Cutting the Dragon's Tail

by Lynda Chidell

  Eventually we launched Knot Often and rowed over to Customs Wharf, the designated landing point for dinghies from foreign yachts. We were allowed to proceed into the town, but two important rules were first explained to us. Firstly, no cameras could be taken past the customs check point; and definitely no video cameras. Secondly, we were to be subject to a curfew. We had to stay on our boats between the hours of sunset and sunrise every night.

  We had no difficulty in understanding the reasons for these rules, given the political instability still very much present in Aden. Only two years earlier there had been a bloody coup and some fierce fighting in the streets, together with gunfire across the harbour. A moored British yacht, appropriately named Innocent Bystander, had been sunk. Four other yachts had been damaged, one beyond repair; all crew members safely evacuated, leaving their yachts behind. We learnt later at the British Embassy that all the embassy staff – and other foreign nationals – had had to evacuate the country, many of them being taken off by the royal yacht Britannia, which had happened to be nearby at the time.

  We were quite happy to return to Tin Hau each night during our nine day stay there – we never did like leaving Tin Hau for too long anyway. The skipper of another yacht, which arrived after us, felt rather differently. He liked to sample the night life ashore in ports; and Aden wasn’t going to be any different. He solved the curfew problem his own way – by the risky method of sinking his dinghy in deep water at Customs Wharf whenever he intended to stay overnight, thus rendering it invisible to the patrolling soldiers. Luckily for him, he was never caught.

  On our second day ashore we cashed some traveller’s cheques at the Bank of Yemen (the currency being the Dinar, worth about three US dollars, and divided into one thousand fils or twenty shillings), Darren and Martyn returned to the boat, while Lynda and I took a bus to the British Embassy further round the bay at Khormaksar. We did not quite know what to expect – normally we avoided embassies unless there was a real problem. However, having had such a warm letter from this particular embassy when we had written from Galle, we felt we had to pay a visit. We were immediately welcomed. The embassy staff, particularly Andy Goodwin, could not do enough for us.

  I was asked if I played golf. ‘Not very well,’ I replied, ‘and I have not played for five years – but, as it happens, I do have a set of clubs on the boat.’ This was one of many items totally unrelated to life at sea that we were still carrying after our days in Swaziland. A game of golf was arranged for the following Saturday.

  We were asked if we wanted to run with the Hash House Harriers. I had never heard of this sport before. But once the rules had been roughly explained – it seemed like a cross between a treasure hunt and cross-country running – we said yes. That was arranged for the Sunday.

  Having read the latest international papers at the embassy and generally caught up on any news we might have missed during the past month (not much), we were driven back to the harbour by Andy.

  But where was Tin Hau? Just for a moment our hearts stopped – she wasn’t where we had left her! Then we saw her – lying happily at anchor with the other yachts. But hadn’t she moved a bit?

  We rowed out to her quickly, only to find Darren and Martyn looking quite unconcerned and relaxed. However, they had a story to tell. Apparently, a couple of hours earlier, the anchor had failed to hold during a strong gust of wind. Tin Hau had become entangled with Yemanja II, denting her pulpit. At this point young Bruce (aged twelve) on Aquilla had noticed the commotion and had immediately shot over in Aquilla’s dinghy to help.

  None of the three of them had ever started Tin Hau’s engine before. Darren and Martyn had only once witnessed the process of winching in Tin Hau’s anchor by hand. But – all credit to them – they managed to do all of this without inflicting any damage to Tin Hau or any further damage to Yemanja II. Having broken free, they had gone for a jaunt around Aden harbour, inspecting the Russian ships and so on – which Martyn in particular had thoroughly enjoyed – before returning to drop anchor in a slightly different location.

  We were obviously most grateful to our crew – and also to Bruce – for saving Tin Hau in this way. That act alone more than justified our choice in having crew, although I suppose if it had been just the two of us, Lynda would have stayed on the boat and I would have gone to the embassy on my own.

  Later on I worked out where I had gone wrong. This was the first – but not the last – time Tin Hau’s anchor had ever dragged. The problem was that prior to Galle we had always used a system of painted marks on the chain to know how much of it we had let out (we had not at this stage changed to the better system of ribbons). But in Galle harbour, with all the marine growth, these marks had disappeared, and it had been impossible to re-apply them while still at anchor. As a temporary measure I had worked out that each turn of the windlass handle was equivalent to about half a metre of chain. So sixty turns of the handle was the equivalent of about thirty metres of chain – which we had needed in this case. In my haste, I had forgotten the 3:1 gearing built in to the windlass and my calculations had been out by a factor of three! I should have counted one hundred and eighty turns on the windlass handle, not sixty! No wonder we had had a problem, even though I had still added a generous length of anti-snub line to what had felt like a well dug in anchor. Unfortunately, it had been impossible to view the anchor and chain underwater, as the water had been so murky.

  Later that day we saw Rick and Julie (French and English respectively) of Yemanja II to apologise for the accident and to see what we could do to make amends for Yemanja II’s dented pulpit and scratched paintwork. Rick insisted the pulpit needed replacing anyway. There was nothing we could do to make them accept any money or gift in lieu. Such a reaction was absolutely typical of those people we met in the Indian Ocean on long distance cruising boats. It was wonderful to feel part of this group of sailing folk, who believed in helping each other, whatever the cost. Nationality did not matter. Assistance from the outside world was not needed. It was only when we reached western Europe that attitudes changed and phrases like ‘you must pay for this’, ‘I will sue you’ and ‘this has to be an insurance claim’ were used.

  The following day we took the bus into Crater, the nearest ‘town’ to the harbour. The area around the harbour had included several buildings built in colonial style in the days prior to 1967 when Aden had been a British colony. Crater, however, was much more of a traditional Moslem town with a large open-air market, minarets and narrow alleyways. We had a meal at a street cafe, drawn in more by the smell than by the looks of the place. What a good meal it was - it proved to be about the best tasting fish we have ever experienced.

  My game of golf took place as planned. It seemed very strange playing on a course without grass. I had to carry a small mat of artificial grass (or Astroturf) for use on fairways (which I kept forgetting to pick up); and putting took place on ‘browns’, not greens. In reality these were black and as fast as a table top. They consisted of desert sand, held together with oil, and were well rolled.

  On returning from the golf, Andy visited the boat for a drink before taking all of us out for a meal in Crater at the Red Sea Restaurant. We were surprised to see nearby hundreds of iron bedsteads lined up in rows, open to the sky and facing a large black and white television set, apparently an ‘outdoor’ hotel. It hardly ever rains in Aden – so I suppose a low-cost hotel such as this made sense.

  The Hash House Harriers run was an equally new and enjoyable experience. It was also good exercise for the calf muscles, the only muscles that are not well exercised on long ocean voyages in small boats.

  Soon it was time to start preparing for the onward passage. This involved more hull scrubbing and an extensive shopping session at the western-style supermarket where many bargains were to be had, including excellent Russian vodka. We also topped up our supplies of gas, water and diesel. The latter was cheap – it cost us fifty US dollars (or £30) to fill up our tanks with eighty-four gallons (three h
undred and eighty litres) of fuel. We had managed to reach Aden with half of our diesel supplies intact.

  On Thursday, 21st January, we were ready to leave. Clearance formalities took a mere fifteen minutes. We slipped out of the harbour at noon, with the expected ideal forecast of a ten to fifteen knot easterly breeze, good visibility, a maximum temperature of twenty-three degrees centigrade and – of course – no rain.

  6. Aden to Port Sudan

  It took us just twenty hours to sail the one hundred miles to the island of Perim, the Yemeni (formerly British) island at the southern entrance to the Red Sea. We kept close to the coast all the way, in depths varying from twenty metres to fifty metres; and so had wonderful views of the rugged mountainous terrain to starboard. To port there were many ships bound to and from the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb.

  The main shipping lane lay between Perim Island and the coast of Africa (Djibouti), ten miles to the south-west. For years I had remembered a phrase from my diary, written twenty-nine years earlier (aged six) while on passage from Hong Kong to England with my parents and brothers on the liner, the Hamburg. The phrase went something like: ‘I fort Djibouti would be horridle, but it was even more horridle than I fort.’

  I think that this childhood memory had tipped the scales in deciding me to stop in Aden instead.

  Years later, however, I saw this diary again and read it with renewed interest as Tin Hau and the Hamburg had sailed in so many of the same waters. I was amazed to see that the Hamburg’s time from Colombo to Suez (3,400 miles) had been a mere eight days, including the stop in Djibouti (at that time the capital of French Somaliland), compared to one hundred days on Tin Hau). I discovered also that my uneasiness about Djibouti had been ill-founded – I hadn’t actually felt it was too horrible. My words had actually been: ‘We came to Djibouti. I went ashore. I fort it was horridle but it was nicer than I fort. They are funny trains there.’

  So much for the accuracy of childhood memories!

  Returning to Tin Hau and the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, we chose to take the less used Small Strait – the narrow channel between Perim and mainland Yemen. This was a definite short cut when turning the corner into the Red Sea, and it was out of the shipping lane.

  We approached the strait at five o’clock in the morning under full sail with the easterly wind dead aft, sailing goosewinged. Erni steered. The closer we got, the more the wind increased and the steeper the waves became. I think we had quite a strong current with us, as the land on both sides appeared to shoot by at tremendous speed. It was exciting to pick out more and more detail, first with binoculars and later with the naked eye. The lighthouse, which we had spotted during the night at ten minutes to four, was by eight a.m. only a few hundred metres away. The echo sounder showed the depth was decreasing fast.

  Suddenly we were through. The sea became much calmer and the depth started to increase. We began to turn to starboard, expecting to gybe the main. But, as so often happens at headlands, the wind followed us round, gradually veering from east to south-east to south – and increasing in strength to force five. In the relatively calm seas Tin Hau shot along at six to seven knots. Soon, however, it became time to reef. Sailing overcanvassed and goosewinged in these conditions, although exhilarating, was hardly safe. A violent gybe could happen from either direction. Also, we could expect the sea to become rougher, with every mile covered, as the fetch increased. We gradually reefed the sails from six-six-six to six-five-four to five-five-four. In the middle of all this activity, Lynda noticed a tug on the fishing line (which we nearly always trailed) and hauled in a one metre long wahoo.

  By ten minutes past one we had sighted the buoy marking the entrance to Mokkha (a town of North Yemen, visited – we heard later – by Rick and Julie on Yemanja II, who had also made an interesting trip inland). The water depths remained steady at about twenty-two metres; and the sea state was moderate to rough, the steep eight-foot waves still chasing us from behind. I wanted to reduce sail further and alter course. First, before I could decide which sails to gybe, I had to work out exactly where we were. Unfortunately the radar – still the original one at that time – did not help at all. I did not want to stray too close to the North Yemen shore on our starboard side, as the authorities had a reputation – similar to that of the Ethiopians twenty miles to the south-west of us – of being unfriendly to foreign yachtsmen. We were all spy ships or gunrunners, they thought. Nor did I want to become entangled with the busy shipping lane a mile or so to port.

  The crew were becoming increasingly agitated as they awaited my decision.

  At twenty minutes past one I had nearly finished my furious plottings at the chart table, when... Bang! Crash! Something had come adrift in a nasty unplanned gybe. It did not take long for us to realise that the mizzen yard had broken in two – just aft of the eye where the halyard was attached.

  We gathered in the sail bundle as quickly as possible – scrambling around on the pilothouse roof – and lashed it to the gallows. Then we gybed the foresail and reefed both foresail and main to only three panels of each, thus sailing three-three-zero. We should have done this twenty minutes earlier, but I had been too engrossed in other things.

  Although everything seemed much safer under the reduced sail, our speed was still 4.2 knots (plus current). I wanted to anchor somewhere to recover from the shock and assess the damage, but the only possibility – the twenty-five mile long Hanish group of islands thirty miles ahead – would be passed during the hours of darkness. I considered various ways of slowing down still further, but with such little room to manoeuvre between the Yemeni shore and the shipping lane – and with unknown currents – I decided against this idea. It was a pity, as there were some attractive anchorages and beaches on these nearly uninhabited islands.

  Instead, I decided that we would stop at the Zubair Islands , seventy miles beyond Hanish, and reachable, I calculated, before darkness the following day.

  The wind continued to increase during the night and the sea became rougher, but under such reduced sail we had no real difficulty in tacking downwind, gybing every three hours or so. Several reefs had to be identified and avoided; we made certain that we never, quite, joined the shipping lane.

  By the next morning, Lynda and Martyn felt refreshed enough to spend several hours on the pilothouse roof fitting a new yard. First they released from the sail the two broken pieces of the original mahogany yard. These they secured to the main cabin top in place of two of the spare bamboos that we had been carrying around for so long and which had never been needed until that moment. Painstakingly, in the continued rough seas, they lashed these two bamboos together to form a new yard, which they tied once again to the sail and halyard. Their repair work was so good that we did not have to make any more changes until Cyprus, where the original yard was fixed.

  At ten minutes past two, the Zubair Islands were sighted dead ahead. I decided that we would still try to stop there. We all needed the rest.

  Leaving the main island close to starboard, we made our approach. We spotted four or five dhows at anchor within a small bay on the leeward side of the island. Towering over this anchorage was a steep extinct volcano, the most barren piece of earth we had ever seen.

  At half past five, just before dusk, we dropped anchor amongst the dhows in water ten metres deep. The wind howled in the rigging and the wind generator worked overtime in gusts of thirty-five knots. But, with seventy metres of chain and nylon warp let out, we were more than safe. We could relax over a sun-downer, enjoy a good meal and sleep.

  We ended up staying nearly three days at Zubair. Darren and Martyn went ashore and climbed the volcano. I tried to video the two small dots as they worked their way up the steep incline, but it was difficult to hold the camera still with Tin Hau rolling so much in the open anchorage. Lynda – by now the expert video camera operator after hours of dolphin filming between Galle and Aden – left me to it. She was feeling very sick, as she had been in Aden. There was definitely something amiss with
her health. Hopefully things would just get better on their own.

  I made the most of the opportunity to give the hull a really good clean, appreciating the first clear water for this job since Chagos ten months earlier. The sea temperature was still nearly twenty-six degrees centigrade, quite warm enough for all sorts of weed, molluscs and other marine creatures to flourish.

  I also carried out a thorough service of the engine, checked the batteries and generally gave Tin Hau the TLC (Tender Loving Care) that she deserved. We gazed across in admiration at the beautiful dhows. These were lovely brightly painted vessels with large crews. There were no covered cabins on deck – the men slept out in the open. One of them came by to give us a large fish, a gift much appreciated by all of us.

  On the morning of Tuesday, 26th January, the dhows started to leave the anchorage, which was a sure sign that we could go as well. We set off at ten o’clock, bound for Port Sudan four hundred miles distant.

  For the first forty-eight or so hours, in winds of less than five knots and waves no higher than two feet, we drifted gently in the right direction, and no more. I resisted all temptation to turn on the engine, as I knew that, if we waited long enough, a wind of favourable direction and strength would arrive. Besides, it was pleasant just to drift. Martyn passed much of his time sprawled out in the hammock reading more books from Tin Hau’s library (he confessed to never having read a book for pleasure before joining us – in Galle we had started him off with The Secret Life of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾). Darren squatted on the foredeck wrapped in his lungi (a sarong-like garment), contemplating the horizon and looking like a native of southern India. Lynda always seemed to be busy with something below decks, yet she invariably spotted the ship on the horizon long before her watchful crew – or skipper – had seen anything. I kept myself occupied at the chart table – immersed in charts, pilots, atlases and any other books that would tell me more about the fascinating Red Sea.