He had mentioned it to me once, years ago, but until I heard him chatting to a fellow yachtsman recently I had forgotten all about it. And by the way he spoke of it to the yachtsman I think so had he. However, I suspect that unconsciously the Virgin Islands have become for David a highpoint because whenever the name arises for any reason, he presses his lips together in a sort of half-smile as if savouring a future delight. And it will, after all, be the culmination of our trip in the sense that it will be our last Caribbean location before we have to leave the region ahead of the hurricane season.
The 90-mile journey there certainly does not disappoint. It is one of those magical night passages of warm light winds, billions of stars and a breathtaking dawn. The winds are relatively light, but not wanting to arrive in the dark anyway we have been more than content to enjoy the sail and simply ghost along.
Our destination is Road Town, Tortola, the capital of the BVI. Shortly after dawn we enter Sir Francis Drake Channel via Round Rock Passage to the east of Ginger Island. This channel is a long, broad seaway surrounded by tropical islands. It is so early that there are no other boats about, just us on a gentle blue sea and everywhere you look there seems to be an endless series of rocky islands, with their golden sandy beaches and palm trees, and names like Lost Jerusalem, Cockroach Island, Fat Hogs Bay, Nanny Cay and the Blinders. It is Paradise. Barely nine miles further on we enter Purgatory.
At 11am on a Tuesday we drop anchor off Road Town. Our thermometer says the temperature is currently 35°C in the shade but we are not in the shade and by the time we have finished anchoring we are very hot. Then David goes off in the dinghy to clear in.
The Customs counter is manned by a very nice young man who warns David to be careful because it is expensive here. Downstairs the woman in Immigration appears to have graduated from the same school of deliberate offensiveness as her opposite number in Antigua, only with honours. In the supermarket the truth of the Customs officer’s words is revealed, if the price of the few basic food items purchased today is anything to go by.
Our plan now is to be lazy for the rest of the day, have a look at Road Town tomorrow morning, and then leave for a drift around the islands. The weather forecast is for light winds.
Mid-afternoon we see a man in a dinghy bringing in a yacht. Reckless has engine trouble and the people on board look very resentful. After taking them ashore in his dinghy, the man returns and brings Reckless a short distance from our starboard side in an easy-going, leisurely sort of way, climbs aboard her, throws out her anchor, pays out some rope, drops back into his dinghy and chugs back to land in that kind of slow, laid-back attitude you associate with the Caribbean lifestyle.
Too laid back, as it turns out. Like so many yachts out here the anchor is on rope, which is cheaper than chain but being so much lighter it doesn’t lie on the seabed and help the anchor to stay dug in the way that chain does. Also, the recommended ratio of rope to water depth is 6:1. The water in this part of the anchorage is around 40 feet. Nothing like 240 feet of rope has been let out. Nor has the dinghy been used to reverse the yacht and test the anchor. But what the hell? This is the Caribbean! And there’s not a breath of wind to ripple the surface anyway, which bodes well for a restful night.
A little after 2am we are woken by heavy rain. We get up and close all the hatches, left open on what had been a very hot night. We go out on deck to collect rainwater in buckets from the awning, filling four in no time, and then we take down the awning. With the arrival of the rain the wind has increased, and we are now facing inshore, to the south-west. It has become an unpleasant night but we are happy that we are comfortably at anchor and about 3am we return to bed. Before we do, David removes the bung from the dinghy to let out the water that has gathered in it, and prevent it filling overnight.
An hour later I am woken by David leaping out of bed. There are noises outside. By the time I reach the companionway doors he is already on the afterdeck, although barely visible. It is difficult to comprehend what is happening, as it so often is with sudden, chaotic events, because so much is in motion; so many things hit you all at the same time.
The rain in my face so that I can barely see.
The noise of the wind howling in the rigging and the sky roaring.
And the darkness. After so many night passages I am used to functioning in the dark, but now I am disorientated. I don’t recognise anywhere. Neither a light nor a brooding landmark that I left an hour ago is there any more.
The wind has shifted again and increased dramatically in strength. We appear to be in the grip of a very nasty squall and Reckless, the yacht anchored yesterday afternoon with such gay abandon, is lying across our stern. David is frantically trying to push it off. When I join him, slipping and sliding on the streaming, plunging deck, with the rain slapping my sodden nightclothes against my body, I can see that the yacht is bending our heavy duty stainless steel davits sideways and our dinghy is about to be crushed. But even with both of us pushing against the yacht we have no effect on it whatsoever.
The noise is overwhelming. Even side-by-side we have to shout to make ourselves heard. And along with the howling wind is the clatter of the most ferocious rain I have ever experienced. It is most agonising on the face, making you close your eyes involuntarily when you most need to see. Turn your face from the wind, however, and the rain simply streams down from your hair and blinds you anyway.
What is confusing us utterly is why the boat on our stern is immovable. David yells to me to go and start the starboard engine, to pull Voyager forward, away from the intruder, but as soon as I put it into gear the engine stalls. My attempt to move forward on the port engine also fails. The yacht’s anchor rope appears to be wrapped around our propellers.
The port davit rope snaps and our dinghy’s bow falls to the water. The aluminium boat is now dangling by its stern from our mutilated starboard davit and being crushed against our transom. Its outboard is still attached and, with so much weight hanging on a davit that is also bending sideways, it can be only moments before the second rope snaps too.
We get the outboard engine off the dinghy and David lets down its stern. It is only when it begins filling with seawater that we remember taking out the bung earlier to prevent it from filling with rain. I run to the chart table for the bung. David drops down into the dinghy, and struggles to screw in the bung with the dinghy tossing on the waves and rapidly filling with seawater under him. I am horrified. Holding onto the dinghy’s painter I look down on his crouching back with this damned yacht grinding remorselessly above him and I am sure he is going to die.
Finally he clambers out of the dinghy onto the back steps. Never an easy operation at the best of times, even worse barefoot, in driving rain with the wind tearing at your clothing. From the back steps he pushes with all his might against the yacht while I drag the dinghy free and tie it up to a cleat on the beam.
In all the chaos it takes us some minutes to realise that Voyager is lying with her port beam into the wind instead of her bow. And with Reckless’s bow held fast to our port quarter, its stern is being pushed towards our starboard quarter by the wind, which is ferocious. Just how ferocious we will not know until later in the day when a local broadcast reports that it was in the mid-forties, or Severe Gale 9. Nor does it pass over in the time it takes for the average squall. It just goes on and on.
Having flattened our davits, the yacht is now beginning to grind into our pushpit and gallows which are in danger of going the same way as our davits, only faster as they are nowhere near as sturdy. After it has demolished them it will be grinding into Voyager’s actual stern. While I fend off as best I can, David attaches a rope to Voyager’s stern cleat and the other end to Reckless’s bow roller. Then he climbs aboard and pays out a metre or so of the yacht’s anchor rope. Once slack it floats free of our underwater gear, the boat falls back from us and Voyager swings into the wind. David climbs back aboard Voyager and pays out more of our own rope so that Reckless falls well behind us
.
The wind gradually dies away completely and we are left in an almost unnatural quiet after the frenzy and confusion of the night. By now it is nearly dawn and wearily we are able at last to draw breath, make a cup of tea and in the light from the coming dawn reflect on what happened.
Reckless we knew had dragged her anchor, but only now do we realise that she had drifted about with every wind change, circled us, and not only wrapped her anchor rope around Voyager, but also a nearby marker buoy which is currently being dragged below the surface every time Reckless plunges. We have no way of knowing if the yacht is being held by its anchor, or the marker buoy or whether, if we let it go, it will drift away and damage other boats in the anchorage, not least the little sloop directly behind us. So we keep it tied to us.
Around 7.30 we manage to raise someone on the VHF who contacts the yacht’s owner, a charter company, and one of its partners, Jerry – the man who had anchored Reckless yesterday afternoon – comes out at 8am to take it away. He is regretful, accepts responsibility for the damage to our boat and thanks us for not leaving his to drift. He tows it away saying that he will be back shortly to see about our davits.
Soon after he has gone, the owner of the little sloop behind us comes over. He says he had been watching from his saloon – we had seen his lights glimmering in the worst of the gale – and that it had been ‘a wild night’. He gives us his name and address, and says he is willing to be a witness if necessary. Like us he had watched Reckless being brought in by dinghy the previous afternoon, and the negligent way it had been anchored.
He is just about to leave as the charter company’s boat returns. It is not Jerry this time, but his partner, an altogether different sort of fish. Simon is offhand to the point of rudeness and glares at our departing visitor. He is clearly angry that his partner has accepted responsibility for the damage, although it is difficult to see how he could claim otherwise.
Resentfully, Simon talks about repairs. We suggest new davits. Simon snorts. Our point is that given the degree of damage, how can the present ones ever be expected to be as strong as they were, and what on earth are they going to look like? His response is simple. We can accept the offer of repairs or make a claim through his insurance company. That will take months – through the hurricane season – or we can have our own repaired and back in place in a couple of days. And he will get the welder to put strengtheners in them. If David removes the davits, he will take them, and us, to the welder. We don’t appear to have much choice. David fetches his toolbox.
On the drive to the welder Simon starts complaining to us about his own problems saying that his secretary has just caused $3,000-worth of damage to one of the company’s cars. He seems to be expecting sympathy but having spent part of last night watching my husband only inches from being crushed or drowned I find myself wondering if she damaged anybody else in the process, and whether the unhappy family removed from the malfunctioning Reckless were reimbursed. Or whether negligence is a company byword and with this sort of track record if it even has any insurance.
Failing to get the sympathy he feels due to him we travel in sullen silence until he receives a call on his mobile. He listens briefly, eyes us resentfully in the rear view mirror, says, ‘I think it’s got past that now, Jim,’ and hangs up. I assume that he has just received legal advice about not accepting liability but that in between seeking it and receiving it he has discovered that we have a witness and a case. Looking at his spiteful face I regret not having cut his boat loose to smash itself to pieces after all. But the welder seems friendly enough and promises a quick job so that we can be on our way as soon as possible. He says to telephone him Monday.
45
Tortola
Next morning our backs ache from the strain of yesterday. My arms hurt as well, and I have a large bruise between my left wrist and thumb where Reckless squashed it as I tried to protect our gallows and stern light. On the other hand, we are relieved, and not a little surprised, to be still alive and unharmed, that Voyager is otherwise undamaged and we still have our dinghy – a bit dented but intact. We take it ashore and have a wander round the town, observing as we walk down Main Street its major landmark, Cockroach Hall, a doctor’s premises throughout the previous century but currently a real estate office.
Late Friday afternoon a small group of boys form a line in front of a large yellow and white striped marquee and drum – for hours. It isn’t particularly loud at this distance, but so insistent that you can understand the effect it has traditionally had on infantrymen. After the first hour or so even I am marching about the boat as I carry out my domestic duties.
When the drumming stops, a hot gospeller holds a meeting inside the marquee. Unfortunately for his congregation he begins in the top register so has nowhere to go and the result is an endless harangue with only the words, ‘...the Kingdom of Gard...’ discernible at regular intervals. It is difficult to gauge the effect on the congregation because there is no audible response from it.
But you do wonder about the collision of cultures in a place like this when the wet T-shirt competition gets underway at the pub just a few yards away and the weekly all-the-mussels-you-can-eat night costs more than an islander will probably earn in a week. And far more than these two blue water cruisers can afford. The waterfront meanwhile is overrun with young men in pressed shorts and polo shirts carrying clipboards and you realise that daydreams take a long time to reach fruition and places change dramatically in forty years. As if to reinforce the message, today is the first day of April. All Fools Day.
On Sunday there is another gospel meeting in the marquee, only this time the preacher begins lower down the scale and builds up gradually to a climax, which is far more satisfying. It is all part of a Millennium Crusade apparently.
On Monday BBC World Service’s new schedules come into play which is important because World Service is our contact with the outside world. The announcers have been talking about ‘the changes’ for a month now, without ever actually saying what they are. They are mentioned repeatedly during the course of today, but specific times are not confided. And programmes are trailed repeatedly without anyone saying when they will actually be broadcast.
This morning, at the time when we traditionally listen to our home news programme, Britain Today, someone talks endlessly instead about how much better the new schedules – ‘now on two interlinked channels’ – will be for us. But they don’t tell us what they’ve done with the programme we’ve just tuned in for!
Like us, quite a large proportion of World Service listeners probably don’t have easy access to the internet and thus the BBC’s invitation to consult its website and discover its elusive new schedules is maddening. I don’t know how the Third World does it but for us it means a long dinghy ride across the bay and round the cruise ship dock, going ashore, booking a slot at the cyber cafe and waiting for a computer to come free.
At least David can check our e-mails while he’s there and telephone his brother, the welder and Layla for any sign of our mail turning up at Antigua. I spend the time in Freeman’s Laundrette and get chatting to an American there who tells me about a marina at Washington DC that lets you anchor for $25 a week. It is apparently only a hop and a jump from there to the US capital’s major landmarks, galleries and museums including the Smithsonian.
After she leaves and my washing is installed in a couple of machines, the laundrette’s manager very kindly offers me a chair to take outside in the shade where it is cooler. There I read through the BVI tourist booklet, although even the tourist office can’t find anything more to offer us on Tortola as we’ve already experienced Cockroach Hall.
There is, however, a nice article on a repaired pelican. The impressive plummet executed by a brown pelican can result in serious injuries if refuse has been dumped at sea. This one had such a large tear in its pouch that it was unable to retain any of the fish it caught and was doomed to starve. Happily the bird had been rescued and a local surgeon persuaded
to use his skills in sewing up the hole in its pouch.
The biggest difficulty had been confining the bird on land so that it could be fed by hand while its wound healed because if allowed to return to its normal habits it would burst the stitches. A pelican in captivity, like any large bird living on a diet of fish, is a problem because it excretes so much mess that if kept in a cage it becomes a health hazard to itself. The solution was to tether it by one of its legs and keep moving it to new locations until it was successfully released back into the wild.
I have become inordinately fond of pelicans. Apart from being comical, beautiful, graceful in flight and unbelievably amiable, they make no sound except Ha – loudly when threatened, softly when contented. So you can sail past a large colony of them and instead of the harsh squabbling you often hear with large groups of birds the most you get from pelicans is a sort of communal sigh.
Thanks to a combination of wind direction and the wash from the large number of RIBs roaring about we return to the dinghy dock to find our little aluminium one squashed underneath the pontoon with just the air release valve on the fuel cap of the outboard sticking out. We rescue it and sit in the shade under a palm tree for a few minutes to review our individual sorties and decide if we need to do anything further before making the trip back to Voyager.
I can report that our washing is immaculately clean – not something you can say for every laundrette we have ever used and I have, in addition, the location of a future US anchorage that sounds delightful. David says there is still no sign of our missing mail in Antigua, that he has failed to get a telephone connection to his brother in England and the welder will not have our davits ready for us today as promised yesterday because his polisher is off sick. They will definitely be ready tomorrow. ‘But phone first.’
A Thousand Miles from Anywhere Page 28