Casting Off (18 page)

For centuries the Malacca Straits were notorious for pirates. Ships laden with valuable spices bound for Europe had no choice but to pass through the narrow channel between Indonesia and
Malaysia as they set sail homewards with the north-easterly trade winds, taking their chances against the fearless cut-throat bugis who patrolled the waters, looking for boats to pillage and crews
to murder. Today, piracy in these waters is fairly uncommon – it is the Somali bounty-hunters further west that the shipping companies have to worry about. Nevertheless, the Straits do have
their dangers for a small sailing vessel: sumatras, ships and fishing nets.

Sumatras – the fierce, sudden squalls that are thrown up by the steep Indonesian terrain west of the Straits – were unavoidable no matter what route we took. They can bring gusty
winds of 50 or 60 knots, fierce enough to rip sails in half (we had had first-hand experience of this, when the jib tore on our approach to Singapore), and downpours of the kind of rain that feels
like needles when it is blown horizontally on to bare legs by the wind.

Tyrone opted to take an offshore route, close to the shipping lane, to have the best chance of avoiding submerged fishing nets, which could get caught in our propeller and stop us dead in the
water. So that left us with the shipping to negotiate, which was meant to be confined to the designated lanes a couple of miles off our port side. It didn’t quite work out like that.

We didn’t settle into the easy, rhythmic routine of the other passages I’d done on
Gillaroo
. We started off sailing but the wind was strong and unpredictable and we were
constantly putting sails up and down, reefing and fiddling with them to keep our speed high and the chances of damaging the already well-worn sails low. After a short while the wind came round on
to the nose and, as tacking would have been a lot of effort in those conditions and with a small sea space, Tyrone decided we would motorsail a very bumpy ride into it, so that we could keep our
course. We tried to use one engine at a time, alternating them every few hours, to save fuel and wear and tear, but we found we had a problem with the steering so we had no choice but to use them
both, constantly. They got so hot that a part of the exhaust system in the engine under my bed melted and the fire extinguisher went off, filling the chamber with powder and stopping the engine. I
began to worry about fire – what if it overheated again, while I was sleeping on top of it, and now without an extinguisher?

And then there were the other boats. The long outlines of container ships, grey rectangles on the horizon, were our constant companions. But, unlike the captains of the bigger vessels, the local
fishermen didn’t feel that they had to stick to maritime law and when the ships peeled off from the shipping lane to head into Port Dixon or Malacca, it was every man for himself.

I was sleeping in my cabin, waiting for my 3am to 6am watch to start, when shouts woke me. I sat up, straining to listen over the throb of the engine and the roar of the wind. Chris was calling
for Tyrone. I scrambled into a T-shirt and picked up my glasses, and as I lowered myself down to the floor I glanced out of the window and saw a green light really close to us. Dangerously close.
Outside, because I had been in a deep sleep, it took me a few seconds to get a grasp of what was going on. Chris was at the helm and there were ropes all over the cockpit. Tyrone and Aaron were
already on the coach roof, struggling to get the mainsail down in the wind and the dark. The green light belonged to a small fishing boat off our starboard bow and we had narrowly missed it. Just
beyond that was a small ship, which must have turned right out of the shipping lane to cut across our path to the mainland. I could see its green light, which was on its starboard side and meant it
was heading east, moving away from us.

I glanced down at the winch and struggled for a few seconds with tangled ropes before I could release the main sheet, looked up and the green light was gone. In its place was a red light, which
meant the ship had turned 180 degrees and we were now just a hundred metres or so apart, moving towards each other. Everything went into slow motion. Tyrone yelled from the bow: ‘Stop!’
I froze. Did he mean for me to stop or Chris? ‘Go back! Put it into reverse!’ he screamed. Chris switched both throttles to full reverse and the engines whined as the propellers
struggled against the momentum of the boat. The move slowed us down just enough that we missed the ship by maybe 20 metres. It wasn’t as large as a container transporter but it would have
caused us serious damage, perhaps even wrecked the catamaran, if it had hit us. Tyrone was furious and tried hailing the ship on VHF but it ignored us. We didn’t even know if it had seen us
at all.

We were all pretty shaken by the near collision and Tyrone decided we wouldn’t use any sail at all from now on, so that we had more manoeuvrability in case something went wrong again. What
I didn’t know was that it already had.

The next day, while Aaron was sleeping, Tyrone said to Chris and me: ‘I think Aaron’s going to get off the boat.’ Before we almost collided with the small ship, Tyrone
explained, there had been another incident.

‘Aaron took us into the shipping lane and didn’t notice there was a big ship coming up behind us,’ Tyrone said, the calmness in his voice at odds with the seriousness of what
he was telling us. ‘He said to me that he couldn’t handle the responsibility of watches and he doesn’t think his girlfriend would be able to, either.’

Chris and I looked at each other, stunned. It was a shock – Aaron had flown all this way, with plans to stay for months, and we had only been sailing for a few days. He had done a couple
of night watches, with Tyrone awake in the saloon during them, and it was understandable to be rattled by a couple of near crashes. The Malacca Straits was proving to be a particularly horrible
crossing for all of us but it wasn’t at all typical of the cruising experience.

Aaron painted a slightly different picture of what had happened when we were talking about it later. He said that he had wanted to look at our course on MaxSea but that Tyrone had been using the
computer and he hadn’t wanted to keep disturbing him.

‘And I said we should tack and Tyrone said, “In 10 minutes”,’ he added. By then, we were already in the shipping lane.

Who knew which was the true version of events? Probably the blame lay somewhere in the middle, but it didn’t really matter. And there was no persuading Aaron into giving it another shot.
As well as being a bit nervous of the responsibility, he was also majorly bored, and being cooped up on a small boat meant he had no way of burning off his excess energy. He wasn’t a reader
or a thinker like the rest of us; he needed to be doing things.

‘Five days of this is bad enough,’ he said. ‘There’s no way I could handle two weeks of it across the Indian Ocean.’ So when he left in Thailand, as Chris would too
(‘I’m done with sailing,’ he said), we would have two new crew to find.

A
aron was more than enthusiastic about our imminent crossing of the border from Malaysia to Thailand. It was only half a day’s sail north
from Langkawi in Malaysia, where we spent a few days before Tyrone checked us out of the country, to the first Thai island, Koh Lipe.

‘You’re going to love Thailand,’ Aaron said. ‘The water is clear, the food is great and the beer is cheap. Party, party!’ he chanted. ‘Whoop, boy!’ He
danced around the cockpit. ‘I’m gonna go insane!’ I looked doubtfully down at the greeny-brown, jellyfish-ridden water streaming past our hulls.

‘But it’s only a few hours away,’ I replied. ‘How can it be that different?’

‘Just wait and see,’ he said, grinning at me.

He was right. It was as if the water knew the international boundaries: greeny brown one side, beautiful blue and crystal clear the other. And he was right about everything else, too.

As we pulled into Koh Lipe ready to drop anchor, Chris laughed. ‘Hey, y’all. Look, there’s Guy’s boat.’ I looked at what he was pointing to and there was
Incognito
at anchor. Despite leaving Danga Bay two weeks after him, we’d caught him up.

We were sheltered in a natural channel between the islands of Koh Lipe and Koh Adang. Both islands had white, sandy beaches, dotted with the odd bit of driftwood. From where we were I could see
a beach bar on Koh Lipe and a couple of people milling about. How different it was from Malaysia. The sea was clear enough that we could see the bottom. I hadn’t seen water like that since
Mabul. Chris and Aaron jumped straight in and swam for shore. I followed in the dinghy and even felt inspired enough to have a short snorkel by myself, but there was little to see.

I passed
Incognito
’s dinghy as I walked in my swimsuit to the beach bar, where Aaron had headed to. He had a few Thai baht in the pocket of his shorts and was already sucking down
his first beer. I had changed my remaining ringgit before we left Malaysia but I’d left it on the boat. Dammit! I looked longingly at his glass bottle (not a can to be seen!), with
condensation running down the sides.

‘Is OK,’ said the barman. ‘You pay later,’ and handed me a Leo. I was liking Thailand already.

Guy and his new Canadian crewman, Pauly, emerged from a path between the trees. At the sight of Guy, my stomach did a little flip and I started to feel self-conscious, sitting there in my
swimming costume. I tensed my abs, to pull my stomach flatter, realising that my physical reaction to Guy meant that I liked him.

‘Yo, Guy!’ Chris shouted, beckoning them over. They came to sit with us on the bar stools, made of polished tree trunks sunk into the sand, and we caught up. Now that I knew I was
attracted to Guy, I couldn’t look at him for long for fear of blushing. I looked at my beer bottle, at my toes digging into the soft sand, out at the boats, up at the palms above, anything to
stop that tell-tale red from flushing my cheeks. I sneaked glances at little bits of him at a time – at his deep brown skin, his wide shoulders, his beautiful full mouth, his white, straight
teeth, his thick brown hair, until I’d made a mental jigsaw.
He is so good looking
, I thought as I picked at the label of my beer, made soggy by condensation,
but I don’t
think he knows it
. His friend Pauly was handsome in an I-work-out-a-lot way but Guy obviously didn’t really care about his appearance – his shorts were old and holey and he had the
beginnings of a beer belly – but that made him even more attractive. He was magnetic to me.

Tyrone had told me to invite them over for dinner and I eventually plucked up the courage to ask. Pauly already had plans with some girls but ‘I’m up for that!’ was Guy’s
reply. He threw a huge, dazzling smile my way, holding eye contact for longer than was necessary.
Is he flirting with me? What about the French girlfriend?
‘What time?’

I looked at Aaron, whose turn it was to cook and who was planning a Mexican fajita feast.

‘About seven thirty?’ he asked.

‘Oh, shit, I can’t,’ Guy said, frowning. ‘I agreed to meet some friends at eight and I can’t let them down. But you could come?’

We arranged to meet later and I had a grin on my face as I walked back to the dinghy with the boys.

The ‘you’ in his invitation had been general but I spent extra time getting ready after my bucket wash, leaving my hair down, putting on a short, bright red playsuit I’d bought
in Singapore and putting in earrings. I told the boys – and myself – that I was making the effort because I could, now that we were free of the Malaysian modesty dress code, and because
we were on a party island, but who was I kidding?

After dinner, Chris said he didn’t want to go out and Tyrone wasn’t interested, either, not being much of a drinker, so Aaron and I set off in the dinghy, dragging it up the beach
and tying the painter to a stranded log. We walked along a jungle path in the dark until we could see lights ahead and emerged on to a cute little winding sand street lined with hutlike shops and
restaurants. There were few people around and Thai families were taking advantage of the quiet time to eat rice and fish on the doorsteps of their shops, sitting on the floor and picking at the
food with nimble fingers. I looked at everything as we walked along, noticing how everything was prettier than it was in Malaysia, more geared towards tourism. We passed a tattoo parlour where a
white guy lay on his stomach having ink jabbed into his back by a Thai woman holding a length of bamboo with a needle sticking out from it. Most of the restaurants were empty and staff stood
waiting patiently outside. There were fresh juice stalls and shops selling jewellery. We reached the tourist information centre, where Guy had told me I could buy some more baht, and I copied Aaron
as he took off his gnome shoes (‘Me jandals,’ he called them) and walked barefoot inside. It was pretty low-tech: no computer, just a phone and some brochures for scuba trips and boat
tours. They had one of those old-school card-swiping machines that rubs carbon paper over the card to leave an imprint of the information. While I waited for the woman to count out my money, I
noticed what looked like a machine gun propped casually against the wall. I nudged Aaron. ‘Do you think that’s real?’