Blue Water

by Lindsay Wright

  Peter’s house was just off the road back to Omoka village from the airport, so the excited principal with the huge bag of gaily wrapped lollies balanced between his legs stopped in for a papaya beer to celebrate. The two men admired the sack of lollies, imagining the effect it would have on a school full of pupils who had rarely seen sweets before. Eventually the principal remounted and left with the bag of lollies wedged precariously between his legs and a somewhat shaky grip on the handlebars. Somewhere between Peter’s house and the main road he wobbled right off the track and straight into a palm tree, spilling the Honda and himself to the ground and scattering a few hundred lollies throughout the undergrowth.

  He limped back to Peter’s place and the two began gathering the lollies from among the undergrowth. Word soon got round that Peter and the principal, the two gentlemen entrusted with educating and enlightening Tongareva’s youth, were scrabbling around on their hands and knees in the bush and several of their pupils turned up to help.

  ‘It was the best-kept secret on the island till then,’ Pete recalled ruefully, ‘but after that the lolly scramble became the talk of the island.’

  On Independence Day, Omoka village came alive. The clear voices of the young people rang through the deserted main street and, for half an hour, drowned out the omnipresent sound of waves washing on the reef. Grandmothers sat on small wooden school chairs in their best white dresses and woven rito hats, rocking gently back and forth in time to the ancient tunes, with their eyes closed. Men barbecued tuna steaks fresh from the sea and muttered about the lack of beer. The lolly scramble was a free-for-all in the hard coral playground, raising a gritty pall of dust over a maul of scrabbling knees and elbows. Sand-blonded kids staggered out with beaming white smiles as they held their spoils aloft, and grandmothers rocked indulgently in the shade of the school house and clicked in approval.

  After almost a week had passed, on Saturday we were stopped at the wharf. ‘You must come to church tomorrow — come to our house first,’ Soatini told us. Guests at Tongareva are almost invariably ‘adopted’ by a local family, and attendance at church, with a cup of tea and brunch afterwards, is a must.

  Next morning we stopped by the Soa household and Sarah was taken aside by the womenfolk to be fitted out with a rito woven hat. The finest selection of hats just about anywhere in the world is on display almost every Sunday on Penrhyn, where manufacture of the hats has evolved to fine art. It’s thought that the fine woven headgear was introduced by Gilbertese Islanders who were brought home to Tongareva by a group of local men who had travelled there in the 1880s. Either way, Tongareva is now the acknowledged source of the finest hats in all the Pacific, probably the world.

  Omoka’s church-cum-cyclone-shelter is almost the opposite to a European church. Worshippers sit in pews facing the heavy wooden doors and the pulpit is on a raised dais over the door, so late-comers face the whole congregation as they sidle guiltily through the door.

  The sermon was in Cook Islands Maori and except for a few verbs and nouns which we recognized, its import escaped us, but it was wonderful to be there for the heart-lifting a cappella hymn singing, ornate headwear and immaculate Sunday best apparel of our fellow churchgoers.

  In the village, a strict Sabbath was observed. No motors were allowed to be started, no manual labour undertaken, and people stayed inside their shady houses, drinking tea or cordial and quietly talking.

  I was forced into churchgoing as a kid, in the hope that it would make a God-fearing citizen out of me, but all it really did was make me into an expert at wagging church. I watched the mothers with crying babies take them to sit in the shade under the trees outside the church. The next Sunday, midway through a particularly interminable sermon, I gave Alisdair a gentle pinch on the back of the leg. He hollered immediately and I sashayed outside to join the mothers in the shade of the coconut palms. Shared parenting must have its spoils. The mothers weren’t too sure about having a palagi male in their midst at first, but soon settled down to some serious kid talk.

  It’s often amazed me how well many Pacific Islanders know the Bible. To them, it’s just a book of short stories which they read and re-read until they know it by heart, and I’ve often been humbled by my own ignorance of the holy tome.

  For three weeks we relaxed into island life, rowing in from Elkouba to check out the pearl harvest in the evening, or stringing a net round the lagoon side of the reef to catch the trevally which came foraging among the coral at high tide. We’d splash our way through the coral to scare them into the net, then frantically pull them out of the mesh, kicking away at the gaping black-tipped sharks which arrowed up from the lagoon’s waters to gulp their share.

  It took a few days to say our goodbyes and pull the anchor back aboard. A crowd of villagers stood by the shore to wave as the trade wind bellied Elkouba’s sails and she bent to the insistent pressure, sailing past the headland and out the deep blue passage to the rolling green Pacific.

  By dusk, Tongareva’s tallest palm trees were once again over the horizon, but behind us this time. A coral speck in the ocean, about 4 metres above high water at its tallest point, Tongareva had become part of our history; but its memories, of friendly people and simple unhurried living, would last a lifetime.

  ASKOY — LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST

  Some yachts provoke powerful passions in sailing people. Their hull form will be beautiful, with generous sheer and the grace that suggests sea-kindliness and speed. The construction will be strong to withstand the hard usage dished out by the sea. And the price should be reasonable so that you can take them home with you.

  The derelict 64-foot (22-metre) steel ketch was a sorry sight moored beside the Government Slipway in Suva Harbour, weeping long tears of rust from her battered hull and with tatters of sail flapping from the booms, but she fitted most of the above criteria.

  It was May 1993; Sarah, Alisdair, Tui and I had just arrived in our 11.8-metre cutter Elkouba and were waiting to clear customs when a friend came alongside in his dinghy. ‘Mate — come and have a look at this old derelict,’ he said. ‘What do you reckon about buying it, beaching it somewhere and getting the lead out of it for my new boat?’

  Fatal first words. After I’d splashed through the rainwater that was pooling inside the derelict hull through the open hatches, I realized that this was too good a boat to cannibalize for ballast. She was built like a ship, 6-millimetre-thick round-bilge steel fastened to 50-millimetre angle iron frames with countersunk rivets. The interior joinery was all gone, torn out to fuel Fijian cooking fires, but a Gardner 6LW diesel was only half covered by water in the engine room and a Hunderstadt variable-pitch propeller unit completed the best-possible propulsion package available on her 1960 launch date, and arguably today.

  Due to her position next to the slipway, the yacht had been used as a fender by ships hauling out and launching, and she’d also been torn from her moorings during a cyclone and cast on a reef. One of Suva’s harbour tugs had put a line on her and towed her off. No other yacht I’d ever seen could survive the abuse that this one had. She was altogether too fine a vessel to leave rotting in this fetid tropical graveyard.

  I rowed furiously back to Elkouba to fetch Sarah and we returned to check the wreck. I showed her through the boat, pointed out the steel hanging knees riveted between the frames and deck beams, the Gardner, the Hunderstadt, the volume, the potential … I was in love.

  Sarah agreed that we’d be unlikely to get another opportunity to own a vessel of this calibre and that she was just too good a boat to rot away and sink in a tropical backwater. We decided then and there to buy the boat, take her home to New Zealand and refit her as a high-latitude charter vessel for scientific research with maybe a bit of Pacific albacore tuna trolling.

  The first job was to find out what she was called. There was no indication on the rusty and battered hull of her name or hailing port, so I strode off to the Fijian Customs Service office. Record-keeping there was done using huge Dickensian
ledgers, but eventually I found an officer who recalled the boat arriving and we flicked back through the books until we found her.

  Her name was Askoy II and she’d been in Suva for six years, under arrest by the Fijian police on a US federal marshal’s warrant. Askoy had allegedly been used to run drugs from Colombia to California. The alleged 15 tons of marijuana had been trans-shipped to smaller vessels off the Californian coast, but several of these had been busted and a worldwide search started for Askoy. The perpetrators had arrived in Suva; they had been arrested and one of them had been extradited to the United States to stand trial. The other, a German national, had been jailed in Suva for drug possession. Askoy was impounded to use as evidence, but the smuggler on trial was imprisoned without needing the boat and Askoy got lost in the paperwork.

  It took four dreary months in Suva to find this out; trudging off to Fijian police headquarters on a daily basis, then to the US Consul to get the arrest warrant annulled, trying to trace her owners, getting the marine department to put her up for tender, and putting in a tender. Meanwhile, I’d hauled her across to a wharf and hired a fire engine for the day to pump her out because she was in danger of sinking through a hole in the topsides where a bronze porthole had been stolen.

  Just as it looked like we might be getting closer to acquiring our dream boat, the Fijian president, Ratu Sir Ganilau, died in a Hawaiian hospital and, after shipping his body back to Fiji, the government closed down for a month in mourning. Black-clad Fijians prostrated themselves beside the main road while the cortege bearing his body drove from the airport at Nadi to Suva, and government officials returned to their villages to mourn with family. No progress was made on the tender process, while Askoy rotted at her pile berth, rainwater pouring into her hatch apertures. Our tourist visas expired and we slunk off in Elkouba to a quiet corner of the harbour to bide time until the marine department called for tenders for the graceful yacht we’d set our hearts on owning.

  Rumours began to reach us that an expatriate English naval architect, who lived on a rotting Baltic trader near where we anchored Elkouba, had been telling people that he’d already bought Askoy — the tender process was just a formality. This sent my spiralling paranoia even further out of control. I sketched pictures of how she’d look after our refit and dreamed of Askoy at anchor in the Auckland Islands surrounded by southern right whales while her scientific complement busily researched away.

  One benefit of the extensive work and research I’d put into bringing Askoy to the sale stage was forming a close friendship with the Suva harbour master, Captain Viliami Salu. Captain Salu was an old-school ship master, whose word was as good as his bond. I’d consulted ‘Major’, a former seaman who lived on a ramshackle fishing boat in the anchorage and was my advisor on all things Fijian, about the best way of approaching someone of Captain Salu’s status. ‘You must take a savusavu (gift) of kava — good kava,’ Major had advised. ‘Kava from Kadavu Island is best — I will get for you.’

  A few days later, Major beckoned me over to his boat for our regular evening kava session and handed me a bag of the powdered pepper root. ‘You give this to Captain Salu,’ he said, ‘and say: Turaga (Turaga means Chief — all people like to be called this), this me savusavu.’

  Next day I called at the box-like concrete structure, adjacent to the ship yard, which housed the Fiji Marine Department. Fans swung lethargically from the ceiling to move the humid air around the clerks who sat hunched over paperwork at their desks or strode around, in immaculate white shirts, with fists full of official forms.

  I was directed to Captain Salu’s office and asked the homely Fijian secretary, seated behind the counter in her flowery Mother Hubbard dress, if the harbour master was available. She disappeared through an adjacent door which soon re-opened, and she beckoned me inside.

  Captain Salu, wearing a white shirt and black business sulu (skirt), motioned me to the seat on the other side of his huge hardwood desk. ‘Turaga,’ I said, bowing, ‘this me savusavu,’ and placed the bag of kava carefully on the desk in front of him. He looked at me for a second, a look of bemusement spreading up his broad Fijian features, then roared with laughter and, chortling merrily, clapped his hands above his head.

  A young Fijian man appeared at the office door and Salu gestured towards the kava, then rocked back on his chair, grinning broadly as the younger man snatched the bag off the desk and hurriedly backed out of the office.

  ‘How can I help?’ the captain asked, and I began my tale of Askoy. How I’d arrived in Fiji en route to Japan in my own yacht and spotted her rotting away beside the slipway. How I’d tracked her down through Fijian Customs Department records, been in touch with the police and the US Consul, and had the arrest warrant annulled. How I wanted to take her back to New Zealand and refit her to work as a small research vessel, tuna troller and freighter.

  All the while he sat back in his chair with his fingers interlocked across his stomach, nodding sagely and murmuring support. The office boy returned with a bowl of milky brown kava and bilo — the coconut shell container used to drink it.

  Captain Salu clapped his hands, dipped the bilo and handed it to me. ‘Where you learn to drink kava?’ he asked. I explained about my evening sessions with Major on the fantail of the fishing boat, and he smiled again. ‘Major was my bosun at sea,’ he smiled, ‘very good seaman.’

  After several more bilo of kava and some gently probing questions about my own background, Captain Salu explained the story with Askoy. ‘Your yacht is now an officially abandoned vessel,’ he said, ‘and becomes the property of the Fiji government. But we cannot just sell her to you. First we must try to find the owner, or advertise in the newspaper that we intend to sell her and put a notice on her mast advising her owner of our intentions for at least 30 days before we sell.

  ‘Then the yacht must be put up for tender to the highest bidder … there may be other people who want to buy her and they should be given a chance too. But the final choice of who buys her comes from the Minister for Transport.’

  I left the office after about an hour with Captain Salu, my head reeling from the effects of both the kava and my plans for obtaining Askoy. Clearly, Plan A would be to contact the yacht’s owners. According to customs records Askoy was German-registered, and the numbers welded into her main bulkhead identified her as a German vessel. Later, I learned that she’d allegedly changed hands in Hawaii from a previous owner, Harlow Dougherty, to an unidentified German for a briefcase full of South African Krugerrands.

  I tracked down the honorary German consul, a local merchant banker, and explained the situation to him. ‘No problem,’ he said, taking the registration numbers from me, ‘we should be able to track the owner quite easily.’ Within a week or so he summoned me back to his bank in downtown Suva and said that his investigations had led to a law firm in Frankfurt who denied any knowledge of Askoy.

  ‘It looks like nobody owns your boat,’ he said.

  The marine department posted notices in the newspapers warning Askoy’s owners, or anybody who had a claim to the boat, that she would be put up for tender in 30 days’ time, and a very official document, encased in plastic, was fastened to her mast.

  Finally the 30 days expired without any claims being made on Askoy and the letting of tenders was announced. Fiji has very high customs duties and tariffs on imported pleasure vessels, which made them prohibitively expensive to source in the islands, and we heard rumours that tour operators were lining up to buy Askoy for conversion to an excursion vessel. Colin Dunlop, the ex-pat naval architect, had of course also told other people that he’d bought the boat already.

  On the day that tenders closed, I took the bus from our anchorage off the suburb of Lami, nervously fingering the envelope with our tender in it. Trade winds flowed through the open windows of the bus as it skirted Suva Harbour and, by craning my neck, I could just get a view of Askoy’s wooden mast poking up through the architectural clutter of workshops and offices surrounding the slip
way.

  At the marine department office, Captain Salu’s secretary took the sweaty envelope and tapped on his door. She ushered me inside, and I took my customary place across the desk from the harbour master while he clapped hands for the office boy to bring a kava bowl and bilo. We drank and talked for a while before he rose dismissively and reached across the desk to shake my hand. ‘Good luck, Mr Wright,’ he said and saluted.

  Early next morning I rowed ashore and walked to a phone booth. After a few rings, Salu’s voice rang down the line. ‘Bula vinaka, Captain Salu,’ I said, ‘Lindsay Wright — how did I go with Askoy?’

  ‘Mr Wright,’ he replied accusingly, ‘you been talking. There’s one tender higher than yours — from Colin Dunlop — he bid $50 more than you.’ I felt a plummeting sensation from the pit of my stomach. ‘Not me, Captain Salu, I haven’t spoken a word to anyone — I’ll come and see you.’

  I flagged down the first Suva-bound bus and fretted anxiously as it skirted the mangroved edges of the harbour into town. At the Marine Department building, the secretary looked crestfallen and showed me straight into Salu’s office. He clapped and a kava bowl and bilo appeared, the office boy bowing deeply as he backed out the door.

  Salu and I discussed the tenders — there had been eight, he said, and most of them were much lower than mine, except for the one which was $50 more. I assured him that I’d told no one what I was prepared to bid. ‘We’ll see about this,’ he said sternly, and summoned the secretary into the office.