Casting Off (23 page)

And he did understand, and was excited for me. But there was a but.

‘The Caribbean wouldn’t work for me,’ he said, digging the bottom of his empty beer bottle into the sand. ‘The hurricane season.’

I don’t remember inviting you,
I thought, although not unkindly. Once again I wondered whether he thought we were in a relationship. If we were, it was one doomed to failure. I
was about to set sail for the Andamans, Sri Lanka and the Arabian Gulf, swiftly to be followed by yellow-house-hunting in the Caribbean.

Why, then, did I have a lump in my throat when we parted at the ferry harbour? Despite how wrong I thought he was for me – he didn’t want children, he would be happy with an
itinerant lifestyle, he was so laidback he was horizontal, and, don’t forget, the hurricane season ‘wouldn’t work’ for him – I still really liked him. He was so very,
very different from previous boyfriends – no rugby-playing, blond-mopped hooray Henry here – and the strength of my attraction to him caught me off guard. Was I so desperate to like
someone that I was willing to turn a blind eye to some fairly basic-level incompatibilities? Or were all the new things that I was experiencing changing me?

G
illaroo
was full of shit on my return. The starboard toilet had broken and the other crew had had to pull it to pieces and clean it.
Tyrone picked me up from the jetty in the dinghy. ‘Ben’s here,’ he said, ‘and Vicky’s coming tomorrow.’ A nice welcome for Ben – less than two hours on the
boat and he was unscrewing toilet pipes blocked with excrement and having to scrape them clean with a screwdriver and a few steel nuts tied on to the end of a piece of string.

‘It is the calcy deposits,’ Libertad informed me. ‘They have built up over the time.’ Apparently when faeces mixes with seawater it can form a substance as hard as
cement. Layer upon layer of it had built up inside the pipe between the toilet and the holding tank until our poos were left trying to squeeze their way through an opening the diameter of a
knitting needle. Strong chemicals and a chipping action were our weapons of choice against this blockade. It’s a wonder Ben didn’t leave there and then. But he wasn’t a quitter;
he was a stoic. A stoic full of sarcasm and northern humour, which is exactly what is needed when scouring a toilet pipe. He gritted his teeth, cracked a joke and got on with it. By the time Vicky
arrived the next day the boat was back together again and we lifted up the anchor and set a course for Port Blair in the Andaman Islands.

Tyrone and the Spaniards (or The Spanish, as Ben referred to them in a jokily xenophobic fashion, as if they represented their entire nation) had been busy while I was getting drunk in Lanta.
The galley had been cleaned and completely reorganised (what was it with new crew and the need to clean the kitchen?). Even the herbs and spices pots had been relabelled. ‘Curry
powder’, ‘Curry powder’, ‘Curry another more’ were written on white stickers with black marker in Pablo’s cursive hand. They had been to a cash-and-carry and
restocked the boat with a lot of provisions and there were some weird Spanishy things in there – a whole gallon of olive oil, a kilo of paprika, extremely short-grain rice and 90 eggs.
Ninety
.

Within a few days it became clear that it was going to be the English (and Irish) vs The Spanish when it came to food. Pablo and Libertad were not big curry eaters. ‘Is it spicy?’
they asked waiters in Thai restaurants. ‘Is it spicy?’ they checked with Tyrone when he served up vegetable curry for dinner. ‘What is this? Is it spicy?’ they said, poking at a bowl of coleslaw with their forks. They couldn’t understand Asians’ and English people’s love of hot food. And
we couldn’t understand their love of oily, bland food. Everything Spanish seemed to taste of oil: tortilla, vegetable paella, flan. Ben took to pouring chilli sauce on to everything, much to
Pablo’s disgust. The only thing they cooked that wasn’t bland was cakes – and they were so sugary they made my teeth hurt. But a cooking rota is a cooking rota and we stuck to
it.

Christmas Day I was on dinner duty. I started at 11pm on Christmas Eve, cutting up sausages and wrapping them in streaky bacon before I went on night watch. I made a loaf of raisin bread with
cinnamon butter for breakfast and a traditional English Christmas lunch. I couldn’t afford a turkey in Thailand but I had got hold of a chicken for the others and I roasted that and served it
with potatoes, two types of stuffing, carrots, the pigs in blankets and even Brussels sprouts. With one small oven and only three hob burners, it was as much of a juggling act on the boat as it was
at home. I reheated a stollen cake and poured custard over it for pudding. I had managed to find crackers and we sat around the cockpit table, 200 miles off the coast of Thailand, in some of the
bluest water I had ever seen, tucking into our gravy-smothered dinners in 35°C heat, paper crowns on our heads. In keeping with the festive spirit, I wore a red bikini and white shorts all day.
Pablo and Libertad had never experienced a traditional English Christmas dinner and they were more than a little bemused by it. If you take a step back and look at it – flimsy hats and crappy
toys inside a shiny wrapped firework, types of meat and vegetables you wouldn’t normally touch with a bargepole the other 364 days of the year, three gazillion calories in one sitting –
it is faintly ludicrous. But I like to mark an occasion and I think everyone enjoyed it, even if it did make them sweat even more heavily in the strong sunshine.

The wind politely waited until Boxing Day to come in – and thank God it had, for I wouldn’t have fancied doing that seven-hour cooking and washing-up marathon in rough seas. For the
first three days of the passage we had been motoring along, so there was only a small amount of new information that Pablo and Libertad had to grasp, on how to check the chart to make sure we were
on course and monitor the instruments. Now the sailing lessons were to begin.

‘OK, so this is a boat,’ I said, drawing a kind of curvy triangle on a piece of paper as they sat facing me at the cockpit table. ‘If the wind comes from here, straight ahead,’ – I drew an arrow pointing towards the peak of my triangle – ‘we can’t sail. It has to come from at least 45
degrees for that.’ I drew arrows coming from all directions to spear my little boat, as if Robin Hood and his Merry Men had let loose against it. ‘Following so far?’ I looked up
and they nodded at me. ‘If the wind comes from here,’ I said, pointing at one of my arrows, ‘we call it a close reach. From here it’s a beam reach or on the beam. From this
direction it’s a broad reach or on the quarter or sailing downwind or…’ I’m sorry to say I bamboozled them with information that first sailing lesson. They did really well,
especially considering that English wasn’t their first language and that sailing terms aren’t really English at all anyway. They were very keen students and took notes and asked
questions and everything. I was proud of them.

But, over time, I noticed Pablo’s attitude towards me starting to sour. I wasn’t sure whether it was because he was getting frustrated with himself over the language barrier, was not
happy with being taught by a woman or just plain hated me. Because there were six of us, we had to do only two two-hour shifts each in every 24-hour period. Tyrone and I also worked Libertad and
Pablo’s watches with them. With Pablo’s deteriorating attitude, the crew started to noticeably split into three camps: The Spaniards in one corner, the English in another and Tyrone by
himself in the third. It was subtle to begin with and no one seemed to mind too much: it was tricky to involve all six people all of the time, anyway.

Ben and Vicky became good friends of mine that trip. They had been together for so long that they didn’t make me feel like a gooseberry. While Pablo and Libertad would be kissing and
cuddling, Ben and Vicky didn’t really go in for PDAs. They had met at university and were still together, 17 years later. Ben had tried one year in a normal, London office job after
graduation and soon quit. They were divers and had worked all over the world, running their own dive company in Mozambique for a few years. When they sold that they bought a home in Malta and Ben
had been driving boats for a watersports company and Vicky had been teaching English there. He had landed himself a job for the summer being a paid sailing buddy to a rich businessman in America;
Vicky was going, too, and the businessman was throwing in a house for them to stay in as well. They were a very good-looking couple, tanned and slim. She was as southern as he was northern, she was
fair to his darkness. We all three shared a love of reading and an English sense of humour. But what I liked about them most was that they were proof that it was entirely possible to live this kind
of life, long-term, make money from it and still stay sane. You didn’t have to turn into a freeloading hippy if you decided to make a warm, sunny island your home. Ben and Vicky were the most
normal people I’d met so far. I don’t know if they’d ever owned a ute, though.

There were dolphins, dolphins everywhere on that four-day sail across the Andaman Sea. Tyrone wrote a note in the log that more than a hundred of them had been following the boat on Boxing Day
morning during his watch, when I was sleeping. He said there’d been whales, too. I didn’t get to see schools as big as that or any whales but I did witness a particularly spectacular
acrobatic display by some spinner dolphins. We had the usual group swimming in our bow wave, weaving in between each other as they kept pace with the boat, and we’d all gone forward to get a
good look at them. Then we saw a smaller group following the boat a way off our starboard quarter. One dolphin leapt completely clear of the water by a good 10 feet or so and threw himself into a
horizontal corkscrew spin through the air. He did this a few times, until he had our undivided attention, and then he pulled out his party trick: he did three backwards somersaults in the air, tail
fin over bottle nose, all in a row before hitting the water. I wanted to applaud, it was that impressive.

Our destination, the Andaman Islands, together with the Nicobar Islands further south, make a long, thin chain of dots of land extending north to south in the Indian Ocean, about 400 miles off
the coast of Thailand. Originally inhabited by indigenous tribes, they were commandeered by the British, and on the main island, South Andaman, the Brits built a prison to contain freedom fighters
campaigning for independence. If you were Indian and you were caught plotting to overthrow the Brits, you were tossed into the Cellular Jail, your hands and feet shackled and fettered, and you were
forced, on a daily diet of just two cups of rice gruel, to turn a wheel to press oil out of coconut husks and reach a quota that even a water buffalo would barely be able to manage. Only Indian
nationals are allowed into the Nicobars now. They are so far from India and undeveloped that I doubt they get many visitors. But a handful of the 330-plus Andaman islands are open to foreign
visitors in possession of an Indian visa and, luckily for us, they welcome yachts.

Welcome is perhaps too strong a term; allow is more like it. I thought rules and regulations were bad enough in the UK but that is mere child’s play compared to the Andamans. We spent 36
hours dealing with the authorities – customs, immigration, the coastguard and port control; we’d been warned to expect it to take at least two days. There was an unbelievable amount of
paperwork to complete. We had to list every food item on the boat and each piece of equipment and at one point I seriously thought I would have to itemise every loose screw and nut in the tool box
but – lo and behold! – a ‘gift’ of a bottle of wine was requested by one of our visitors and after that the paperwork all went smoothly. We were informed that we could only
stay for a maximum of 30 days; even if our engine failed we still had to leave once our time was up. We had to provide the authorities with a strict itinerary of our route, listing which anchorages
we would use on which day. We were warned that it was strictly forbidden to deviate from this programme once submitted and that random checks would be carried out. On the crossing we had done our
research, all reading the pilot guide and having a meeting to discuss which islands we wanted to go to so that we could draw up our itinerary. Some places were out of bounds to everyone,
particularly those where original tribes still lived. Just one or two were geared up for tourism, still on a basic and small scale, and the rest were uninhabited. It was these islands that we were
the most interested in. Because we had our own boat, we were fortunate enough to be able to go where no wily backpacker had boldly gone before.

The plan was to restock in Aberdeen Bazar, the main shopping town of the Andamans, and then sail off, moving from island to island for just over three weeks. Then we would come back to anchor at
nearby Port Blair and provision up again before sailing for a week to Sri Lanka. With six people on one boat, everything had to be strictly rationed: food, electricity, even drinking water. We were
lucky that we had a big fridge and freezer (big in boat terms but about the capacity of a standard domestic fridge-freezer) but six people get through an enormous volume of food when they are
eating all three daily meals on board for three weeks. Tyrone called a crew meeting to explain how it would work. Whoever was on cooking duty would have to use up the fruits and vegetables that
were likely to go off first, he said. I made a shopping list of fresh foods that I had learned from experience would keep the longest, especially in the heat and humidity: pumpkins, cabbages if we
wrapped them in newspaper, potatoes covered in dirt, yams, onions, green apples, very green tomatoes. Stacks of carrots, which wrinkled within a couple of days, were a no-no; the same with peppers.
Pablo volunteered to turn over the 90 eggs each day to help keep them fresh.