Blue Water

by Lindsay Wright

  We didn’t bother with Britain a second time round and sailed straight to Bangor, beside the Belfast Lough. We were almost the sole occupants tied to the near-new breakwater and Luigi stayed boat-bound until we pulled into Dun Laoghaire. We tied up alongside a local trawler and Luigi, ever the brash American, bounded aboard and befriended the two brothers who worked her. This bit of trans-Atlantic diplomacy (Luigi was back to being American by then) secured us a supply of free flounder for the duration of our stay.

  Elkouba anchored at Crosshaven and we rowed up the Owenabue River with Luigi to pick blackberries, to make into jam. The sight of the little grey cat stretching himself in the sun and strutting around the river bank enchanted an elderly couple, who swapped some apples from their tree for blackberries so we could both make blackberry and apple jam.

  Luigi’s next landfall was Muros, in the Galicia area of Northern Spain. After a particularly foul spell of weather, Elkouba lurched into the seaside village for sail repairs. Luigi seemed pleased to be back among yachting folk and soon made himself at home among the few French, German and Spanish yachts tied to the small wharf. He accepted praise and admiration in a variety of languages, but had a preternatural ability to sense when boats were about to sail and would scarper home to Elkouba before people took him to be an errant local and added him to their crew.

  Other people who have taken cats to sea say that their feline shipmates have been seasick and suffer from incontinence brought on by the misery of mal de mer, but big seas never seemed to faze Luigi. In the gusty conditions between the Hebridean Islands he took a few memorable tumbles, but generally he found a comfortable nook to wedge himself into and rode the worst of weather out as well as we did.

  Luigi befriended a Japanese single-hander in Portugal, who sailed off determined to find his own cat, and he basked in the attentions of admirers on the wharves at Leixões and Lisbon before heading out to Madeira.

  At Funchal in Madeira, the affable American moggy wandered around among the cruising boats, but the busy road around the waterfront put him off nocturnal expeditions further afield into the city proper. The humid weather suited his tropical temperament much better; he found several spots around the boat where open hatches funnelled the cooling breeze, and would move from one to the other as the sun tracked across the sky and left him in the shade.

  Christmas was spent in mid-Atlantic with a few feline treats, but the sailing tabby was no slouch when it came to fresh food. Often at night, he’d be below-decks in what looked like a sound sleep, when he’d suddenly leap to his feet, eyes wide and ears erect. He’d streak through the yellowy light of the kerosene lamp, out of the hatch onto the deck, and return seconds later with a flying fish flapping frantically in his mouth. Then, crunching with gusto, he’d eat it on the cabin sole.

  Elkouba spent most of her Caribbean time riding to anchor in Simpson Bay, St Maarten, but we’d often row Luigi ashore for the evening and return to pick him up next day. He would sit, just after sunrise, under a clump of bushes at the end of the beach, completely spent after a sailor’s night on the town chasing crabs on the beach or rats and geckos among the palm trees.

  But our indomitable little moggy wasn’t well, so we sailed across to Anguilla which was reputed to have the best vet clinic in the West Caribbean. Kidney problems were diagnosed and part of his treatment had to be administered at the clinic every day for a week. Each morning I’d put his limp grey form, curled up in a private pain, in a plastic laundry basket, lash a piece of plywood across the top and row him ashore. On the beach, I’d put the basket on my head and, emulating the island ladies’ load-carrying style in the African fashion they’d learned from their forebears, I’d walk him across the island to the vet.

  The locals watched me curiously for a few days before one, Belter, a wizened old island boatman, approached me: ‘Hey, Lindsay mon — where you goin’ wit’ de cat?’ he asked curiously. ‘I’m taking him to the vet, mate — he’s sick,’ I replied. ‘Wha? … wha’?…’ Belter stared at me incredulously. ‘Put he in a sack wit’ some rocks, mon,’ he advised scornfully. But Luigi, the sea-cat, deserved a better end than sharing a sack wit’ some rocks on the bottom of Road Bay. He had other oceans to sail.

  Elkouba’s on-board dynamics changed a bit with the addition of our son Alisdair, who was born at Road Bay, Anguilla. Luigi took the new addition in his stride and spent hours on patient watch while Ali’s cradle swung backwards and forth from its fastenings in the deckhead. Sometimes at sea, he’d snuggle up beside the baby — the only other warm-blooded animal anywhere near his size for miles around.

  Luigi supervised operations from Elkouba’s foredeck all through the Panama Canal, and superciliously ignored the gangs of Panamanian line-handlers who called out ‘puss-puss-puss’ to try to distract him. The close proximity of a live, rustling tropical rainforest around our anchorage in the Gatun Lake kept him on deck all night, patrolling the deck to ward off jaguars, crocodiles or other unwelcome visitors.

  In the Gulf of Panama we hooked a 1.5-metre shark, hoisted it aboard and Luigi played rodeo rider while it thrashed around the cockpit in its final death throes. With no refrigeration we ate shark, in every possible guise, for the next four days and Luigi gorged himself, in cat heaven.

  At the Marquesas Islands, parents paddled their children out in dug-out outrigger canoes to meet le chat who lived on the yacht. Luigi would hear them coming and welcome them at the rail, purring loudly and stretching to his full length to rub against their outstretched hands.

  I’d been in touch with the New Zealand embassy in Apia, Samoa about Luigi coming home to New Zealand with us, but the answer was a draconian ‘no’. Well, not quite an unequivocal refusal — we could sail into New Zealand with him but we’d have to sign an undertaking that he’d never leave the boat, could only stay for a limited time, fly a special flag and pay for a Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries officer to come and check on him every second day. Or fly him to Australia and/or the UK where he’d be quarantined for six months before flying back to New Zealand for a further quarantine period. This would all cost the equivalent of a year’s cruising kitty.

  I showed them his passport/inoculation record, pleaded that he’d been in effective quarantine for the last four months at anchor or at sea in Elkouba, offered to sail direct to Wellington and drop him off at Somes (Matiu) Island, the quarantine depot in Wellington Harbour. We’d had the cat for six years and lived in close quarters with him, I explained; any disability or disease would be readily noticeable. Couldn’t he be given a check-over in New Zealand and quarantined on board? But the answer was an adamant and impassive bureaucratic negative.

  ‘Welcome home to New Zealand,’ I thought disgruntledly as I rowed out to pass the word to Sarah and wondered what to do with Luigi, our faithful mate of six years or so. We set sail with heavy hearts for Penrhyn, the northernmost island in the Cook archipelago and one of the biggest atolls in the Pacific. The only vehicles on the atoll were a couple of mopeds and the island council had long since banned dogs. Penrhyn’s an enchanting place and we spent some weeks there; readily accepted by the locals, attending church at the coral and cement church/cyclone shelter, walking, and fishing in the lagoon.

  When Elkouba sailed out, Luigi watched from the wharf, safe in the arms of a local family. For years afterwards we received photographs and stories in the mail of his tropical lifestyle: chasing crabs and rodents. His new Cook Islands family visited us in New Zealand and reported on the little grey moggy’s happy transformation from sailor to atoll dweller.

  Years later we received notice that Luigi had died peacefully from old age on Penrhyn. The secret life of Luigi was over.

  RIP faithful shipmate, intrepid adventurer.

  Pacific Islands and Points South

  PENRHYN

  We’d run our dead-reckoning distance from Nuku Hiva by about midnight, and dropped Elkouba’s sails to lie ahull on a gently undulating Pacific Ocean, its heaving surface silvered by a three-q
uarter moon.

  ‘Tongareva should be about 8 miles in that direction,’ I pointed at the western horizon with more confidence than I felt.

  Next morning we rose at sunrise and, sure enough, the white puff of cloud that hovers over most Pacific islands and atolls dominated the western horizon. We made sail, and an hour or so later, the first frizzy tops of the atoll’s tallest coconut palms began to pop above the unbroken, encircling horizon. We skirted the island’s south coast, catching glimpses of low houses and a radio aerial, around about where the landing strip was marked on our chart.

  There’s ultimate satisfaction to be had from a good landfall at the end of a passage guided by sextant and celestial bodies. To locate the boat, in relation to the rest of the universe, scuttling like an insect across the surface of the greatest ocean on Earth, is a wonderful experience and gives a sense of fulfilment that is unattainable from simply reading the flickering green numbers on a GPS receiver readout.

  GPS is undoubtedly accurate and reliable, but it has opened small-boat seafaring up to a breed of sailors who cannot find their own position without it and who place total faith in a score or so of satellites operated by the US military. Only a fool would go to sea without GPS these days, though, and there are few acts quite as gratifying as placing a position line derived from a celestial observation close to the vessel’s position from GPS.

  A few open boats were fishing round the channel through the reef and their occupants waved cheerfully. One detached itself from the fleet and surged alongside us with a roar of outboard motor. ‘Kia orana,’ the skipper called, ‘welcome to Penrhyn. I’m the customs and immigration officer — I’ll come and clear you in later on when we’ve finished fishing.’

  We steered Elkouba into the calm waters of the lagoon and laid our anchors out in about 20 metres of water in the small bay that was the bosom of Omoka village on the leeward side of the 233-square-kilometre lagoon. A few people gathered on the beach and raised languid hands in response to our waves.

  Elkouba was quiet and still for the first time in 10 days or so, and Sarah, baby Alisdair and I sat in the cockpit enjoying the sights of the village: people bustling about, the red tin roofs and church spire dotted amongst palm and papaya trees. Bright lava-lava flared splashes of colour after so many days of blue and grey sea and sky.

  Eventually the customs man came back from his fishing expedition and produced a battered briefcase from his boat’s cuddy cabin. His eyes lit up when he sighted the .308 rifle we’d bought for protection from polar bears in Spitsbergen. ‘Whoo … you wanna go pig shooting out at the airport?’ he asked, hefting the rifle to his shoulder and lining up the sights on the coconuts clustered under the head of a palm on the beach. The rifle and ammunition were taken into custody for the duration of our stay, but I suspected they’d end up pig shooting out at the airport anyway.

  Formalities completed, we headed ashore for a walk. A gang of giggling children dogged our footsteps, darting in to stroke Alisdair’s blond hair and try some halting English on us. We tried some halting Cook Islands reo Maori back. They understood our smiles better.

  About 500 people live full time on Tongareva, which is a proper atoll, a 77-kilometre long circular reef built by generations of coral polyps clustering on top of an extinct volcanic cone rising 4876 metres from the ocean floor. The European name was bestowed by Captain William Crompton Lever, master of Lady Penrhyn, a sailing ship which stopped off at the atoll in August 1788. The Maori name, Tongareva, means ‘Tonga floating in a big space’ — the nearest islands are 370 kilometres away and Rarotonga, the Cook Islands capital, is 1365 kilometres south-west-ward.

  People emerged from the cool shade of their houses to nod affably and say ‘kia orana’. Omoka’s main street leads to the open doors of the church. The metre-thick coral walls offered a cool sanctuary from the midday heat and also from the furious cyclones that sweep the atoll every few years. When the cyclone warning goes out, every family on the island will take refuge in the church until the worst weather has passed and they can step out to re-build their village.

  The one white man (palangi) on the island was an Australian teacher called Peter, and we were soon led to his house to say hello. He made beer from the bright-orange papaya which drooped like pendulums from the trees round his house and kept bottles of the brew securely locked in a chest freezer in his lounge. The local menfolk would break into the house to steal it otherwise, he said.

  The island commissioner, who ordered all the stores that were sold in the general store, had recently been called to Rarotonga on official business, Peter explained. He had left the order for supplies, which would be delivered on the monthly mail boat, with the island’s womenfolk, who had inconveniently left beer off the order. This had resulted in a beer drought on the island and a rash of menfolk breaking in to broach his supply.

  As the sudden tropical dusk dunked Tongareva in the dark, a diesel generator in the ramshackle shed by the main wharf rattled into life and fitful lights began to glow around the village. People had already explained that the generator had been installed by an American entrepreneur to run an ice plant. He planned to buy tuna fish from the village fishermen, pack them in ice, and sail them to sell in Hawaii. The plan had worked for a while but wasn’t the money-spinner the entrepreneur had expected, and he had decamped leaving boats, ice plant and generator behind. That American was called Harlow Dougherty and his yacht was Askoy. We had no way of knowing then, but both would feature in our later lives.

  At about 9 p.m. the generator was turned off, the lights faded except for the dim glow of occasional kerosene lanterns, and Omoka went to bed.

  Next morning we talked to the pearl fishermen as they readied their boats at the wharf for another day on the lagoon. A high percentage of Tongareva’s menfolk were deaf, an occupational hazard of pearl-diving for a living.

  Rocks are a rarity on coral atolls, but each oyster boat had a large rock, polished smooth by decades of divers handling it. Holes were drilled in the middle of each rock with a rope spliced through it and neatly coiled on the bilge boards beside it.

  ‘We take the rock and jump into the lagoon … wheeew.’ An elderly diver showed me how they plummeted through the clear waters of the lagoon; nose firmly clenched between thumb and forefinger. ‘How deep?’ I asked. ‘15 fathoms.’ I did some quick mental arithmetic — 15 fathoms = 90 feet = about 28 metres. ‘Really?‘ I asked incredulously. He nodded and confirmed: ‘15 fathom.’

  Using small plastic swimming goggles and a catch bag, the Tongareva divers clutched the rock and leapt from their boats. They plummeted to the sea floor, 28 metres below the lagoon surface, where they stuffed as much pearl shell as they could into their catch bags and then swam back to the surface to do it all again. Younger men in the boats pulled the rock back to the surface and dreamed of the day they would become divers, too.

  The fruit of all this labour was the Cook Islands black pearls which were shipped off to buyers in Rarotonga, New Zealand and Australia to be turned into jewellery. Most of the shell was sold to Japan to be used for buttons and jewellery.

  Our son Alisdair, born at Anguilla in the Caribbean, was at this point only a few months old. As we walked through the village, teenage girls tagged along pleading to hold him and mothers strolled out to the road from their houses to cluck over him. Sarah was breastfeeding him, but we had left Panama with a year’s supply of baby formula aboard in case something should go wrong with the milk output en route. One of the village grandmothers showed a bit of interest, and it turned out she was feeding her grandson from tins of sweetened condensed milk in the absence of a handy supply of mother’s own, so we left her our supply of baby formula and briefed her on how to mix it.

  The atoll tradition was that most of the young women would have one baby, to prove they were capable of conception, before they got married. The grandmother would bring up the baby. The Polynesian people were also well aware of the deformities inherent in a limited gene pool, and that
’s why the womenfolk mobbed foreign ships — to introduce new genes to the limited supply on their atoll.

  Christianity put an end to some of that, and a few other things besides. In 1863 Tongareva’s four resident missionaries sold 410 of the atoll’s 500 people to Spanish/Peruvian ‘blackbirders’ — slave traders recruiting labourers for the silver mines — for $5 a head. The Spanish knew Tongareva as ‘The Island of the Four Evangelists’; none of the kidnapped population ever returned and that is why the atoll has no ariki (paramount chief), as the other islands in the Cook group do.

  Each motu (island) around Tongareva’s lagoon originally supported a village or tribe of people, and they frequently warred amongst themselves. ‘They were always fighting,’ an elder told me, ‘always over the same things — women, fish or coconuts.’ The ubiquitous coconut palm made life possible on the far-flung atolls of the Pacific. Ripe nuts drop, or are blown, from the trees, and ride on wind or current to another atoll. They take root in the sandy soil above the tide line and, when mature, can provide up to 75 nuts a year. The nuts supply drinking water rich in sugar, proteins, antioxidants, vitamins and minerals. The succulent meat from the nuts is used in cooking or dried to make copra and coconut oil for cosmetics. The hairy husks make coir for rope, mats, brushes, caulking boats or stuffing. Woven, beaten and dyed, it makes colourful and durable tapa cloth. Leaves are used to clad houses, timber to build, and the husks make good fuel for cooking fires. Plainly, coconut palms were worth fighting for. But only one other village remains around Tongareva’s atoll, and that’s the 100-strong settlement at Te Tautu, on the windward or east side of the lagoon.

  Meanwhile, excitement was running high on Tongareva. A holiday to celebrate Cook Islands independence was planned, with concert performances at the school and a festival all round. The pièce de résistance of all the festivities was to be a lolly scramble for the atoll’s school children. It would be the first lolly scramble in Tongarevan history, Peter the teacher had explained, and a logistical nightmare to arrange. Lollies were almost unheard of in Tongareva, so a selection had been organized and ordered from New Zealand and airfreighted to Rarotonga. From Rarotonga they had been discreetly packaged by an ex-pat Tongarevan and put on the weekly aeroplane to Tongareva, where they had been triumphantly collected by the school principal on his Honda step-through scooter.