Eventually, an agreement was reached and we were bussed to the military airport in the small hours of the morning for the 1200-kilometre flight in a French military transport plane south-east to Moruroa. By now I’d gleaned that La Ribaude was painted black and the defunct engine was probably a Perkins diesel — and that La Ribaude loosely translated as ‘lusty wench’ in French.
In the plane, the Greenpeace people strapped themselves into the canvas sling seats fastened around the perimeter of the cargo hold. A central bank of similar seats were occupied by khaki-clad French Foreign Legionnaires, who sat back to back and fondled their weaponry while they returned our grins and winks with grim indifference.
Three hours later, the huge plane banked over Moruroa Atoll and I peered anxiously through the sole porthole, hoping for a glimpse of the vessel which, I hoped, would carry me safely across the 5000 kilometres of open ocean to New Zealand. The Moruroa I saw was like a beauty queen with smallpox. A beautiful, classic Pacific coral atoll with an alluring turquoise lagoon and platoons of coconut palms swaying in unison to the breeze. But squat and ugly drilling rigs jutted from the lagoon, and menacing grey warships schooled like sharks alongside the dock and at anchor off it.
On the ground we were herded into a bus and driven to a low concrete building opposite the dock, where lunch had been prepared for us. French military propaganda photographers flashed around taking images of us enjoying hospitality at Moruroa with our gracious French hosts. English-speaking Foreign Legionnaires mingled among us and did some translating. ‘It’s bloody boring here most of the time’ one told me in a northern English accent, ‘you protesters were the best fun we’ve had in years.’
One of the ultimate ironies of the place was the man employed to drive around the immaculately groomed roads in a truck equipped with a cherry picker. His role was to position the truck under the roadside coconut palms, climb into the basket on its back and hydraulically hoist himself into the trees’ shaggy canopies to cut down the ripe nuts before they fell and injured anyone underneath. Elsewhere in the islands, two or three people a year are injured by falling coconuts. I couldn’t help but smile — on this poor, ravaged atoll, half a world away from Mother France, where they had chosen to develop the ultimately obscene death machine, the French military were worried about a few falling coconuts.
The first atmospheric bomb tests began at Moruroa in 1966 and were detonated from barges in the lagoon, dropped from bombers or suspended beneath helium-filled balloons. International protests forced the French to take their bomb tests underground in 1974, and they drilled shafts into the sea mount that anchored Moruroa’s coral in order to detonate their devices. Another 106 tests were conducted until cracks were discovered in the volcanic rock test site and tests were stopped in 1996.
After the meal, we sat sweltering in the bungalow for a few more hours while Greenpeace lawyers negotiated compensation for damage to the boats on the wharf; then, finally, we skippers were allowed onto the boats to witness French naval officers ceremoniously removing the red wax seals from their hatches.
La Ribaude was a rough one for sure — though I suspect that much of the damage had been done by the people who built her and not the French navy. Her hull and deck were buckled and concave in places but, as I crawled through her interior, I saw the vital parts — hull, rig and steering — were strong and sound.
Teeming cockroaches fled en masse as I opened locker doors, and I didn’t dare investigate the contents of the pressure cooker that had been left on the stove for the last 18 months. A French naval officer, dressed in a dazzling, white tropical uniform that hurt the eyes to look at, and I, ticked our way through the detailed inventory, then crewmen Dave Jones and Daniel Tucker were allowed on board and we started setting La Ribaude in order.
Dan climbed the mast and checked the rig while Dave and I checked water tanks and onboard systems, then began to scrub her filthy interior. We dragged the sails, our sole motive power, onto the wharf and carefully inspected them for chafe and wear. Armed legionnaires marched back and forth on guard as we worked, and more naval officers in snow-white uniforms bustled about with clipboards of paperwork.
About an hour before the sudden tropical sunset, a truck pulled up by the wharf with a squeal of brakes. Legionnaires swarmed over the tail-gate, formed into a chain gang and began loading cartons, on the double, onto the wharf beside La Ribaude. Within a few minutes, a pile of boxed military rations sat beside each boat and the truck roared off again.
Dave, Dan and I began unpacking and stowing the cans, bags and boxes ready for the run home to New Zealand. Delicacies like tinned tripe and duck drumsticks were manhandled aboard and, more welcome, 20 one-litre cardboard containers of red wine. We also stowed cases of mineral water — after decades of nuclear testing at Moruroa Atoll, the local water held no appeal at all.
We worked until 2:30 a.m. and then slumped into our sweaty bunks for a fitful sleep under the bright floodlights on the wharf and barked commands of the legionnaire guards. I felt a bit like the hero of Henri Charrière’s novel, Papillon: imprisoned on Devil’s Island while the sentries clomped around outside and barked orders in French.
I woke early the next morning, doubled over with pain and nausea. As I sat in the cockpit, the French administrator from Papeete stalked down the dock. ‘Captain,’ he called in heavily accented English. ‘You are ready now — you go?’ and he bent to untie La Ribaude’s mooring lines.
It was great therapy. I rose painfully to my feet and let fly with a volley of plain English, the import of which was that if he touched one single fucking mooring line he’d be swimming in the fucking lagoon which his scumbag European government had so brutally defiled. I sank back into the cockpit, staring daggers, while he glared at me from the dock and looked around for support. Finding none, he strutted off towards the administrative building. The English legionnaire on guard at the shore end of the wharf slipped me a sly wink.
By mid-morning my condition had worsened, and Greenpeace’s Dutch lawyer insisted that the French treat me on the island. A military ambulance turned up by the dock and a legionnaire escorted me inside for the ride to the hospital. Using techniques no doubt developed to suppress dissidents in France’s unrulier colonies, the Foreign Legion doctor thrust his stiffened fingers first into my groin and then into the small of my back. I was pushed back against the concrete wall while a huge, old-fashioned X-ray machine was focused on my midriff. The irony of being X-rayed in one of the world’s nuclear hotspots was not lost on me. Finally, after studying the X-rays, he held them up and stabbed a finger at a small white dot on the negative. ‘Les reins … les reins,’ was his diagnosis. Kidney stones. ‘Drink, drink, drink … pee, pee, pee,’ his cure.
‘Kidney stones, eh,’ the same English legionnaire, charged with guarding me in the back of the ambulance, said on the way back to the wharf. ‘No big deal — we get ‘em here all the time. Just drink heaps and piss ‘em out … they reckon it feels like having a baby.’
Either way, I wasn’t fit for sea and, after more negotiation by the lawyer, I was bussed back to the airport and marched aboard another transport plane for the flight back to Papeete. Toilet facilities were provided by a small funnel and tube leading directly overboard through the fuselage to the outside. The kidney stones gave me a continual urge to urinate and each time I would shuffle past the row of smirking legionnaires swaying in their canvas seats. With their battledress and shaven heads, each one looked capable of stuffing me through the tube after my pathetic dribbles of wee, and as if they would enjoy doing it. None seemed to speak English and my schoolboy French met with stony indifference.
Back in Papeete I talked the Greenpeace organizers out of shipping me straight back to New Zealand, and went first to a medical clinic for drugs, anti-spasmodics, which eased the pain, and then to an acupuncturist who was entertaining but ineffectual. I began to feel some empathy for the wives and partners of seafarers as I paced the Papeete docks waiting for my ship to com
e in and badgered Greenpeace office staff for news or jobs to do.
Foiled by light winds, it took Dave, Dan and a Greenpeace crew member, Nguyen Van Chinh, a week to cover the distance to Papeete. ‘The bastards only gave us another day to get her ready after you left,’ Dave complained, ‘then they cast us off and towed us out, ready or not.’
We spent a hectic week in Papeete, readying the yacht for the trip onwards to New Zealand. We worked on the seized engine and deemed it irreparable in the time available to us, fitted a wind-powered generator to help charge the batteries, removed the propeller to reduce drag and took on fresh provisions, much of them given to us by local people. La Ribaude was not a thing of great beauty — or any beauty at all for that matter — but she was strong and seaworthy.
Early one morning we winched ourselves out to our anchorage in the harbour and sat waiting patiently for the wind. About midday it filled in, so we hoisted sail, weighed the anchor and sailed out of Papeete Harbour for New Zealand. Vega motored out astern of us bound for the same destination; and Manutea, bound for San Francisco, completed the exodus.
Light winds wafted us past Moorea before the south-easterly trade winds set in and La Ribaude bowed to the weight of the wind in her sails. Too much weight for one of them: the light No. 1 genoa, which had spent six months on deck in the tropical sun at Moruroa, shredded itself and we hoisted a heavier working jib to replace it.
Beyond Moorea, the breeze picked up and we had four days of glorious sailing with the wind piping over the port quarter to send the boat soaring over the ocean swells. Well, maybe soaring isn’t exactly the word to describe La Ribaude’s stately progress. For a heavy old steel cruising clunker with buggered sails, she made gratifying progress. The constellations spangled the sky at night and we hadn’t yet been forced to eat any of the French navy’s canned tripe. We joked uneasily about radioactive provisions — the weaselly administrator’s final revenge.
The tops of Rarotonga’s mountains cleared the horizon on the fifth day out and we foamed down beside the island, passed through the harbour entrance, powered up on a foaming beam reach and rounded up into the wind, dropped the sails and tossed our lines to people fishing from the wharf. ‘Good work — don’t see many people sail in here any more,’ one of them said admiringly, and we didn’t tell him we had no choice.
I’d planned on a brief stop for fresh food and water, but we had arrived on Easter Thursday and couldn’t clear customs until the following Tuesday. It was an enforced stay but a pleasant one among the cheerful and smiling Cook Islanders. Their homelands are downwind of any fallout from the French bomb tests at Moruroa and they were grateful for any assistance in having the tests banned. Vega arrived a few hours later and together we basked in the islanders’ hospitality.
Meanwhile, a huge barge hauled by an ocean-going tug arrived and berthed near the entrance of the harbour. There was enough room for La Ribaude to slide by, but we would run out of wind in the lee of the barge and would be in danger of joining the swell smashing on the coral reef that formed the southern side of the entrance. Daniel Mares backed Vega in towards La Ribaude’s bow, swung her around and towed us out into clear wind. We worked our way out of the light winds in the lee of the island and La Ribaude heeled to the easterly trades and angled off towards Auckland.
Just on dusk the mainsail tore in half, so Dan and I dropped it and set a smaller storm mainsail. La Ribaude was woefully undersailed for the conditions, but her motion became more comfortable while we settled back into our sea legs and watchkeeping routine. A few days later, when the wind had eased, we dragged the mainsail on deck, restitched it and rehoisted it. We were to repeat this process several times between there and Auckland, and became quite deft at stitching it in situ: one crew member on either side of the sail, passing a needle back and forth.
For another four days we roared along before the warm and steady trades, then spent a frustrating few days working our way through a period of calm weather. The tripe was still in its tins and Nguyen, the Vietnamese cook who also answered to Jaime, did a wonderful job of making appetizing meals from the military provisions we’d loaded in Moruroa and the fresh produce from Rarotonga. He’d been a cook in the specialized world of Greenpeace ships and considered cooking to be his job — sailing was best left for sailors — but we slowly cajoled him into helping out on deck. He also did a stirring job on deck at night, drumming the sun below the western horizon ahead of us with the big carved bongo drum that he’d picked up in Africa and which accompanied him everywhere in a special case. Sunsets at sea are special; a time to reflect on the day’s sailing before the cold and dark night closes around us. We sipped the French boxed vin naval, thumped the cockpit coaming in time with Jaime’s drumming, and watched the sun disappear.
A few hundred kilometres north-east of New Zealand, we were slammed by 35-knot south-westerlies and bashed our way slowly westward with waves smashing against the weather bow and sending volleys of spray slashing across the cockpit. With battery power low we couldn’t afford to run the navigation lights, so we kept an especially wary eye peeled at night for other shipping and had white flares handy in case we needed to alert someone of our presence. Radio communications were limited to VHF.
Slowly the wind eased, and left us nursing La Ribaude through light winds again. The final 320 kilometres down New Zealand’s north-east coast took us four days and the final 100 kilometres took us 50 hours. Long, hard hours cajoling forward motion out of La Ribaude’s reluctant heavy steel hull in the flat, calm waters of the Hauraki Gulf. At one stage we backed the sails and sailed backwards for two hours to clear the channel for an outbound freighter.
Finally, a few miles out of Auckland, we heard Vega calling Auckland Harbour Radio; when they’d finished, we called them back and asked for a tow. Vega overhauled us from astern and threw us a line which we fastened to a bridle at our bow.
It was Anzac Day and the calm waters of the gulf were peppered by hundreds of pleasure craft, their decks thronged with happy holidaymakers, as we weaved our way unnoticed past North Head at the entrance to the inner harbour. The Anzacs, men who’d experienced the brutality of war with firearms, would have appreciated La Ribaude’s protest against the most inhumane of weaponry. Slowly we wove our way through the throng, the only inbound vessels. Two brave little weatherbeaten sailing boats ending a protest against mankind’s greatest aberration.
New Zealand Customs cleared us at Admiralty Steps in downtown Auckland, where traffic lights flashed and beeped, automobiles clamoured and a small Greenpeace team showed up with champagne. Vega then towed us to Westhaven Marina where uniformed staff did their best to evict La Ribaude until we could prove that a berth had been booked for her. ‘From Moruroa to Moruroa,’ I thought, ‘with people trying to boot us out at both ends of the trip.’
OCEANIC ORANGE GROVE
As a boy, growing up land-locked in central Taranaki, I yearned for the sea and indiscriminately fell in love with anything that floated. My Bible was Johnny Wray’s South Sea Vagabonds — the 1939 classic yachting tale of how Wray built his cutter Ngataki with kauri logs he salvaged from the Hauraki Gulf. Wray went on to sail Ngataki around the Pacific, and in his wake he lured generations of Kiwi sailors, myself included, off on their own adventures.
My dog-eared copy of South Sea Vagabonds still falls open at the chapter about Sunday Island, a sub-tropical paradise north-east of New Zealand, where a cruising yachtsman could sling his pick and amble ashore to help himself to sacks of juicy wild oranges. ‘The best oranges in the world’, according to Wray. He and his crew filled Ngataki with sacks of the succulent citrus fruit with the idea of selling them in New Zealand, but buckled to temptation and ate them all en route.
Sunday Island, about 1000 kilometres (540 nautical miles) north-east of Cape Reinga, now goes by the name Raoul and is administered by the Department of Conservation as a reserve area. I’ve passed nearby several times but weather, or delivery deadlines, have made it impracticable to sto
p. So when the offer came to sail as mate in the Raoul Island supply ship, Southern Salvor, my bag was half packed before I’d put down the phone.
Southern Salvor is a 38-year-old veteran of the global oil and salvage industry. Built in Holland to service oil installations off the stormy coasts of Africa, she measures 51 metres long overall, with a beam of 14 metres and a draught of 4.9 metres. Two 12-cylinder Lister Blackstone diesels produce 1200 horsepower each at 900 rpm to give her a comfortable 9-to 10-knot service speed.
A small mountain of expedition equipment met the ship at Kings Wharf in Auckland — all the gear necessary to sustain an outpost at one of the remotest places in the Pacific, along with the 16 Department of Conservation and MetService staff who would be using it. A new John Deere genset (generator), Kawasaki Mule 4-wheel-drive, meteorological and scientific gear, and packs full of personal gear were all swallowed by the Salvor’s hold.
We sailed through the gulf into 15 to 20 knots of north-east breeze which soon had the 499-gross-registered-tonne ship — and many of the stomachs aboard her — heaving. The weather eased as we motored north, though, and wheelhouse watches became educational events with the bird-and whale-watchers aboard scanning the ship’s environs through binoculars for wildlife.
At L’Esperance Rock, a rugged islet about 420 miles (778 kilometres) from Auckland, we rendezvoused with Heli Harvest pilot John Funnell in his Squirrel helicopter. He’s the man tasked with carrying out emergency evacuations from Raoul, and maintains a cache of seven 200-litre fuel drums at L’Esperance to boost his range in case of headwinds. We backed Southern Salvor’s big stern close to the rock while Funnell lifted seven rusty drums off the rock and replaced them with seven new ones off our deck, then ship and chopper both headed towards Raoul.
The Kermadecs consist of 14 volcanic islands, many of them active, sitting astride the fault line between the Indian and Pacific tectonic plates. Raoul’s last eruption, in 1964, had fired a column of smoke 1.2 kilometres into the air and blew a 100-metre-diameter crater 80 metres deep into the island’s hinterland. There are 94 sub-sea volcanoes, many of them active, between New Zealand and Tonga.
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