far the eye can see (which is not far as visibility is severely affected) into an appearance of angrily frothy white. The tumbling of the sea is heavy and shock-locked. We are rolling and pitching violently. Everywhere there is the crash of falling objects.
I’ve heaved my way up the severely angled staircase to the bridge – not easy at the best of times, but painfully ridiculous with a knackered knee. The captain is up here with the chief officer and the chief engineer. None of them looks happy. The Kestrel has been slowed to its minimum manoeuvring speed (6½ knots) in an attempt to ease the ship’s motion at the cost of delay. Tonight will be our fourth night of storms. Last night we were under attack from a vicious electrical tempest with forked lightning exploding all around. Outside the heavy bridge doors the wind is yowling like a million strangled cats, the rain pelting down like there was no tomorrow. Though I’m hoping there will be.
Captain Ben has told me it is what the wind does to the waves that is the worry. This reminds me of one of the books I read on the ship to New Zealand. I still have the bit that I copied into my diary from John Rousmaniere’s After the Storm where he says:
The sea itself usually shoots the fatal bullet, not the wind. ‘The waves, not the wind,’ sailors say of the worst risks. Because a cubic foot of seawater weighs sixty-four pounds, the power of even a moderate-sized ten-foot breaking wave flying at twenty knots is enormous. Waves are sledgehammers, and they are also sandbags. What they don’t destroy, they fill and sink. As boats are pressed lower, they become less stable. Eventually they may capsize.
There is rumour that if this keeps up we could roll, which is a bit more excitement than I bargained for. I’ve long wanted to cross the Tasman Sea by ship, but I can’t say I’ve ever been so keen that I’ve wanted to swim it.
Captain Ben, who is usually so jovial, is clinging to the rail (like we all are – the bridge is acting like a roller coaster) and staring out of the water-drenched windows at the walls of sea with a face deeply scored with anxiety and dread. It’s not a good face to see on a captain. He tells me this is the worst storm he’s ever seen. It seems we are being bombarded by two major depressions, and the back of one is behaving more like it should at the front. The thought that this is the worst storm the captain has ever seen in over forty years at sea has turned my stomach into a knot of mild fear. I want to hear some words of reassurance from the captain like, ‘Oh, I’ve seen seas like this a hundred times. We’ll get through this fine!’ Instead he’s muttering how unusual this storm is. When I joke by saying that at least he could treat the abnormality of it as an unusual maritime challenge, a faint trace of a smile lifts the corner of his mouth.
‘That’s one way of looking at it,’ he says. ‘But let’s just say I’d rather not be here.’
And the knot in my stomach tightens another notch.
Appendix
Equipment Department
Bicycle
Frame Custom-made 16” Roberts (Roughstuff) with custom Columbus Nivacrom tubing
Rims Mavic D521 (36 H)
Hubs Shimano Deore XT (36 H)
Spokes DT double-butted stainless steel
Rim tape Velox
Tyres Continental Top Touring 26 × 1.75
Tubes Specialized 26 × 1.5–2.2 (schrader)
Headset Stronglight Headlight 1⅛
Stem Alloy A-Head Uplift
Handlebars Forma (TTT)
Handlebar tape Cinelli cork with Marsas foam padding
Chainset TA Zephyr 150 mm (with TA 6 mm sel
f-extracting bolts)
Chainrings TA 20/34/40
Chain Sachs PC68
Bottom bracket Shimano XT UN72
Front mech Shimano RX100
Rear mech Shimano XT
Cassette Shimano XT (11-34)
Gear Levers Shimano Dura Ace (downtube)
Brake Levers Campagnolo Super Record (with Campag hoods)
Brakes Shimano Deore XT Cantilever
Brake blocks Shimano Deore XT
Pedals TA Road Pedal
Seat post Tranz X (alloy micro-adjust)
Saddle Selle Italia trans am ldy
Racks Tubus (seamless cromoly tubing). Front: Tara lowrider. Rear: Cargo
Water bottle cages 3 × Elite
Mudguards SKS Chromo Plastics
Toe clips Christophe, steel with leather toe protection
Toe Straps Mt Christophe
Computer Speedmaster 7000
Bike lights Front: Busch & Muller Lumotec Plus dynamo Rear: Vistalite and Cateye (LED)
Bike stand Esge Pletcher (double leg kick stand)
Mirrors 2 × Mirrycles (attach to top of brake hoods)
Panniers
Rear Ortlieb Bike-Packer Plus (with additional outer pockets)
Front Ortlieb Sport-Packer Plus (with additional outer pockets)
Handlebar bag Ortlieb Ultimate 3 L Plus (with map case and inner pocket)
Rack packs 2 × Ortlieb roll-closure (size small) (All Ortlieb bags are completely waterproof but I still put most of pannier contents in plastic bags in plastic bags because I can’t seem to grow out of the habit)