We take a car and visit the nearby towns and desert – Sousse, Kairouan and El Djem. Knowing little of the history, I am perturbed to learn that this country was full of lush forests before the Roman occupation, when it was turned into desert as a result of over-farming. Even after 2000 years, it remains a desert. I stare with renewed horror at the immense tracts of sand. I grew up thinking that nature was infinitely forgiving, and infinitely capable of renewal. I now know how wrong that is, but with all the science and the growing knowledge of Western society, this lesson was here to learn, yet we didn’t learn it.
We are happy to move on, but first there’s Ted’s birthday to think about.
‘I’ve seen what I’d like for my birthday present,’ Ted says one hot Tunisian evening over sundowners. ‘And it’s small!’
(There’s a rule about purchases, they have to be tiny – there’s no extra stowage room on Blackwattle.)
There’s a strange look on his face, so I am immediately guarded.
‘That’s good, darling, if you’re sure it’s small. What is it?’
There’s a pause.
‘Well, it’s very small for what it is.’
‘What do you mean “for what it is”?’ My antennae are up – this is sounding more and more suspicious.
‘Well it is a very small one of these.’
‘Ted.’ Patiently. ‘Tell me now, what is it?’
‘It’s an aviary.’
There’s another slight pause, as I absorb this choice of birthday present.
Finally, weakly: ‘You can’t have an aviary on a boat.’
‘It’s a small aviary.’
And he’s right, it is small for an aviary. And that’s why we now have a large Tunisian ornamental birdcage swinging from the ceiling in the forward cabin. Any comment of mine inserted here would be superfluous.
It’s time to head for Sardinia for some Italian food and to practise a little Italian. I am also looking forward to some swimming in a pleasant anchorage – there have been too many crowded marinas for me, Crete, Malta and now Tunisia . . .
The morning of departure, waiting impatiently to complete formalities, we spy our customs officer coming. He strides down the wharf, resplendent in his perfectly laundered khaki uniform, complete with ribbons and tassels, a big taut girth, moustachioed, a broad smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, confident of his authority. Behind him saunters an even bigger man, but flabby and drooping-shouldered, dressed in crumpled grey shirt and trousers.
‘Aha! Blackwattle, I am Mohammed, the Customs Investigation Officer, you are wanting to check out from Tunisia?’
They come on board with great difficulty – stiff-legged, neither of them can negotiate the bow easily. We stand helpless for fear of embarrassing them, trying not to notice the scrambling that goes on. It could be considered quite unwise to giggle at a customs officer in a foreign port.
Below, they fill our small saloon to overflowing with noise and movement. ‘Do you have any drinks for us?’ begins the sidekick, hovering from foot to foot and darting his eyes around the saloon. I flash my best smile, knowing, after much experience now with ‘check-in procedures’, that they are asking for baksheesh – something like a bottle of Scotch.
‘Yes, of course – it is very hot isn’t it?’ I gush. ‘We have Coke, and coffee, tea, juice? What would you like?’
‘Ah yes, it is very interesting you are our guest, and now we are your guest. Very interesting.’
I suspect that ‘guest’ means presents, but I busy myself getting Cokes for all and passing them around. Ted has produced our ship’s papers for inspection.
‘No, no, we have seen those,’ says the customs officer, waving them away magnanimously. ‘I must just look around. Of course, you have your lady wife here, so there will not be any Tunisian girls here, no need for me to look for those. That boat next to you with the Englishman and no wife, well, that’s where I need to look.’ He promenades up and down in our tiny saloon, looking around vaguely.
It’s Sidekick again. ‘Do you have any chocolate?’
I look sad. ‘No, no chocolate.’ (It’s in the fridge behind me.) ‘But I have chocolate biscuits!’ I rush to the cookie jar, and helpfully point out the ones with the most chocolate in them.
The officer spins around. ‘Ah, cakes! How I love cakes.’
I fill the silence by remarking how hot it is.
‘Yes, it is Man,’ says the officer.
‘Man?’
‘Yes, Man is ruining the world. This summer is too hot, the winter was too cold. The weather is going bad because Man is ruining the world.’
I am astonished at this sudden shift.
‘Do you smoke?’ asks Sidekick. A one-track mind this man has . . .
‘They’ll kill you,’ says Ted.
‘Do you have a computer?’ asks the officer.
Oh no, I think, surely they don’t want our computer.
Ted shows him one of our computers and, without warning, the customs officer produces a memory stick. ‘I have a present for you,’ he says and copies some Arab prayers in beautiful calligraphy onto the computer.
‘Do you have any batteries?’ It’s Sidekick, not giving up.
Ted opens his battery trove.
‘A3s, A3s!’ says Sidekick excitedly. He takes a handful, and our visitors leave, finally, with their ‘present’.
Such is Tunisia.
We sail north for Sardinia, but it is not to be. The northern waters of the Mediterranean are wild with gales. We receive emails from our old friends Jay and Carol on Gandalf. They are holed up in an anchorage in Sardinia because eighty-knot winds have persisted for three days. They dare not even leave the boat in those conditions. Weather forecasts in the north continue to be dire, so there is nothing for us to do except turn away from our course and head for the Balearics. We stay south for several days, running along the coastline of Algeria to avoid the gales, planning to head north later. Here the wildlife starts to appear, hunting birds and dolphins, our old friends. However, the northerly gales continue and are now affecting the Balearics. We continue to track west, and will now head straight for Gibraltar. We change course accordingly. One never knows what will lie ahead when one is cruising.
Several days later, peering through binoculars, we sight not a rock of any sort but Gibraltar’s vast cloud, and, guided by this, find a home in the waters of La Linea, a pleasant and wide anchorage tucked neatly under the overhanging Rock, on the Spanish side of the border. Here we meet many cruising friends from the Red Sea, including Chatti and Fantasy1, friends we are to meet again and again as we make our separate ways across the oceans.
So we have transited the Mediterranean. It has been fast, but by choice we are shunning the more touristy ports, and look forward to visiting countries that we haven’t visited before, and are unlikely to visit unless on a yacht. We are now anticipating the next great adventure – crossing our second ocean: the Atlantic!
12. Land of Volcanoes
Gibraltar to Graciosa Island
It’s a dank place, Gibraltar, because of the Levante, the easterly breeze that causes a great pear-shaped cloud to spread from the top of the Rock every morning like a white shroud suspended over our lives. The locals complain of asthma and arthritis.
Each morning, we find all the outside surfaces are moist with a wretched dew. The cabin top and covered cockpit are both as wet as if from rain, and water drips depressingly from the awnings and booms. The damp even seeps down through the saloon and the cabins, making everything clammy and humid to the touch.
By midday the cowardly sun finally shines through and burns away the mists, giving us fine afternoons. The boat is dry by three o’clock, but by six the dew builds again. Like the locals, we long for the Poniente, but this dry wind from the west is not for sailing south to the Canaries, so
when it does come and the weather clears, we must wait for the Levante to return to speed us on our way. We wish to sail south from here before the winter gales make the voyage a miserable experience, but we cannot cross the Atlantic until the hurricane season is over, so it means filling in time between September and the end of November. Cruising the Canaries sounds like a good plan.
Aside from the humidity it causes, the Rock certainly is a magnificent sight. Not merely visually, but geologically also, as the Rock is different from its surrounding terrain. It’s a little bit of Africa from aeons ago, abandoned by the great African continent when it crashed into and then split again from Europe. Culturally, it’s also very different from the surrounding terrain, a tiny globule of England dropped in between Spain and Morocco, and we find its very Englishness constantly entertaining.
The main street is ingeniously called Main Street. This is a horse-and-carriage-width walking street, featuring such English icons as British bobbies, Marks & Spencer, and lots of English pubs called delightfully absurd names like The Friar’s Hat, serving typical British pub fare and a Sunday roast. There’s even a London-style political demonstration or two in Main Street!
We take the aerial gondola to the top of the Rock and, with all the other backpack-toting tourists, run, laugh and squeal, frightened of the apes which scratch and bite and leap on your head to grab your lunch if they can . . . so we fill in our time while we wait for the Levante.
We also spend time with our fellow cruisers in the anchorage, planning our escape through the famed Pillars of Hercules and out into the Atlantic. The Straits of Gibraltar are a curious small challenge for the sailor. The evaporation of the Mediterranean is so great, and it has so few rivers, that it is one metre lower than the Atlantic Ocean, which creates a shallow waterfall effect as the ocean rushes in through the strait trying to fill the Mediterranean. This, combined with tidal flows, some overfalls, currents, vagaries of the weather forecasts, and the 80,000 ships a year that pass that way, makes a complex situation for the wandering sailor.
It’s the end of September when the Levante returns, and our leaving is precisely timed to catch the tides. Just after daylight, engines whispering and anchor chains making soft growling noises, we slip out of the anchorage, three boats together, Fantasy1, Chatti and Blackwattle. Our hulls make small wash-waves in the satin-grey stillness of the water but that’s all we leave behind, and soon that will be gone as well.
Apart from an early-bird sailor drinking coffee in his cockpit who waves goodbye, most of the anchored boats are still sleeping as we move into the main channel of Gibraltar, sliding past the lines of great ships at anchor, towering above us. There’s movement up there, silhouetted bodies moving smartly around the decks, early-morning duties.
It’s momentous, this moving from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. We arrived in the Med at Port Said on 24 May 2004, and two years, four months and two days later we are leaving to start our next great ocean journey. By three in the afternoon, we’re clear of the land. There’s still mist around – a brown mist to the north over Europe, that bastion of progress and modernity; and a pure white mist to the south over Africa, that ‘backward’ continent that hasn’t learned properly yet how to poison the air it breathes. Birds hunt low to the water, skating over the waves. There are cuttlefish floating, and seaweed, and two, no three pods of dolphins putting on a display. One charcoal form leaps clear out of the water, its snow-white underbelly shining wet as it arcs back below the surface. Damn! Too fast for my camera!
After several days and nights of blissful downwind sailing, smooth seas, fragrant nights and sun-filled days, the Canaries are in sight – clear black shapes, without foliage, volcanic. Drawing closer, I can only see white rectangular blocks breaking the stark monotony of black rock.
‘It looks like a giants’ cemetery,’ I comment. ‘Or maybe one of those temporary mining towns full of portable buildings.’
Graciosa is a minute island at the far north of the Canary Islands, formed from the remains of five volcanoes and their black-streaked lava overflows. Today the volcanoes still brood over the prickly saltbush which spreads along the yellow sand of the long, deserted beaches.
The houses are white, flat-roofed with traditional Spanish blue windows and doors, and holiday tourism has replaced fishing as the primary industry. The local men, old and young, sit in the sun, and holidaymakers troop along the shoreline and laze in the shallows. Homeowners plant palms, cacti and prickly pear, and make stone gardens from the different colours of volcanic rock. The roads between the houses are soft yellow sand, and nowhere is very far, so walking or riding a bicycle is the happy solution. Sometimes the post office has no stamps and sometimes the internet cafe just doesn’t open. And though the marina has electricity and water outlets, they’ve never been connected. It’s laissez-faire for the locals and ‘make do’ for the visitors. We haul our water, all desalinated, from the town centre by jerry can.
This is a good place to wait for the end of the hurricane season. The marina is full of cruisers intending to cross the Atlantic this year, and we work on our boats, getting them ready for the long passage. Everyone is hammering, scrubbing, polishing and painting. When not occupied with maintenance, we hike the beaches, climb the volcanoes, explore the nearby island of Lanzarote, and swim in the clear, fresh water. We’re reluctant to leave, but in November we sail southwards to Las Palmas in Gran Canaria to join more than 200 boats in the annual Atlantic Rally for Cruisers – otherwise known as the ARC – now in its twenty-first year. Many European yachts use the ARC as a way of ‘getting their feet’ on their first ocean crossing, others come back time and time again, enjoying the camaraderie of joining other cruising sailors to cross the Atlantic. We’ve never been in a formal rally, and we’re looking forward to the adventure, little realising just how much of an ‘adventure’ we are destined to have . . .
13. Skippers are From Hell
The Canary Islands to the mid-Atlantic
Arriving in the enormous marina in Las Palmas, we find hundreds of yachts already gathered from twenty different countries, preparing their boats for the Atlantic crossing. Safety is a high priority for the ARC organisers, and all participating boats must pass stringent safety tests.
I will forever remember Las Palmas for its white skies. In the shadowless light of morning, the dock hums with activity. Above the buzz of human conversation a dog barks somewhere, and there’s the sound of confused flapping of hundreds of flags – most boats are ‘dressed’ in a glorious cacophony of colourful fabric. Below, a body writhes in the water cleaning his hull. Above, a long-limbed man dangles from his mast, calling out instructions. Tantalising smells of curry waft across the dock, hinting of pre-cooked meals for the journey, and cartons of beer are being handed into an aft cockpit. Here on Blackwattle, I doggedly finish varnishing our gunwale.
It’s a familiar cruising scene in some ways, but lacks the easy feeling of a normal marina – people walk with purpose, attend to their duties. We have just hours to go before all of us – all 232 boats and 1100 people – set off for one of the most famous cruising passages of all, the Atlantic crossing. For the last couple of weeks the crews have toiled all day and partied most of the night, at multiple parties held by the ARC organisers.
On Blackwattle we’ve repaired, installed, hosed, cleaned, varnished and put on enough food to reach Galapagos. We’ve route-planned fifteen different scenarios, but we reckon the trip will take about nineteen days. We’ve studied the weather until I’m dreaming about isobars, and attended so many cocktail events that I can’t wait to get to sea. Nothing for it now but to depart. I wonder what the ocean will have in store for us this time . . .
The marina is quiet as we sneak out earlier than the other boats to take pictures of the start. The morning is surprisingly sunny, a tiny breeze rustling in the flocks of flags above, but there’s little activity on the wharves. Soon enough we are surrounded
by the other 231 boats, and spinnakers glow brightly all the way to the horizon, like multicoloured petals fallen on the water. Ted has agreed to be a controller of a ‘sched’, those regular radio roll-calls that are critical to knowing the whereabouts and welfare of the yachts.
I’ve never been among 232 sailing boats in an event before. It is worth being in the ARC just for this experience. We speed along, enjoying the spectacle for most of the afternoon. By night the boats fade into twinkles in every direction and, as if by design, a crescent moon rides high with our course directly in her path.
By morning, the yachts have scattered and we can see only three on the horizon. But the wind is up, and we must pay attention. Blackwattle rocks drunkenly in a sideways sea – we move around like tree-climbing monkeys (I wish I had a tail sometimes), holding on against the wild rocking. We have wind up to twenty-eight knots, but mostly twenty to twenty-five, from the north-east, just what we want. About nineteen days and 2900 miles to go . . .
As the days pass and we head deeper into the Atlantic, my now-familiar euphoria grows until it becomes a constant flooding of sweet air into my chest. At night, rushing into a moonless black, the faint white glow of breaking water tells me Blackwattle’s sliding down a wave. It’s a soft landing. I think of the roller coaster at Luna Park, or the rides at the Ekka in Brisbane, where I grew up. It’s cold. I’m wearing my beanie and three layers of warm gear. In the soft humid warmth below decks, Ted sleeps. All I can see is red and green glowing squares with electronic numbers – the speed, the direction, the water depth, our position on earth; small helpful friends to get us to the other side of the ocean. Serenaded by the swish of water and waves, I can also hear reminders that there are other friends – the whine and click of the autopilot, the occasional growl of the trailing generator, its white rope spinning wildly out into the dark waters behind us, making electricity. Further out is the faintest furry horizon line dividing the dark sea from a sky full of stars.
Shooting Stars and Flying Fish: Swapping the boardroom for the seven seas Page 20