Casting Off (17 page)

‘Where’s Henry?’ Hugo asked later in the afternoon. We searched all over the boat for him but no joy. Surely he hadn’t had the strength to fly away – he’d not
eaten or drunk for two days. So had he fallen or jumped overboard, or had he been pushed? Morgan was chilling, his head tucked under one wing, the picture of innocence.

He had moved right up to the helmsman’s chair, which was better for us because in his old position he kept standing on the sheets we needed to pull. As time passed he allowed us to stroke
him; his feathers were cold to the touch. It was tempting to think we had tamed him but he was probably just too exhausted to put up a fight. Small, brown, sparrow-like birds visited us from time
to time, too, struggling in the gusts to cling on to the guard rails with their tiny feet. One canny fellow sought shelter in the galley. Chris picked it up and brought it outside, laying it on a
cushion. It rested for a few minutes and then, when his back was turned, flew straight back into the galley again. Tyrone picked it up this time and put it out of the front saloon window. It was
blown straight into the sea.

Dolphins were swimming near the boat and snakes and jellyfish were wriggling their way under it. And don’t forget the ants and the cockroaches – and a big spider that decided the
best place in the whole of the boat to live was on my pillow. (‘Ty-ro-one… I know I’m a 32-year-old grown-up but can you please get that thing off of there?’). Gerald
Durrell had nothing on us.

By 6am, Morgan was dead. At least, that’s what Chris told me.

‘Morgan’s dead,’ were his exact words. There was no beating around the bush with that man. Next to him, on the seat, a feathery corpse lay, splayed in the ungainly position he
had collapsed in.

‘What are we going to do with him?’ I asked Chris.

He rubbed his nose. ‘Throw him overboard?’

‘I suppose we have to,’ I said, sighing. ‘But I’m not doing it.’

‘What?’

‘I hate dead things. Can’t touch them. You saw me with that flying fish – I had to pick it up with a piece of paper. Nope. You’ve got to do it.’

Chris gave Morgan a tentative poke – neither of us knew how to take a bird’s pulse – and he twitched. Not quite dead, then. More in a birdy, vegetative state.

‘Oh come on,’ Chris said, after another ten minutes. ‘We’ve got to put him out of his misery.’ He picked up the bird with both hands. ‘Ah, dude, we were so
nearly in Kuching. If only y’all could have held on a while longer.’ Morgan lifted his head a little bit and looked Chris in the eye. The next second he was floating on the water, the
South China Sea becoming his vast, watery grave. Apart from all the memories we had something else to remember him by – his poop, which he had left all over the boat.

I
t took us a further four days to sail across the South China Sea from Kuching to Singapore, and with good winds our speed topped 9.2 knots. The
winds were too good at one point – we ripped the clew clean off the jib and the mainsail reefing lines got caught in one of the wind turbines, breaking the blades. The first few days were
choppy and when I wasn’t on watch I felt too sick to do anything more than sleep or lie around listening to music. When the waves died down I turned my hand to cooking, whipping up loaves of
bread, batches of yoghurt and trays of chocolate brownies. It was all pretty calm until we got closer to land again. With Singapore being an island off the southern tip of the Malay peninsula, it
is a very busy place for shipping to converge. Think about all of the goods we buy that are made in China, Taiwan or Japan. They have to get here somehow, and they often do so on the back of
container ships. Those enormous lorries you see on the motorway, which create so much turbulence that they try to blast your car out of the middle lane when you overtake them? The steel containers
those lorries carry have come to our shores on the back of a ship, piled high among hundreds of identical boxes. The cargo ships are gigantic, sometimes hundreds of metres long, they weigh
thousands of tonnes and they shoot through the seas at 20 to 30 knots. That might not sound like much to a land lubber, but consider that the best speed I was doing on
Gillaroo
under full
sail was just over 9 knots, and, on
Kingdom
, 7 knots. And then add in the fact that these ships have no brakes; it can take them a mile to do an emergency stop, which they perform by
throwing their engines into full reverse thrust, and they can’t exactly turn on a dime, either. So they are basically the biggest bulldozers in the world, there are hundreds of them and they
are all aiming for the same small gap, slingshotting around Singapore, at the same time. And we, in our little floaty catamaran, which was made of a bit of lightweight foam sandwiched between a
couple of sheets of plastic, were heading for that small gap as well. At night all we could see of them were a few white, red and green lights, from which we were supposed to be able to decipher
whether they were heading towards us, away or if they were going to collide with us. It was a mind fuck.

Even the brainiac needed help – Chris woke me up during his night watch to help navigate through the maze of ships that all seemed to be aiming straight at us. We had a gadget called AIS
that sent us little text messages telling us which direction the ships were heading in and their speed, and it plotted their positions and courses on a radar screen. You had to be able to
understand how a radar screen works to use it, otherwise it just looks like a lot of little sperms wriggling their way across a Space Invaders game machine. Between the two of us we managed to
manoeuvre between anchored and moving ships without being sunk. Go, team! The smug, we’re-so-clever attitude didn’t last long: we hit a reef when coming in to anchor and, after the sun
had set, discovered we had illegally stopped in Indonesian waters, rather than Malaysian ones. Indonesia in some places is closer to Malaysia than the UK is to France. Who knew?

By night, the city scape of Singapore was beautiful, all skyscrapers and multi-coloured lights. After weeks of blackest Borneo rainforest views, it was a bit of a shock to the system. Tyrone was
eager to move the boat as soon as possible the next morning, first to get out of Indonesia before the coastguard spotted us and fined us, arrested us or chopped off our hands, and second to get
across the shipping lane. We needed to be the other side of the straits, closer to Singapore, to get to Johor Bahru on the Malaysian mainland. In theory it was a bit like crossing the road, as
there was a straight line of traffic going west straight ahead of us and another line going east just behind that. Except we couldn’t see the ships in the dark – the only way we could
tell where they were was by watching the buildings on the land and waiting until their lights went out, meaning a ship had passed between them and us, obscuring our view. Obviously there are no
road markings in the sea but we knew when we were at the edge of the shipping lane by referring to our GPS, so we motored along, waited for a gap, gritted our teeth and gunned it, maxed out, put
the pedal to the metal. At 4 knots. That’s about walking speed. And have I mentioned those big ships couldn’t stop?

Obviously we made it through (otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this now) and safely moored the boat in Johor Bahru, at the southern tip of the Malay peninsula, a stone’s throw from
Singapore. Danga Bay marina was the Skegness of the Far East, a sprawling site that included a mall of tacky souvenir shops, an outdoor market of food stalls, a couple of bars that no one visited,
a fishing area, a theme park and a zoo. Rumour had it that the owners of Danga Bay had bought up an entire amusement park that the Sultan of Brunei no longer wanted and had transported it across
the South China Sea to Johor Bahru. At night, particularly on Thursdays and Fridays, the Islamic weekend, the whole place lit up like a Christmas tree and families strolled around, chatting away.
The haphazard layout of the park lent itself to dark nooks and crannies and it was popular with courting teenage couples, who sat on the benches and talked. The boys wore their best pressed jeans;
the girls heels and headscarves. I never saw any kissing, sitting-on-laps or even hand-holding.

Danga Bay was the place to take stock and knuckle down to some work on the boat. A fridge engineer was called out, the sun shades were taken off and sent away to be patched up, Tyrone changed
the engine filters and Hugo, Chris and I spent a dirty day dismantling all seven winches, cleaning the parts in petrol, regreasing them and trying to remember how they all fitted back together. I
bought flights to the UK and back so I could make my brother’s wedding in six weeks’ time. Hugo booked his plane ticket home to New Zealand; Tyrone accepted another Kiwi called Aaron as
his replacement. Tyrone and I took our damaged jib into Singapore on the bus and the MRT to be repaired, looking at immigration on the border like we were dragging a dead body in a bag, and I had
my first taste of city life in ages – hello aircon, tea and cake and Topshop.

I went back by myself a couple of days later, lured by the appealing prospect of books, a new dress and some tampons (very difficult to find in Malaysia). At first I felt right at home.
Singapore’s malls, with their escalators, chrome and limestone styling and mix of designer and high street brands, are just like London’s. But gradually I became aware of how much I
stuck out as I walked among the locals. Ethnic Chinese and western expats alike were dressed in winter fashions despite the 30°C+ heat outside, with pale, made-up faces and conditioned,
poker-straight hair. I was unfashionably tanned, I had coarse, sun-bleached hair and my rubber flip-flops were just not appropriate among the leather boots and über-cool trainers. After half a
day I had had enough and went back to the boat, where I could kick off my flip-flops, put on my faded board shorts and happily pad around barefoot again.

A wide variety of boats filled the marina. Most, like us, were passing through, although many looked as though they had been ‘passing through’ for a few months now. Every day there
was the sound of drills, planes and other power tools being deployed to plug holes, mend decks and fix rotting interiors. One catamaran had been there so long the occupants had turned half of one
of its hulls into a planter. Next to us was a boat called
Incognito
with a young British man on it, Guy, a scuba instructor/computer nerd. He was waiting for crew to arrive before moving
north to Thailand. The first thing I noticed about him was his hair – there was a lot of it. He had old-fashioned mutton chops, like Mr Darcy, and wore a pony tail. The second thing I noticed
was his devastating good looks – a twinkle in his eyes and a smile so broad and dazzling it could have featured in a toothpaste commercial. The third was that he appeared to have a sort of
girlfriend. A French woman, Sylvie, from one of the other boats, was constantly hanging around his yacht.

Our new crewmate Aaron turned up, a few days early, before Hugo had even left, smelling strongly of Nivea suncream – he was a redhead with pale skin (and a lot of tattoos). Sailing on the
equator wouldn’t have been my first choice if I had been him. We did the round of introductions and Tyrone gave him a tour of the boat. I was going to the supermarket to get more food for us
and Aaron offered to come with me.

On his feet were leather sandals held in place by just one strap over the big toe. I noticed them because the front edge ended in a point that extended a couple of inches past his toes and
curled up into the air, like some kind of strange gnome footwear. He also had a hat with bells on it.
Hmm, looks like we might have a hippy on our hands
, I thought as we walked to the bus
stop.

He was a talkative chap – a welcome addition, in my opinion – and pretty well travelled. He had done his OE (overseas experience) in the UK and the previous year had travelled solo
through South East Asia and some of the Arab states. He told me his ex-girlfriend, who he had remained close to, had died of a brain tumour in the spring, and it had put things into perspective for
him about what was important in life. He was hoping his current partner could join
Gillaroo
in Thailand and sail to Europe with him.

I liked Aaron immediately and we became firm friends – real friends this time, with no hidden agenda – but I think he was more of a girl’s man than a man’s man. Not that
he wasn’t masculine: he had motorbikes and a VW Beetle, he knew his way around engines, he worked out and had the inverted triangle kind of torso that men’s fitness magazines have based
their industry on. His enthusiasm for travel, for getting the most out of life and not sticking to the well-trodden path just because it was expected of you, infected me.

Some of his theories were slightly too hippy for me, however. One he firmly believed in was manifestation.

‘What are you on about?’ I asked him as we lounged in the shade of the cockpit, barely able to keep the cynicism out of my voice.

‘If you want something strong enough, the universe will manifest it for you,’ he said.

I snorted. ‘Manifest?’

‘Yeah, you know, make it happen.’

‘Yes, I know what manifest means.’ I closed my eyes and held out my hand. ‘Dear Universe, I’d really like a Cadbury’s Dairy Milk.’ I made a show of opening
one eye at a time to peer at my empty palm. ‘See?’ I needled. Aaron took my scepticism in good humour.

But as time went on some of what he believed, especially about doing what you want to in life, even if it involves going against the conventional flow, started to chime with me and subtly change
the way I thought about myself.

In my darkest moments I thought that what I was doing, here in Malaysia, was running away from failing at ‘real life’ in England. I didn’t think this way most of the time but
the negativity was buried in my subconscious somewhere. The way Aaron explained things made me think. I wasn’t running away; I was exploring. So I didn’t have a conventional 2.4 life.
So what? I had
this
life – this interesting, ever-changing, free-running, go-with-the-flow, beautiful, calm yet exciting life. And that was no bad thing.