Maldives
Uplifting
Warning: This post contains scenes that may not be suitable for some viewers
When you sell most everything you own and decide that it would be good sporting fun to invest it all into a sailing trip around the world, the last thing you want to see is the sum total of its parts dangling precariously from a crane 40 feet off the water beside a giant ship.
|
On April 13th that’s exactly what we saw. We were like the chain smoking dads off those old sitcoms who paced back and forth in front of a delivery room imagining the worst and hoping for the best. The load masters first comment as we boarded the BBC Everest did nothing to help our state of mind.
“I’ve got a really good spot picked out for the Slapdash” he said with a wink and a crooked smile.
A glance around the deck revealed a bunch of perfectly normal looking spots unworthy of such a cryptic comment. A glance skyward revealed some activity and a landing pad more suitable for a helicopter than a catamaran.
“You’re shitting me” I said.
Load master Ian just shot that same crooked smile at us and then walked away saying something into his shoulder mic about prepping the ballast tanks.
|
Seventeen boats were waiting in the harbour to be loaded onto this ship. Rumour flew around the anchorage about them running out of room. The many loading delays, taken while the crew shuffled boats around like jigsaw pieces, seemed to lend some credibility to the gossip. Boat owners began to worry that they wouldn’t fit all who had paid.
All that time we applied to creative solutions for a passage past Somalia meant that, of the seventeen boats, we were seventeenth to confirm a spot. If anyone would be dropped from the roster it should be us. We had mixed feelings about that. We were still well positioned for a passage to South Africa, and a refund on the money we had transferred to the shipping line would end feelings of buyer’s remorse. On the other hand we were sick and tired of the ever changing plans and had felt a sense of relief when we finally committed to one. The two sides of that coin did a good job of balancing each other out and we felt lucky to not have it bother us too much one way or the other. We had also rocked up to Male virtually the same day that the ship did, so we didn’t have as much time invested as the other boats, some of which had been waiting here while we were still in Thailand.
Yes, in the end we decided to ship. It went like this; A boat (Capricorn) showed up in Galle full of bullet holes despite having security forces. I started getting a bit nervous about our attempts to buy AK-47’s in Sri Lanka and decided at that point that it wouldn’t be a good idea to arm ourselves and make the passage. We were both still very comfortable with making the passage with some hired guns aboard. We had already made these arrangements in fact. A team was on its way east. We would pick them up offshore (avoiding Sri Lankan weapons restrictions) and take them back to their point of origin at a cut rate, kind of like a rental car return special. Then 48 hours out we received an email which informed us that the ship our Yemeni mercenaries were on had decided to bypass Sri Lanka all together. By this point we had virtually waited out the season and so began planning the Cape route in earnest. We would love to visit Madagascar and Mozambique, but spending months on our boat there wasn’t something we could muster up any excitement for. Maybe it would have been different if we had planned the passage months ago and timed the trip accordingly. Around the same time we learned that the transport ship we assumed had left weeks ago had encountered substantial delays, they still hadn’t left Singapore. Everything began to point in one direction for us; sell the farm, (the other farm) and ship the boat.
We were surprised by the amount of shipping as we left for the Maldives (Male) on April 3rd, motoring into uncomfortable seas and an annoying headwind. It was a rough night out. There must be a convergence of shipping lanes East of Sri Lanka because we seemed to be bombarded by traffic from different directions all night. On two occasions drastic course changes were required to keep us from becoming road kill. I was sickly tired and Jaime was sickly well, sick. Puking sick. This is a rare and special level of seasickness not ordinarily achieved. I came out at one point to see her leaning over the side retching, and in these conditions worried about her flipping right over the lifelines. I found a bucket for her so that she could puke from the comfort of the cockpit, then I passed out on the settee. A little while later Jaime woke me up to have a look at some odd looking lights on the horizon.
We talk about this a lot but it’s one of those things that you just have to experience to understand. After being so sleep deprived you could literally fall asleep in the rain, you are jolted awake at some point and find yourself outside in an uncomfortable and noisy sea blinking away at red and green lights on the horizon. You wait as your brain slowly extracts meaning from the images it’s been sent from your puffy eyes. Red and green, or were they green and red?
In this case it was easy to see why Jaime had invited me to this middle of the night stare fest. We were looking at a white light and red and greens which meant that this boat was both coming and going. I speculated that it was a tug and tow, white lights in front and a red and green somewhere behind. We watched it for a while and as it loomed closer watched the one white light separate into three vertical which confirmed the early suspicions, this was indeed a tug and tow.
He was approaching off our starboard bow. We decided that we would clear his course in time and he would pass safely behind us. Apparently he didn’t think so. Suddenly our VHF began shrieking at us in a panicked Dutch accent. We both jumped a foot off the ground and before we landed, a bazillion watt search light exploded from the tugboat and obliterated our dim world with a blinding white light. Our eyes had been adjusted to hours of night watch by this point and huge pupils were now in complete overload. We were blind. The VHF was still blaring away at us but we were both too shocked to hear it. To make matters substantially worse the search light acted as a signal for a school of nearby flying fish that it was time to charge. “Death to the Slapdash! It’s now or never boys, we’ll attack them while they’re panicked and blind!” They began slamming into the side of the boat with kamikaze ferocity. “Thup!-thup!-thup!-thup!” against the hull, finally a loud wet THWACK as one found its target. I grabbed at my chest and yelled AARG! My brain was still reeling to cope with this explosion of madness, 11 seconds earlier I had been fast asleep. Jaime thought that I had been shot. She of course didn’t see the fish; because of this asshole and his spotlight she couldn’t SEE anything!
I pointed at the floor and yelled “FISH!” which must have seemed like a very strange thing to do for someone who had just been shot. She looked at the fish and screamed. Apparently flying fish are one of the things that Jaime finds scarier than me being shot.
When she finished screaming I politely asked her if she would ask the tugboat to please turn his spotlight off, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble of course. At least that`s what I meant to say. I think it came out more like:
“PLEASE TELL THAT STUPID MUTHER****ER TO SHUT THE F**K UP AND TURN THAT MUTHER F***NG LIGHT OFF!!!”.
Jaime knew what I meant though because a moment later she was on the radio asking for him to kindly shut his spotlight off. Which he did. The fish stopped raining down on us and we began trying to rub the big floaty spots out of our eyes with our fists. We altered course a little to starboard and passed port to port. Nothing more was said.
By this time it was my watch. Jaime went to bed and I sat there wondering if any of that had actually just happened. The next morning fish scales covered the boat, especially on my jacket just below the left shoulder. Kill shot.
After the first night the shipping gave us a break. Now we just had this beastly weather to deal with. Still right on the nose, still motoring. That’s when the engine started to overheat. Actually it wasn’t overheating, but the needle was creeping up on us. We were well within the safe operating temperature, we were working it hard, and the sea temperature was over 30 degrees. That’s how the denial stage works. Despite being in the safe zone I did notice that stupid needles gradual assent each time I started a watch. It was just a matter of time. We thought we would be able to hold out for a change in the weather. We were headed straight West and would soon be able to drop several degrees to the South to point towards Male, the capital of the Maldives. The wind was meant to click up to the north a little, and when it did we would steer downhill, flop out the sails and enjoy a close reach straight towards our target. We were obviously still in the denial stage.
When the time for our course change arrived and passed there wasn’t a hint of north in the wind at all, in fact it had dropped a few degrees to the south. I gave up and shut the engine down and, as soon as it had cooled off, began trouble shooting. I had dove into the super nasty Galle harbour water to check our raw water intake before we left (I can’t even muster up the level of disgust required to give that story justice), and changed the impeller so didn’t expect what we saw when I pulled the cover off the water pump. Only two of the blades remained. Not only was he struggling with only two of his usual six blades, the four deserters had each wedged themselves into various parts of the cooling system. It was amazing that the engine didn’t overheat. With a combination of tools we managed to locate and extract all the missing blades. Then I popped in my last impeller and buttoned everything back up. The relief and satisfaction we felt as a healthy gush of water once again spewed out of our exhaust left us cheering and high fiving.
|
Humility is being on a little boat hundreds of miles from land with a beast that could end your world with a flick of its tail. It wasn’t long after the engine drill that an immense leviathan breached a couple hundred yards off to starboard. Just the small section of its back that broke the surface was over 40 feet long. A Blue whale, bigger than dinosaurs and buses. The largest living thing ever known to have lived on earth.
I called Jaime up and we both gawked as it slowly arched it`s back eventually exposing a tail as wide as our boat is long. A thousand unnoticed gallons of water poured off as it continued up into the air. Soon all that was visible was this giant tail, now totally vertical, and the long shadow cast beneath it. It paused there as if for our benefit, then slipped below the surface. Then there was nothing, just the same old sea we had been staring at for days. We are so effected by everything going on with the surface of the ocean that it`s easy to forget how much is beneath us. Then by luck and timing we happen to share the same little bit of sea with a creature like this. We were awestruck.
It took the better part of 5 days to complete this passage of less than 500 miles. What struck when we arrived was Male city. We expected tiny deserted little atolls, but Male rose up like a bustling cheery looking seaside city which, as it turns out, is exactly what it is. We were happy to find a protected anchorage in 25 feet and some friends we had met back in Galle. We dropped the hook and relaxed.
|
|
Before long we had caught up with all of the news about the ship. The boats waiting for shipment had organized a daily radio meeting every morning at 7:30AM. This was an opportunity for any boats to share information they had with the rest of the fleet. Like us most boats had been expecting to sail up through the Red Sea and were well provisioned. Shipping your boat is like closing down your cottage or summer home. You won’t be there for a while so you need to empty it all out and shut down the systems. We were fresh off passage so didn’t have a bunch of surplus food, but our cheap Sri Lankan booze was a warmly welcomed trade item for the boats who had been hanging out in this dry Muslim country. There were a lot of freezers being cleaned out so this was a good time to be invited for dinner. Perfect! One night on the big red crewed sailboat I assumed that the weighty dish handed to me was the serving plate for the whole table of 5, heaps of mashed potatoes and veal right out to the rim. Turns out that it was just mine, and 4 more just like it were on the way! A certain German bet that I couldn’t finish it. Captain Chris took the same challenge. Not bad, a hundred dollars worth of meat and 20 dollars for eating it all? Good night out.
The loading process was a bit like being hauled off to the principal’s office. A bunch of us hanging around not really knowing what was going on, then suddenly somebody’s name being is announced over the radio. They would trundle off and never be heard from again. This was especially true since after loading many went straight to the airport. They really would disappear from the anchorage, then the country while the rest of us sat on our boats wondering who would be plucked up next.
Another analogy (especially given the limited space on the ship) was like being lined up against a fence while captains select players for the softball team. Hanging around in the anchorage while one by one boats disappear. Everyone hoping they’re not going to be picked last.
Eventually we were called to report to the BBC Everest for loading, we wouldn’t be left behind after all. It was about an hour from the anchorage to the loading area, and once we arrived we had time to finish stowing away a few things, lashing the dinghy etc. We bobbed around for an hour before we were signalled to come along side. There hadn’t been rain or wind for weeks, and the 30 lousy minutes of clear weather we need for this critical piece of our trip was interrupted by a squall that ripped through. Seriously, what is it with our stinking bad luck this season? It was a bit dicey as Jaime and I both stood on deck holding Slapdash off from bashing itself to pieces against a big commercial ship in the pouring tropical rain. At one point we were advised that loading may be called off for the day, we would need to return to the anchorage. That would really have sucked but alas we caught a break in the weather. The captain gave the okay for loading to resume and before we knew it two divers were in the water securing straps beneath our hulls. Four crew hopped on deck and started guiding the crane in. We had the boat prepped (removed topping lift and back stays) so there wasn’t much to do besides fret, and fret we did. Eventually after the boat was six feet above water they exited and kicked me off too.
|
With knots in our stomach we watched them pull Slapdash from the water and balance her up on a pedestal (okay ballast tank, but it might as well have been). It took about an hour to get things sorted and maybe another 40 minutes after that to get her all strapped down. In the meantime we were allowed to run around on the ship and act like asses which was pretty cool. We climbed the ladder to our boat and tried to get aboard to gather our things and reattach the backstay. Easier said than done. We had a good view from up there and another cloud burst kept us trapped inside once we finally figured out a way in. We threw some clothes in our backpacks, shut off all the breakers, emptied the garbage can and wondered what the hell it was that we had gotten ourselves into this time. When the rain eased off we scrambled down the side and into a launch that zipped us off to the airport. In a few hours we would be on our way to Abu Dhabi.
|
|
|
|
|
|
© 2012 The Slapdash. All Rights Reserved.
Powered by Wordpress. Designed by 