Authors: Emma Bamford
If I thought the outside of the boat was large, the interior seemed even bigger. There was another wooden table, with a curved sofa around two sides of it, in the main cabin, which was split
60:40 into a saloon and galley. The port side was the saloon, with the table, a large shelf-cum-nav table along the outer edge, radios, screens, gadgets and technical bits and pieces. On the
starboard side the galley was a U-shape, with a cooker at eye level and a separate hob. Tyrone showed me the port hull. Down a few steps was a corridor with a double aft cabin on the left, at the
back of the boat. Straight ahead were cupboards for storing tools and spares; to the right, going forwards, was a bathroom and, on the other side of the heads, a single cabin that contained a bed
easily big enough for two people. It was the same layout in the starboard hull but instead of tools the cupboards housed food and box after box of books. On top of the boxes of books were stacks of
more books. There was a library on this boat. I couldn’t believe my luck.
Katherine showed me the aft starboard cabin. ‘This is yours,’ she said.
‘Wow, it’s huge!’ I said, turning full circle. The bed was raised, because the engine bay was underneath, and I had to climb on to a small bench to get on and off it. It was so
big I could lie like a starfish and still have spare room either side of me. This was lucky as there were no fans or aircon on the boat so quite often I did have to lie like a starfish, to get the
maximum amount of air circulating around me to cool down.
‘The house battery bank is in here so sometimes Tyrone has to come in to change the switch,’ she said, showing me a large red knob. ‘So don’t touch this unless he asks
you to.’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘I gave it all a good clean. And I’ve left you a few bits – body lotion, vitamins, things like that.’
‘Thanks,’ I said idly, exploring the cabin. There was a tall set of shelves and a small wardrobe with sheets and sleeping bags stored in them. I reached into a shelf and pulled out a
child-size pair of Crocs. ‘Are these yours?’ I asked.
‘No, they were gifts we picked up to give away to local children but got left over.’
‘Oh.’ I put the shoes back in their place, next to a set of playing cards. ‘So if this is your cabin,’ I asked Katherine, ‘where are you sleeping tonight? Do you
want me to stay in the saloon?’
‘No, I’ll bunk in with Tyrone,’ she said. I was surprised – they didn’t seem like a couple at all. I put him in his late forties and her in her early twenties. And
if they were a couple, why was she leaving? Then I thought about Steve and I and wondered if it might be a similar situation.
After I had unpacked – my things took up maybe a quarter of the storage space – the four of us had tea and cake at the table outside. It was all very civilised – a teapot, tea
leaves, cake served on plates. Except there was very little conversation. Conscious of the silence, I gabbled on like an idiot, asking questions. Where was the other crew member, I wanted to know.
Where were we going next? When? Then what? Where had they just come from? What was it like? Where had they been to stay in Borneo so far? Did we always have to paddle the dinghy along? What was
that red wooden thing hanging off the transom (back of the boat)?
They looked a little startled at my barrage of questions but they answered them. The remaining crew member was Chris, an American who was off doing some inland exploration on his own. They
weren’t sure when he would be back – he didn’t have a phone so they were waiting for an email from him – but whenever it was that he did put in an appearance, we’d be
off towards Kuching. In the meantime the outboard was having to be mended after it fell off the dinghy and filled with water. There was also a rudder that had to go back into the catamaran. They
had been to Tawau, to Mabul for just one day and the Kinabatangan. They hadn’t stayed to snorkel in Mabul and they hadn’t managed to see elephants up the river. They had come from Papua
New Guinea, a place they all loved (‘When we were in Manus’ became one of the most common sayings), and it had taken them two weeks to cross to Borneo. I wanted to know all about PNG
and bombarded them with loads more questions.
The red thing was a canoe that Tyrone had built himself. He used to make them commercially, he said, back in Ireland. Through the course of the conversation, it turned out he had built
Gillaroo
as well.
Hang on a minute
, I thought to myself
, building a nice little canoe is one thing but a 48-foot, oceangoing live-aboard catamaran? That is something
else
. I started to look at this slightly geeky man in a whole new light.
Time for my Sweet Valley moment. Tyrone was the 6-foot 2-inch, 52-year-old Northern Irish son of a bank manager who had peacocks and a pet sheep when he was growing up. He had been a computer
programmer back in the early days, a volunteer trek leader in Africa for a group that worked with troubled kids, a maths teacher and a canoe builder. He looked like a mish-mash of all of those
careers – he had a strong, lean body any man half his age would have been proud of, and a handsome, square-jawed face topped with a full head of floppy brown hair. His good looks were held in
check by his nerdy elements: his glasses, those tied-under-the-chin sunhats and his manner of opening his eyes really wide in surprise. He and his brother Sackville (yes, really) had come up with a
scheme to build their own catamaran and sail around the world with a crew consisting of Tyrone, Sackville, Mrs Sackville and the little Sackvilles and Tyrone had moved to the Irish countryside,
built a polytunnel yard and started to craft this enormous boat himself, over five years. They had bought the plans from a naval architect, Derek Kelsall, and changed them slightly, to give longer
hulls than the original design. For five years Tyrone laboured away in his polythene workplace in the middle of nowhere, while Sackville, home in Florida, researched equipment and gizmos and
ordered the sails. Somewhere along the line there had been a brotherly falling-out and the Family Sackville no longer wanted to cruise, so Tyrone cobbled together a crew of friends and volunteers
old and new. He hired a local farmer to drag the boat a hundred yards into the Irish Sea, hoisted an orange, white and green ensign and set sail for Spain, with a plan to keep going west for two or
three years until he ended up back where he had started.
By the time I joined, the ensign was a bit faded and frayed along the edges, the orange stripe noticeably thinner from numerous patchings-up. The interior was starting to look worn – two
years in the tropics had given her a nasty fungal infection, with mould growing everywhere it could get a hold, and a bad case of rust which was mostly confined to the cutlery drawer. The painted
Gillaroo
sign had worn off the dinghy’s bow, the spinnaker had ripped apart and been sewn back together multiple times and there were a few nicks in the cat’s topsides. But
these were mere battle scars – she had sailed the high seas and lived to tell the tale.
As Tyrone and
Gillaroo
went along their merry way, some problems with the boat started to emerge. The wrong size rig had been ordered – five per cent larger than was originally
planned – so she wasn’t sailing right. By New Zealand, he had to stop for five months to do some major work: the keels had to come off and be moved, the front of the boat redesigned and
the trampolines moved. ‘This was a mistake,’ Tyrone uttered about every third sentence as he introduced me to the boat’s systems and told me
Gillaroo
’s story.
‘That wasn’t a very good design.’ I think by the time I met Tyrone, two-thirds of the way through his journey round the world, he could see only the flaws in
Gillaroo
and
nothing of the astonishing feat he had accomplished. He had built a boat in his backyard, for God’s sake, and safely sailed himself, and at least 10 other people so far, across thousands of
miles of open water. They’d crossed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, visiting some of the remotest places in the world, and the boat was still in one piece. I wished I could open his eyes to
seeing his achievement for what it really was.
Katherine (who, I discovered, was older than me – perhaps there really is something in staying out of the sun’s ageing rays) left the following morning, Tyrone and Hugo paddling her
ashore, and over the next couple of days I concentrated on settling in. I was given a kind of training manual that set out what was expected of the crew. The sailing would be divided into watches
of three hours each, and I’d be on watch from 6am to 9am and 6pm to 9pm when we were on passage, and in charge of navigation and sail plan at those times. In between I was free to do what I
wanted unless more hands were needed on deck for any reason. Breakfast and lunch were fend for yourself but dinner was a family affair, to be served before sunset to preserve power. We were to take
it in turns to have a cooking and washing-up day. A small amount of paper could go down the toilets, it was best to charge computers and phones in the morning when there was spare solar power, any
expenditure on food, fuel and so on was to be recorded in a notebook and divided equally every so often. While sailing at night, the person on watch had to wake someone up if they needed to go
forward of the cockpit. We reefed the sails (furling them in and tying them down to make them smaller) once the wind reached 20 knots and put the engines on if our sailing speed dropped below 4
knots. There was nothing about dashing out in the rain to remove fleecy cushion covers – they were waterproof and fine in all conditions – and absolutely no mention at all of any
saucepan protocol.
In fact, the only really strict rule seemed to be about alcohol – absolutely no drinking on passage and, if you want to get right royally pissed when at anchor or in a marina, you were to
find yourself a bed ashore for the night. It was very much a community spirit – all for one and one for all, only without the swords and giant feathers in our hats – and it felt great
to be trusted. I was happy to contribute to boat tasks and work off my own initiative because there was a strong feeling of all mucking in together. And I could read – oh, everyone was a
great reader, even Hugo, which I found unusual in a 19-year-old lad. These were my kind of people and I felt so much more at home.
Hugo was a guy who took everything in his short-legged stride. He was between school and uni and had decided to head off for his summer break. There’s nothing too surprising about that
– the overseas experience is practically a rite of passage in New Zealand. But Hugo didn’t fly off to Bali to get pissed with his mates; he found someone at the yacht club who was
looking for crew, borrowed a waterproof jacket from his dad and hopped on board. The captain was a cruel drunkard and Hugo mutinied when he reached Vanuatu. And yet he didn’t call on the
banks of mum or dad and fly back home. He posted up an advert on the yachties’ notice board and ended up not long afterwards on board
Gillaroo
. Still in his teens, he found himself
with the responsibility of ensuring the boat’s safe passage during his watches at night, alone, while the rest of the crew and the skipper slept. I think he was a romantic soul because every
evening he would go forward to the front of the boat to watch the sun wind its way down the sky to vanish beneath the horizon. His enthusiasm for anything was tempered only by his poverty.
I offered to go shopping to re-provision the boat so that we could leave as soon as Chris arrived back. I already knew where the supermarket was, and the dodgy Chinese beer-selling restaurant.
And, after weeks of pooh-poohing the idea of schlepping around town to buy sausages here and fresh milk there, I converted. Tyrone and Hugo said they hadn’t tasted cheese for months so I set
myself a mission to buy some.
I had to take a bus to an out-of-town shopping area. I texted Debs to ask her if she knew which bus I could take. ‘Any number between 4 and 8,’ she replied, ‘going to Kim
Fong.’ I walked to the bus station and there were three number 4s so I got on the one at the back, which was the only one that had any passengers on it. ‘Kim Fong?’ I asked the
driver. It was a woman – not at all what I had expected – and she beckoned me on with her hand. I sat near the back and waited. In Malaysia there aren’t bus timetables, as such
– the buses leave once they have enough passengers. It was a long wait at that bus station. So long, in fact, that a woman got on, selling snacks of dried fruits and nuts. Eventually the
engine started and we belched our way along but there was confusion about where I was supposed to get off because I’d given the driver and conductor the name of the highway, not the stop I
wanted, and I nearly ended up being left in the middle of nowhere. But through counting on fingers, gesticulating and taking a leap of faith, I ended up in the right place.
When I was shopping in Sandakan with Steve I had passed a small Chinese store that sold imported Australian cheeses and frozen non-halal meats, and I set off from the bus stop in that direction.
I was walking along a wide road with broken paving slabs and overgrowing weeds. Coming towards me was a Malay who started shouting things at me. ‘Sorry?’ I asked and he yelled something
else utterly unintelligible. A young man who had been walking behind overtook me.
‘Don’ worry,’ he said, ‘that man crazy,’ and he twirled his finger by his temple in the international sign of madness. He shouted something at the other man, who
left us alone, and continued to walk alongside me.
‘Oh, terima kasih,’ I replied.
‘You speak Bahasa?’ he asked me, surprised, and said a long sentence that I didn’t understand.
‘Only a little,’ I shook my head. ‘About two words. Terima kasih and jumpa lagi.’ These mean thank you and goodbye and, even though I was pleased to have learned them, I
would hardly have said I knew the lingo.
‘You speak Bahasa,’ he said, a statement this time, and again said something I was unable to translate. ‘You understand me?’
‘No.’
‘Where are you going?’ he asked in English, which seems to be the standard question asked in Malaysia, rather than ‘How are you?’