Turtles in Our Wake

by Sandra Clayton

  It is equally relaxed and pleasant where we are, among the other anchored boats. A couple of children swim lazily, a couple of adolescents flirt in a desultory sort of way but mostly people laze in the sun, until around 6pm when the jet skis arrive and roar round and round in relatively small circles. The water is quickly churned into a frenzy, the air filled with the stench of exhaust fumes and the peace shattered by the whine of their engines and the roll from their wash. And you think about the generations who have worked the terraced hillside above and raised families in the old house and lived quiet lives above a quiet bay until the late 20th century invented purposeless noise and motion.

  By seven the jet skis have gone and peace resumes. When the sun sinks below the cliff-top the people on the beach begin to carry vast loads of chairs, drinks coolers, water carriers, bedrolls, beach mats and tents up the steep path past the old single-storey house. With the cliff now in shade, someone leaves the house and goes up onto the terraces to weed and water the neat rows of plants. We are still in sunshine; just us and some fruit flies, for the other boats have also left, including the wooden dinghy with the big canvas umbrella. We have dinner, swat fruit flies and contemplate our GPS.

  All current GPS units have been working to a calendar, for a set number of years, with an expiry date this year on August 22 – tomorrow – after which the newer models will automatically re-set themselves. No GPS manufacturer ever mentioned an expiry date until a year or so ago and if your unit cost several thousand pounds, as ours did, the news came as an unpleasant shock.

  Our GPS is five years old. Unsure if it is a newer or an older generation model, and not wanting to be caught without it, David contacted the manufacturer a year ago to find out and was assured that our unit would re-set itself. There were, however, so many stories in the yachting magazines, including fears that even some very recent models would not re-set themselves automatically, that he had checked with the manufacturer again a few months later, in case anything had changed. He was again reassured that ours would re-set itself.

  Throughout today something has waved a fin above the water. It has shone and glittered and seagulls have sat around and watched it. Now it disappears. Will our GPS do likewise, we wonder, on the morrow?

  The answer is: yes. The manufacturer’s assertion that our GPS would survive the roll-over date is contradicted by its own equipment. This morning it is as dead as a dodo. As a precaution we had already dug out a hand-held Magellan GPS which David bought last year as a backup. However, for simplicity we just turn Voyager’s stern to the beach and head out to sea in a straight line using the compass.

  We leave just before nine in heavy mist and like yesterday everywhere is absolutely dripping. I watch from the foredeck for a while as a precaution. Visibility is so poor and confusing that at one stage we prepare to change course for what turns out to be a jumbo-size bleach bottle floating on the surface.

  Then a large family of common dolphins stops by. They are exuberant and competitive, with the occasional synchronised leap but mostly freestyle. Common dolphins are smaller than the more-familiar bottlenose, have a less-pronounced beak, but are a real joy. They are fast and athletic and beautifully marked with a figure-8 pattern on their flanks. They are also very responsive to human presence and go out of their way to attract your attention and entertain you.

  Sometime later David eyes the galley and asks suspiciously, ‘What’s for lunch?’ This is the man who chivvied me out of a supermarket the day before yesterday saying, ‘We’re only shopping for one day!’ These are the times you get out the cans and bottles. We have tuna in tartare sauce with capers and olives, plus the last of the cheese, lettuce, tomato and four pieces of surprisingly fresh brown bread.

  There is an African Kikuyu proverb: Never throw anything away until you have something of value to replace it. These days I never feed the birds with the end of a loaf until I have my hands on a fresh one. However, when this has gone … I ruminate on coming days. We still have four lemons left from El Corte Inglés and quite a bit of garlic. Not appetising on their own perhaps but, famed as lemon and garlic are for their antiseptic qualities, at least our intestinal flora will be thoroughly disinfected.

  The sun finally makes its way through the mist after lunch and finishes drying what the wind has not yet got around to. It also brings out other vessels and it is like driving a car on a country road: nothing for miles and then suddenly, all together, there’s a parked van, a cyclist, and somebody walking a dog on your side of the road and just as you pull out to overtake them an articulated lorry comes round the bend in front of you. At the moment it is several fishing dinghies drifting aimlessly, two power boats, and another yacht heading directly at us. There is also a raft of sewage and assorted garbage that we really do not want to sail through. When the sea is flat like this you can see just how much rubbish lies about.

  Unfortunately, the world treats the sea as a giant refuse facility and expects whatever is thrown into it to disappear. It doesn’t. It just goes somewhere else. Traditionally coastal towns and cities have routinely dumped their garbage into the sea. So have cruise ships. Some still do.

  The worst offenders are plastic and nylon. Even a plastic composite milk carton takes an estimated five years to break down. A supermarket poly bag between 10 and 20 years. Six-pack holder rings: 450 years. Disposable nappies: 500 to 800 years. But plastic bottles, styrofoam cups and discarded fishing net will probably last forever.

  It is difficult to know whether plastic thrown into the sea is less dangerous when it does finally degrade or when it does not. When it breaks down, it still doesn’t go away. It becomes chemical molecules that poison the marine environment.

  Intact, it is a constant threat to wildlife. For instance, it is surprising how often you see those shiny, purple, heart-shaped party balloons bobbing about on the open sea with most of their helium gone. And a regular feature is supermarket poly bags, pulsating just below the surface as they are pushed along by the tide. Unfortunately, both are ingested by unwary sea turtles who mistake them for a staple part of their diet, jellyfish. Sadly, the plastic blocks their digestive tract and they die.

  And those plastic rings which hold six-packs of canned drinks together are just the right diameter to slide over an inquisitive dolphin’s beak. Once there it holds the mouth closed and the dolphin starves to death. And an estimated one million seabirds a year choke, drown or starve because of discarded fishing nets and other debris, along with hundreds of thousands of seals, sea lions, whales, dolphins, sharks and sea turtles.

  There is quite a bit of pollution above us, too, of the noise and aviation fuel variety, for we are now under the flight path for Malaga airport. Our serene voyage along this stunning coastline is at an end, although there is still fin-waving everywhere.

  45

  Marbella

  Early evening we try to get into Marbella marina.

  ‘Completo,’ shouts an attendant from an over-crowded pontoon and cheerfully waves us away.

  We anchor off the beach. It is a most attractive waterfront of large villas with the most beautiful gardens of sub-tropical trees and evergreens. All around us it is bedlam. The half dozen super yachts, anchored out in deeper water, have dispatched their fleets of jet skis and riders and they are roaring round and round inshore. A cruiser’s worst enemies are fishermen and rich people.

  The noise is horrendous, the smell worse. Petrol fumes lie over the water in a grey haze, like a motorway on a humid day. The stench in the nostrils is so acrid that we go below and close our doors and hatches, but too late to prevent David sneezing. Battening down proves to be a good move for another reason, as jets of seawater from their exhausts fly over our boat. I have no desire to lose any more belongings or spend any more time washing seawater from carpets and upholstery.

  I should also be most unhappy, I reflected, had I bought an idyllic waterfront villa here only to languish indoors behind double glazing and air-conditioning because of other people’s no
ise and fumes.

  Meanwhile, in the greenhouse conditions inside an airless Voyager, the fruit flies multiply. Their continued presence is a mystery. I keep spraying insecticide, yet there is never any reduction in their numbers. There is no fruit on board, apart from lemons and they are sitting in style in an almost empty fridge. Nor is there anything else lying about for them to live on. Except … The thought occurs to both of us at the same time.

  Throughout our odyssey along this largely deserted coast there has been nowhere suitable to dispose of our refuse so our dinghy has been doing service as a skip. As soon as the jet skis return to the super yachts we go outside and contemplate the collection of gash bags lying in our dinghy. The bags hum, in both senses of the word. David carries them to the forward locker and shuts them up in there.

  By 8.30 almost everybody has gone but us, the air is fresh again and it is bliss. We have just dined on pasta. The coffee pot is in the cockpit. The sun is setting behind the lovely trees sheltering the expensive villas and all the chairs on the beach are empty now – just a woman and a small child at the water’s edge, reluctant to leave.

  Everywhere is perfectly still. There is a three-quarter moon and a distant, solitary fishing boat floats in space because the sea and the sky are the same colour and the eye cannot find a horizon against which to place it.

  Some time later I detect a faint rubbery smell when I go into the starboard cabin. David goes in, sniffs and says, ‘Hmm’. He is always dismissive about my sense of smell because he has very little himself, whereas I wonder sometimes if I might have been a bloodhound in a former life.

  We are uneasy in the night and get up around 2am to check our location, but Voyager is lying exactly where we left her, parallel to the beach and facing west. There is no wind despite a forecast for gentle to moderate breezes from the east. Visibility is clear. The yellow lamps along the waterfront shine brightly, illuminating the lovely trees in the gardens of the villas above the beach in a way that is quite magical.

  A few minutes later we cannot see the beach at all and even the yellow lamps are barely visible. It is so sudden and creepy it reminds me of the arrival of the leper ship in The Fog. The film is set in a small town on the US coast of Maine whose current prosperity stems from the gold the town’s founders accepted from a group of lepers in exchange for refuge for their ship. The townspeople, however, had betrayed the lepers and as the film opens the rotting hulk of their ghost ship drifts silently in with a sea fog and its ghostly crew is about to unleash a horrifying revenge upon the founders’ descendents. Although why they have waited so long is never explained.

  Of more immediate concern, however, is being hit by a fishing trawler. My worry is that we are not in a bay but on a long coastline with small outcrops. However, as David points out, the fish dock is well away from us and any boats leaving or entering it are unlikely to come this close to shore. It is that old intuition thing again. I know we have a problem waiting to happen, but I don’t know what it is. Nevertheless we return to bed and go back to sleep.

  At daybreak, when we start the engines ready for another foggy departure, the starboard engine’s alternator warning light comes on. David suspects a broken fan belt but when he lifts the lid he finds the engine bay half-full of sea water. The water inlet hose has broken away from its retaining strap and the fan belt wheel has rubbed through it: that faint rubbery smell I detected yesterday. The result is that seawater is flowing in through the ruptured hose and the fan belt is spraying it all over the engine and electrics. David turns off the engine, closes the stopcock to prevent us sinking and we begin baling out.

  46

  Marbella to Gibraltar

  We set off through the fog on one engine. David had set a compass bearing the previous night and we have the radar on. Originally we had never thought about having radar. Until we bought Voyager we had never even been on a yacht that had it. It just happened to be on the boat when we bought her. Now we wouldn’t be without it.

  Steering 175°, almost due south, by the manual compass we follow a straight line until we are about a mile from shore and clear of all obstructions. It is then safe to turn west and resume our journey to Gibraltar. I take what has become my usual morning place at the bow rail. The air is so moisture-laden that it drips like rain. I have to wipe a handkerchief across the lenses of my sunglasses every thirty seconds or so to see through them. Take them off and the fog mists your eyes, droplets gather on your lashes and the glare is unbearable. My hair is dripping and my feet are soggy.

  When we are well out to sea David sets the autopilot but finds that its compass read-out is different from the manual one. After comparing the Magellan hand-held GPS against both of them he finds that it corresponds to the manual compass, so the fault must lie with the autopilot. David hates mysteries, especially of the technological kind, and there is a great deal of thought and fiddling going on at the helm. Out on the foredeck I suspect I might be in the early stages of trench foot.

  Unfortunately, David’s contemplation of the autopilot detracts from his contemplation of the radar. I have just wiped a soggy handkerchief across my lenses for the thousandth time when the leper ship looms at me through the fog. I turn to David, but he is not looking. I begin jumping up and down and waving; shouting at him to look up, see the boat and alter course. The young fisherman on our port side had clearly been paying attention to his own radar, knew we would pass safely, and mistaking my hysteria for an exuberant greeting waves back. He glides past, only yards from us, and immediately melts back into the fog.

  The mystery of the autopilot compass reading is finally solved. Our portable radio had been left on the floor of the saloon beside the sofa. The sofa has a locker underneath it in the corner of which, only inches from where the radio lies, is the fluxgate gyro compass which provides the autopilot’s compass read-out at the helm. The magnet in the radio’s speaker has affected the autopilot’s compass by around 20%.

  The autopilot is not the only thing on board to suffer from the effects of outside interference. The fog has deprived me of all sense of distance and relative size. A seagull dozing on the water, white-bodied with grey wings, becomes a distant boat with white topsides and grey superstructure. A small orange oceanographic survey buoy appears 15 feet tall.

  When the fog thins temporarily, the sea takes on a soup bowl effect as if we are in a hollow and distant boats are on a rim, higher than we are. It is utterly disorientating to see a boat apparently sailing above the horizon. Once, turning back to face the bow again after a 360° check, I become convinced that we have made a sharp turn to port although David insists we have not wavered a degree in hours. A melancholy fog horn has been sounding for over an hour: two 10-second bursts followed by a minute and a half’s silence. I can easily understand how lone sailors occasionally go mad. We have been staring into this shifting greyness since 7.30 this morning and it is now noon.

  Gradually the fog begins to lift. We get two separate visits from dolphins, first a group of common dolphins and then a family of bottlenose. I think that of all the pleasures of the sea the most captivating is dolphins. It is easy to understand their success in therapies for brain-damaged children for they transcend the mind and appeal to the spirit and the emotions. To be close to them is to experience pure joy. Today’s prize for sheer panache, however, goes to the twenty-strong group of whatever it is that is doing the synchronised fin-waving within sight of a fishing trawler.

  As we approach Gibraltar, half of the LCD display of our automatic steering disappears. We spent hundreds of pounds having this repaired by the manufacturer before we returned to the Mediterranean in May. Now it will have to go back to England again, and we wonder how much of a delay this is going to cause. We do not want to set off on an Atlantic crossing without automatic steering. After leaving the Canaries we could be at sea for up to three weeks. With only two of us on board, it would be very tiring to have one or other of us constantly at the wheel. Hand-steering is particularly wearying at
night, as your eyes endlessly have to adjust between a lighted compass and the darkness around you.

  As we limp towards Gibraltar, on one engine and without our autopilot or main GPS we ponder whether we should really be contemplating an Atlantic crossing at all, considering this level of equipment failure.

  At least Navtex is working, although the amount of warnings is so intimidating it is tempting to turn round and leave again. There are damaged navigational buoys and an oceanographic survey to worry about and the Army is hyperactive, with parachute jumping over here and gunnery practice over there. So if they don’t survey you, jump on you or shoot you, you collide with a loose buoy without its top markings and, just to keep you on your toes, they’ve altered the markers inside one of the harbours. All this and only one engine.

  It is flat calm to Europa Point, then windy once around it. As we pass the Governor’s mansion, a number of fins are waving at us. The difference this time is that they are very close and we can see them clearly. Their fin-waving raises their flat round bodies out of the water a little and now we can see their pale undersides clearly for the first time. It is actually their face. It is a round, rather comical face and their vigorous waving seems to give it an animated expression as they gaze up at you.

  We have only ever seen an artist’s impression of them, on those faded marine-life posters you occasionally get in Iberia’s coastal resorts, but finally we realise what they are. Sunfish. Whatever purpose the fin waving serves for them, its effect on the viewer is rather like that of a welcoming committee, a marine equivalent of meeters and greeters.

  Those other meeters and greeters – otherwise known as Immigration, Harbour Master and Customs – have had a change of staff since we called in here on our way into the Med, and are far more civil. Unlike last time though, when the wind was driving us remorselessly off the pontoon, it is now driving us onto it instead. So getting alongside, even with one engine out of action, is not a problem at all. Getting away again is.