Naked and Marooned

by Ed Stafford

  ‘That was the most incredible night’s sleep. The best night’s sleep in a long while and I feel like I’ve just had sex, I enjoyed it so much!’ Too much information, Ed, but I had been a long time away from home. The sleep was offputtingly good − amazingly good. I sat and grinned at how good I felt. Recharged. Positive. Happy.

  There was still loads of jerky left so I munched on a couple of sticks. I saw no need to extend my shelter any more. I loved the openness and the light afforded by the single-sided home. It was good for filming, too, as it let in light and allowed me to get wide shots of myself working indoors. It would be a waste of time and energy to do any more. ‘So that’s that settled then. No more construction work!’

  There was no beach hibiscus left on my side of the island any more. I’d used half an island’s worth. So, with the high tide, I walked via the Faraway Tree to Lemon Camp to collect some bark to lash the raft together. I knew how long tasks could take and so I wanted to be there and back in two hours and raced over to cut the poles, strip them of their bark in Lemon Camp, coil the bark up and throw it over my shoulder. I was back in my shelter within the allotted time. Legend.

  I wolfed down some of the last leg of goat and a few sweet chunks of coconut and slung the hibiscus over my shoulder again to go and build the raft. No rest for the wicked on this island. It was non-stop from dawn till dusk. The hibiscus around my neck was like a wooden scarf that weighed about as much as a Rottweiler. The skies were greyer today, which was fine for getting a task like this done on a beach with no shade. I was in sync − it was appropriate. I felt solid and worked nimbly to get the raft built.

  I knelt down in the sand and set to work. Each square lashing was tight and secure. My mouth was dry and parched and I was utterly exhausted but the raft was complete in three hours and I dragged it into the tree line ready to be launched another day.

  Building the wall for my fish trap would also have to wait for another day. I could only do so much and my days were now packed and positive. I wasn’t worried at all − just happy to be home in time for tea.

  I caught six crabs while on the beach sending the ‘All OK’ message on the InReach device. I had no goat leg left and so this was easy and most welcome. I was looking forward to the pleasant change of a crab broth once again.

  With a smile on my face I shouted, ‘I want to get out! I want to get off this island!’ then to the camera I countered this with ‘Don’t count the days – make the days count.’ A wise man, Muhammad Ali.

  I would launch the boat tomorrow, as I wasn’t quite ready to go to sea. First I made another spear to replace the one that I had broken in the goat’s eye. It was simple, with a fire-hardened tip. I enjoyed making a paddle using the chopping board bit of plywood that was spliced into a four-foot section of boat pole and bound, as ever, with hibiscus bark.

  After four days of drying and scraping, the hide was now ready. I untied all of the strings and freed it from the triangular frame. I decided that sewing wasn’t an option but that if I made one alteration to the hide I would have a simple, functional garment. I made a foot-long slit in the centre, big enough to put my head through, and slipped the skin over my head with the fur next to my skin. I used the hibiscus that had held the hide to the frame to wrap the whole thing tight around my body like a furry corset.

  ‘Do you know what? Fashion aside, I’ve got myself a warm top! Rather Fred Flintstone, isn’t it?’ The fur was trapping all the warm air next to my skin. ‘That’s really cool – it’s a grey, drizzly day and I’m warm!’ I beamed, with tufts of goat hair stuck in my big wiry beard.

  Day forty-nine meant that it was the end of week seven so I did my end-of-week exercises. I had managed eighteen chin-ups three weeks ago, then I only competed ten the following week, and last week I had skipped them entirely because I was ill.

  ‘Eighteen again!’ I gasped as I dropped to the ground and bent over, panting. ‘That was good, though – I feel strong.’ It was my current limit and I knew it. At least I’d got back to my full strength after my illness. I was duly happy.

  By now I was changing shape. My muscles felt full and hard. I had long ago shed my beer belly and I imagined that, had I been a boxer, I was now at my fighting weight.

  On the way home I decided to dig up a dead plant that I’d passed every week for the past seven. As soon as I started digging I could see tubers – and lots of them. It was a ‘kowai’, not taro but a similar Pacific plant that produces a crop of potato-like tubers, too. The leaves were unrecognisable from the vine that I’d been shown. It was just a mass of dead vines.

  I got to eleven large starchy corms and I almost started to cry with happiness: twelve, thirteen and on it went. This one is enormous! In the end I managed to excavate a big pile of potatoes – twenty-two in total – and as I had eleven days left that gave my morale an enormous boost: I had two whole potatoes per day for the rest of my time here. It was beyond incredible. Even with gorging on goat meat I’d still had relatively heavy legs due to the lack of complex carbs. This could be my ticket to real energy for the remaining days.

  Once in my shelter it began to rain. As it grew heavier I could hear the sound of water trickling into my rain collecting bucket. ‘The guttering is working!’ I shrieked. The water was red thanks to the smoke that had stained the thatch but otherwise it was pure and uncontaminated because it fell from the sky.

  ‘Soooo nice not have to suck water from clamshells through a straw any more. It just collects in a bucket from falling on the roof above my head.’

  Ten minutes of a medium-heavy downpour has provided half a bucket. Fourteen bottles of fresh rainwater wasn’t bad. And I’d not had to move a muscle.

  The kowai was good but needed a lot more boiling than the taro, a good half an hour to get it to the point where it was soft enough to eat.

  At the end of week seven I pressed my abraded fingers into the pulse at my wrist and used the video camera to time one minute. My resting heart rate was sixty-four – higher than when I’d started. Slightly confused, as I felt fit and strong, I put it down to the mountain of red meat that I was now consuming.

  In the dark I summarised my current status. ‘I feel like I’ve proved that you can come on to an island, with absolutely nothing, and survive. Everything is improving and life is becoming easier. There is, annoyingly, a rat on my right foot, and one behind me. Come on, guys. They don’t do any harm . . . ’ I rationalised. Then I remembered the bubonic plague.

  The night before I’d dreamed that an Arab woman in a headscarf was cutting my nails. Every time I tried to pull my fingers away she looked really offended and carried on. When I woke up I realised that rats had been nibbling at the tips of my fingers where they could smell coconut. Surely the only sensible interpretation of such a dream was that I should make myself a bed and get off the floor?

  ‘If I do make a bed I need to get some more beach hibiscus,’ I rambled . . . ‘I’ve never done that before. Perhaps it will take me an hour to collect poles, perhaps it will take twenty minutes to strip them of bark and then a further twenty minutes to strip the bark into string . . . ’ I cut myself short. ‘Go to sleep, Ed.’

  In the night the rats ate all my coconut that I had left roasting beside the fire, so there was nothing to chew on when I woke up sporadically, which disturbed my habitual pattern. I could collect more tomorrow, but my nightly ritual was upset. My body felt battered on the hard floor. I had my goatskin, which was soft, but I drifted off again dreaming of a foam mattress.

  A night of drizzle brought me a further five or six litres of water in my bucket. It amazed me that this had happened while I slept.

  I didn’t launch the raft because of blustery weather. The trees were groaning and tormented and rain further served to smother any hope I had of fishing. I feared the ocean enough when it was flat and calm and had no intention of fighting nature’s grander plans.

  As a resu
lt, day fifty was a naked day. I forgot about the camera and just did the grunt work needed to keep things moving forward. I collected firewood, palms and beach hibiscus to make my bed. And because the camera was off there was absolutely no need to get dressed.

  I woke up very early on the morning of day fifty-one. I wasn’t sure how much I’d slept. My internal body clock knew that I needed to launch the raft before the tide started to rise.

  A quiet thought crept into my head: nine days to go.

  I experimented with heating up the jerky by resting it on a smouldering log, and it crackled enticingly. The fat was being cooked for the first time and the strip doubled over and crinkled up like bacon. The result was utterly delicious. Crisp, smoky meat and sizzling fat that melted between my teeth.

  If it ever seems like I am overdoing it about how good something tasted, I can only assure you that I am not. In a world bereft of physical contact with others, pleasure seemed to come from a small handful of things. Accomplishment, and feeling that I was winning, were big internal ones, but I also found that enormous pleasure was to be taken in awakening my senses. As a result, swimming and eating had become my top two pastimes. I cannot overstate the effect that both had on me.

  Turning to today’s activity, I was quite concerned about my own safety as I’m a terrible swimmer. The beach was fresher and cooler at this early hour and the wind stripped away my night-time snugness. With goose bumps on my arms I added large plastic bottles (the two- or three-litre ones) and washed-up floats to the raft to increase the buoyancy. I then warmed up by using all of my lean muscle mass to drag the rectangular vessel down to the sea. I worried that the whole boat would dissolve in the water as I’d not tested the beach hibiscus bark lashings to see if they held fast when they were saturated. The test would be ongoing when I was on the ocean, relying on them for survival. I reduced the risk by taking some extra bark on the boat with me to conduct emergency repairs if necessary.

  My green shirt wrapped round my head like a shepherd in a nativity play, I now felt like a hardened islander. The elastic strap of the GoPro camera that held it in place was perhaps less biblical, but needs must. Deeply tanned, with lean delineated muscles, I scoffed at the memory of the white arse-cheeked flabby Londoner who had arrived here eight weeks ago. Did I fancy myself? Well, there had to be some compensation for all this hardship.

  I entered the water and, as the cold waves lapped at my thighs, making me stand on tiptoes to protect my balls that were now tight from the cold, I remembered the first day when I had stepped off the boat naked and terrified of what I was about to put myself through.

  The raft floated beside me and so I swung a leg on top and gently eased my weight over the craft and lowered myself to a kneeling position. I was at sea! I took the now obviously very small paddle in two hands and ploughed it down into the water on alternate sides of the boat like an Amazon native in a dugout canoe. But paddling seemed to get me nowhere. I was using all my energy doing deep hard thrusts into the water but it might as well have been a stationary exercise rower. The onshore wind and the prevailing currents dictated that I could not move far off the shore. Feeling about as penetrative as a marshmallow drill bit, I walked the raft round to the more sheltered side of the island in the shallows.

  Once more I clambered atop the floating platform and attempted to take control but the currents took me out of my depth and I felt so vulnerable to the whim of the ocean that I jumped off and swam the raft back in until I could stand again. The swimming used all of my energy and I was shaking with exhaustion.

  Panting, I took in the scene. The waves were thundering into the reef and if I’d had hair it would have been billowing behind me. I’d been so blinkered in my urge to get out to sea that I’d ignored the weather conditions and attempted the apparently impossible. The short period during which I had been tugged away from the beach had given me a slap round the face and woken me up. I could so easily have been swept out to sea, surrounded by sharks, with no possibility of turning the craft around.

  ‘It is buoyant. It is stable. But, my goodness it is not manoeuvrable.’ I gave up the hope of fishing on the reef for the day and put it down to a good lesson learned. The raft was still in excellent condition and I decided to let the incoming tide move it up the beach. The wet weight of the bamboo was now far too heavy for me to drag through the sand.

  I ate my last ever meal of goat meat. Adding my penultimate, then ultimate, strips of jerky to my snail and crab broth, my rafters were now bare. I dried my radio mic on a rock by the fire, knowing in my heart that it was long dead. My grass skirt, sodden from my hour in the water, was also hung from the empty thatch in the smoke to dry it out and reduce the weight. Kowai bubbled in the pot for forty-five minutes. The rainy season had begun and I had guttering and a collection tank so I could be relaxed about the amount of water I was using. The final goat meat was especially tender as well, thanks to the long cooking time.

  Day fifty-one was a great day as far as I’m concerned. The boat was very difficult to keep in one line but at least it floated and I had learned a lot in one simple outing. A calmer, less windy day may prove more successful. I desperately wanted to access seafood from the reef.

  None of the goat meat that was edible had perished. It had all lasted me all the way through. Nine plentiful days of eating as much red meat as I could had left me strong, but if I had one aim in the next nine days it was to catch some bigger fish.

  Looking back, I really did think that at times I’d been very ill with a viral infection. My grumbling stomach slightly unnerved me as I lay down to sleep.

  ‘I enjoyed today – a lot,’ I said, ignoring my stomach.

  I woke up to sharp stomach cramps and explosive diarrhoea on the beach. Mouth hanging open, gasping, I didn’t want to admit I might be ill again. I couldn’t let myself slip into sick mode, though, and so fishing was the order of the day.

  I had seen shoals of fish swimming just off the beach at high tide in the shallows. I had heard about the local Fijian women using palm leaves tied together as a giant noose to trap fish in shallow water and I thought the method might just work for me.

  I had to make a palm frond line to act as a noose for the fish. I knew I would have to daisy-chain all the palms together and really hoped I could do that by using the palm leaves themselves (rather than collecting even more beach hibiscus to use as cordage). In an hour I had cut thirty-two palm leaves and dragged them to a pile at the top of the shallow beach.

  I scooted directly up the side of the huge rocky headland. I’d not been up this way before, considering it too steep, and the journey had been taking me about an hour from my camp via the Faraway Tree and the woodland slopes. But after nine days eating goat meat I climbed the steep slope in no time at all, perhaps five minutes, and realised I’d been making an absurdly convoluted journey. It‘s a funny feeling when you realise that you’ve been doing something the hard way for such a long time. Part of you is thrilled that you now have an easier method and the other is pissed off that you hadn’t worked it out sooner. I laughed at my cautiousness. ‘I’m never coming up the other way again!’

  The tide was relatively high now and there was a much better view from the top as to where fish might be. I could see that the fish weren’t where I’d piled up the palm leaves. They appeared to be swimming over the large flat rocks of the wave-cut platform − the large area of flat rock the size of a baseball field at the base of the cliff. It was worth spending some time up here observing the general movements of the fish. Several black-tipped sharks swam in single file through the rock pools. If I was going to spend valuable time making a thirty-palm-leaf line, I wanted to know what the fish were doing.

  The problem I faced was that the area in which the sharks were swimming was too deep for the palm-leaf line to work. As I hauled it in and constricted it they would just swim under the line, so I decided I would work on the huge rock platform. It loo
ked as if the line would work a treat there.

  I moved my pile of palms, realising that they would be easier to shift while they were still not joined together. This was all very experimental – I’d never done this sort of fishing before. Above the high tide I then tied the palms together using just the palm leaves themselves to make a mammoth snake-like line that must have stretched over some forty metres.

  I headed back to the shelter and reflected to the camera that some people function well on their own. They may even prefer their own company. I admired that. Explorers who never faltered on a solo journey to the poles or rowing across an ocean. That stood for everything that was strong and independent about mankind. Didn’t it? I now considered I wasn’t that abnormal in the fact that my enjoyment was somewhat qualified because I missed all the people that I love so much. I no longer saw that as a weakness − it was just an indicator of what mattered to me most.

  What is life anyway? Is it going out on your own trying to prove something to yourself or to others? Selfishly seeking just one more adrenaline rush? Seeking the approval or admiration of others? Or is it spending time with the people you truly care about and looking after them? Maybe I’m not ungrateful after all. Maybe I’m just growing up.

  At times my weeks spent on the island felt like irrelevant nonsense, while on the other side of the fence was a fulfilling, meaningful life at home. ‘Days like today I just think – really? You’re thirty-seven years old, Ed. You have people in your life who you adore and who love you – why would you choose to go away from them for so long? Why would you do that?’ The silence told me that I still hadn’t quite worked it out. And I wouldn’t tonight.