Gale force winds whistling through the rigging, white capped waves crashing over the deck, and hardened, bearded men grappling with the helm and shouting commands over sounds of alarms screaming to be acknowledged. If you were searching for a situation like this on February 5th 2016 within 20miles of Cape Town, chances are you wouldn’t have found one.
If you had tried hard enough though, you would probably have come across a pasty white Irishman furiously drawing on a blueberry flavoured ecigarrette, pacing up and down a sailboat in zero winds, taking the “watch” in “watch keeping” to a whole new level. I’d been spared the deep end, apparently.
It was my first time being out of sight of land on a small boat, my first time keeping watch alone, and certainly the first time either occured at night. Even though the conditions were benign at worst, I was constantly checking the horizon, never leaving the chartplotter out of sight lest a ship appear on AIS. Every few minutes I needed a change of underwear when a seal would pop up beside the boat in the pitch dark, and be gone again before I could find him with my torch. As I said, if you’re looking for salty sailor material, you’d better move along.
As we got more firmly into the trade winds, the boat settled into 150+ mile days in the following winds and seas, and I was even beginning to settle down myself. I’d gotten used to the watch keeping duties, had grown to love our watch keeping timetable (I’m a fan of strange sleeping hours), and some familiarity and rhythm had been restored. As we were a team of 3, our rota dictated that one person cook and do the washing up each day. I vowed at one point that if I ever owned a boat I’d call it “Day 3” – a day where I was on watch in the light, playing scrabble and reading books on deck while the scents of the day’s meals flowed out through the companionway before the food itself was served. We were blessed with following winds which rendered the boat fairly flat, and walking around without holding on the things (although not recommended), was not much of a problem.
Making landfall was awe inspiring, and especially in a place like St. Helena. Only in the last couple of weeks has the island become accessible by airplane. For the last few decades, the RMS St Helena has carried goods and passengers to and from the island, stopping at Ascension Island, Walvis Bay, and Cape Town. After rounding the island to the anchorage in the sheltered North, a few hundred metres off Jamestown, our mooring was seamless and we put the boat away to have dinner with an eye to starting the exploration tomorrow.
Although I had a fair idea setting out that I’m not hugely prone to seasickness, I was intrigued by the whole idea of “landsickness”. Supposedly the level to which people are affected varies greatly; some people have one or two wobbly steps after stepping off the boat, and some people need a few minutes to adjust to terra firma after days or weeks at sea. Unfortunately St Helena was not to be the island on which I learned just how susceptible I am. The previous evening’s arrival celebrations had left me otherwise afflicted – suffering a sickness induced by yours truly rather than by mother nature. A few beers they said. Johnny the taxi driver delivered us to the Jamestown harbour and so the week began.
Those returning home from a visit to a foreign country have a tendency to inform everybody how friendly the locals were, sometimes sounding a bit surprised. I think it’s a bit cliche as we’re all fundamentally the same, but I think the lack of air travel and globalisation really does make the St Helenans (or “Saints” as they’re properly known) a particularly welcoming bunch. Saying “hello” to everybody you pass is something I thought limited to small town Ireland, and this was the first place I’d come across with the same custom. I guess tourists haven’t rendered themselves a nuisance in the locals’ minds yet based on their limited numbers.
I went on a tour around the island with an 88 year old man called Robert Jacobs in a minibus that can’t have been too much less than half his age. Rental cars were unavailable and we agreed that this might be the next best thing. It was definitely better – Robert’s anecdotes about his decades on the island made for some really interesting listening. He told us how it took him 8 years to persuade another man to sell the minibus to him. If the vehicle had been in Ireland or even South Africa it would have been scrapped a while ago, but the value of a car is higher when the lengthiness and cost of importing a new one is so exaggerated. He had seen the decline of flax exports and the development of a reliance on British aid.
The interior of island is lush green, making a stark contrast to the rugged cliffs that make up the island’s coast. Robert showed us around Napoleon’s old residences, where his family grew up and live, the vantage point from which Edmund Halley observed the comet named after him, and of course the infamous Jacob’s ladder. The names of some of the areas were almost Tolkien-esque – “cabbage tree road”, “below high knoll”, and “half tree hollow”. When he dropped us off (after a quick visit to Jonathan the tortoise – supposedly the oldest reptile on Earth), he announced that he had to hurry to beat rush hour and meet his mother, who if I remember correctly was about 110 years old!
Another thing that struck me was that there is a certain interdependence and community among the populations of British Overseas Territories. Ascension Island is made up of almost 100% Saints running support businesses for the military operations there. Many Saints have been to the Falkland Islands. Johnny the water taxi driver was a gentleman and a jack of many trades, and mentioned while we were out on a whale shark watching trip that he paid for the boat by fishing in South Georgia. With eyes as wide as an astonished child I asked “whoa, what was that like?!”. He just said “Hah, cold man. Force 12 almost every night”. Hard as nails!
St Helena marked the end of my first ocean passage, and the first stop off in the Atlantic. Getting here had been a relative walk in the park compared to what lay further ahead on the overall trip to the UK. More to follow!