‘Don’t worry,’ I say, jabbing my forefingers at the sides of my head. ‘Ear plugs. We shan’t hear a thing.’ She looks relieved.
It turns out to have been a good decision on our part. They are soon completely stoned and the music, to our ears at least, is terrible.
Next morning, they rise late and look frail. They totter around their decks in an unfocused sort of way and the men sway in unison as they make water together off the stern. Meanwhile the two girls begin banging their fists into large cushions with elasticised covers held over their side rail. They look like the upholstery from sofas and bunks.
‘What on earth were you doing last night?’ I ask the nearest girl, meaning the cushions.
She looks anguished and as she gropes hesitantly to form an answer her skipper, close behind her, winces.
‘No, no!’ I say. ‘What I mean is, what’s with the cushion thumping?’
Her face brightens and her skipper relaxes and wanders off.
‘Glitter,’ she says. ‘Fancy dress.’
They had all dressed as angels, complete with blond wigs, cardboard wings and lots of glitter. For a moment my mind’s eye is filled with the image of some yachtie returning from a local bar, perhaps a little the worse for wear, confronted by five glittering angels relieving themselves off Mojo’s stern. Smiling at the thought, I go below and close the starboard hatches before our galley and bedding become filled with glitter.
The thumping is obviously unsuccessful because Mojo’s engines go on, water cascades from her stern for an hour, then the elasticised cushion covers emerge from Mojo’s capacious washing machine and are hung in the rigging to dry.
The following day, David is completing our maintenance and I’m doing the last of the laundry when Voyager skews violently to port. David rushes to check our mooring lines. I follow him. But when we get on deck we find that we are not at fault. Mojo’s starboard shore line has sliced through on the concrete quay and sent her 60 tons lurching into us. As David and I hold Mojo off – as best one can hold off 60 tons of fibreglass and teak, fourteen stainless-steel winches, half of them the size of beer kegs, a 120-foot mast and an industrial-size washing machine – her skipper murmurs, ‘Oh, how careless,’ and spends the next fifteen minutes unhurriedly seeking new rope and tying it in place.
Quite early in this longueur there is an anguished movement up the mast. One of the crew is at the top of it, doing a maintenance check. In the search for a new shore line, he has been forgotten, and the more time passes, the more agitated he becomes. I note the wind direction and hope it’s not his bladder that is causing his distress. As soon as I can, I leave their rail and go and close our hatches.
They are leaving today, they tell us, when I return. At around 5pm.
‘We’ll see you off,’ I say.
They finally cast off at 10.20pm and then spend the next hour and a half lurching between one extreme of the harbour and another. Because of Mojo’s size the lazy lines had not been adequate to hold them away from the quay so they had used a kedge anchor instead. Unfortunately, it appears to have snagged on something on the bottom and they have difficulty raising it. At midnight I leave them to it and go to bed. I have grown fond of them and shall miss them.
Piet and Else and their young son stop by next morning, to say farewell before they leave for Antigua. The fountains are turned on and shortly afterwards a very large yacht arrives.
There is a saying that misery loves company. It is also noticeable that negative people seek out conditions they can be negative about. In particular, of all the days of all the many weeks that Gene and Erica might have hired a car to explore this beautiful island, they choose today. The sky is heavily overcast and promising rain and the wind is rising steadily. It turns out not to be the best day to have left their boat for other reasons.
Gene and Erica have a negligent attitude to berthing. While we have double bow ropes as a safeguard against chafing, they have a single, rather threadbare ex-genoa sheet now almost completely frayed through from rubbing against the quay. They also keep their lazy line slack so that when they want to get on or off their boat they can haul on their bow rope, pull the boat close to the quay, climb onto the ladder, let the bow rope go and the lazy line pulls the boat back off the quay again.
Carpe Diem is an expensive boat of a type coveted by many. But it is not a restful one. On more than one occasion we have noticed the design’s mobile tendencies when at anchor – plunging stem to stern and rolling port to starboard – even to the point where it has pulled up its own anchor. This is the first time we have been berthed alongside one and have discovered that even when moored it worries at its lines like a terrier.
Because of their casual mooring habits, Gene and Erica’s boat has been leaning against Voyager ever since we arrived. This morning has brought a change of wind direction, however, and it is now colliding repeatedly with the Beneteau on the other side of it, which is also currently uninhabited. Along with a rising wind, and rougher water in the harbour than any we have seen during our time here, its lazy line has stopped doing its job and Carpe Diem is currently butting the quay.
We attract the attention of a man in a dinghy checking lazy lines on the other side of the marina. He chugs over, takes one look at the boat and then leaps aboard. He winches up its lazy line to pull it off the quay and then addresses the frayed bow line.
The water in the harbour grows increasingly rough as the day wears on while outside it the sea becomes ferocious. It comes flying over the huge sea wall, landing only feet from Voyager and all the other boats on the seaward side of the marina. All motor traffic is banned from entering the quay for a while and anyone attempting to climb the stone steps with a view to looking over the top of the sea wall is prevented from doing so.
But the sea is not simply reflecting the wind here at Santa Cruz but of much further away. For despite the Atlantic hurricane season having officially ended, on 16th November a Category 4 hurricane named Lenny arrived in the Caribbean with devastating results.
We remain aboard for the day. While David makes his final preparations for the journey, I start work on a big, rich, fruit cake. I get the best part of the deal. While he compromises his ribcage hanging headfirst into the engine bays and wanders blustery decks fitting safety lines, digging out our drogue and tarpaulin and strapping the dinghy onto the foredeck, I get to sit at the saloon table with a the big mixing bowl and a wooden spoon. When cooked and completely cold the cake will be wrapped in foil and stored somewhere low down in the boat in the cool where it will mature nicely in time for Christmas and not go mouldy in the humid conditions of the coming weeks.
By evening the worst of the weather has passed for the time being and everything is settling down for the night. We are just beginning dinner when a familiar flat, negative and very loud voice hails us from the quay. We leave our meal and go on deck. Erica is standing sullenly on the quay with a quantity of supermarket bags around her feet. Gene is yelling that somebody has been tampering with his lines and that he can’t get onto his boat. We tell them about it butting the quay and suggest they might like to drive round to the marina’s manager and use his tender to get on board, but Gene seems rather more the worse for wear than usual and wants his lazy line released. There will be no peace until it is.
Carpe Diem is still leaning on the Beneteau and a full boathook’s length away from us so we end up hauling the boat over between us, which is a great strain on the back but enables David to climb over and slacken its lazy line. Then while Gene staggers off to park their hire car for the night David helps Erica and their shopping aboard. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, apparently.
We go back to our own meal which has now gone cold. We have not quite finished it when a loud crash sends us lurching to starboard and David rushing up on deck. Gene has loosened his lazy line further still, the wind has changed back to its previous direction and Carpe Diem is back leaning on Voyager again.
There are a few more days of high winds and
rain but finally the time comes for us to leave. Gene is returning from town with his daily newspaper as David is reversing out.
‘Where you heading?’ he calls to me.
‘Trinidad.’
‘Maybe we’ll see you there.’
My silence hangs in the air.
We do see Gene and Erica again, in the Caribbean, embroiled in an argument with a householder who objects to their using his garden to get ashore instead of the dinghy dock like everybody else. But under cover of the ensuing melee we leave the scene. And the anchorage.
In the meantime I catch a glimpse of a fellow traveller of an altogether different stamp. On our way out of Santa Cruz harbour we encounter a very small, single-handed yacht named after a very large star, whose benign skipper has, like some recording angel, been witness to our progress so far.
The little sloop Antares, which was at anchor beside us at Alderney in the Channel Islands during the earliest days of our setting out, and most recently at Porto Santo after our longest-ever single passage, appears before us now as we are about to embark on the biggest journey of our lives.
I wave to the tall, dark, young man in his small cockpit, and then go down into the cabins and rootle about for the poetry anthology I know is in there somewhere with the Longfellow poem in it containing that stanza about ‘ships that pass in the night’.
Our last act before leaving Tenerife, around noon, is to fill up with diesel at Puerto Radazul’s fuel dock, just along the coast. Our destination after that is the Cape Verde Islands, 870 miles further south, whose currency is Cape Verde escudos, and after that we expect to be in the Caribbean which trades in US and EC (Eastern Caribbean) dollars. Accordingly we have gathered together all our Spanish peseta coins so as not to have money lying around the boat going to waste because, like banks everywhere, those on the other side will exchange only paper money.
‘Going across?’ asks the man at the diesel pump, eyeing the growing mound of coins being counted into his cupped hands.
Our purpose in heading for the Cape Verde Islands is to break the journey in two: a short leg and then a longer one. The distance from the Canary Islands to the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean is 2,800 miles and a typical passage time is three weeks. The journey from the Cape Verde Islands to the Lesser Antilles is 2,085 and typically takes just over two. Although adding around 150 miles to the overall journey, it will give us a break, the opportunity to pick up fresh food and fuel, collect our mail, and experience – apart from a brief but tantalising gust of heat and spiciness one dark night in the Strait of Gibraltar – our first brush with Africa.
TO THE CAPE VERDE ISLANDS
15
Dolphin Delight
Once out to sea we find that our log is not working. This instrument, showing the speed at which a boat is travelling and the distance covered, is not as important as it was before the advent of the GPS. But if for any reason our GPS malfunctions, the information provided by the log will be essential for calculating our position and navigating by dead reckoning.
Our log’s measurements are obtained via a tiny paddle wheel a little over an inch in diameter and built into our starboard hull. Occasionally this paddle wheel seizes up. The cause is sometimes weed, but more often it is because tiny shellfish have set up home on the only bit of hull below our waterline which is free of the antifouling we have so assiduously painted on to discourage them.
One way to unblock the paddle wheel is to go full speed ahead, come to halt and then go full speed in reverse. As well as causing more than one mystified cliff-walker to call friends over to watch, this will often be enough to free the wheel and the log will work again. Today no amount of roaring back and forth will do the trick and must look to the man on the Puerto Radazul fuel dock as if the two of us are having a violent disagreement about whether to make an Atlantic crossing after all.
Our only option now is to take out the paddle wheel and remove whatever is preventing it from spinning. This would be simple enough but for the fact that a) it is below water level and b) most working parts on a yacht are in barely-accessible places.
To be specific, taking out the paddle wheel requires, first of all, that you crawl head-first into the little cupboard under the bathroom wash basin, because that is where the bit of hull with the wheel in it is located. As soon as you remove the wheel there is a heart-stopping moment as seawater starts pouring in, which you have to staunch with a piece of rag in one hand while prising off a determined mollusc with the thumbnail of the other.
Given that the cupboard’s opening is not wide enough to get both arms inside at once, and that its interior is full of sharp-edged obstructions such as stopcocks, hose clamps and wiring, this is quite a painful process after which there is a second heart-stopping moment when you have to remove the rag bung currently holding the Atlantic Ocean at bay and shove the paddle wheel back into its hole again. And as David rains down blessings on the yacht designer his head gets banged, his knuckles cut and his elbows bruised. And if the vanity door’s hinges get bent during this struggle, the door will creak and groan and fail to shut properly for weeks afterwards until he finally gets around to taking off the hinges and hammering them flat again.
In sailing, as in any other area of existence, it is odd how often the really irksome moments in life seem to coincide with some of its most memorable. For no sooner has a cut, bruised and rather twitchy husband reversed out of a cramped and water-logged bathroom cabinet, than a family of dolphins comes to visit.
Dolphins, on the whole, follow a basic procedure when taking their pleasure with a yacht. There is the sheer joy of swimming in your bow wave, naturally, and of challenging your bows by barrelling along barely inches in front of them. But all of this is heightened for these extraordinarily sociable animals if they can only get somebody up front to watch them. To achieve this, they have to get you onto your foredeck.
So, there you will be, sitting in your cockpit with your head down, reading or preparing vegetables for dinner or, as now, applying sticking plaster to bleeding knuckles, and they have to get you onto your feet and move you from the centre of your boat up to the bow. To do this they first have to attract your attention so they materialise alongside your beam directly opposite you and begin arcing vigorously through the water in ones, twos and threes. They then swim very close to your hull, so that to see them properly you have to stand up. Once they have you on your feet they move forward, and naturally you have to follow if you want to go on watching them. By then, of course, you are committed and the moment they have you hanging over your bow rail, that’s when they put on a show.
Today, though, having got us into the front stalls as it were, these half a dozen small, common dolphins swim between our bows in an almost perfunctory manner, giving more attention to observing us and the boat than enjoying themselves and giving a performance. Then, after a final glance up at the two of us, they shoot away.
It is like having a human guest leave your home looking disappointed but not knowing where you went wrong. Perplexed by the briefness of their visit and its patently unsatisfactory nature, and feeling that we must have somehow given offence, there is nothing for it but to return to the cockpit. We have barely turned away from the bow rail, however, before the dolphins rush back again, only this time there are more of them. They have another family member with them, and two very small calves.
It is as if the original group had reconnoitred us and our boat, to see if we were safe for infants to play with, and then being satisfied gone back to fetch them and their minder. One calf is maybe two feet long, the other less than three; two perfectly-formed, smiling-beaked miniatures of the mature dolphins surrounding them.
The latter usher the two calves close to the inside of our starboard hull, where they swim side-by-side as if joined by an invisible thread, at exactly the speed of our boat and closely shadowed by adults who rarely take their eyes off them. We can’t see all the dolphins. Some may be under the boat, because in the unlikely eve
nt that these superbly capable little calves should fail to keep pace with our bows, and the boat went over them, they could be hit by our propellers. So there are no acrobatics by the adults today. They are here to see that the two youngsters come to no harm while taking an early lesson in swimming between the bows of a catamaran.
They stay for quite some time. The slightly larger, darker calf is cautious, almost a little anxious, as if being a bit older it has reached that moment in its development where danger has begun to impinge on its awareness. It is watching its mentors almost as carefully as they are watching it. But the little one! Its black eyes glow, and even its naturally-smiley beak seems to have acquired an extra dimension. Like an already happy baby suddenly presented with a new and delightful experience… well, call me anthropomorphic if you like, but it looks thrilled to bits. When it is time for them to leave, the two calves sink and sweep sideways under the starboard hull with the same easy grace as the adults. Then the family swims away in a tight little group.
It is nightfall before we clear the south-eastern end of Tenerife, but for hours afterwards we can still look back on the tiny lights from the islands shining out into the darkness.
It is Tuesday and our second day at sea. The wind is fairly light, although we manage to sail all day except for a couple of short periods where it becomes so weak that our speed drops below three knots and we motor-sail. To grab every bit of wind available, David hauls out our staysail, the small sail between our genoa and mainsail, but before it is even fully out it collapses onto the foredeck. The loop by which it is hauled up the mast has snapped.
Weather reports are a problem as usual. On our way to Madeira we tried various sources but found the only accessible one was Radio France Internationale. It still is, but unfortunately we find the forecasts increasingly difficult to hear, and their being in a foreign language compounds the problem.
A Thousand Miles from Anywhere Page 9
