Blue Water

by Lindsay Wright

  A CARIBBEAN CAPER

  The bedraggled old charter yacht looked utterly forlorn, like a maritime Little Orphan Annie. She was tied to the dock at Road Bay, on the Caribbean island of Tortola, by chafed and faded docklines. Her fibreglass hull was scarred by minor collisions and careless usage, chalky from neglect, and a marine biologist’s dream accumulation of oceanic flora and fauna fanned out from her bottom in the limpid water of the marina.

  Below-decks, tumbleweeds of wiring dangled from holes in the bulkheads which had once housed electronic equipment. Beneath the cockpit, where an engine had formerly resided, there was an oily cavity with bits and pieces of plumbing at its periphery. Hundreds of sunbaked bodies had sweated on the squabs which lay like long-dead flounders on the bunks. Dim sunlight filtered through the scratched polycarbonate hatches and dry varnish flaked off the cabin-sole boards.

  Roger, who had just bought the boat — sight unseen — from another island, St Maarten, didn’t look a hell of a lot better. I found him slumped over a beer in a nearby bar, looking like a bridegroom who has just found out that the woman beside him at the altar was that month’s Hustler magazine centrefold. We both worked for a yacht charter company in St Maarten, part of a team of yachties who earned a living piloting tourists around the reef-strewn waters of the eastern Caribbean, and I’d agreed to help him get the boat back to St Maarten.

  Roger mumbled about waiting for a northerly and continued tracing palm trees in the pool of condensation puddling the bar around his beer glass. A northerly … it was March in the Caribbean and the nearest northerly could be months away. I had an overnight delivery trip in mind, not that sort of time-frame.

  After a few more beers and some intensive cajoling, I bullied Roger down the dock to his boat, where he lurched around the deck for a while, sighed and started to poke desultorily at the sun-faded sails dumped on deck. ‘Didn’t realize it was this bad,’ he muttered. We went below and began hauling junk out of the boat; shattered joinery and sodden seat squabs. ‘Just needs a bit of work,’ I said cheerily. ‘A bit of work?’ Roger replied gloomily. ‘More like a bloody lifetime of hard labour.’

  Our burst of activity aboard the derelict boat attracted a bit of interest from people around the marina, and the skipper of a nearby cruising yacht ambled over for a yarn. ‘Goin’ somewheres?’ he drawled. ‘St Maarten,’ we replied. ‘No kiddin’ — in that thing?’ he replied incredulously, and walked away shaking his head.

  As we worked, a tall, bearded and ear-ringed, seafaring-looking sort of bloke appeared on the dock. ‘Hi,’ he said in a sharp, north-eastern USA accent, ‘the name’s Tommy — I hear you guys are going to St Maarten.’ We nodded. ‘Well, that’s great,’ he continued, ‘can I hitch a ride? I need to go up there.’ And he went on to extol his broad experience as captain of all kinds of craft and his virtues as a knowledgeable and energetic ship-mate.

  It pays to be wary of hitch-hikers in the Caribbean. We’d heard all the cautionary stories about drug smugglers, pirates and itchy-fingered Americans bearing firearms; but, well, many hands do make light work, particularly hand-steering a lame duck like we would be doing, and we had nothing to steal, so we welcomed Tommy aboard.

  We should have been a bit suspicious, I suppose, of anyone who claimed to have some sailing experience and still wanted to go to sea in a maritime cot-case like this one. But then again, I’d volunteered for the trip myself and I was all right … wasn’t I? I was beginning to have my doubts.

  ‘Thanks, guys,’ Tommy said, ‘could you put my bags on board?’ He passed up a couple of heavy suitcases and, when we’d stowed them in the aft cabin, Tommy settled back on the cockpit cushions to oversee preparations with a proprietorial air; offering advice and directions — just about everything except a hand.

  When we were ready to sail, we hailed the crew from a nearby superyacht, who towed us out of the marina with their big inflatable dinghy and said goodbye as though we were Scott’s expedition heading for the Antarctic. Once in open water, we winched the battered old mainsail up the mast, the sail slides squealing as they inched up the track. ‘Hope she lasts till St Maarten, mate,’ Roger said ruefully. The roller-furling jib didn’t look much fitter than the mainsail, but we sheeted them in and got the boat wallowing in the right direction while Tommy continued his monologue. ‘Gee, guys — this is just great,’ he said, basking in the cockpit as Roger and I tacked through the boats anchored in the smooth waters of the bay.

  After a while, we sailed between two small islands and the boat waddled up and over the first lumpy sea of the Anegada Passage. That wave left the several thousand barnacles that were clinging to the boat’s bottom — and Tommy — gasping for air. But it had just about the exact opposite of the desired effect. The barnacles stayed where they were, and Tommy went to bed. ‘Aahh, I’m not feeling too good, see you guys later,’ he said with a dismissive wave of his hand, and disappeared below.

  The passage from Tortola to St Maarten is about 90 nautical miles (167 kilometres) straight into the prevailing trade winds, against the north equatorial current and the steep seas of the Anegada Passage. The big charter yachts motorsail it overnight, and the average cruising boat will take about 30 hours to cover the distance. It took us 64.

  During the first 20 hours, Tommy appeared on deck three times, poking his pallid face through the hatch to ask which island the blaze of lights on our starboard side came from. The answer was the same each time: ‘St Croix’. After the third time, he groaned despairingly and became permanently prone.

  Roger and I took turns steering for the first 40 hours, cat-napping in the cockpit, yarning and enjoying the warm, soft tropical air. Eventually the beer ran out and we decided that we really needed a third hand at the wheel. Roger went below and roused Tommy, who raised his bedraggled head 10 centimetres off the pillow and fixed him with bleary eyes. ‘You’re looking at a sick man,’ he groaned, slumped back and rolled over. I tried a more aggressive approach, threatening to douse him with buckets of sea water, but met with a similar result. Perhaps he realized I was too soft to carry out the threat.

  The boat sloshed sickeningly onwards. We abused Tommy from the cockpit, related stories of sea-sick young girls who had taken their turn at the wheel on Atlantic crossings, and threatened to drag him out of bed and lash him to the wheel, but all Tommy did was groan piteously and turn sideways in bed with his back towards us.

  A few hours later, as we lurched across a star-freckled sea, a loud and ominous splashing noise came from below. I looked quizzically at Roger; he looked quizzically at me — each daring the other to investigate. He lost — it was his boat after all — and disappeared down the hatch. Minutes later his head reappeared. ‘Looks like we’re sinking, mate,’ he said. This bald assessment of our situation was greeted by a series of wailing noises from the cabin where Tommy lay, but he must have quickly reconciled himself to meeting his fate, because he didn’t stir from the bunk.

  I sat at the wheel wondering what the hell to do: sinking in mid-Caribbean with no dinghy, no life-raft, no flares, no EPIRB, no radio, and hardly anything aboard that would float for any length of time. Ah well, at least the water was warm.

  Meanwhile, Roger had launched into a feverish bout of activity in the part of the boat where the water seemed to be coming in. He traced old engine plumbing and tore at dangling wires until he found an open through-hull fitting which we hadn’t noticed in the flurry to leave Tortola. Placed high on the hull behind some smashed joinery, it was swallowing prodigious amounts of sea water every time we lolloped over a wave.

  ‘Found it, mate,’ he grinned from the hatch, a baggywrinkle of red hair flying above his grease-smeared face and T-shirt. We tacked the yacht to raise the fitting to the high side, stuffed a rag in the hole, and took turns hand-pumping the water out, a chore made all the more onerous by having to reach elbow-deep into the oily bilge water every few minutes to clear debris from the pump pick-up. Tommy stayed in bed, groaning conspicuously.

&nbs
p; On the morning of the third day, we raised the peak of Saba (pronounced Sayber), the steep volcanic pinnacle that rises from the sea floor south of St Maarten. Tommy’s tousled and haggard head appeared in the hatchway. ‘What island is that?’ he asked. ‘St Croix, mate,’ Roger replied, quick as a flash. A pitiful look of abject despair slunk over Tommy’s face as he moaned piteously and slunk back to bed.

  Just on dusk we sailed into Groot Baai, St Maarten, rounded up into the wind, and dropped the anchor. Tommy appeared on deck and stood in the cockpit, stretching: ‘St Maarten, eh — God, it’s great to be here,’ he sighed.

  Roger and I cadged a ride ashore with people from a nearby cruising yacht. Tommy stayed aboard and the next day he was gone, though it was obvious he still hadn’t figured out how to operate the toilet.

  Roger renamed his boat Carawak and we towed her into the marina to begin the long refit that would transform her into his cruising home. A month later, as he was completing installation of the shiny new Perkins diesel engine, a shapely young lady in a barely adequate bikini sauntered down the dock and stopped to talk. ‘Did this boat used to be in Tortola?’ she asked. Roger nodded, almost swallowing the stainless-steel screws he was holding in his lips. ‘That’s right,’ she said, ‘I thought I’d seen it before. That’s where I’m from. I’m a friend of Tommy’s, the delivery captain who sailed it up here. He said it was really rough — his crew were seasick the whole way.’

  CARIBBEAN JET BLAST

  The good ship Gandalf, her decks teeming with well-oiled tourists (internally with free rum punch and externally with sun-tan lotion), was a familiar sight in the eastern Caribbean. Designed by Sampson, with a proud clipper bow, long wooden bowsprit and raised poop, she evoked the pirate ships which had plied those waters in days of yore.

  Built in South Africa, from ferro-cement, the 56-tonne staysail schooner sailed six days a week between St Maarten and the neighbouring island of Anguilla. Her six tan bark sails bent picturesquely to the warm and gentle trade winds and the wide, stable teak decks lent themselves to sunbathing, rum sipping and just plain lazing around.

  My crew — Bobby (South Africa) and Bobbi (Canada) — and I ferried our guests from the Pelican Resort every morning by dinghy, then dropped the mooring buoy and gently motorsailed out of Simpson Bay. Gandalf began to reek of coconut oil as our guests began to slip, slap, slop sun-tan lotion on themselves and the ship. The first rounds of complimentary rum punch disappeared into the rapidly reddening tourists as the white sandy beaches and rocky headlands of the St Maarten coast slid by.

  We often sailed Gandalf close by the airport so the guests could take photographs of the hotels clustered around the beach by the runway. If we timed it right, a jetliner would be warming up its engines, poised for take-off at the end of the runway; and we found that by carefully trimming the sails beforehand, we could get an exhilarating shove out of the bay on the warm, kerosene-smelling 25-knot jet-blast as the plane roared off down the runway. We came to know the flight departure schedules and sometimes timed our sailings to provide us with a nice boost out of the bay.

  An hour later we’d be clear of the coast, and the guests could experience the thrill of being out of sight of land for half an hour or so until the low-lying shore of Anguilla smudged the horizon ahead and grew larger until we skirted the edge of Shark Reef and sailed into the calm waters of Sandy Bay. Our guests snorkelled on the reef, lounged on the beach or the boat, and swam in the shallows until lunch was served on board, then relaxed as Gandalf reached sedately homewards, the water snoring gently at her prow and an occasional dolphin undulating under the bowsprit. We kept a sharp eye out for people who had fallen asleep and were likely to get grilled by the hot tropical sun as the trade winds drove the schooner steadily back towards St Maarten.

  For the entire off-season, Gandalf plied back and forth with 15 to 20 people on board. Fast powerboats and high-speed catamarans whisked people off to other islands, but Gandalf’s stock-in-trade was providing unhurried relaxation for her mostly American passengers, while she wafted between the islands. We were the love boat for honeymooners and holidaymakers. Then the tourist season began in earnest. Every day Gandalf was packed with up to 42 winter-racked Americans. The resorts were thronged with gaily clad and loud-voiced vacationers and the roads clogged by their rental jeeps.

  Gandalf sailed on schedule, breezing serenely out of Simpsons Bay and across to Anguilla. The Bobbies and I, flat out with the increased workload, remarked that the plane timetables had changed but didn’t put too much thought into it. One day, running late with a bumper crowd on board, we cruised past the airport just as a plane was lining up for take-off. At that stage in my life I believed that anything which travelled at over 12 knots was an aberration, and doubly so if it had to guzzle tonnes of jet fuel to do it. After years of yachting, I was blithely oblivious to aeroplanes, except when they could provide a bit of breeze to help a heavy staysail schooner on her way.

  It must have been an inkling of impending disaster that made me look over my shoulder at the last minute. The plane did look a little different from the off-season people-movers, and it seemed to have an extra engine mounted on its tailfin, too. Suddenly, the aeroplane accelerated away with an ear-wrecking roar, disappeared down the runway and smacked Gandalf flat on her beam ends with what felt like about 80 knots of wind. Forty-two portly American tourists slid into the lee scuppers in a screaming, bellowing mass of oily humanity, along with assorted cameras, bottles of sun-tan lotion, snorkelling gear and towels. Straw sunhats cartwheeled away downwind and glasses of rum punch went flying, splashing their contents among the beach gear and bodies thrashing frantically to leeward. Sand, blasted off the beach, spattered the boat while I dangled helplessly from the steering wheel. The lid from the huge chilly bin aft had swung ajar and I sighted little green bottles of Heineken beer plop … plop … plopping into the sea.

  The huge plane lifted off and Gandalf swung slowly upright again, her ballast overcoming the inertia of about 4 tonnes of hysterical humanity on the lee deck. Our shattered guests crawled shakily back across the deck while the crew ensured that nobody had been hurt. Feeling a little weak in the knees, I clung to the wheel while visions of what 40-odd lawsuits for personal damages and trauma in a US court of law would do to our cruising kitty flashed through my brain. My maritime career would be over. I envisaged charter jets full of American lawyers winging their way towards us and a severe raking over the coals at the maritime inquiry.

  One of the young passengers swaggered back to the cockpit, and I braced myself for the verbal onslaught. ‘Wow — that was cool,’ he laughed, ‘can we do it again?’ Soon we were all joking about our shared adventure, and the day’s trip settled back into the usual comfortable routine.

  That evening, when Gandalf was safe back on the mooring and an extensive check had shown no structural defects, Bobby, Bobbi and I took our snorkel gear back to the beach. Lining up the end of the runway, we swam out and recovered 10 of the beer bottles that had plopped overboard, then sat sipping them in the sand while the sun slowly sank below the horizon. It was just the sort of day when we’d be likely to see the fabled green flash.

  THE BOAT THAT WOULDN’T FLOAT

  High charter season in the Caribbean can get pretty hectic, and the boat barely had a few hours back in port from her last charter before the next guests were due. A team of cleaners swarmed over the Beneteau to make her ready while the company mechanic checked out the engineering, electrical and sailing systems.

  ‘All ready to go, mate,’ he grinned, and slapped me on the shoulder. ‘She’s all yours — have a good one.’

  The guests were two middle-aged French couples due on the direct flight from midwinter Paris at any moment. My conversational French was about as fluent as my Swahili, but a broad smile and an accommodating attitude had always got me by in the past, so I hoped that skippering the week-long charter around St Maarten and Anguilla would be a breeze (pardon the pun).

  The gue
sts soon appeared on the dock and I leapt ashore to help them with their bags. I saw straight away where the French term bourgeoisie (middle class) came from. The men, in white shirts and tropical-weight blue blazers, stood nervously stroking neatly trimmed David Niven moustaches while their wives went into a close huddle, heads close together and crackling with animated Frenchspeak.

  ‘Aahhh … bonjour, welcome aboard,’ I gestured at the gang-plank, then backed aboard with arms full of their portmanteaux. This language thing was getting easier all the time. Secretly I thanked Barry Jackson, the Francophile language teacher who’d taught me the little I knew during my too-short secondary schooling in New Zealand.

  The women clapped their hands with delight at the vase of fresh flowers and ice-bucketed bottle of champagne on the saloon table, and dragged their luggage over the varnished cabin sole to their cabins. Soon they reappeared, looking like swimwear ads from a 30-year-old Vogue magazine, and the men followed in their own swimwear. I fired up the engine, cast off the mooring lines and eased the boat out of her berth. The first stop would be Honeymoon Cay, just off the neighbouring island of Anguilla.

  The guests relaxed in the cockpit, sipping champers, nibbling canapés and slowly reddening in the sun as St Maarten slid by. The boat rollicked the few miles across to Anguilla and I soon picked that none of the guests were sailors, but they settled down in the calm waters under the lee of the island and became more animated as I pointed out Honeymoon Island (‘Voilà! Une île de la après matrimony’ was the best I could do, wishing I’d spent more time with the English/French dictionary I had in my cabin below).

  Honeymoon Island is the classic tropical paradise — even more so if you’ve just emerged from a gloomy European winter. The sun glances off its glaring white beaches and a smattering of palm trees sigh in the trade winds overhead. The anchor and chain rattled overboard where I could see them on the bottom about 4 metres down, and I gently idled the engine in reverse to dig the anchor into the golden sand. Les femmes busied themselves in the galley and emerged with a picnic hamper full of goodies. They invited me to join them on the island but I politely declined, secretly planning to spend time alone on the boat, boning up on my French.