Dolphins Under My Bed

by Sandra Clayton

  Our destination is Culatra. It is one of the long narrow islands that lie off the coastal towns of Faro and Olhao which between them form Faro Lagoon with its 37-miles of coastline. The islands themselves are really sand dunes, with some areas barely above sea level. The lagoon’s entrance is narrow, with boulders on either side. Unfortunately we have arrived at it in a wind-over-tide situation. The wind is sending a turbulent sea rushing into the entrance just as the lagoon’s mid-tide is rushing out. To make matters worse, we have also arrived at twilight. The lagoon is criss-crossed by narrow channels. Much of the rest of it dries out to sand banks at low tide. We have a choice. We can go in now and navigate our way to the anchorage in the last of the light; or we can hang about among the outer shoals for a couple of hours and then go in on slack tide. The latter means we will have to try and find the unlit narrow channel to the anchorage off Culatra’s village through the sand banks in the dark.

  We decide to go in now.

  Between the two narrow heads the outgoing tide of the lagoon meets the turbulent sea with a tumultuous roar. Voyager is no lightweight, but she bounces like a cork in a water chute. She lunges and surfs. When a boat surfs you have little control over it and first the great boulders of one head come rushing at us, and then the other. Just when we think it can’t get any worse, the fishing fleet from Olhao begins to make its way out.

  In the same way that the wind always rises when you approach a pontoon, so whenever there is a narrow and difficult bit of water to negotiate you can more or less guarantee that the entire local fishing fleet will charge out; with their local knowledge, bigger engines and dark resentments toward yachts. It doesn’t matter what time of day or night it is, out comes the fishing fleet.

  The effort to keep clear of the trawlers to port sends us dangerously close to the boulders on our starboard side. A natural tendency to over-steer under such circumstances sends us hurtling towards the beam of a fishing boat. We receive a wave and a friendly smile from its skipper.

  I instantly forgive mine his earlier keenness to sacrifice me to the Portuguese Navy. He does well. Ultimately we surf in safely and the half dozen trawlers surge out. Looking back from the calmer water in the channel it is possible to get a better perspective. Close to the entrance’s port side – the line the trawlers had taken – the water is relatively calm. So is a very narrow area close to its starboard edge. But the rest, through which we’ve had to come, is crashing water and when the trawlers reach the heads and turn left through it, to get out to sea, it sends them twisting and plunging too.

  Throughout our struggle in this maelstrom, the local anglers on the breakwater above us have been watching impassively, casting their fishing rods or cycling away with them balanced on their shoulders and their catch dangling from the handlebars. It is pure Chekhov. Like few other playwrights, this nineteenth century Russian captured those tragi-comic moments of human existence where one character succumbs to a broken heart while another laughs on the other side of the half-open door. And as I clung to a winch and despaired of our continued existence, a passing trawler skipper gave us a cheery wave while above our heads men cast their fishing rods or cycled home to tea. But then, they have undoubtedly witnessed versions of this scenario numerous times before.

  In retrospect, we should not have attempted to enter under such conditions and would not do so again. Nor would we go in at night. After David does finally get us inside the heads and into the correct channel he accidentally veers out of it briefly and our depth drops from seven metres to one in seconds. It is 8 o’clock before we anchor, and almost dark. A strong smell of unfamiliar fuels burning wafts from the village on the night air.

  I wake at 2.30am. Rather than keep David awake with my fidgeting I slide out of bed and settle down in the starboard cabin. One of the nice things about having two roomy cabins is that when one of you can’t sleep, or the weather is hot and humid, you can wander off across the bridge deck to another bed. With neither wind nor any discernible tide, it is so quiet the fish can be heard plinking around our hull. Through the window at my feet I can see the return of the fishing fleet that we passed on our way in. In the pitch darkness of a moonless, starless night they are visible only as a line of navigation lights, which all turn left at a red flashing buoy a considerable distance from us. Then the lights recede down the channel towards Olhao on the far side of the lagoon.

  I am just beginning to doze when I hear an engine roaring. I can see nothing through the window so I open the hatch above my head, stand up on the bed and, with the upper half of my body above the hatch, stare towards the noise. It is travelling in a direct line from the lights of Olhao. Gradually I can just make out a black triangular shape hurtling towards us like an Exocet missile. A 10-foot boat might not seem much of a threat, but here some are blessed with engines far larger than our 40-foot catamaran. This makes a small boat very fast and quite lethal in a collision. Is this one being driven by a drunken fisherman, or simply an angry one returning from a really bad night on a trawler? There are no lights from the village to illuminate us and from this angle I can’t see if our hurricane lamp is still alight. The impact will be colossal. And of course there will be all that spilt petrol to go up in flames when it hits us amidships. I must signal our presence. I have seconds only.

  While still standing upright on the bed I manage to switch on both cabin lights. These suddenly illuminate, from below, the top half of me in white night attire. Moments later the boat zooms past, a couple of feet from our bow, and heads for the beach. With more experience I would have realised that a man who has lived his entire life on an island without electricity, and whose working life is spent on the night sea, has a night vision second to none. And that if I could see his unlit boat then he could undoubtedly see mine. He has simply been taking the most direct route home. For now, however, I am still very green. I do wonder, though, what the poor man made of a pale half-apparition appearing suddenly in mid-air before him in the blackness of a September night.

  I am still awake at 3.30am, listening for more homecoming fishermen, when David gets up and makes us a cup of tea. At 4am a rumbling noise sends us up on deck to see if we are dragging our anchor. David stands on the chain with his bare feet to feel for any vibration, but it is just the chain straightening. Overhead low-flying charter ‘planes, offering inexpensive flights at unsocial hours, head for Faro airport. I do finally go to sleep.

  When I wake again, just after seven, it is light. Voyager has turned and instead of looking out towards Olhao, I now face Culatra and on the beach outside my window are the women of the village. As the tide recedes each day they leave their houses to collect the shellfish left behind. Some of the older ones wear skirts and are bare-legged. The younger ones wear trousers. All wear straw hats. The thing that strikes you is the quietness. They work singly and silently.

  Mid-morning we go ashore. On the beach, busy little turn-stones upend pebbles with their beaks and some large, stately white birds with black wing tips turn out to be storks, the first we have ever seen outside a book. And just above the waterline is the village.

  Ilha da Culatra, to give it its proper title, is an island of fishing families. Forty four of them, someone tells us later, and twenty-two family-owned bars, mostly in people’s back rooms. Their neat little single-storey houses and simple church are built directly onto the sand. There are no vehicles because there are no roads, only paths through the sand, and no shops. For these the island women have to take the ferry across the lagoon to Olhao, or persuade a husband or son to take them over in his open fishing boat. One of them prepares to go across this morning. Just when you think not a single soul more could be fitted into the boat, two large dogs come running down the beach and leap in too. Their excited bodies are accommodated, their thrashing tails brought under control, and the boat lumbers away with everybody squeezed companionably but silently together.

  As well as the quietness, there is a rhythm to Culatra. It comes from the women, moving slowly alon
g the beach, bent double at the hip, harvesting what the sea has brought. It is there among the men, sieving sand where the tide scours into an inlet to the left of the houses; two men to a rectangular sieve, push-pull, push-pulling, hour after hour. It’s there in the small open fishing boats lolling out on the lagoon or delivering a precarious pyramid of the island’s sand to the mainland, the boat so overloaded that there’s barely two inches of freeboard as it travels at a snail’s pace to avoid sinking under its own wash. Once upon a time they used Portuguese water dogs here, to swim under water and drive the fish into their nets. The main concession to the late 20th century seems to be a powerful outboard engine on the back of their small traditional wooden boats.

  In the small inlet, to the left of the houses, a dozen foreign yachts have been pulled higher up onto the dunes at each successive high tide until they are almost permanently aground. With the tide out, the inlet has become a large sandy area with just the occasional small pool. It is vibrant with wading birds – little egrets, curlews, sandpipers and godwits – grazing on whatever the village women have left behind.

  By the time we return to the boat the morning has become heavily overcast. David sits in the dinghy cleaning unsightly black marks, caused by an old sticky fender, off Voyager’s port topsides. It is hot: 33 degrees Celsius. No sun. Just hot. The lagoon is dotted with small fishing boats. Sky and water are the same hazy blue-grey colour. The only way you know where the horizon lies is by the vague grey shadow of hills and buildings that is Olhao. Fish leap several feet into the air, although it is not exuberance on their part but a lack of oxygen in the over-heated water. There is not a ripple anywhere apart from the occasional fishing boat. When the shopping expedition returns from Olhao, loaded down with purchases, the small boat is so low in the water that the first couple of women to get out do so with the greatest delicacy, to avoid swamping the rest.

  Meanwhile, on board, we have house guests. We brought a pair of large flying ants with us from Lagos. The two of them sat together on the windscreen all the way, hunched against the wind. They are still there. They’re a lethargic species. Brush them off your clothing and they fall to the ground, land on their backs, turn over, but remain where they stand. Standing about seems to be as good as it gets for large flying ants; unlike Culatra’s long-legged mosquitoes which are either mating energetically on the wing or biting you.

  After lunch the sun comes out, the canopy goes up and so do the feet. ‘Lovely,’ I sigh. ‘We have everything we need.’ Except something for dinner this evening. The lagoon is brimming with fish, leaping high out of the water or lolling with their open mouths just above the surface. I briefly consider using a bucket to catch one but I’d still have to kill it, with its eyes rolled up at me, contemplating its own mortality. I can always open a tin of dolphin-friendly tuna.

  By 3pm David is back out in the dinghy, cleaning the rest of the topsides and the back steps. I make a vegetable curry and get in the hand washing done in Lagos. It is finally dry after four days. With a lack of sleep the previous night, combined with the day’s heat, I am very tired and yearn for bed. As I totter past him in my night attire David looks at his watch.

  ‘But it’s only 8 o’clock.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Goodnight,’ he says.

  SOUTH-WEST SPAIN

  32

  Culatra to Cadiz

  It is a hot, bright morning. We have breakfast out in the cockpit and a lazy day in lieu of another night passage. We weigh anchor at 4.45pm, which is the best time to ensure that we leave the lagoon on a more conducive tide than the one by which we entered. Then it is out through the sand banks, a turn to port and it’s all sails up on a broad reach along the coast. And just as the River Miñho marked the place where North West Spain ended and Portugal began, so another river, the Guadiana, determines Portugal’s south-eastern extremity. And once past the narrow mouth of the wide Guadiana we are back in Spanish waters and on our way to Cadiz.

  There is a spectacular sunset at 7.30pm followed by a clear starry night. I cannot be sure what was in the mind of a tanker’s captain, but I think one changed course for us. There seemed no other reason for his veering right and then making a sharp left turn some distance from our stern. Most kind. A second tanker does something similar an hour or two later. Not so a fisherman on David’s watch. Every time David takes evasive action the man turns his trawler back into us.

  By my second watch the night sea is alive with them. There are seven or eight ranged ahead of me at one point and despite our being under sail they go instantly from stationary to full speed ahead into our path. Change direction for one of them and before you can find your course again there is another one coming straight at you.

  The sunrise at 7.30am is glorious. There is a line that passes through my head when the night is particularly dark, the weather worrying or the fishermen more bolshie than usual. It is, ‘The sun also rises’. Hemingway used it as the title for one of his books in 1926 but like so many titles it comes originally from the Bible: Ecclesiastes 1:5. The words are a comforting reminder that no matter how dark or difficult the night, the day always comes. And when that soft blush does appear in the sky with the approach of dawn there is a sense of excitement as you wait for that first tiny piece of the sun’s rim, glowing like a small gold ingot, to appear on the horizon. You watch it rise, bit by shimmering bit, first to a narrow crescent, then a semi-circle, and finally a whole blazing circle of golden light. And the instant warmth of it on your face! After a night at sea, the sun’s rising is like a welcome fire suddenly lit in a cold, dark room.

  By nine o’clock we are approaching Cadiz. It is most impressive to arrive here from the sea because, although attached to the mainland by a narrow isthmus, the city is effectively an island surrounded by formidable stone walls which the morning sun is currently turning to gold. The walls turn the city into a bastion and the bastion is ringed by a shimmering sea and as you get closer you can see palm trees and palatial buildings within the walls.

  It was founded around 1100BC as a Phoenician trading colony and claims to be the oldest city in Western Europe, with continuous urban life for 3,000 years. Drake put it to the torch in 1587. It was described at the time as ‘singeing the King of Spain’s beard’. It destroyed a large quantity of stores and ships, thereby delaying the Armada by a year. The present walls, through which we now enter, were built in the 18th century.

  David ties on the shore lines and hangs our fenders over Voyager’s sides while I steer towards the marina. It is the only one close to Cadiz and is still in the process of being completed. In fact, the facilities consist of a line of four portacabins representing the women’s shower block, the men’s, the office/reception and the restaurant.

  The wash from passing vessels outside the marina’s entrance has an awesome effect on the pontoons and on the monohulls tied to them. Even Voyager jiggles a bit. In the shower block I reach for the washbasin tap and a large indignant cicada rears up out of the plughole. I return to our boat and close all the insect screens.

  We sleep for a couple of hours and then walk into the city along its beautiful promenade. On a plinth a large, bronze, naked maiden gazes out to sea. On a nearby bench a young man casually caresses his girlfriend’s right breast. Down below the sea wall a man on the rocks casts a fishing pole 30 feet long.

  Cadiz is a lovely medieval city of shady squares, narrow streets and a splendid park. We have been struck by how much space is given to parks and trees in Portuguese and Spanish cities. The trees here are glorious: palms, jacaranda, pines, oleander, feathery firs, eucalypts, magnolias, and enormous banyan trees with roots growing down from their branches into the soil to form supplementary trunks. Huge and old, beautiful and shady, they line the promenades and grace the squares. And they are cherished. Along the mosaic pavements they stand in special circles of soil edged in stone, and their roots are refreshed in the mornings by a man with a water truck. Where buildings are being demolished or extensively refurbis
hed, the surrounding palm trees have their fronds tied up in rattan bindings, like great hairnets, their crowning glory to be let loose again only when the threat from cranes and diggers is over.

  We go into one of the large and shady squares of beautiful trees for lunch. We have swordfish which is very good. As the restaurant is inexpensive, and not far from the university, it is very popular and the service so slow that we do not discover the glorious cake shop round the corner until after 3pm when it is closed. We wander streets and alleyways little changed in centuries, with their green shutters, glazed balconies, and dark, mysterious, narrow shops and bars. At night, antique wall lamps light these alleys. They are too narrow to waste space at ground level on the free-standing kind.

  The park has a wide gravel avenue lined with tall, dark green topiary, and secluded paths leading down to the seafront. There is a small artificial island devoted to waterfowl, and students everywhere. The Plaza de la Flores, a small, irregular-shaped square, lives up to its name and is filled with flower-sellers. The scent from the arum lilies is heady in the heat.

  We have a beer at a street café opposite the cathedral. Its walls are covered in scaffolding. It is being spruced up for the Millennium celebrations next year. Then we cross the student quarter, with its narrow houses and tiny corner shops, to get to the supermarket in search of tonight’s dinner and food for the passage to Gibraltar tomorrow.

  At the fruit counter, a couple press their noses and lips onto the end of every honeydew melon on display before choosing one, by which time I’ve decided I don’t want one after all. And we fall foul of the do-it-yourself weighing machine. We have tied a knot in our bags. We have not realised that using the spool of sticky tape to seal them is not an option: it is wired to the scales, which will not produce a price ticket until you have sealed the bag with the tape. We buy Bonka coffee, Bimbo bread and a marbled cake called Mildred whose wrapper lists its ingredients in nine languages including Arabic. Also some fizzy white wine that will require a strong screwdriver to prize off the large metal staple holding down its cork.