by Rita Pomade
I continued to meditate each morning before heading to the galley for my first coffee of the day. Bernard and Stefan were usually there with mugs in hand, discussing some aspect of the yacht in need of attention. Stefan shared Bernard’s interest in solving technical problems. Good, I thought. He could be sailing with us for a long time.
“What are your plans?” I’d asked a few days after he arrived.
“I don’t know, mom,” he answered, “but I’m not going back. I have to figure out what I want to do with my life first.”
Although I no longer tried to include Bernard in my daily excursions, I still wondered at his lack of interest in Hong Kong. I recalled our trips in Mexico and how he enjoyed trekking through unexplored places and talking to the local people in the small villages. He once built a hut of palms on a secluded beach in Playa Azul where the two of us lived for a week sustained by love and red snapper sold to us by local fishermen. I missed the Bernard who had once been so full of curiosity and adventure.
One evening he agreed to join the boys and me for a week of Chinese operas being performed near the harbour. Though I knew he had only agreed because the Santa Rita was within viewing distance, I was still pleased. We stood for hours with throngs of Hong Kongese in front of a makeshift outdoor stage to listen to the performances. The reverence the audience showed the singers was unlike anything I’d experienced in the West. From our vantage point we were able to observe the actors in the operas painting their faces — a white face for the villain, a red one for the hero, black for a bold or fierce character.
But while we observed, as the only westerners in the audience, we were also being observed. Jonah, with his large blue eyes, was a particular object of curiosity. People often stopped on the street, stared at him and then walked on. For the most part, he was used to it. But during a performance, an elderly man decided not to walk past. He stood directly in front of Jonah, his back to the stage, and stared unblinking into his eyes, absolutely transfixed. Jonah moved away in an effort to lose him. The man followed. He tried to look over the man’s head. The man raised his head to match Jonah’s movement.
“That guy gives me the creeps,” Jonah whispered to me.
“He’s in love with you,” I said, teasing.
In exasperation, Jonah left the performance while the man, following behind for a few feet, stared after him. I thought of my American friend Katherine from Taipei telling me how strangers would touch her hairy arms, and I recalled seeing a man without legs getting on a bus in Taipei. Passengers ran to the bus door to watch. It took me a while to get used to this overt form of curiosity, but Jonah never got used to it.
When the theatre people took down the bamboo infrastructure and dismantled the stage, Bernard returned to his pattern of our oncea-week outing for dim sum with a quick return to the yacht. It was as though he were attached to the Santa Rita by an invisible elastic band — a short stretch out, snap and back.
He wasn’t the only yachtie who didn’t venture far from his boat. There was Captain Iredell, his brawny drinking buddy, who was moored beside us. Iredell, a seasoned sailor from the United States, had commanded cargo ships for American companies before retiring, and was now captain of his own small yacht. And though he sailed without crew, he still referred to himself as Captain Iredell and wouldn’t reveal his given name to us.
Every night I sat on deck with my one bottle of beer while Bernard and Captain Iredell went through a 6-pack each. And every night I listened to them commiserating about how boring Hong Kong was.
“Of course you find it boring,” I finally said to Bernard. “The two of you never go anywhere. You just sit around drinking and discussing boat hardware. What do you find so interesting about that guy?”
“He knows a lot about the sea,” he answered. “I can learn from him.”
Aside from Iredell’s disdain for the world, I wasn’t convinced there was much Bernard could learn. I also got the feeling Captain Iredell didn’t like women, especially women on boats. He made a point of ignoring me except for one pointed comment that he threw at me when we first met.
“Jonah, you call him? Not a good name for a sailor. I don’t like Stefan either. Why didn’t you give your kids common names like Jim or John?”
“Maybe I didn’t want them to be common.”
“I’m going to call him John.”
“His name is Jonah.”
“Not good luck on a boat.”
“I’ll take my chances. I’m not superstitious.”
Captain Iredell smirked and walked away. It was the last time he ever addressed me in a conversation.
During one of those nightly drinking fests, Bernard again brought up the theme of boredom.
“Know what we need?” Captain Iredell countered. “A television. Sailboats should come equipped with televisions.”
Even I laughed at the idea. It seemed so farfetched. Besides, we planned to go for a sail the next day, and I felt that would alleviate some of Bernard’s boredom. Cheung Chau, a small island about an hour away from Hong Kong, would be our first sailing venture since we had arrived, and it generated a lot of nervous excitement in all of us — especially Stefan, who was sailing for the first time.
“We’ll be doing a number of test runs to the island,” Bernard informed us. “We can’t chance leaving Hong Kong without them.” He worried, having already uncovered some glitches in the Santa Rita.
Halfway to Cheung Chau, Bernard spotted an object partially sunk under the waves.
“Can you make it out?” he asked no one in particular.
“Maybe it’s a big fish,” Stefan offered. Jonah and I shrugged. It kept appearing and disappearing, and even with binoculars it wasn’t easy to see.
“I’m going for a better look,” Bernard said. He handed the helm to Stefan, lowered the sails, and jumped into the dinghy. With grappling hook in hand, he fished a large Styrofoam-covered object out of the water.
“It’s a TV!” he shouted. It was the first bit of enthusiasm Bernard had shown since our arrival in Hong Kong.
He extracted the bright red 12-inch television from its thick, buoyant wrapping. “A bit wet,” he mumbled, mostly to himself, and carefully took it apart to dry on deck.
I looked with dismay at the scattered pieces. “You’ll never get that thing to work, let along figure out how to get those bitty parts back into the right places,” I said.
“Maybe,” he mused, completely absorbed in the project at hand.
Once re-assembled, the TV worked on a 12-volt battery. Bernard couldn’t wait for our return to Hong Kong to see the expression on Iredell’s face. Coming into the harbour, he shouted over the put-putting of the engine. “You were right about us needing a TV. I’ve just fished one out of the sea.” He held the set up for Iredell to see.
“Son of a bitch,” Iredell exclaimed. “I don’t believe it. You’re pulling my leg, right? You bought the damn thing in Cheung Chau.”
“Look, here’s the case it was floating in. It was kind of wet, but I took it apart and dried it out on deck.”
“You did what?”
I could tell that Iredell, who never liked to give credit to anyone, was impressed.
“Bernard has this uncanny knack.” I said. “Whenever he puts out an intention for what he wants, it comes to him. And he can fix anything. It’s a gift.”
“Son of a bitch,” Iredell repeated.
That evening, along with Captain Iredell and the boys, we settled back on the settees below deck, drinks in hand, and watched our first TV broadcast from Hong Kong — John Wayne in an old black and white western speaking in Cantonese. It didn’t matter that his lips stopped moving before he finished speaking or that sometimes he started to speak with his mouth shut. It was hilarious to see this wooden actor spouting words in a language that didn’t match the sets or his body movements. It was even funnier to listen to the other characters in the movie responding to him. The best part was that it brought some common ground of enjoyment into ou
r lives.
We continued our regular sails to Cheung Chau, anchoring away from the port with its ferries, water taxis and fishing boats vying for space, its streets an extension of the frenetic life crowding the harbour. All activity was squeezed into the port area, streets so narrow, only miniature, toy-like emergency trucks and bicycles were allowed. I walked the streets much as I did in Hong Kong, strolling through the cramped back alleys, taking in the pungent food smells and familiar clicking of mah jong tiles. I wondered why all of Cheung Chau’s life was packed into this small area while the rest of the island remained unblemished with golden sand beaches.
Bernard’s testing and constant vigilance proved to be right. During one of our excursions, the salon flooded. Neither the electric bilge pump nor the hand pump worked. The boys and I bailed while Bernard searched for the leak, finally tracing it to a loose cap on the engine. Another time, as we motored into Aberdeen’s narrow harbour, the engine died. Bearing down on us from behind was a huge tourist junk going too fast to stop. For one harrowing moment it looked as though we’d be rammed. Within seconds of that near crash, Bernard managed to restart the engine. A small air hole in the fuel feed had caused the problem. Leave nothing to chance, I thought.
Our last sail to Cheung Chau was for pleasure. Even Bernard wanted to witness the colourful Bun Festival. It was a time when the whole island went vegetarian, including the local McDonald’s. We watched Pak Tai, the god of water and spirit of the north, lead a procession of children through the village. Young children, standing motionless in traditional clothing, are held high above the crowds on steel frames. Walking among the suspended children made me think of deceased children from another time floating upright through the air.
Arrhythmic drumming and clashing cymbals surrounded the children to protect them from evil spirits because the dead, who have no family to feed their souls, come on this day to eat. Three scaffoldings 60 feet high were completely covered with steamed buns to feed the orphan souls. Revellers waited for the dead to have their fill before they ate the leftovers. But those of us with less compassion for the hungry souls bought buns to eat as we watched the lion dancing through the narrow streets and cheered on dragon boat races in the harbour, accompanied by still more drumming and clashing cymbals. In the West we “let the dead rest in peace.” In the East the dead are kept at bay by noise. I found it curious how our cultures differed in the way we thought the dead responded to sound.
While moored in the Aberdeen Harbour, I observed my fellow travellers. Some were as interesting as the culture I was experiencing. One was a quiet man from Scotland, who kept apart from the other yachties, and seemed pleasant enough, always polite and well-mannered, but I felt his presence and was alert to wherever he was around the harbour. As soon as he moored beside us, I was unable to sleep. His hull was pressed up against ours, with its aft cabin berth only a fibreglass skin away from ours. His head was inches from mine when we slept, and I could feel his energy through the hull. It felt as though he was sleeping in bed with me, and I couldn’t bear it. I changed places with Bernard so that I wouldn’t have to sleep so close to him.
“Do you mind?” I asked. “I know you’ll be squeezed in.” The Santa Rita was curved at the stern, and my side of the double berth was narrower than Bernard’s. I slept on the inside part next to the hull because I was shorter.
“No problem,” he answered. Bernard may have found my reasoning for the switch irrational, but he didn’t question it. He trusted my intuition and never thought of my premonitions or “feelings” as anything but normal. His total acceptance of this aspect of my nature was part of what glued me to him in our relationship.
After the Scotsman sailed away, we learned that he’d been commissioned to supervise the building of the yacht he was on. Instead of delivering the boat to its rightful owner, he sailed off with it. Interpol was after him, but he always managed to be elsewhere when they came. In 1982, no country had legal jurisdiction over large bodies of water three miles off shore. It freed others as well as him to engage in cheating, theft, pirating, and murder. Before living at sea, I believed that police control was, for the most part, excessive. But I was wrong. Take away societal constraints and some of the most law-abiding citizens turn rogue. I witnessed the most arbitrary and petty crimes by “decent” people, because they could get away with it — from a retired jeweller from Toulon who sailed out of Aberdeen Harbour without paying the meagre fee for filling his water tank, to fellow travellers stealing equipment from neighbouring yachts.
Fortunately, most yachties tended to be more eccentric than criminal, like the New Zealander with his 30-foot yacht who sailed alone and lived solely on coconuts. He had hundreds of them aboard his boat, maybe thousands. They were stacked everywhere, above and below deck. With his long, messy hair and emaciated body, he looked like a zombie from The Living Dead TV series, but in truth he was a loner with a generous nature and gentle soul.
And then there was Charlie and Cat who lived together on a beat-up steel-hulled wreck anchored a short distance from the harbour. Charlie was an alcoholic who lived mostly on booze. Cat was rescued by Charlie from a cat farm somewhere in Hong Kong. Cat was destined for the meat market and Charlie changed the direction of his life. He also changed his appearance. Cat was smooth and pink from his neck down. According to Charlie, the big tom had fallen into a barrel of oil, lost his fur, and wasn’t able to grow it back. As a result of being furless, Cat loved water, and the two used to scuba dive together.
Their life in Hong Kong was supposed to be temporary, but Charlie couldn’t leave the country because he was at war with the Hong Kong government over the naming of his boat. He had applied to register it under the name of Screw Driver. The Government insisted Screw Driver was a dirty word. Charlie couldn’t make them understand it was his favourite drink.
“And also a tool,” I interjected into his story.
The officials kept rejecting his application. They were at loggerheads and neither would budge from their position.
Charlie told us that, once he got his boat properly registered, he was going to start a floating utopia of like-minded people. He had made drawings for a series of huge connected rafts that would float between Europe and the Americas on the trade winds. His people would grow their own food and have all their needs provided for within the community without ever having to go ashore. He had an engineer’s mind and was totally focused on refining the blueprint for his vision. But he was in Hong Kong when we arrived, and still there when we left several months later.
Charlie and the coconut man from New Zealand were loners, men who were wounded or disillusioned in some way and could no longer live within a workaday environment. We met people like them all through our travels — solitary figures who didn’t feel at home in a structured society. Many of these sailors didn’t trust women and made total female transferences onto their yachts that were always referred to as “SHE,” and where they, as captain, were always in control. I gleaned this information from women who paired up with these men at various ports. They were seduced by the romanticism of sailing and then disillusioned by the knowledge that the yacht was the captain’s only love. They served as pillow mates, galley slaves, money providers, or charwomen until they got fed up and left.
I wondered about my own position. I didn’t share ownership of the yacht, and worried that maybe something shifts in men at sea. Most of the time, the excitement of the adventure and practical considerations buried this needling thought.
Our sail from Taiwan to Hong Kong convinced us the Colman camping stove was too dangerous on a rough sea. Bernard threw it out and installed a gas two-burner with an oven. My beautiful, new stove stirred my interest in cooking. In one of the English bookstores I found a small paperback with simple Chinese recipes. This little gem of a book served me well through our adventure and has travelled with me through many countries since.
I had no problem trying most of the food products from China and was even willing to exper
iment with duck feet and bring aboard thousand-year-old eggs, but I was never able to overcome my revulsion to sea cucumber, a leathery tubular thing that crawls on tiny pods along the ocean floor perpetually eating and excreting. When attacked, it jettisons its organs from its anus and then regenerates them. Unless you’re into science fiction, there’s something unsettling about a vegetable-like animal that can almost disintegrate its entire body, and then put itself together again. And although it’s one of the most disgusting looking animals on the planet, and looks even worse dried than alive (often compared to a glop of cement), it’s a favoured delicacy of the Cantonese who spend days in its preparation to clean and cook it to slippery perfection. I could neither cook nor eat it.
Had I been less squeamish, there was another culinary possibility. One night at about two or three in the morning, I got up for a glass of water. As I entered the galley, I felt eyes on me. I looked around and could see nothing. I figured it was my imagination and turned on the faucet. Still, something creepy in the dark disturbed me; maybe a robber was hiding aboard. I knew something was there. I was afraid to turn on a light because I didn’t want whatever it was to know that I knew it was there. I calmly walked back to the aft cabin and poked Bernard.
“There’s something or someone on board,” I said.
He rolled over and faced me. “How do you know?”
“I just know.” It wasn’t much of an answer, but I refused to go away, and I wouldn’t get back on the berth.
He finally got up, grabbed a flashlight, and headed for the galley with me trailing behind.
Right there, under the galley table, was a rat. Bernard picked up a woven stool with an open bottom and tried to catch it in the open end. The rat was a lot faster, gone before Bernard could pounce on it. Terrified of its coming towards me, I headed back to the aft cabin. The rat ran behind me. I jumped onto the berth and pulled the blanket over my head. The rat also jumped onto the berth. I could feel its little feet running across my back. I was running from it. It was running from Bernard. For different reasons, the rat and I were both in a state of panic.
