Casting Off (38 page)

‘He scream at me, too,’ he said, ‘when I buy two litre of milk. And at Daniela. This is no good. I going ask him to stop Ramadan.’

Oh God
, I thought, feeling guilty.
That’s not what I meant to happen
. I knew how important his religion was to him. I had just wanted Carlo to have a quiet talk with
Imran, to ask him to not be so rude.

The next morning, everything was back to normal, with Imran chain-smoking, downing espressos and eating – and acting like a normal human being.

‘Captain tell me no do Ramadan,’ he said, with a shrug. I was surprised he wasn’t angry about it, but I suppose he’d never worked in the UK, with employee rights and
religious equality. He was just used to having to do exactly what his boss told him.

‘What will you do about Ramadan?’ I asked him.

‘Oh, I can do in winter. No problem. You want omelette, Golden Laydee?’

Carlo convinced me to use the free time we had again after the short charter to learn how to scuba dive. ‘You need it, if you want to be a captain,’ he said. ‘You might have to
check the anchor or the bottom of the boat or the propeller.’ I hadn’t the heart to tell him that I was changing my thinking and that I was going to head off for travelling and cruising
fun again, rather than focusing on a superyacht career. Instead, I said I was a bit worried that it would hurt my ears. I didn’t confess to being an absolute wuss in the water when it came to
snorkelling, unless I had a couple of kind-hearted Aussies with me, in the shape of Greg and Debs.

‘We will do a practice,’ he said. ‘I have diving gear and we will go down on the anchor chain, only five metre. Then you can try to clear your ear of the pressure.’

I found myself agreeing. Guy was a diver and he wanted us to go diving on our Indonesia trip.
And
, I reasoned with myself,
you grew to like snorkelling when you took your time and
had a good teacher and, who knows, maybe the same thing will happen with diving and you’ll forget about imagining scary, sharp-toothed sea monsters rising up from the deep to bite you
.
This whole leaving London thing and starting a new life was about being more open to trying new things. This is a chance to not automatically say no.
I agreed to the try dive.

It was awkward, using Carlo’s spare regulator to breathe, which meant I had to stay inappropriately close to him while we descended, hand over hand, down the chain. I felt a bit nervous as
I went, mainly because the regulator felt like it was going to pop out of my mouth, so I was holding on to that with one hand, the chain with the other and with both ankles, and was also having to
let go of the regulator constantly to hold my nose while I blew out, to pop my ears. And I was trying not to get my naked legs tangled up with my boss’s. Probably I was overdoing it a bit on
the ear-popping but I was paranoid that I would hurt myself. Down and down we went, with not a sea monster in sight. In fact, there was nothing but blue water and Carlo’s face, close up. He
kept his eyes trained on mine, looking for signs of panic, and gave me a questioning OK sign every few seconds. I nodded my head in response, my hands being otherwise too occupied to make the same
signal in reply.

At the surface he asked me how I felt.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘But I felt like the regulator was being pulled out of my mouth the whole time.’

‘That is because it is my spare one,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow we will borrow some equipment and you will find that easier. And, I tell you, we went to ten metre, not five metre, so
you did very well.’ I was astonished at that. I had made it down to ten metres, not panicked (too much) and not hurt my ears. I happily agreed to try again the next day.

He took Daniela down next but she freaked out and they didn’t make it more than a metre below the surface. I moved away from the bow, not wanting to put her off by having an audience. But
her panic made me feel even prouder of myself for staying calm.

Cumbersome dive gear donned the next day, Carlo again tried to coax Daniela into the water. We had taken the dinghy to a small pebble beach so that we could start in very shallow water. I left
the pair of them to it and swam a little way off by myself, looking at a few small, light brown fish and grass peppering the sandy bottom. I had to concentrate hard on what I was doing and it was
very distracting, which turned out to be a good thing, really. I hadn’t quite got the hang of my buoyancy and my belly, in my wetsuit, scraped lightly along the floor as I swam along, my
whole body tilted to the right so I resembled a fish with an infected swim bladder. I carried on and on, my dive mask inches from the sand. I was by myself and I felt absolutely fine – until
I checked the depth gauge. I was 12 metres deep. I couldn’t believe it. Because I had been following the bottom, I had no idea how much water was above me. I began to worry a little bit about
the bends – I’ve seen
Baywatch
, so I know the dangers – as I didn’t know if I should be diving to 12 metres. I turned 180 degrees and followed the seabed until my
tank broke the surface of the water.

Sitting in the pebbly shallows, waiting for Carlo and Daniela to emerge, I felt jubilant. Not only had I done it, I had enjoyed it so much that I had lost track of where I was. Not once had I
freaked out or imagined nasty creatures of the deep. I had been utterly absorbed in the moment. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that I had loved it.

‘I bet you get the diving bug now,’ Guy wrote when I went on to Facebook to babble excitedly about my day.

‘Well, I decided to do it for you, because you said you want to dive in Indo,’ I explained, ‘but now I’ve discovered that I am actually doing it for me.’

I was as thrilled about it as I had been when I had had that first day of snorkelling in Mabul with Debs. But it wasn’t the diving, specifically, that had given me such a boost; it was the
fact that I had dared to try something that I had been pretty much convinced I was going to hate. A few years ago, back in the UK, I would have automatically demurred – in other words, wimped
out. Now I was willing to give things a shot. Going off on a boat with people I didn’t know; sailing into new countries with little more preparation or planning than ‘point it that way
and keep going ’til we get there’; being brave enough to try new, frightening things. Heading off on that original adventure and, now, having my dream life or epiphany to focus on, was
opening up the world to me – and me to the world.
And it’s not going to stop here
, I vowed.
This is just the beginning of seeing what I can achieve.

O
ur little holiday over, it was back to work. And some work it was – I would start my cleaning marathon at 7am and climb, wearily, into my
bunk at 4am, after the last of the customers had gone to bed. All day, every day, I was bending, lifting, twisting, pulling, carrying, stretching, reaching, loading, unloading. The good thing was
that with all this physical exertion the extra pounds that I had put on when I first moved to Italy through over-enthusiastic consumption of carbs melted away. The downside was that something had
to give – and that something, unfortunately, was my back.

I got up, as usual, early in the morning to start hosing down and polishing the cockpit area while the guests slept, preparing for breakfast. As I did every morning, I crouched down, cloth in
hand, to reach into the awkward corners of the gunwales to remove any traces of salt residue or sand that showed clearly against the black paint. As I twisted and leant forwards, I felt my lower
back ping. I stifled a yelp as I straightened up, hand to the back of my waist. Rubbing didn’t ease the pain; sitting didn’t help, nor did standing and pacing the deck. The only thing
that seemed to make any difference to the waves of pain and the nauseous feeling it was creating was having a little cry. So I sat on the wooden rail and let the tears flow.

‘Em-ma!’ Daniela said, coming up from the saloon to smoke. ‘What happened?’

‘I’ve hurt my back,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how but I can’t really move.’

She went to wake the captain and, while he was dressing, came back with a heat pad and some painkillers and a glass of water. The captain had a look at my back – nothing to see, really: no
jutting broken bones or giant swellings – and packed me off to my cabin to rest. For three whole days.

It was probably a good taster of what being sent to prison would be like. I was in a room maybe 6 foot by 6 foot, lying on a narrow slab that could only loosely be termed ‘bed’. I
was solitary, apart from when Daniela popped in to shower and change or sleep, and there was absolutely nothing to do. I slept, I woke, I ate, I stared at the ceiling until I was so bored that I
fell asleep again, I ate, I slept some more. By listening to the timings of the engine starting and the anchor windlass grinding, I could work out roughly where we were in the routine of the day.
After the first 24 hours I was able to lie in one position long enough to read but I’d soon worked through the couple of books I had stored on my Kindle and had nothing left, unless I started
on the dictionary. I was completely and utterly bored. The boat’s wifi couldn’t penetrate the steel bulkhead between the crew cabin and the rest of the interior so I couldn’t even
kill time on the web.

By the second morning I was going so stir-crazy that I gingerly climbed the ladder out of the cabin – extra tricky, given the twisting motion needed to get out of the bed and on to the
rungs – and went up on deck. Jobs I could do upright, like hosing the floor, were fine, but as soon as I tried to lean forwards, pain seared through my back again. Carlo caught me wincing and
sent me back to bed. I tried again on the third morning but it was still no-go. By the fourth, I was so fed up with being stuck in the cabin that I carried on through the pain, which was easing
slightly and which I think was being helped by the movement. Carlo let me work – everyone else was feeling the burden of my absence, too, as they’d had to pick up the slack and do my
work on top of their own (although not quite to my standards, I noticed, as I found pockets of dirt here and there).

‘What you think cause it?’ Daniela asked me.

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It has only happened to me once before in my life. Maybe all the heavy lifting?’

Carlo cut in. ‘I think it is the mooring lines. This boat weighs 100 tonnes and you are pulling on these lines because we do not have the winches for them. Is no good. You see other boats,
they have winches just for this job, for mooring. You cannot pull 100 tonnes by the hand.’ He had a point.

A couple of days later, while I was still feeling a bit tender, we were moored in Vibo Valentia marina, next to a power megayacht, and I watched its deckhands at work. They were all men in their
twenties or early thirties, all fit and strong, with broad backs and defined triceps. They wore tool belts and carried their power sanders around the boat with confidence, marking out areas to work
on with blue tape and then starting their grinding, varnishing or fibreglassing tasks with practised ease like the skilled craftsmen they were.

I looked down into the cup of tea I was holding.
Who am I kidding? I’m not a deckhand, not really. I don’t have any carpentry skills; I’m not an engineer; I can’t
look around the boat and identify what needs replacing, fixing or upgrading and know how to do it. There’s a reason why I have barely seen any female deckhands working – and
that’s because it’s not a woman’s job. OK, so woodwork or fibreglassing skills can be learned, but what about everything else? Strength and power – they are the main
attributes, for lifting and pulling things or climbing. I just don’t have that. I’m a nine-stone weakling who gets a bad back from lifting a few suitcases and pulling on a few lines. Of
course I can’t be a deckhand; not really. Imran has to come out of the kitchen every time we enter or leave a marina to handle the big fenders because they’re too heavy for me to lift
over the guard rails. This is not an office; we can’t have equality of the sexes here, smash through the glass ceiling to proportional representation in the boardroom. It comes down to
natural differences between the genders. Carlo was right to make me the waitress – that’s the job for a woman on a boat. Folding the towels, serving the coffees and smiling at the
guests.

I sighed. I had always worked in male-dominated environments, tried to find a way of being ‘one of the lads’ while still looking like a woman: by accepting being called by my
surname, peppering my language with swear words or by bragging about how much I’d drunk the night before or how many minutes I’d managed to shave off my run or cycle home. That was
different, though, it was just bravado. I couldn’t fake this in the same way.

Over the following days I felt conflicted. I still loved everything about boats and the boating life: the familiar clinking noise of halyards hitting masts in the breeze in marinas, working
outside, the instantly calming effect of the rippling water, the beautiful lines of the yachts, seeing the stars every night, the sunrises and sunsets. I didn’t want to give all that up to go
back to being a journalist in an office. But I didn’t see how I could do this job again next summer.