Blue Water

by Lindsay Wright

  Sarah was the only woman on the station, and when she went to have a hot shower one of the men gave her a chair to take with her. At first she was a little mystified by this, but the Poles soon rushed to show her that the chair was meant to jam the shower door shut so that nobody would walk in on her. The Poles also used sled-dogs for winter transport, but they had two snow scooters — huge, old-fashioned machines compared with the swept-up versions we had seen elsewhere. They had had a favourite dog, a bitch called Lady, who loved to taunt polar bears. Lady would bark at the bears and then run off, and she could keep ahead of them until they overheated and had to find water to cool themselves down. Lady had played this game successfully for a couple of years, and they showed us a photo of her in full flight with a bear hot on her heels. One bear, however, was a bit quicker than the average — he ate her.

  Cases of beer bottles were stacked eight high along the passageways of the base, and I winked at one of our hosts. ‘You must spend a fair bit of time on.’ and I imitated someone swigging from a bottle. ‘Oh no, no,’ he replied, and explained that their drinking water, because it was taken from the nearby glacier, contained no minerals or trace elements. The beer bottles held mineral water, which the men used to supplement the glacial water.

  The 10 or so men at the base held a dinner party for us, with traditional Polish food and warm hospitality. They showed us photos of Poland and their families, and before we left they gave us a sheet of addresses to write to in Poland. ‘So we know you are safe,’ they said. Our address book containing these names was stolen a few months later in the Caribbean, and I have always felt guilty about not writing to them.

  Never once did the nasty spectre of politics raise its head, and I believe this applies also among the many nationalities working in Antarctica. The awesome beauty and grandeur of the Arctic around us transcended all that — we were all mere humans together. We left reluctantly, once again imagining Elkouba frozen-in for the winter. It was a splendid farewell from Svalbard, but this time we really had to make the break.

  Spitsbergen, ‘pointed mountains’ in Dutch, lived up to its name as we sailed away. The long, ragged skyline of mountain peaks serrated the horizon behind us for hours, and we remembered the awe and apprehension which we had felt when we first sighted it, six weeks before. Now it evoked warm memories of wonderful people and unforgettable scenery. I felt a bit as I had after my first trip in our corrugated-iron boat on the duck pond — a changed man. We will be back.

  For anyone who is bored with their lot in life, I can recommend the Norwegian sea in mid-September. During the 10 days it took us to cover the 1800 kilometres to Shetland, the wind blew from just about all corners of the compass and varied from moderate gale to full gale.

  One night Sarah, on watch, called me excitedly on deck. Fearing the worst, I burst through the hatch wearing only my woollen long-johns. A blaze of flashing, twinkling, glittering light and colour writhed in the sky all around us. Aurora Borealis — the northern lights. ‘Wow,’ said Sarah quietly, ‘do you think that they could have blown up the world while we were away?’

  XIII THE REAL WORLD

  Elkouba arrived in Shetland during a strong south-easterly gale that prevented us from reaching Lerwick. We picked our way into Baltasound, Unst, barely making headway and blinded by flying salt-spray, and spent a convivial couple of days there until the weather eased enough for Bjørn and me to sail to Lerwick, where Sarah had already been driven by car for urgent dental treatment. We collected Luigi, the ship’s cat, from Sandra and Ali Bruce at Burra, where he had taken up residence in the hay barn and looked very well indeed on a diet of cat food and mice.

  Bjørn left us in Lerwick to fly to Sweden and place an order for his own Roberts-designed 11.6-metre yacht and Sarah and I sailed on to Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, which we made at the height of the inevitable gale.

  From Stornoway we sailed directly through the Hebrides to Bangor, near Belfast, and on arrival found that the trouncing we had received had sheared the engine off its flexible mountings. We sailed on into the harbour, and a fisherman helped us tie alongside his trawler. ‘Have youse been here before?’ he drawled at us, in a rich brogue. ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘on our way north last spring.’

  ‘I t’ought so,’ he said. ‘Ye don’t see many yachts with chimneys in ‘em.’

  While I replaced the mounts, at vast expense, Sarah visited her parents, also at vast expense; and I met John Gore-Grimes, who has sailed his Nicholson 32 to the ice from Howth, on the other side of Dublin harbour. Howth, with its modern marina and yacht club, is the accepted yacht spot in Dublin, but somehow I prefer the coal pier on the other side of the harbour. We also met Elkouba’s sister ship, being used as a sailing school on the harbour at Dun Laoghaire. A planned race against her never eventuated, which is probably just as well — as I think, laden with cruising gear as she was, Elkouba might have been soundly beaten.

  Continuing south, we were safely berthed in Crosshaven, County Cork, when England’s first recorded hurricane ravaged that country’s south coast. In heavy seas and foul winds off Cape Finisterre, the headboard pulled out of Elkouba’s mainsail, so Sarah winched me to the masthead, 15 metres above sea level, in a bosun’s chair to retrieve the halyard. We repaired the sail, but after four days spent trying to batter our way through atrocious seas towards Lisbon, we decided that discretion might be the more sensible policy and reached off towards Spain. With only a large-scale chart (English Channel to Strait of Gibraltar) to guide us, and no visible sun to obtain a position from, we ran into a large open bay, one of three on the chart south of Cape Finisterre. Eventually we came across four men, fishing from a large open boat in the choppy seas.

  We sailed up to them, and I bellowed across to them in my best ‘Spanglish’ (Spanish/English): ‘Dónde está us?’ Their reply was blown away by the wind, but they pointed vehemently across to the breakwater of the fishing village of Muros. The village, however, wasn’t on our chart, and it took us an hour or so of looking at the shop windows and bus destination signs to figure out where we were.

  I did my best to clear customs but the resident official didn’t seem to care, so we stayed for a week while Sarah laundered our clothes at the village’s communal laundry trough. The village ladies gathered at the trough each Monday as, no doubt, their forebears had done for centuries, yarned away and graciously took Sarah in hand when they thought she was doing something wrong. Elkouba’s mainsail, her original one, was showing signs of wear, so I spread it out on the wharf and went to work on it, re-stitching seams and replacing worn slides.

  Our neighbouring yacht was crewed by a French sail-maker and his family who had also experienced rough weather. Elisabeth was determined to stop their Caribbean cruise right there and return home to Brittany, so I agreed to help Yves deliver the yacht to Portugal where he planned to leave her until the following year. Consequently I travelled the north-west European coast three times: south by boat, north by bus and south again by Elkouba to Lisbon. From Lisbon we had a stormy trip to Madeira, spending two days hove-to while the wind tore at the rigging and waves foamed across the deck.

  Madeira is on the main European yacht-cruising track, and boats were crowded four and five abreast in the tiny marina, preparing to ride the trade winds across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Most were manned by northerners on their way west, but some were circumnavigating the world and had come from the Mediterranean via Gibraltar. One small New Zealand boat, Sirena, sailed in with Auckland boat-builder Ian Wood and Dianne Rush on board — the first Kiwis I had seen in a couple of years. Sirena leaked badly, and Ian had to be hospitalized immediately with severe stomach ulcers before he could beach the boat and repair her problems.

  After 10 days at Madeira, we set off across the Atlantic and made a textbook 21-day trip over the 2800 nautical miles to St Maarten in the Dutch Antilles. For three weeks Elkouba soared before steady trade winds. The wind vane did all the steering, and with very little sail-handling work neede
d in the consistent breeze, we settled back and relaxed. Christmas Day was spent at 7 knots, opening parcels from home that we had collected in Madeira, and sun-bathing on deck. We stowed our sweaters and long-johns as the temperature rose, and unshipped the chimney, plugging the through deck fitting to make it watertight.

  We made the navigator’s delight — a good, reliable landfall — and I could not help but marvel at how easy it all is in the tropics where the sun shines every day and the stars are clear in the night sky.

  By now our coffers were a bit bare so, soon after our arrival at Philipsburg, St Maarten, I began to do the rounds of the charter companies and marinas looking for work. I soon found it — repairing a fibreglass charter boat that had been thoroughly abraded by contact with a coral reef, and then working as skipper on a series of yacht charters. Sarah, by now, had started work as a crew member on a day-charter boat, lugging cargoes of tourists around the island while they guzzled rum punch and regurgitated into plastic bags.

  Eventually I began work, skippering the schooner Gandalf, taking tourists between the islands of St Maarten and Anguilla. At first the job frustrated me to distraction, but I slowly grew to like it for itself — sailing a big, steady boat in almost perfect sailing conditions every day with a good, compatible crew, and I became more tolerant of the tourist cargo. After a while I almost began to feel guilty for collecting my weekly pay packet — well, almost.

  Soon after our arrival in St Maarten, Sarah found that she was pregnant, and soon had to stop crewing. Living in Elkouba at anchor, I often swam the few metres to work on the schooner, and Sarah likewise spent much of her pregnancy swimming in the warm sea water around the boat. In January 1989, we sailed Elkouba to Anguilla where Alisdair was born a month later. Two months after his birth, Ali set sail with us, and at the ripe old age of three months he passed through the Panama Canal into the Pacific Ocean.

  A small, blond, brown-eyed baby boy is probably about the best passport one can have in the Pacific Islands. In the Marquesas and Cook Islands, Samoa and Tonga, Ali attracted crowds of teenage girls and clucky mums. We, as parents, became secondary guests of honour in homes and villages while he was admired and spoilt. He got the best bananas and the sweetest papaya.

  During a sweaty, choppy trip between Western Samoa and Tonga, Sarah was uncharacteristically queasy, and a visit to the hospital at Vava’u, north Tonga, proved her suspicions to be correct: she was pregnant again.

  Ten days out of Tonga, and not far from a landfall, we spotted the tell-tale long white cloud across the horizon, and soon afterwards a faint outline of green hills beneath it. Aotearoa — the land of the long, white cloud. Home again, after a decade away for me, and a new home for Sarah, Ali and the sailor in her womb.

  All day we coasted close to the Northland coastline, past the rolling hills and scarlet pohutukawa, then anchored overnight near Whangarei Heads before motoring upriver to clear customs the next morning.

  ‘G’day, welcome to New Zealand,’ the customs officer said, and ran us through the usual ream of paperwork. I phoned my parents for the first time in years, and they arrived days later to inspect their daughter-in-law and grandson.

  Elkouba had been registered as a New Zealand ship for six years or so, but this was her first visit to these waters. We cruised the Bay of Islands with some English/Italian friends from the Caribbean, then sailed around to New Plymouth for Christmas. From New Plymouth we sailed down to Picton to settle for the winter and, at the Blenheim hospital in May 1990, Sarah gave birth to a daughter, Tui Anne. ‘Give her a New Zealand name,’ my mother had requested, but soon scotched my plan to call her ‘She’ll be’ Wright.

  During the winter in Picton I worked as a yacht broker, a profession I found to be neither financially nor morally rewarding. The highlight of the season came in mid-June, while we were en route to introduce Tui to her grandparents, when Elkouba was knocked over by a huge wave during a gale off Cape Egmont. The boat sustained two shattered portholes and a blown-out mainsail; her dodger was destroyed and the radar scanner stand bent; but her occupants came through it all unscathed. Elkouba had done it again.

  POSTSCRIPT: CRUISING KITTY

  It was the wet season at River Bend Marina, off the New River in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and rain had been falling for days. Not the spirited rain of the subtropics, with wind and swirling clouds, but a dank, grey downpour that felt like it would never end and washed the spirit out of people. Trips ashore, to the communal toilet or laundry, meant squelching through an ankle-deep quagmire of mud and boating chemicals, and it was too damp to glue or paint. Yacht refits slid to a halt and people sat in their hatchways listlessly watching raindrops dapple the limpid water of the marina.

  Boat-yard time is precious to cruising sailors on a budget. Yard bills mount on a daily basis, so every waking moment is spent working to reduce the job lists that accrue during the previous years of cruising. The big structural jobs are generally done during daylight, and the small, satisfying cosmetic work continues well into the night. Spending time in a boat yard without working on your boat is particularly galling and can quickly scuttle one’s cruising kitty.

  Elkouba was freshly launched; we’d rescued her from among the hulks in the ‘long stay’ back-blocks of the boat yard, with a flurry of sandblasting, grinding, welding, painting and varnishing. We were anxious to finish off her refit and take our new cruising home out to where the waves were, where she belonged, and head north for summer in the Arctic.

  But the rain wouldn’t stop, maybe for weeks. Standing on the companionway stairs early one morning, shaking my head ruefully at the grey pall of rainfall, a cup of coffee steaming in my hand and rain thrumming on the canvas dodger over my head, I noticed a sodden ball of grey fur tightly furled on a pile of rags in the corner.

  River Bend Marina hosted a variety of cruising yachts from all over the world. They chugged up the river, to the heart of suburban Fort Lauderdale, to haul out of the water, re-antifoul and make the myriad repairs or improvements that yachts on the move always require. Some had cats aboard, which mated with local cats and formed a gang of semi-feral felines which slunk around the boat yard feeding on handouts, rodents, geckos and garbage.

  As I gingerly reached towards the kitten which was curled up under our dodger, it opened one big black eye and lifted its head slightly, and met my gaze with an imploring (I thought) stare. The small body shivered uncontrollably as I scooped it into my hands and carried it below. We soon had it slurping warm milk from a saucer on the cabin sole, and installed it in a cardboard box where it curled up on an old blanket and went to sleep.

  Just about the last thing we needed was a cat. After the refit was over, we were heading for the Arctic and Europe. To countries where it would be easier to get an atom bomb on an airliner than get an animal past their border quarantine rules. It was extra hassle, extra food, extra expense, where would it poo? We just didn’t need it.

  The kitten snuggled deeper into the blanket and its flanks heaved with a contented, full-belly sigh. It was descended from animals which were hand-fed with delicacies from the fingers of the pharaohs of Egypt; animals that had been associated with humans for over 9500 years and colonized laps and sofas all over the world. In ancient Egypt, the cat-god Bast was the god of households, daughter of the sun god Ra, and is credited with saving the civilization from many rodent infestations. The prophet Muhammad had a favourite cat, Muezza, and it’s said he would go out without his cloak rather than disturb the cat sleeping on it.

  But we didn’t have any rodents, our cloaks were PVC wet-weather gear, and our home was a minimalist ocean-cruising yacht on a budget. We needed a cat like we needed a hole in our mainsail.

  And we weren’t alone in our staunch anti-feline stance. When the weather had cleared, we hawked our wee kitty round the boat yard, trying to palm it off on other yachts. People politely declined, but their body language said they’d rather dump acid in their bilges. Cats and cruising yachts don’t mix.


  So we ignored the cat … well, almost ignored the cat. We got on with our refit; hammering loudly near where it slept, drilling and grinding. The cat slept through it all, then rose at the end of the day, leapt nimbly from the cardboard box and rubbed its obsequious little grey head against our ankles and purred until we reluctantly poured some biscuits or scooped cat food onto a plate.

  Well … we couldn’t let it starve, could we?

  We door-knocked at all the houses that edged onto the boat yard, like Seventh Day Adventists bearing felines, and almost succeeded in palming it off on one old lady resident — but she reneged at the last minute. Sarah and I developed a cat-riddance sales patter that would soften the staunchest anti-feline stance and could easily have been adapted to sell Greenpeace memberships among the Japanese whaling fleet. But nobody wanted our cat.

  Our cat? I think the turning point came when he got a name. The entire boat yard breathed a collective sigh of relief after they’d all, in turn and several times, spurned our attempts to pass it on, and they enthusiastically entered into naming the orphan animal. People suggested the standard ‘Moggy’ and ‘Tabby’. Someone else put ‘Stormy’ forward, for the prevailing weather when he came aboard (‘Downpour’ would have been more appropriate). The German people on the big fibreglass yacht near the marina entrance which boomed out a daily diet of orchestral music suggested ‘Johannes’, but we couldn’t quite make the connection between a German classical composer and a scruffy Florida boat-yard stray.