Casting Off (27 page)

Vicky took back the binoculars. ‘They’re black.’

And so they were – three Jarawa youths, crouching on the edge of the rocks, one in orange shorts, the others naked except for narrow black bands around their waists. They had dark, dark
skin, short, curly black hair and were definitely not Indian. I was so excited that I forgot we were supposed to be leaving them alone and, not even considering whether such a gesture would be
universally understood as a friendly greeting, waved. After a pause, the one in orange shorts waved back, slowly. The second man hurled a stone in our direction and the third just watched us pass
by. I don’t know who was the more surprised – them, at seeing a large floating box drive past on the water with six gurning pinky-white men and women on top of it, or us at being so
easily and quietly able to catch a glimpse of some of the most elusive people in the world.

I didn’t really believe that we would be able to get a replacement rudder in Port Blair. We needed the highest quality stainless steel, for one thing, and someone who worked with
fibreglass, and most of the local boats were wooden. But within a day Tyrone had found someone to weld a new rudder frame for us. A tuk-tuk driver took him to a rusty, falling-down shack, with a
scrawled sign outside declaring its business as ‘Island Fibre Glass’. The helpful men inside were delighted to see Tyrone – they hadn’t had any work for three months. The
steel rod was bought, measured and cut, a frame of the blade was welded on to it (upside down, but we won’t talk any further about that, apart from to note that it made no discernible
difference) and the blade was coated in fibreglass. Four days’ worth of labour and materials came to a grand total of about 6000 rupees, or £90. The Doubting Thomas was happy to be
proved wrong.

The Doubting Thomas also had a pretty fun time in Port Blair and Aberdeen Bazar. There were some tourist attractions to visit: the Cellular Jail, a park, an outdoor Olympic-sized lido (I had to
buy a swimming cap and try not to swallow too many drowned bugs as I breast-stroked my way along) and, a short ferry ride away, an old British government settlement, whose buildings, once
independence was declared, had been abandoned and had crumbled into ruins in less than 70 years. At the anthropological museum we positively identified the black men we had seen as Jarawas.

I paid 50 rupees (60 pence) for a haircut, making sure to check with the ‘stylist’ at the Pony Saloon that he understood what I wanted: just a trim, a few layers around the front. He
waggled his head – Yes? No? – picked up some rusty shears and chopped six inches off the front, working his way unevenly around my head. A pile of sun-yellowed hair sat on the floor. He
wasn’t finished – I had the head massage to come. Given the standard of the haircut I’d just received, obviously this was no relaxing scalp rub. No – there was slapping,
there was pummelling, there was neck manipulation and, to finish, he braced one forearm against the side of my skull, gripped my right ear with the fingers of his other hand and pulled and pulled,
until the place where my ear joins my head cracked loudly. That procedure he repeated on the other side. My ears recovered pretty quickly but that haircut took months to grow out. I was only
relieved I hadn’t asked him for a colour, too.

At an internet café I checked my emails. Apart from the texts at New Year, I hadn’t been in contact with anyone for nearly a month. The connection was slow and it took a long time
to update my inbox. There was the usual spam, some ‘where/how are you?’ messages from friends and – what was this? – an email with the subject ‘Offer of
employment’. I vaguely recognised the name of the sender, Carlo Giordano, and decided it was safe to open it.

Ever the cynic, I hadn’t subscribed to Aaron’s theory that if you want something enough the universe will manifest it for you. Hard graft can get you there, I believed, but not some
spooky higher-power-influenced coincidence. Yet here, on this flickering, boxy computer screen, was the option 1 choice I had picked as my life’s new direction: an offer of a job, as a
deckhand, on a superyacht, in Italy this summer. It was mine, Signor Giordano wrote, if I was interested. Oh, and by the way, the salary was 1500 euros a month.

‘Couldn’t believe my eyes’ was an understatement of an understatement. How did this Carlo Giordano even magically know that I had picked option 1 and wanted a job on a boat in
the Med for the summer? An image of Aaron’s face, his mouth forming the words ‘the universe will manifest it for you’ over and over, swirled around my head. Carlo was a captain of
a superyacht who had once stayed at my sister’s guesthouse in Southampton. She had told him I liked sailing; he gave her his business card to pass on to me. He stayed with her not long after
I’d first decided to go off travelling and only a few weeks after I had done a low-level professional crew course to give me the option of picking up work while I was away. I had sent Carlo
an email, with my meagre sailing CV attached, asking him if he wouldn’t mind taking a look and giving me any suggestions he might come up with. He replied, saying kindly that my CV was
‘quite good, for a beginner’. I thanked him and we had no further contact. That was more than a year earlier. And now here he was, offering me a six-month paid position on his boat,
starting in April, without even needing to interview me. And did I mention the 1500-euro-a-month salary? Of course I said yes.

Excited, I Facebooked Guy to tell him. He soon congratulated me.

‘So glad you got your epiphany and you go for it!’ he wrote. ‘That’s what life’s all about, follow the epiphanies! The job in the Med sounds great experience on a
posh boat. Shame as I was hoping I could convince you to spend a few months on
Incognito
for a trip to Indonesia, maybe PNG.’

Argh! What was this? Option 1 and option 4 both manifesting themselves but inconveniently at the same time? Bloody universe and its tricks. I was dying to visit Papua New Guinea – and Guy
knew that. But I was still not sure if he was being serious.

‘I’d have loved to,’ I replied, ‘but I’ve already accepted the job.’ I hedged my bets. ‘Some other time?’

‘I will keep trying, maybe next year,’ he wrote. ‘I think we would get on well on board together. It would be easy and fun.’ Sadly, but pleased that I’d been asked
and that he still seemed to like me, I signed off.
Maybe he will ask me again
,
I hoped, if he really does mean it
.

While I’d been sorting out my summer, Ben and Vicky had been booking flights to the UK, now that we knew we were going to make it to Sri Lanka, and Pablo and Libertad were doing a little
internet project of their own – on pirates. The night before we left Port Blair for Galle in Sri Lanka, they brought up the subject.

‘Are ju not scared about this pirates?’ Pablo asked, casually, after dinner, looking intently at us each in turn through his glasses. ‘Because I look on the internet and it
says the ships are being attacked.’

Obviously we were all aware of the risks of sailing across the Gulf of Arabia, from Yemen up into the Red Sea. The area was a notorious target zone for Somali pirates and the threat was being
taken so seriously by foreign governments and shipping companies that a patrolled ‘transit corridor’ had been designated in an area where pirate activity was historically at its
highest. I used my journalistic skills in weighing up all the evidence and to cut through the hype. Usually, the pirates were after container ships or tankers with valuable cargo and large crews
that they could hold hostage. Yes, the British cruisers the Chandlers had been captured, but that had been widely recognised as an almighty cock-up on the part of the pirates. There were tactics
that we could use – as Sexy Josh had done, and he’d been absolutely fine – to pass through the corridor safely: go as part of a convoy of at least five boats, run without lights
at night, turn off the radio. All of this Tyrone had been aware of for years, from when he first began to plan his round-the-world voyage. He had already loosely arranged a rendezvous in Salalah in
Oman with two other boats in order to set up our convoy group. It was a worry but not a major one: the Somalis were after rich, insured ships, not poor cruisers, and they were confined to an area
fairly close to the Somali coast. By the time we got anywhere near, there’d be foreign navy ships and aeroplanes keeping an eye on us, anyway. It was exciting, rather than frightening. As
Tyrone tried to reassure Pablo when he waved at him a sheaf of pages about pirates he had printed off the internet in Port Blair, ‘The biggest danger to us is the weather.’ I agreed
with him, and Pablo and Libertad said no more about it.

A
crossing is a crossing is a crossing. Sorry to sound so blasé about it but sometimes there’s just sea, sky and precious little else.
I love the peace and the rhythm, when the wind isn’t kicking off, but a blow-by-blow account, in either sense of the word, doesn’t necessarily make for the most interesting reading.
There is one thing that stood out about the one-week crossing from the Andaman Islands to Galle in Sri Lanka: it rained. But you didn’t come to me to hear about the
weather
, did
you?

In Sri Lanka yachties can only take their boats to two places: Galle, a colonial fort town in the south, and the capital, Colombo. Galle was the closest, and the most popular place for yachts to
pull in, and we arrived in the early evening, just as we were beginning to worry about losing light. Two boys in a little metal launch shot out of the harbour to smile and wave at us as we
approached, white teeth gleaming in their mahogany faces. This was by far the friendliest reception we had received. Our designated parking space was a tight squeeze against a high concrete wall,
with boats in front and behind us. The harbour authorities had hung black car tyres over the side of the wall to fend us off from the concrete. They would have to do as ladders at low tide, too.
Using an old car tyre to clamber up a sheer concrete wall – it’s all glamour, yachting.

Packs of feral dogs roamed the harbour, making me nervous. A week at sea had generated a reasonable amount of rubbish and I was the one carrying it when we went ashore. One dog broke away from
its group to follow me closely, attracted by the smell coming from the black sack. I tried to keep in mind the tips Vicky had given me about dog behaviour during that horrible night on Long Island.
It’s only interested in the rubbish
, I repeated to myself as my new mantra.
Just keep going and don’t look at it.
I managed to keep my cool long enough to reach the
bin and toss the bag inside it. The dog stopped following me and stayed by the bin, sniffing at the plastic. I breathed out, relieved.

The Cricket World Cup – partly hosted by Sri Lanka – was due to start in a few weeks’ time and the place had gone cricket crazy. Boys and men set up a game on any piece of
spare garden, yard, car park or wasteland they could find. Everyone we met – Navy security guards, fruit sellers, waiters, people in the street – wanted to talk cricket with us. They
were out of luck with me. The best I could manage was to smile and cry, ‘Freddie Flintoff! Stuart Broad!’ loudly and with enthusiasm. The Sri Lankans humoured me. ‘England team
very good,’ they said. ‘Maybe win. Or maybe India.’ No one fancied Pakistan’s chances and surprisingly few were backing their own team for the top slot.

Galle was, we found, a town of two halves. By the sea was the quiet, preserved old fort with narrow, seventeenth-century streets lined with grey stone Dutch colonial houses that had been turned
into art galleries, restaurants and hotels for foreign tourists. At the fort’s centre, the narrow lanes widened into a peaceful cobbled courtyard and lawyers on their lunch break chatted
about court business under the shade of huge banyan trees. Tyrone and I – the crew had broken off into two couples and the two leftovers – meandered about, going into jewellery shop
after jewellery shop. Gemstones are big business in Sri Lanka and tourists come to gaze wistfully at the beautiful sapphires, rubies and moonstones on display in every other window. As we continued
our tour we found – at last! – a museum and went in, keen to learn something about Sri Lanka’s cultural history. But there were no labelled cards, no information boards, no
instructive displays. One step into the next room and we found out why: the ‘museum’ was a front for another jeweller’s, a cheap trick designed to get customers through the door.
I admired some milky moonstone earrings but reluctantly handed them back. You can’t exactly sport dangly earrings when you live on a boat – one wrong move and you’d find yourself
hoisted six feet in the air by your ear.

The other half of Galle was for the locals. Every second shop here seemed to be an imitation of Claire’s Accessories, the windows filled with pink and black sparkly handbags and hair
scrunchies. No one has worn scrunchies in England since about 1992. In Sri Lanka they remain popular, probably because they are the only hair ties strong enough to get a firm grip on Sri Lankan
women’s hair. Hair growing is practically a competitive sport in Sri Lanka and you’re no one if you can’t sit on your plait. It must be the one country where the usually feeble
excuse ‘No, I can’t come out with you on Saturday night because I’m washing my hair’ is accepted as fair.