SADDLED AT SEA: extracts

Having just cycled a thousand miles across the blowy coastal flatlands of Holland and Germany, I was now in the middle of cycling across Denmark on my way to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, when I suddenly got the idea of cycling there via New Zealand. This may sound like a slightly illogical route to take, seeing as all I had to do to reach the Baltics was to finish riding across the tip of Denmark before sweeping swiftly across Sweden and nipping along the southern flanks of Finland to pick up the Helsinki ferry to Tallinn, but at the time it made perfect sense to me.

Ever since I've been cycling in fits and starts around the world, I have been trying to hitch a lift to distant lands on board a container ship in return for cooking or deck-scrubbing favours. Then, out of the blue in the middle of Denmark, a haphazard phone call to a shipping agency revealed that there was a non-existent chance of getting a free passage to the other side of the world.

Nothing new there, then.

Sadly, things aren't like the good old days when 'working your passage' was a viable option. Today shipping companies are all too tied up in their unions and too frightened about the tangled world of visas as well as the wild escalation of liability and the ludicrousness of people who are determined to sue, dragging a shipping company through the courts simply because they tripped over a rope on deck and broke their little toe.

So the only way to sail around the globe by very large ship these days is either by taking a cruise on one of those massively cushy floating five-star hotels (which doesn't grab my fancy or my wallet at all) or as a fare-paying passenger on one of the few freighters that allocates a handful of cabins to people who like the idea of getting nowhere fast on board an oily greasy working ship.

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The Atlantic, 6 November

At one point during the night the Speybank slammed with such force into what must have been a particularly unfriendly wave that the strength of the reverberating shudder shoved aside the three deadweight panniers I had trussed together in front of my underbunk drawer. The drawer then shot out at speed, catapulting its contents (my lifejacket) into the other room. I tried not to take this as an ominous sign of things to come.

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DAY 16
Somewhere just below the Tropic of Cancer, 14 November

Suddenly we are on an emergency mission. At three o'clock last night Mr Alex Sasha second officer Nepomnyashchikh, who works the midnight to 4 a.m. Graveyard Watch, was contacted by the US Coastguard on Puerto Rico. A telex-style message rattled out of one of the many machines on the bridge, which Mr Alex Sasha second officer Nepomnyashchikh later gave me to stick into my diary. This is the gist of what it said:

UTC Time: 03-11-15 . . . SAR Safety Call to Area: 20 N 62 W 200 - PosOK

THE U.S. COASTGUARD IS ENGAGED IN A SEARCH AND RESCUE OPERATION WITH A 42FT SAILING VESSEL NAMED 'ALWAYS SATURDAY' A 42FT KETCH WITH 2 MASTS. A MEMBER ON BOARD IS SUFFERING FROM A HEART ATTACK. LAST KNOWN POSITION IS 20-25N 062-09W TAKEN AT 20:00Q 14TH NOV 03 HEADING AT COURSE OF 240 TRUE. THE U.S. COASTGUARD IS REQUESTING ANY VESSEL THAT MAY PROVIDE ASSISTANCE TO SAILING VESSEL 'ALWAYS SATURDAY', TO DIVERT TO LAST KNOWN POSITION. 'ALWAYS SATURDAY' CAN BE REACHED ON VHF-CHANNEL . . . OR BY SAT PHONE AT . . . U.S. COASTGUARD SAN JUAN, PR CAN BE REACHED ON . . .

ANY VESSEL ABLE TO RESPOND IS REQUESTED TO CONTACT THE U.S. COASTGUARD AND PROVIDE AN ETA TO POSITION. THE U.S. COASTGUARD IS SCHEDULING TO BE SENDING A U.S. COASTGUARD CUTTER AND AIRCRAFT TO ASSIST AT FIRST LIGHT OF THE 15TH NOV 03. ANY VESSEL ABLE TO RESPOND IS REQUESTED TO PROVIDE COMMUNICATIONS RELAY OR MEDICAL ASSISTANCE. SIGNED U.S. COASTGUARD SAN JUAN, PR.

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The bridge was filled with a heightened air of anxiety. Apart from the rain drumming down on the wheelhouse roof, the whirring and static electrical buzzes of the equipment, the suddenly stern calling of orders from the captain to the helmsman and the occasional disembodied voice from the VHF, the only sound was silence -- an all-pervasively agitated and jittery silence. I kept well out of the way in a corner, not daring to murmur a word. At least not until, scanning the almost impenetrable gloom with my keenly roving binoculars, I suddenly blurted out, 'There it is!' as I picked out a feeble light swaying from side to side on top of a murky mast.

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By 20.00 hours, the weather had deteriorated into an electrical storm of ferocious proportions. I stood in the darkness of a corner of the darkened bridge holding tight on to the rail beneath the window. Shards of lightning cut the sky and lit up the sea like daylight. There was nothing so dainty as raindrops in this. As it strafed the decks it was just a cubic mass of falling water, pounding against the wheelhouse with a fearful din. Thunderous explosions cracked above our heads, some so shockingly loud they made you instinctively cower. The therdunk-therdunk of my heart beat harder and harder. The only other people on the bridge were the captain and third mate Young Alex and, over in the far corner, standing with his back to me, the dark form of the watchman who I think was Zhenya Sotnikov, but it was hard to tell as he stood as still as a corpse. And all the time the eerie whirring teeth-grinding sounds of the out-of-the-ark Russian auto-pilot giros filling the bridge with worry.

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Over the past few days we have sailed past a handful of far-scattered desert islands floating on the horizon like shimmering mirages for Martini ads. Today we finally got to land on one. Tahiti may be more commercial pap than desert island, but at least it is land.

This much-awaited land was a bit hard to find at first. When I climbed up to the monkey deck at dawn this morning, I discovered that the burning blue of the past few thousands of miles had been replaced by a dish-rag sky which grew progressively more dirty the closer we slid towards Tahiti. The oppressive weight of these low scowling skies was of the sort that threatened rain in volume at any moment. How very unexotically welcoming of it.

By about nine o'clock, a dark brooding form was just visible squatting on the horizon beneath a mass of bad-tempered storm clouds. All morning, in between fierce bursts of torrential downpours, we inched towards this blackish bulk, which steadily grew in all dimensions until it no longer fitted into the tunnel of my binoculars. Instead I had to piecemeal it in magnified sections. Pale specks and smudges turned into houses clinging like limpets to the precipitous jungle-clad mountainsides. Ships and small boats ghosted out of the filthy sky to crash into the side of Papeete, the main port and capital of French Polynesia.

By 14.00 we had docked at Motu Uta, the small wellington boot-shaped bridge-connected island that sits in the port of Papeete. The Tahitian stevedores, some of them as magnificently round and fleshy as sumo wrestlers, wore winning grins and jazzy yellow uniforms. They appeared impressively efficient despite the overwhelming heat of the place, jumping on to fork-lifts and buzzing around like bees as the cranes swung into cargo-grabbing action. All of us passengers were itching to get off but we weren't allowed to do so until the customs men had checked that we were who we were. So while we waited to get our identities identified, I hung upside-down at the waist over the railings on the monkey deck double-checking I was who I am because sometimes, especially after so many weeks at sea, who you think you are is not what you actually see. And this time was no exception. Instead of finding myself in what I thought was me, I found Ham Man, albeit in inverted form through my legs. But that's only because he had come up to the monkey deck to see what was going on. Or more to the point, what was coming off. Containers. That's what. Loads and loads of containers to be exchanged for even more loads of containers, which were all piled brutishly high on the dockside awaiting their transit aboard the high seas and long trains and tall trucks of this world.




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