Shooting Stars and Flying Fish: Swapping the boardroom for the seven seas

by Nancy Knudsen

  Our old friends Suzy and Robin on True Blue are in Ayvalik as well, and they decide to join us. Together, each of us proudly sporting our new Spade anchors, we sneak out of Ayvalik Bay in the calm of an early morning. Blackwattle is elated to be on her way again, heading for the unknown. As we stream between misty islands out into the open sea with Simon shouting at dolphins from the bow, I try to remember our first departure, from Pittwater in Sydney. I can remember the faces of dear friends, the way the sun glistened on the boat, but the memory is shallow, has no depth, like the unreality of a dream. It is little more than three years ago, but it could be another lifetime. A small voice in my ear immediately replies: It was another lifetime. My next thought is unexpected. Then I carried a heavy load, and now the load is gone. I had carried my history of assumptions, attitudes, postures, prejudices, expectations and responsibilities on my shoulder, and they seem to have vanished, fallen overboard, disappeared in the wake, washed away by the rain and the snow over Istanbul. My old self-perception has vanished, the lens through which I view the world has changed colour. I thought of going sailing as a dream to be realised. Now I know that sailing was the least of it. My past – which had enslaved me, though I didn’t know it – has been wiped away. It was the dream, the unreality, from which I have, finally, woken. Awareness is not something that can be picked up, like a book, and read. It is more like a ladder to be climbed. How far up the ladder am I? And how high is the ladder?

  Some things about the beginning of our voyage I can remember easily, I can laugh remembering how I sailed in circles that first memorable night, how we nearly sank the boat by creating a vacuum in the plumbing, how we had no clue about anchoring. The boat and I are as one now, she will breathe her needs as surely as if she was a flighty horse and I, her rider, will know how to respond or bring her to heel. My trepidations about leaving Turkey are folded into the wake and I lose myself in the joy of being at sea again.

  Wanting to avoid the overly touristy areas, we head south through the Greek Islands, with the African coastline in mind. Checking in to Greece at the island of Lesvos, we find the harbour of the port of Mytilene lined with dozens of fishing boats and cargo ships, yachts and motorboats. From the land comes a barrage of noise from revving motor scooters, squealing brakes, blaring horns, thumping music and thousands of tourists. It’s hardly convivial, and it’s not what we came for, so once checked in we escape quickly and find a quaint anchorage on the other side of the island – Skala Loutra.

  Skala is a tiny collection of waterside cottages and Loutra a splash of village houses halfway up the mountain. The rest is thick ancient olive trees growing in the flaxen grass, with rock terraces stretching up the mountainsides. On its own hilltop high above Loutra is a simple whitewashed church, with a pathway leading clearly up the mountain. The sounds are different here – the church bells ring in the mornings and a donkey brays. We’re back in a Christian culture, and I have a momentary rush of sadness for the loss of our five-times-daily call to prayer.

  We dine in the tiny restaurant on the shore. A warm breeze blesses the velvet dark evening as we drink carafes of a local rosé with our fresh calamari and wonder at the lighted pathway up to the tiny church, itself now floodlit like a beacon.

  When cloud lies over a Greek island, the wind will blow.

  While the wind blows, the cloud will stay.

  When the cloud goes, so will the wind.

  It’s old Greek mythology, but the locals swear by it, and the cloud keeps us happily imprisoned for several days as the boat strains against a high wind.

  True Blue sails off – cruising is ever full of sad-sweet partings – and we head for Mykonos, Simon’s last port before he must wend his way back to Sydney.

  We discover Mykonos as we are to discover many Greek islands. A Greek island doesn’t appear first as a tiny line on the horizon that grows and develops into a solid mass; it emerges suddenly out of the salt mists of the sea, fully formed and towering. One becomes used to not watching the horizon for sign of land, but instead studying the air space above to pick up the mountain line.

  The famous island of Mykonos is barren except for the flowering of white houses, each with its own chapel. The intricately winding maze of narrow streets betrays that this was once the sweetest of fishing villages by the sea. Now she’s like an old lady with a heavily painted face, touting for business. The local shops have been turned into trendy boutiques, and the fishermen’s cottages are painted like Disneyland. Underfoot the grouting between the large stone cobbles is painted a vivid white – pleasant and clean. Then I realise that some of the alleyways are merely concrete yet have been painted to look as if they are cobblestones with grouting. The falseness is disturbing.

  The soul of Mykonos, whatever that was, is gone, replaced by a cute but empty grab for the tourist dollar. Every corner is a photo opportunity, every restaurant a caricature of old Greece. The Lonely Planet guide says: ‘There are more posers per square metre here than anywhere else in Greece.’ They may be right. We three enjoy the atmosphere and the food, nevertheless – although we feel we are buying shares in each restaurant.

  The tourists’ attitudes to visiting these islands are summed up for me by a conversation on the beach. Simon is swimming, Ted is boat-pottering, and I am sunbaking quietly on warm sand, eyes shut, when I overhear an English voice nearby. The dialect is northern, maybe Lancashire or Yorkshire.

  ‘You know, I’m very impressed with Mykonos. Yes, it’s got it all, really. It’s got the T-shirts, and the shops and bars and all that, yes, and the food, yes, the food is good, that was good bangers and mash we had yesterday, wasn’t it?’

  Fascinated, I open one eye enough to observe the speakers: the voice comes from Husband, newly reddened skin from sunburn, fair spiky hair, small tattoo on his wrist, staring out to sea, speaking to Wife, small bikini, large hat, attentive eyes, nodding.

  ‘Well if I had to criticise, I would just probably say, about the T-shirts, they’ve got the basic T-shirts, like the “I’ve been to Mykonos” T-shirts, but they don’t have the, you know, the classy T-shirts, not the really classy ones. Ibiza has those, Ibiza’s much better for shirts. Yes, but it’s good, of course it’s good, I wouldn’t say it wasn’t good, just, you know, the T-shirts, they could be better.’

  Simon, with another life to lead, his own adventures to find, leaves all too soon to catch two ferries, a bus and an aeroplane back to Sydney, and my heart is heavy. We’re on our own again. No more friends will join us, as mostly our way is uncertain, and we must go with the weather. We are to be sea gypsies once more, sailing at the whim of the natural forces around us.

  We drift ever south through the Greek Islands. Paros is our favourite, especially the village of Naoussa. As with most Greek islands, all is white stucco, with a blue-domed chapel in every vista, and bougainvillea billowing over walls. We love strolling the narrow streets where people go about their daily lives, washing, chatting, drinking coffee.

  However Turkey it is not, as we discover when we seek directions one afternoon. It’s sunny and warm, and we want to find the post office. Locals are casually helpful, nodding and pointing up the street. We walk, looking, and keep asking. ‘Yes,’ they say, ‘further along – keep going.’ It’s now very hot in the sun and the dusty street is winding up a steep hill and out of town.

  ‘This can’t be right, we must have missed it – we’re too far out of town,’ says Ted, stopping, morose. There are three men sitting in an outdoor taverna, heads together, sipping Coke.

  They glance up briefly when we ask. ‘It’s a ten-minute walk up that road,’ one disturbs himself enough to mumble. ‘Past the bakery.’

  We slog it out through ever-more-deserted residential streets, checking our watches and perspiring freely in the heat.

  Finally, we find a building that has a large unreadable sign in Greek, and a small English sign to one side that says Hellenic Post. We
rush forward, and – it’s shut. The sign tells it all: 0900–1300. As we wind our irritated and perspiring way back towards town, the three Coke-sippers are still in the taverna.

  I can’t resist. ‘The post office – it is shut,’ I call out, as kindly as I can muster.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ nods the mumbling one. ‘Always shut, every afternoon.’ They turn away and go back to their conversation.

  We sail lazily south for a few days through the windy Cyclades islands and then sail overnight for Xania, on the large southerly island of Crete. With only a single headsail up we gently drift south, planning to arrive at first light. The breeze is refreshing, the water and sky are as dark as ebony, with only a few stars high above us. Blackwattle sways along through an invisible whispering sea, and a hazy red moon appears low in the sky at the 1 am watch change.

  ‘I give you the moon,’ I whisper close to Ted’s sleeping ear to wake him for his watch.

  ‘Mmmgrh what what – ghrmhmm,’ is his rather unromantic reply.

  Xania is light and earth-toned, with decorative buildings of a past age crammed around the port. Venetian ruins have been thoughtfully preserved and even at first glance it is obvious that Crete treasures and protects her past ferociously.

  The eating is superb, and we relish all the Greek specialities: moussaka, Greek salad with the very best feta, grilled octopus and calamari and the mouth-watering galacta boureki. Just as well we’re enjoying ourselves – unseasonable gales hatch in the Aegean and it becomes too dangerous to leave Xania.

  We take a car and tour the island. Winding ever upwards through the villages festooned with bougainvillea and allamanda, the roads grow steeper and steeper, with perilous switchback roads and thousand-foot drops, until we are swathed in clouds. The well-kept goats and sheep have right of way on the roads, so the going is slow. We press on, mesmerised by our surroundings. Too high for the goats now, the trees have given way to stumpy windblown things, and then they too are gone and it’s prickly pear and wild gorse and thousands of nettles. The wind is fresh and wild up here, and the air is thin and damp with racing clouds.

  Finally the weather settles, and we set off westwards, heading for Malta.

  ‘Oh, I feel terrible,’ I grizzle at the end of one watch.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ says Ted, putting on his harness to commence his watch.

  ‘I must have caught a bug.’

  ‘You can’t catch a “bug” in the middle of the Mediterranean,’ he says, sweetly reasonable. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I have a terrible headache, and I feel like I’m dying.’

  He pauses, considering the situation.

  ‘You’ve probably got scurvy.’

  ‘Scurvy?’ My thumping head can’t quite compute this. ‘What do you mean “scurvy”?’

  ‘You haven’t been eating enough onions,’ he goes on, climbing up into the cockpit.

  ‘Onions? Onions?’

  ‘Of course,’ he says. ‘That’s why Captain Cook’s men never got scurvy – because he always took onions on the ship. If you’d been eating enough onions you wouldn’t have scurvy now.’

  ‘You’re making it worse,’ I say, thinking of our vegetable-rich diet.

  ‘Me?’ Innocent Man. ‘How can I be making it worse?’ He’s up on deck now, clipping on to a strong point.

  ‘Laughing makes my head hurt.’

  ‘Drink three glasses of water, take two Panadol, and go to bed.’

  ‘Panadol is good for scurvy?’

  ‘Yup, if you refuse to eat onions, next best thing.’

  I crawl into bed, about to die, but giggling. I guess you can’t expect a guy to be a good sailor, bad comedian and a health expert as well.

  For three days Blackwattle leaps forward over the crests like an enthusiastic puppy out for a walk. She strains at the sheets, keeping up a brisk six knots with only one headsail and the main hoisted. But the breeze lightens and finally croaks a little and dies. Then we float this way and that for two days, waiting, waiting for the wind.

  A flash of thought to turn on the engine is immediately rejected. We still have a long way to go, and the image of spending long days and nights with an engine grinding relentlessly as background music is not what we’re here for.

  Great goliaths of ships begin to blunder past us. We must be in a shipping lane. A haze develops that is so great that ships loom, fully formed, only a few miles from us, giving us little time to manoeuvre ourselves out of the way. We reduce our ‘time between horizon scans’ to eight minutes instead of twelve. They look so efficient and powerful, these grand monster ships, and the radio communications between them on VHF radio are mostly brusque and formal, but occasionally they are very entertaining. Here’s one example, heard on Channel 16:

  British accent, clipped: ‘Container ship Anaconda, Anaconda, Anaconda, this is Blue Skies.’

  No response.

  ‘Anaconda, Anaconda, Anaconda, this is Blue Skies. Come in, please.’

  Over and over we hear the same call without response. Then: ‘ANACONDA, ANACONDA, ANACONDA. THIS IS BLUE SKIES ON YOUR PORT BOW!’

  Finally, a muffled, accented, almost furtive whisper: ‘Anaconda, uh-huh.’

  ‘Anaconda, good morning, sir. What are your intentions?’

  ‘Anaconda, uh-huh.’

  Another pause. Now we’re sitting up, listening intently.

  ‘Anaconda, will you go starboard or port?’

  ‘Yes, go starboard.’

  ‘Very well, Captain, then we shall pass port to port.’

  ‘Yes, okay, go port.’

  ‘Er, Captain, you will go starboard, and we will pass port to port?’

  Pause. We are waiting for a collision noise.

  ‘Captain! Port to port? Red to red?’

  ‘Red to red! Ah yes, unnerstand red to red!’

  ‘Thank you, Captain, red to red. Have a good day, sir.’

  We drift ever westwards. I love these hazy night watches. After the blazing red ball of a sun sets in the indistinct mistiness of the afternoon, the salt-smelling breeze is cooling to the skin. There’s no moon these days and the stars are piercingly bright. The Milky Way is so clear it creates a pale pathway across the sea, and Blackwattle seems to sneak like a cat across the empty expanse. The only break to the silence is the tinkle and swish of the water along the topsides. One finishes a watch salty-skinned and sleepy – three hours is just long enough!

  But there’s something wrong with this sea. We’ve been gradually becoming more disturbed about it, even while we were sailing in Turkish waters. There’s just nothing here. Nothing alive. No fish – no surface fish, anyway – and with no fish, there are no birds. Nothing. In daylight the water is so clear one can see the shafts of sunlight spearing deep into the brilliant midnight-blue emptiness.

  I remember the Indian Ocean, teeming with wildlife – dolphins, albatrosses, boobies, pilot whales and flying fish by the score. Always up to 200 miles from any shore, we would come across massive flocks of hunting birds, swooping low just above the waves or high up, gliding silhouettes above us in the sunshine. Sometimes, we would see the amazing long V formations of the migrations high overhead.

  And here, nothing. They say there are tuna to catch, deep down, but we sail lonely in our immense circle of sea.

  Malta appears out of the haze and greets us with a sailing race just outside the harbour – lots of Kevlar and spinnakers on show, many legs dangling on the windward sides, and a lot of shouting going on at the buoys. Some things are the same throughout the Western world.

  Malta proves to be an island of rock and stone, the natural and the contrived – grand buildings, a forest of church spires, sweeping arches and elaborate doorways. It’s just as well we like the marina we arrive at, because we are caught there for three weeks having our fuel tan
ks replaced after Ted discovers a leak. We explore the island by bus and our own bicycles when not presiding over the major repair. At the end of each hot and humid day, a swim in the Mediterranean is a fitting reward. For my birthday we celebrate at the famed Royal Malta Yacht Club, whose decor and our own dressy clothes for the occasion contrast a little with the bicycle limousines we use as transport. How little we shall ever care again.

  And Malta? It is the only country in the world – as opposed to an individual or organisation – ever to be awarded the George Cross by Britain. It was awarded for bravery during the Second World War, when Malta’s inhabitants showed themselves to be as tough as their island. Today, they’re still tough – or brusque might be a better word. So used to the smiling and generous hospitality of the Turkish people, we are at first affronted by the curtness of the local Maltese. However, their curtness is a style of delivery rather than an unwillingness to help, and there’s dry humour in their brevity.

  One character we meet says, ‘Australians are you? Do you have any relatives in Malta?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid we don’t.’

  He shakes his head disbelievingly. ‘That’s very strange, very strange. I can’t understand that – everyone in Malta has relatives in Australia.’

  Then there is Rosie. She arrives on the wharf, dark curly hair bouncing and sunshine faced, calling out to Blackwattle, ‘Hi, hey! I hear you are Australians? Guess what? So am I! I’m a Maltese–Australian, but I live here now. I’m Rosie!’

  We talk together, share sundowners, meals and adventures, and it’s another of those fleeting warm friendships that make us feel as though we’ve known her forever.

  From Malta we head for Lampedusa, the holiday island that doubles as a jail for Africans who try to enter Italy by leaky vessel and end up spending years on Lampedusa instead. Then we sail south to the African continent to pay a visit to Tunisia, which proves to be a flat desert country of prickly-pear hedges and women swathed in delicate colours. The covered meat markets are jewelled with flies, and the floors of the great halls stink with rotting vegetables. The street cafes are busy with men-only meetings.