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

by Nancy Knudsen

  But at the first clang the shouting starts. ‘What the f&%@ are you doing?!’ and more expletives. ‘Get that pole under control for f&%@’s sake!’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I shout back. ‘I was doing something!’

  By now I have yanked the brace and the pole has stopped its wild yawing. We swing it up into position.

  Ted’s returning to the cockpit. ‘How long have you been f&%@ing doing this on this f&%@ing boat? Ten years?!’

  The volume is quite loud, uninhibited, as we are out at sea.

  My head roars with anger and hurt feelings. ‘I told you: I was doing something. Why couldn’t you see that I was looking after the headsail sheet which was slipping off the boat? I had to save it!’

  ‘You can’t let the pole hit the forestay – you know that!’

  ‘But I didn’t know you were going to raise the pole at that instant. I wasn’t ready! You’re so used to my watching every move you make so that nothing goes wrong . . .’

  ‘Yes, you are supposed to be watching every move I make.’

  ‘Well normally I do, but what’s wrong with a simple “Are you ready?” And why can’t you watch me too? Why do I have to do all the watching?’

  Ted, obviously knowing more about the relationship between Discretion and Valour than I do, doesn’t answer.

  Here the similarity with the boxing ring ends, because here there is no umpire, and so we grumpily retire to our corners, doing the metaphorical equivalent of pouring cold water over our heads and bathing our faces with a wet towel. It takes at least fifteen minutes for the grumps to disappear. They float away behind us, drowning in the wake that streams out to the horizon.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘What a good idea! Sounds marvellous – thank you.’

  We’re heading for Palmerston Atoll, in the Cook Islands.

  23. The Story of Taia

  The Cook Islands

  It’s so quiet here, with just the soft wind whirring through the halyards, and our tiny courtesy flag trilling a flat song in the twenty-five-knot breeze. It’s almost dark now, shh, don’t make a noise, one solitary light towards land, three anchor lights from the other boats here.

  We’re in Palmerston Atoll, in the Cook Islands. ‘In’ is rather a misnomer. We are hanging on a mooring buoy, behind a reef, at least 600 nautical miles from the next landfall. It’s a coral atoll, and the islets are no higher than a metre or two above sea level. Below us is seventy five metres of water, and just behind, the water plunges to an unimaginable 4000 metres down a steep underwater cliff face.

  Not far away, out of the lee of this island, there are four-metre seas. Just a short while ago, great leviathans of waves, monstrous mountains of water, curvaceous, seductive even, legs, thighs and breasts of water, were writhing and curving around our boat. And now as the sun sets over the flat, palm-tree-encrusted islands spread along the reef, we sit, rum and Coke in hand, and marvel. I’m reminded of other remote atolls seen in our travels – Cocos Keeling, the Red Sea reefs, the Maldives. If our dinghy were set adrift now, there’s nothing between here and the Antarctic to stop it in its flight before the north-easterly wind.

  As we arrived into the lee of the atoll in the afternoon, a thickset man in an aluminium open boat sped out to our yacht to welcome us. Introducing himself hurriedly as Bob Marsters, with great skill he fastened us to this mooring ball which seems just metres from the reef. He told us he was the ‘great-times-five’ grandson of William Marsters, an Englishman who settled here in 1861. Sixty-seven people live on this atoll, he explained, and they are all members of the one family. Palmerston has no airport and no regular boat service. A freighter calls every three months or so with supplies, but irregularly, and that is their only contact with the outside world. Sixty-seven people. What would it be like to live in so remote a location with only sixty-six other people – all of them relatives?

  It’s only twenty-four hours later and already the young woman stands out, impressive, languorously graceful, moving like a young deer, eyes alert. Her name is Taia. She’s seventeen, serious most of the time, but when she smiles it’s a transformation, like a sunrise – warm and golden and lighting up the world around her.

  Her family is gentle and shy – as you would expect of people who live simply on a remote atoll in the middle of the Pacific. Their life is placid, and far away from the dramas of the world’s stage. That they should beget this shining, charismatic child is one of life’s mysteries.

  Taia even has a cute ‘lazy’ eye to make her more engaging. We talk to her about her island and her future. At school she excels in mathematics and science. We watch her twist and leap onto a boat with agility, get her arms elbow-deep in fish blood cleaning the metre-long tuna that her father brings home, then swiftly help her mother with the daily chores. Everything Taia does she does with fervour, with energy.

  ‘I want to be a nurse and travel the world,’ she says. These are big ambitions for a child whose only experience of the world so far is a single trip to Rarotonga. We admire her confidence, but then, bit by bit, the horrifying truth begins to emerge from small comments dropped in passing.

  Taia is losing her sight.

  Palmerston Atoll, part of the Cook Islands, is situated midway between Tonga to the west and Bora Bora to the east – about 600 miles in each direction. Only one of the many islands that dot the atoll is inhabited: Palmerston Island, which was first settled by William Marsters from Lancashire, who brought not one but three Polynesian wives with him. He divided the island into three sections, one for each family, and devised strict rules for intermarriage. The descendants of William Marsters still live as three separate families. Today, however, it is slightly easier to find a spouse that you are not related to; the irregular freighter gives some small contact with the outside world.

  As we walk the island I can’t help stopping frequently simply to stare. The water stripes across the lagoon – sand-coloured to aqua to azure, midnight blue and back to aqua. Above that the thin white line of surf tells of the reef edge, and above that again, sea to the horizon. Inland, the sand is spread with coconut and pandanus palms, and a little beach grass.

  Apart from the basic supplies which come with the freighter, like flour and rice (courtesy of relatives who live in Rarotonga), the locals live on fish, lobster, coconuts, papaya, bananas, mangoes and taro, all of which are available in plentiful supply without too much effort required to find them. They also keep pigs and chickens. For the umpteenth time on this journey I have cause to wonder where the rest of the world has gone wrong – why, in many ways, these are the richest people on earth.

  The passes are too shallow and dangerous for our rubber dinghies. We are ferried to the island each morning by Bob in his strong aluminium dinghy, a scary passage through strong rips and many rocky outcrops.

  Apart from the occasional freighter visit, passing yachts are the only diversion for the inhabitants. The families share the hosting of visiting sailors with sumptuous food and inclusion in their family life for a while. There’s no money on the island so yachties find other ways of repaying the islanders. The ways vary – gasoline is always in short supply and fresh fruit and vegetables, apart from the few staples, are like gold, as their soil is sandy and unproductive.

  A double line of coconut trees marks the boundaries between the families, and they are fiercely protective of their part of the island, even having their own cemeteries. Only the church, William Marsters’ original house and the school with twenty-eight children are shared.

  The simple huts among the coconut palms are homely and clean. Building materials are is obviously scarce, and it’s a proud house which is painted. Water is collected in tanks, then carried to huge barrels which sit outside the houses. The electricity is connected via a communal generator, and funding its fuel and maintenance is the only reason the islanders need money at all. There
is no shop. Roosters and their hens, fed only on cracked-open coconuts, run happily among the playing children, and pigs have their own corner of the island.

  Recently Cook Island authorities, heavily funded by New Zealand, installed a telephone with a satellite connection in the middle of a sandy clearing, along with a small shed which houses a computer connected to the internet. Above the shed is a block of solar panels which power the unit. Most of the islanders don’t know how to use the equipment, but the students are being taught, and that’s a beginning.

  When work is done – fishing, cleaning, sweeping the sand, feeding the chickens and pigs – they sing together, make baskets and other containers from palm leaves, make jewellery and hair decorations from shells, feathers, fishbones and coral. Grace is said solemnly before meals, taken on a long raw-wood table under a rough shelter on the white sands. It’s a million-dollar view through the leaning coconut palms across the lagoon.

  So what of Taia?

  I talk to the only nurse on the island – there is no doctor.

  ‘I’m quite angry with the doctors and the hospital in Rarotonga,’ she tells me frankly. ‘I told them about Taia’s condition more than a year ago, and they delayed. Now, there will be no eye surgeons in Rarotonga until April 2008.’

  A quick calculation tells me that’s eight months away.

  The nurse goes on, ‘About eighteen months ago, Taia began to see shadows in her lazy eye. Now she has lost all sight in that eye, and her good eye is starting to fail.’ She shakes her head sadly, accepting that Taia will just have to wait until April next year.

  I talk to her parents.

  ‘Yes,’ her mother tells me, ‘we understand that Taia can have eye surgery, we hope next year, and then go to nursing school. The money is the problem – it will cost about $1000 for the operation, and we have nothing like that, so we are hoping to borrow the money from a bank in Rarotonga. My husband is the mayor here now, and so we get $200 a month, which we normally use to buy flour and rice – we can cut back and use some of that money to pay back the loan.

  ‘Last time we went on the freighter to Rarotonga to see the specialists, we waited and waited for two months, but they didn’t come to Rarotonga that year, so we had to come home. We’re just hoping that next April . . .’ Taia’s mother’s voice drifts off, but there’s a worried trail across her forehead.

  In the meantime, Taia has no worried trails on her face. She looks as if she is bounding into the future, hair flying, optimism streaming out behind her, brown legs a blur as she runs across the sand, chasing her father with his forgotten sunglasses as he goes fishing.

  As we dine on tuna straight from the sea and fried coconut patties, I ask about the chooks running free around the sands.

  ‘Do they lay many eggs?’ I ask.

  ‘An egg,’ replies Taia seriously, and there’s a wisdom in her voice that belies her age, ‘will feed one person. If you let the egg hatch, one day the same egg will feed four people.’

  ‘Sometimes we eat an egg,’ adds her mother, ‘but not often.’

  As we sail away from the atoll a few days later, with memories that we will cherish forever, it saddens me that the remoteness of the island – offering such a simple, beautiful lifestyle in an increasingly dirty and polluted world – may also end up being the cause of Taia’s loss of sight.

  Waving farewell, it is Taia’s beautiful smile that I see last, and I pray that she will see her modest ambitions fulfilled.

  Postscript

  Troubled by our meeting with Taia, I made calls to a doctor friend, to Rotary in Australia, and wrote an article in Sail-World magazine about Taia which produced a flood of donations. After much communication between Australia and New Zealand, Taia was finally operated on in New Zealand. She was found to have a benign tumour, which was successfully removed. The sight she had lost could not be restored, but she has retained the sight she had. She still lives on Palmerston Island.

  24. The Old Man of the Sea

  Tonga to Fiji

  Tonga. Tonga. The word has the sound of a bell – not a clamorous Christmas bell; more like a lazy, sonorous cowbell. The Tongan people, with their slow movements, easy smiles and serene friendliness, make French Polynesia seem like the Fast Lane.

  Neiafu, the main village of Vava’u, is the kind of soporific place we’ve become used to. Like all these Polynesian villages, it’s a little scruffy in a sleepy way, with corrugated-iron walls fallen down across the street, abandoned buildings dotted among smartly outfitted boutiques. No one hurries, not even the few vehicles on the road.

  We are pressed by other cruisers to attend church on Sunday morning to hear the singing, and are not disappointed. With astonishment, and then tears, we listen to the soaring and gliding harmonies, the purity of the voices, the hymns delivered with enthusiasm and amazing volume. There’s a lot of fire and brimstone in the sermon that follows, but as we don’t understand the Polynesian language we don’t feel at all chastised.

  This is holiday yacht charter territory, and the place is brimming with visiting sailors. In the coffee shops the conversation is all about anchorages – all numbered, so that you need not remember difficult Polynesian names.

  ‘Did you like number seven?’

  ‘You must go to number thirteen – hard to enter, but wonderful once you’re there.’

  ‘We saw whales – let me explain. Go by number six and then . . .’

  There’s a falseness about this that is disturbing.

  But away from the charter-cruising areas, the ‘real’ Tonga is delightfully unspoiled. Snorkelling in the Swallows Cave offers some magic moments, and the Tongan feast put on by the local community is gratifyingly free of any hint of organisation by a foreign tour company. It’s tourism, certainly, but the grandmother of our hosting family sings traditional stories to us while the daughters sway and dance to the music. The food is served in shells and banana leaves, and is mostly local seafood dishes. They tell us they are raising money for the local school, and the welcome seems genuine and relaxed.

  The closer to Australia we are, the more we become part of a migrating horde of sailing boats all hoping to get to New Zealand or Australia before the start of the cyclone season. I begin to understand the feelings of those cruisers we have met who, having finished one circumnavigation, simply start again on another. I love my family and friends, but I love this life – how will I ever give it up?

  But Fiji beckons. We can’t delay anywhere too long, as the cyclone season is only a few weeks away . . .

  So we sail on. It’s an interesting sail, with many islands, reefs and atolls to pass, some of them at night. I can’t forget that the next stop is to be our second-last landfall of our circumnavigation. However, Fiji is a disappointment, with the obvious rift between Indians and Fijians barely concealed. We repair to Vuda Marina, a pretty marina-cum-cyclone hole.

  Fiji is home to 500,000 Polynesian/Melanesian Fijians and 350,000 Indians. But at Vuda Marina we meet only Indians – Indians in the marina office, Indian mechanics, Indian IT specialists, Indian security guards, Indian taxi drivers.

  We find the Fijians later – roaming the foreshores, having conversations on the side of the road, selling fruit and vegetables in the markets. Always a smile, always ‘Bula!’ – the ubiquitous Fijian greeting. In all our comings and goings, we are aware of the uneasy truce. Fiji has built its resorts and populated them with Fijian smiles. The gentle atmosphere of the resorts is all Fijian, with Western administration keeping the wheels oiled in the background. But only a few hundred metres from the six-star atmosphere of the large resorts, the Fijian villages stand as an indictment of the system. The thatch and woven-grass walls of old villages have been replaced by cheap unpainted besser bricks or corrugated iron. The villages have a down-hearted feeling, with dirty, dishevelled surroundings.

  The Indians in Fiji live in comparative opulenc
e in the countryside. As farmers they till the soil – everything from sugar cane to pine forests – or they dominate the trading in the city. In Suva, every shopkeeper seems to be Indian, and the streets stream with brightly coloured saris. It’s a prosperous atmosphere, so unlike the dejected feeling of the Fijian villages.

  We are not tempted to stay. The resorts are good for what they represent – a break from city life for the working citizens of New Zealand, Australia and more distant countries. For the cruising sailor, the natural, lively harmony of the other islands of the South Pacific seems to be missing from Fiji.

  Everyone’s running and shouting. It seems the whole of Vuda Marina is running and shouting. Indian taxi drivers, yachties walking by, Indian marina security guards, Fijian loungers, friends on the boat we are about to visit. They are all converging on the place where they heard the splash. We’re all looking down, down, but it’s dark and you can’t see much.

  In all the shouting I hear a soft-as-butter voice beside me, so close to my ear he might be about to kiss me.

  ‘What is it?’ he asks.

  ‘It’s my husband,’ I reply. I glance sideways to see an old seafaring face – long silver hair in a ponytail, crow’s feet, eyes shining in the half-dark.

  ‘Ah – your husband?’

  ‘Yeah, he fell in.’ I’m trying to keep a straight and sympathetic face. This ‘falling in’ habit was supposed to be my territory.

  There’s more shouting – the tide is out and it’s not a floating marina. Hard to get out. Nobody’s doing much else but shouting.