A Thousand Miles from Anywhere

by Sandra Clayton

  David has also learned that Tortola’s Regatta is imminent and we should prefer not to be here when it takes place. In fact, but for the damage to our davits, we should have left here the morning after we cleared in. The holding is poor, the town has been given over to yacht charter companies and its cost of living puts even Antigua’s finest in the shade.

  Another day, another dinghy ride and another telephone call to the welder. He says, ‘Phone tomorrow.’ At least one of these trips is made worthwhile when a passing yachtsman, carrying a large cardboard outer of Fosters lager cans, tells David where they are selling it off cheap. American brewers put a six-month time limit on their products and the Fosters is past its sell-by date, which rather chimes with our feelings about this whole place.

  Each day, morning and afternoon, a large tourist catamaran sails past us. On board, an American woman, with a voice that could seriously damage concrete and enough synthetic enthusiasm to power a battleship, generates good feeling among her day-trippers before they head for home by encouraging them to take it in turns to get a note out of a large conch shell.

  The finale is always the same: ‘You guys are great!! Yeahhhhhhh!!!! And you’ve had a great day and made a lotta new friends! Yeahhhhhhh!!!!’ It all seems a bit juvenile given that her clientele is mostly pushing fifty, but every day they dutifully blow into the conch shell for her.

  Late afternoons the drummer boys arrive and drum into the evening, ahead of another preacher.

  Finally the welder says the davits are ready and describes where to go to collect them. There won’t be room in the dinghy for both of us and two large davits so David goes alone. When he finally finds the place, there is no dinghy dock and he has to carry our extremely heavy davits one at a time across a building site and down a rocky bank. Getting them into the dinghy is quite a struggle, too. So is getting them out of the dinghy, lifting them up onto Voyager’s stern and then bolting them into place. Our backs ache terribly afterwards.

  It is also very hot. Even the heavy rain during the afternoon fails to cool the air. And Tortola’s regatta begins tomorrow. The anchorage is already overcrowded. We leave it early the following morning. To add insult to injury, our anchor winch, so expensively repaired at Sint Maarten, grinds to a stop and refuses to move again.

  46

  Paradise Resumed

  For a little while there is just enough wind to get some help from the genoa, but when we change course to go up Thatch Island Cut we have to take it down and motor the rest of the way into a head wind.

  We pass some classic little beaches, including one with a hammock slung between two leaning palm trees, and anchor off Little Jost Van Dyke Island. It is rumoured to be named after a Dutch privateer, but nobody knows for sure. There is a lot of fakelore about.

  What is undeniably true is that in 1744 it was the birthplace of John Lettsome who was born into one of the early Quaker settlements in this area. Sent to England to be educated at the tender age of six, he grew up to be an ardent reformer and a famous doctor with more than a touch of whimsy, writing:

  I, John Lettsome,

  Blisters, bleeds and sweats ’em.

  If, after that, they please to die

  I, John Lettsome.

  It was doubtless an ironic commentary on the medical practices of the time for in 1773 he used his radical ideas to found the London Medical Society and a year later became a founder-member of the Royal Humane Society. Both continue to this day. He was also an abolitionist and when he returned to this island on the death of his father he freed all the slaves he had inherited under his father’s will.

  Voyager lies only yards off a rocky shoreline broken by two tiny beaches which are alive with pelicans. They are perched on trees and rocks, diving, swimming and even thinking contented thoughts if the soft ‘Ha’ that the nearest one utters is anything to go by.

  To starboard of us is the truly wonderful Sandy Spit, attached by a reef to Green Cay but to all intents and purposes a tiny desert island complete with golden sand and a leaning palm tree. From where we are anchored one softly-contoured wooded island overlaps another. You can’t even see the ocean. It is as if you are sequestered in a large lagoon.

  Halfway up the nearest hillside a line of brown goats treks resolutely towards its summit. A young one, tentative, falling behind, unsure of a foothold and craving reassurance from its disappearing flock, cries like a baby. The water here has the most amazing variety of colours from dark blue through cerulean, aquamarine and turquoise. Small shoals of fish leap out of it sending silver shivers across its surface.

  We finish Our Mutual Friend during the afternoon, Dickens’ novel about personal identity and social class, and are temporarily bereft because we’ve enjoyed it so much. We dig out Framley Parsonage to cheer ourselves up with some Trollope. I think it is fair to say that for the present at least we have given up the sombre and significant in our reading habits and decided to be happy instead.

  I always used to make myself finish a book, or at least put it to one side for a future attempt, because received wisdom said it was a classic and if I didn’t relate to it then I must have failed to read it properly. I now concede that one size does not fit all. That even acclaimed literature suits some people but not others. It is a reflection on neither the writer nor the reader. For art, as somebody once said, is what a dominant group of people says it is. Why else do artists go in and out of fashion?

  David made it to the end of Moby Dick. I didn’t despite an introduction from a Harvard professor saying it is the greatest work in English literature, and scholarly exegesis claiming that the Pequod and its crew are a metaphor for America. For me the moral and spiritual heart of the book – conveyed through Ahab’s hatred of the great white whale and his soul-destroying obsession with revenge – is negated by Melville’s own obsession with killing whales; right down to the minutia of the best kind of knives, scrapers and diverse cutting tools with which to slice, dice and skin them. Having spent a sociable afternoon with a Minke I take immense satisfaction in stuffing Moby Dick in among the egg shells and potato peelings. There will be no further attempts on my part.

  I did finish The Brothers Karamazov, but after being dragged through so many pages of moral depravity, delirium tremens and the kid putting a pin in the dog’s food so that it dies horribly – and then dying miserably himself from guilt – the denouement wasn’t worth the journey and Dostoyevsky went into the gash bag, too. Since I knew before I started it that greed, murder, larceny, fornication, cruelty, gambling and alcoholism do not lead to a happy, fulfilling life, and with the book’s literary subtleties lost in translation, there didn’t seem any benefit to be had from another reading.

  Our present philosophy is: if you are happy, why spoil it by reading books that make you miserable? And we are happy here. We wake most mornings as it begins to get light and watch the sun rise over Sandy Spit. This morning a heron stands motionless for ten minutes as a great red orb begins to form a stunning background and turn the striking lines of the bird into a spectacular silhouette. Only as the composition achieves perfection and I finally persuade the camera to focus does the wretched bird stalk away.

  We breakfast in a pale golden sunrise among the pelicans. The trees are full of them and in so many variations. Some are small and brown. Some large and brown; some are large and grey; some have a white underbelly and underwings, some white heads and necks. One, with its great webbed feet wrapped around a tree branch, has a huge white chest and on top of its light brown head is a perfect fez of dark brown feathers. One, completely brown and sitting motionless on a rock, has large flat eyes like two sets of tiddlywinks.

  Some days they are joined by a flock of boobies. With their sleek brown bodies, long beaks and long pointed wings they are beautiful in flight. When the sunlight catches their backs they glow like warm brown velvet.

  They are related to the brown pelican, and also the gannet which they resemble physically, and like both these species the boobies are energe
tic divers. When a shoal of fish passes through, they rise into the air one after the other, arc, and hit the water like tracer bullets, even pursuing their prey under water. One of them is even bold enough to dive-bomb a large elderly pelican who takes it with characteristic patience, giving it an old-fashioned look as if to say that standards have fallen considerably since he was a lad.

  Seabirds are diminished by large numbers of us humans and our refuse. Their natural habits are corrupted and some become habitués of rubbish tips. Others are forced to swim and feed in untreated sewage or a vile scum of diesel, industrial effluent, poly bags, plastic bottles and nappy liners. But here they are in their element. Clean and perfect. The untainted water is a glistening aquamarine at present and the white bellies and underwings of the pelicans and boobies reflect it, turning their undersides in flight into pale green.

  It is like being allowed to anchor in a bird sanctuary and watch undisturbed without even being asked for an entrance fee.

  After breakfast each morning we take the dinghy over to Sandy Spit and swim. It shoals here quite steeply so you can sit on the sand to put on your mask, snorkel and flippers and then simply push yourselves out into deep water. There are hundreds of thousands of tiny fluorescent almost transparent green fish, angel fish, blue tangs, parrot fish and squirrel fish while the seabed offers a cornucopia of coral and sea fans. The water is so warm and so clear that it is a joy to simply float on the surface and let the current take you gently along while you gaze down upon the fish and coral. And lying there, with arms and legs spread out like a starfish and making no movement, apart from the occasional glance upwards the fish ignore you and go on their way in their brilliant, multi-coloured shoals.

  47

  Treasure Island

  With time passing we feel that we should discover some of the other islands, but before we make a move we have to wait for the latest squall to pass through. Everywhere becomes grey with a rain so furious it bounces off the water like hail off a tin roof. When it stops and the clouds begin to pass, all the different shades of blue and green in the water begin to merge together and a large hawksbill turtle pops up through the kaleidoscope of colour for air. We haul up the anchor and head back into the Sir Francis Drake Channel and towards the southernmost island.

  By lunchtime we are tied to a mooring buoy in a large bay called the Bight at Norman Island. It is known locally as Treasure Island and over the years has been dug up repeatedly by Tortolians thanks to rumours of buried treasure. In its present-day incarnation it is a sailing ghetto. What should have been the anchorage has been buoyed within an inch of its life, leaving just enough swinging room for the average yacht. Like Road Town, the bay has become absorbed into the charter boat industry.

  On a dinghy that someone has left tied to the buoy beside us, to reserve it like a beach towel on a deck chair, we have our first view of Laughing Gulls. They are the only gull we have seen here and not until now as they winter in Venezuela and do not arrive until April for the start of the breeding season. They have very white bodies, grey backs and wings, and heads that look like they’ve been dipped in dark chocolate. Two of them stand on the neighbouring dinghy’s bow, leaning forward into what is becoming an increasingly strong wind, for hours. The one stares ahead without moving. The other repeatedly shuffles its feet, staring first at the buoy and then turning anxiously to its partner, whose eyelids gradually droop. And as you watch them the dialogue of the novice sailor’s first experience of anchoring begins to form in your head.

  I think we’re too close/No we’re fine.

  That rope doesn’t look very strong to me/It is really.

  I’m sure we’re closer to it than we were/I don’t think so.

  I could see the whole of that ring when we landed and now I can only see half of it.

  It is heart-rending.

  In between times other Laughing Gulls land on our own bow. The American habit of using rope to anchor being widespread here, the birds are not prepared for the sheer weight of chain. Nevertheless they try valiantly to lift ours in the hope of finding something tasty lurking underneath. When it proves too heavy for them they give up and stand around looking thoughtful instead.

  By 4pm all the buoys are taken and the latecomers begin circling and looking anxious. Early evening a man in a dinghy and a Hawaiian shirt comes to relieve us of an unseemly amount of money for a night on the buoy. The back of our receipt says that mooring is at our own risk and if the wind speed gets up over 40 knots (the very time you need a secure mooring) we must vacate the buoy immediately.

  Just the thought of 50-odd holiday sailors all abandoning their moorings together in a Force 9 is enough to make you give up sailing. And unfortunately this sort of wind strength is not an unlikely possibility. It is what we experienced on our first night at Road Town and will be repeated over and over.

  The forecast is for strong winds throughout the coming week so next day David decides to head for Gorda Sound which is a large, protected area. Because it is almost circular you will always be able to find a sheltered anchorage and hopefully one that is less crowded. We also plan to make an overnight stop at one of the anchorages en route to do a little sightseeing.

  On the way we pass the small island of Dead Chest, off Deadman’s Bay, said to be the origin of the song:

  Sixteen men on the dead man’s chest,

  Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!

  It is associated with the pirate Blackbeard (c.1680–1718) who is said to have marooned some of his crew there, although the song’s first appearance is in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, not published until 1883.

  We head for Trellis Bay on the north side of Beef Island but it is very crowded and has no room left to anchor. We cross the short expanse of water to the anchorage between Marina Cay and Great Camanoe Island. That too is very crowded. Like Trellis Bay it has been heavily buoyed and has only very deep water left in which to anchor. So we continue on, past the Dog Islands to Gorda Sound.

  We enter the Sound an hour before sunset, via the northern channel between two islands with uninviting names: Prickly Pear and Mosquito. Coral reefs stretch into the channel from both of them but there are marker buoys to give a safe passage. We skirt round Colquhoun Reef and head for Drake’s Anchorage, which is sheltered by the reef and Mosquito Island, but that too is full. This turns out to be the pattern. There are so many boats afloat that you have to find an anchorage much earlier than you really want to stop for the day; in some places by lunchtime at the latest. We cross to the more exposed Great Ghut Bay at Virgin Gorda and drop our anchor there. Happily it bites first time.

  Gorda means fat. The name Virgin Gorda was bestowed upon the island by Columbus because of its resemblance, he claimed, to a fat woman lying on her back. It is surprising how much of the world’s surface reminded Columbus of a woman lying on her back. It probably had something to do with the length of time that sailors spent at sea.

  The back of my left hand meanwhile has become swollen, hot and rather sore. I assume a bite of some kind but can see no puncture mark.

  Strong winds and a nasty chop in Great Ghut Bay keep us awake much of the night. Next morning we decide to seek somewhere quieter and follow the coast around, past all the resorts: Leverick Bay, Biras Creek, the Bitter End and Saba Rock. All of them are filled with buoys so we head for Prickly Pear Island which should give us some protection.

  48

  Prickly Pear Island

  Since the failure of our anchor winch we have been using the lighter Danforth anchor but we cannot get it to bite here and in view of the expected high winds decide to use the much heavier CQR. Even then it takes two attempts. The wind is coming in strong gusts making Voyager swing and snatch at her anchor. It is far from peaceful and we keep an anchor watch throughout the night.

  High winds continue for days, gusting up to 40 knots, with reports over the VHF of 50 knots being recorded on the hilltop at Tortola. But it is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. There is plenty
of time for reading and some necessary housekeeping. David washes away the leavings on our bow from the Laughing Gulls at Norman Island and the muck off the fenders from the fuel dock at Sint Maarten. And there is no shortage of battery power for the laptop.

  We also dig out our small television and videos for the evenings and wallow in old favourites such as Groundhog Day and Kind Hearts and Coronets which seem to get better every time you watch them. David recorded a lot of films from our home TV before we set off, and the tail ends of the videos he filled up with a variety of half-hour programmes, so you never know what you are going to get after the credits roll from the main feature. One of the nights it turns out to be an episode of The Simpsons that we don’t remember ever watching.

  Sideshow Bob (Kelsey Grammer) has been released from jail, put there by Bart who with the rest of his family is now in a Witness Relocation Program – it says so on their T-shirts. When Bob arrives on the family’s boat to kill him, Bart delays him long enough to get police assistance by persuading him to sing the entire score of HMS Pinafore, complete with full costume changes and popcorn. It is glorious!

  We have a double snubbing line on the anchor chain to absorb the snatching and keep pressure off the winch but it is so rough during these few days that the rope shreds three times. My left hand is now a shapeless, bloated thing, my wrist has expanded and the swelling is currently creeping towards my elbow. I can remain on board and risk being really ill or I can take my chances in a small tossing dinghy trying to find a doctor. Procrastination has served me pretty well so far.