'You Jammy Lot!'

Saturday 23 June 2007

It didn’t happen.
It simply didn’t happen.

At 11 sharp on Thursday morning we sailed out of Papeete harbour, under a glorious sky. Past the harbour wall, past the airport, and out into the open sea. In the distance, the ocean was creased by the occasional herd of white horses – well foals, really, Fritzl and Seppl sort of thing: they were truthfully not big enough to be called horses -- and a frothle of foam could be spied tossing itself over the reefs alongside the lagoon of Moorea, ‘cross the way'.
How odd a thought it was, cruising amid all this blue and white and gold scenery, that rough and rude high seas were waiting for us just two hours away.
One hour later, and we could just about count the houses (on not too many hands) on the approaching Moorean shores, one hour and a half, and the reefs and sticklebacked mountains of the island’s volcanic ridges slid by to starboard. But the sky was incessantly blue, and the white whiffs on the edges of sea seemed, if anything, to be getting fewer and smaller, while the horizon showed no signs of darkness or of threat. Two hours. No storm. Quite the opposite in fact. And not even a sign of a storm.
I, who had bossily lectured everyone on stowing everything in their cabin and preparing for the worst, began to feel just a little silly.
As we lounged around with our aperitifs that evening, the Captain poked his head past the bar – ‘you jammy lot’ … we’d been reprieved. The storms had unexpectedly taken a different course. For the moment, at least, it was a case of cruise along as normal.

And so, Thursday, Friday and Saturday passed ... three of the most deliciously warm, sunbathe-y and utterly agreeable days of the whole trip.
I’ve pretty well skinned the library by now, and have been reduced to reading run-of-the-mill detective novels and, ultimately, the classics (I have Captains Courageous and Hard Times lined up, and, as an ultimate reserve, the complete works of Jane Austen). But I hit one unexpected jewel.
The Fairy Gunmother (La fée Carabine, and yes, I get the joke) by Daniel Pennac is a French sort-of-thriller noir, gory and grotesque but irresistibly and almost surreally funny. The English translation by Ian Monk is unusually fine, but I would love to read this in French (with, I suspect, a dictionnaire d’argot close to hand). I couldn’t put it down. It’s actually part of a series of four, so I shall be looking for the other three when I get back to Europe. Remember that name: Pennac.
I took time off from literature to have a haircut. Valeryi, the welder, who desecrated the cadets hair on Crossing the Line day is the local barber, and he put my scanty hair-do beautifully in order. So much so, that Philip followed on and exchanged his rather longer locks for a number one like mine!
Then, yesterday, Lyndall proffered the opinion that it was a shame that our ship had no figurehead. So we thought, perhaps, we might offer our services. Whilst the workers were at their morning smoko, we whipped down to main deck, up to the foc'sle, and did a little photo-auditioning. I’m afraid it was no contest

The winner, Miss Tikeibank Bowsprit 2007





The wooden spoon






Sunday 24 June

Five days to go and, I think, our reprieve may soon be coming to an end.
The sky is smoky-cloudy. There are jigsaw-puzzle pieces of blue here and there, and the sun stares through the peepholes in the grey from time to time, but the no-longer-motionless air has cooled noticeably and there is a slate-coloured line along the horizon. We’re still pretty smooth as we go …
And the Captain’s head goes side to side instead of up and down.

Has the jam run out?
Has my witchcraft of the winds lost its sting?
Do I go up on Monkey Island and give the elements a warning bit of Handel’s ‘Hear me ye winds and waves’?
Or do I just curl up in my cabin, with Rudyard Kipling, and wait for the elements do their thing…

5pm

Well, it didn’t happen. Once again it didn’t happen. An hour after penning those last lines I was up on top, not intoning out a warning message to the four winds and the tritons, but sunbathing once again, on a nice comfy long swell, in the company of Kipling (enjoyable) and Dickens (oh, so windy). Both of them having been disposed of, I’m now going to launch on to something where the characters don’t speak in unreadable phoneticky ‘common’ accents.

Anyway, Kipling and Dickens weren’t the event of the day. They were quite outshone by the appearance of a large whale not too far off the starboard side. He was a nice whale, and provided us with all the ritual leaps and splashes and ultimately the essential bit of spouting before gambolling off northwards.

Oh, and I mustn’t forget the evening bike ride. With the friction gauge now set securely on maximum, I powered through 5km in just 19 mins 47 secs, breaking not only into a very drippy bout of perspiration but also the 4-minute-kilometre rate I’d set as my target. Then, as I sat there waiting for my pulse reading to settle down to a final reading, I thought ‘OK, target achieved … but what sort of a target was it?’ Is it a target attainable by 80 year-old grannies? Or is it actually better than might have been expected from a slightly shapeless (see above), 12-stone (?), 61 year-old who hasn’t exercised for 35 years. So, I took a plunge. I have asked second mate Igor, the ship’s slim, bulging, shy, twenty-somethingish fitness champion to do me a trial run. To see what a top notch 5km (max friction) time would be. I think he understood what I was asking, his English is pretty good. Anyway, he – who has watched me daily punch those sweaty pedals, while he twirled his 70k weights around -- grinned wolfishy. So watch this space.

PS Captain, Purser, Lyndall et al simply hooted at my Igor idea. Apparently he doesn’t do legs. Top half only. ‘All shirt and no trousers’ was how Steve maliciously put it. How strange. I may have to offer a prize.

Wednesday 27

On Monday 25, there was no sun. Nor sea. Nor ship. For, for us, Monday 25 did not have a being. In crossing the International date line, the Tikeibank and all who sail in her quite simply ‘lost’ Monday 25. We went to bed on Sunday and awoke on Tuesday.

Tuesday was a grey day with 3.5 with metre swells on the sea, and a morning of the staunchest rain we have had yet. It was not a day to stick one’s sunbed or even one’s head outside. So I curled up, in various corners of the ship and, between meals, demolished two fair old-style English murder mysteries (guessed ‘em both, but I usually do, unless the author cheats). The swells had gentled by the late afternoon, so – having expected to be exempted from my cycling on weather grounds -- I dragged myself to the gym. Every kilometre en selle was a calvary, I longed to give up before kilometre one was even reached, but to my surprise at halfway I wasn’t doing too dreadfully. So I gritted my false teeth and ploughed through the muscular shriekings to ... yesterday’s record broken by one second! 19 mins 46 secs.
To celebrate, I decided to have a ‘clean’ night. Instead of going straight from my post-gym shower to the bar for aperitif and a bludged cigarette, I stayed on my bunk with a ‘Discworld’ novel by one Terry Pratchett, who must be famous as he sports an appended OBE, presumably for writing. He’s written a lot of these books and they are obe-viously a popular cult, but to come in as a first-timer to a late in the series volume, when you don’t know the style and the geography and the in-jokes and such .. well, its hard work. And I’m not that keen or hard work in my reading.
But after dinner, instead of repining to the lounge and the bar as per habit, I returned – with a jug of iced water -- to my cabin and to Discworld, and I worked hard. Soon I started to realise who and what people and places and things were, soon I started to recognise the clevernesses and the intricacies of the plotting, and before the end I was thoroughly hooked. I shall have to read some more of these, though preferably starting with number one rather than number seventeen!
At 9pm I sank into a Discworld-dreamfilled sleep, interrupted around 3am by a particularly characterful lurch from the ‘ground’ under my bed, but otherwise a splendid 9-hours of semi-oblivion.

Wednesday

This storm isn’t going to happen! I mean, it’s happening and happened, but our master mariners are seemingly going to get us through with nothing worse that a few 5 or 6 metre swells, and the odd torrent.
In fact, this morning, up on the bridge, deck-cadet Dion was occupied in steering us on a veritable slalom course through the various showery areas of this part of Pacific. Unfortunately, just as I arrived, one particularly anodine looking bit off white fluff revealed its true, tricky colours and dumped a couple of minutes of tropical torrent on us.
We’ve taken a 90 mile detour in our efforts to avoid what had previously seemed to be an unavoidable bit of filthy weather, but it has certainly worked. We are up to time, the outside workers have been able to do their outside work, and we have even been able to parsimoniously proceed under less (and less expensive) power than would otherwise have been the case. I guess that’s what seamanship is all about.

Actually, today would be, but for coldish wind – and the odd dissimulating cloud -- a thoroughly agreeable day. Claudie dared, for a while, a chair in a rare semi-windless corner of the deck, but I opted to stay indoors and wasted the morning reading William Golding’s The Paper Men. How bored I am with the interminable list of ‘quality’ novels in which the people spend half their time drunk or drugged. This was just one more such, with anything that might have been a worthwhile tale, or indeed a worthwhile character, drowned in yawnsome, skippable gallons of self-indulgent alcohol. For that you get a Nobel Prize? You can fool some of the people all of the time. I already automatically shun anything which banners itself a ‘New York Times Best Seller’, now I am getting ready to wipe Bookers and Nobels and such things from my reading list. If it weren’t for the fact that I’ve won a handful of the jolly things myself, in my time, and for books like the Whitbread-winning English Passengers, I’d be ready to consider all literary prizes and their winners a Bad Thing.

I hasten to add that I have nothing against alcohol. He and I are, as you will have gathered, extremely well acquainted. But, as we all know, whereas booze – having been intaken -- may be ever so enjoyable from the point of view of him who has intaken, its effects are – to those who have not intaken -- achingly boring to see, hear and, above all, to read of.

Two other events of the day.
With getting on for forty healthy males on this ship, only one person could be found to take up my challenge of 5km of exercise bike. It was, of course, not a male at all, but the best bloke of the lot: Lyndall. And the resultant proof was that my 19mins 46 weren’t so very lousy after all. Maybe I should keep on with this? Except that Wendy’s email from Gerolstein, today, tells of cold and heavy rains down Christchurch way… sigh, back to real life.

Kurt in Tahiti

Thursday 21 June 8am

I’m writing this from the wharves at Papeete, Tahiti. The sun is blazing down outside, from a clear superblue sky over clear superblue sea, and it would seem like an ideal time to be up on deck.
But.
I know that if I don’t get this down now, it may be a while. Because the storm warnings are out. Just a couple of hours south from here, a couple of hours after our scheduled 11am departure from Tahiti, there will be no more of the calm seas and prosperous voyage that have favoured us for the past month. The effects of the huge meterological disturbances which have been ripping Australia apart in recent days have spread as far north as here, and for the week of our trip from Tahiti to New Zealand we are going to be heading – and I mean square on heading – into increasingly rough seas, culminating in all likelihood in force 8 or even 10 gales.
If that happens, it will be a record for me. So far, the most stormy passage I’ve gone through was a force 9, years ago on the ‘Northern Star’, off Brisbane. And that was just for one day, not a week. Also, the Star was a rather bigger vessel than this one. Ah well, I survived that one without blenching, so I should be able to survive this one without being ‘lashed to the Bosun’ (as the Captain rather attractively suggested) or confined to my cabin, as I rather fear one or two of our nautical neophytes might be.
Anyway, I’ve cleared all my possessions away into the hooked closed drawers, and into my suitcase, emptied out everything liquid except the drinking water (which can go in the fridge when things get rough), and the last thing to be packed away, this afternoon when the sea cuts up rough, will be this indispensable machine. I don’t want it toppling off the table on to the floor…

We arrived at Papeete in the night of Tuesday to Wednesday. I didn’t wait up for it. Instead I awoke to find us already berthed.
Now, I have been here before. Twice, if memory serves. Maybe only once. And 35 years ago. But, whichever, I came away with a pretty muted appreciation of the place. I remember, a ‘Pacific-French’ bar-cum-dancing, all lined with mirrors, and Alison and I dancing in what became a virtual floor show as the locals stopped, one by one, their own gyrations, to gawp at the two lithe, tanned, lively stunners that we were in those days, reflected over and over in the mirrors…
And I remember a motor bike tour of the Island with the boys from the band: Alison riding pillion behind I think the drummer, and I glued rather too closely to the decidedly substantial guitarist. Well, the pillion footrest was broken off, so I had to sort of twine my leg round his, and clutch tightly round his vast chest, so as not to destabilise us… Maybe that’s why I don’t remember too much about the scenery, just the disappointing Gauguin museum which, of course, only runs to prints not originals, and the fact that we couldn’t find a decent (by NZ standards) beach to laze on.
Anyway, my feelings about Papeete were pretty much ‘been there, done that, don’t really care to do it again’. But when I peeped out my porthole, when I bounded up topside to watch us tying up and click a photo or two, I was quite surprised. I’d remembered the place as rather shabby and dingy, in the way that so many tropical places all round the world are. But, from the Monkey Island of the Tikeibank, Papeete didn’t look like that at all. It looked really rather pretty. The green misted mountains, the trim little town (and it is indeed little) with what passes for its residential suburbs scattered loosely up the hillsides behind, the blue sea and the blue and white ferries shuttling past heading for the misty island of Moorea – James Michener’s Bali H’ai – in the distance.
And such a nice day.
Should I perhaps change my mind and go ashore after all?
It would, in any case, be good to stretch the legs a little, to have a proper walk after a month at sea.
Lyndall, Grev and Michael were planning to take the 9.05 ferry to Moorea to do some moped discovering on what is supposed to be the nicest island of the group, so I decided that I and my useful command of the French language would just wander along with them to the ferry port.
It was about a 30 minute walk from our far-end-of-the-port berth to the ferry terminal, and most of it is through the various marine installations of the island – from the Tahitian military naval yards to various repair docks and the berths of the local ships: never the choicest part of any town, but nevertheless far from as shabby as I’d expected.
So, once the Moorea-bound team (including Biddy and Hugh, picked up en route) were safely away on their respective ferries, I decided to stroll on a bit further, along the water front to the other end of town.
I am very glad I did.
There is nothing exceptional about Papeete. It is a typical French tropical or Polynesian town. Just like Noumea. But typical French Polynesian towns aren’t quite the same as they were 46 years ago when I first visited New Caledonia. The essential character is still there, though. The funny dark little cafes and bars, the dusty boule or basketball grounds, the ubiquitous, shabby Coca Cola signs, the proliferation of official and government buildings, and, of course, the people. Those lovely plump-cheeked, shyly sparkling girls who are destined in too few years to become the obese, waddling dentally-challenged dames one sees everywhere, and the broad-built, gentle and also often semi-shy men. Perhaps nowadays there are more ‘other-races’ around than there used to be, but it is still the Polynesians who are the glory of the place.
But, on top of what I remember as the characteristic French island of half a century ago, have come the modern additions. The shops and the offices of the late twentieth century. Now, as the whole world knows, very often old plus new equals horrible aberration, but here, somehow, I felt that it worked. The funny little bars and cafés, and the splendid colonial buildings stand side to side now not only with nature, but with never-grotesquely-tall 20th century constructions – many already sandpapered into happy cohabitation by the tropical sun and rain – in what I found a decidedly agreeable way.

My little walk finally ended up being three and a half hours. I followed the waterfront to the town’s end, where the very erratic footpath vanished into a motorway and forced me inland to ‘centre ville – Papeete’. Centre ville turned out to be just one or two streets back from the waterfront and I comprehended that Papeete is decidedly smaller than Rangiora, NZ. But it was full of enjoyable sights – and remarkably few tourists -- and even though I was getting a touch sweaty and decidedy footsore as I headed back to the docks I had duly enjoyed myself.

I enjoyed the churches. Yes, for once, I really did. The Protestant church is painted pink, for heaven’s sake, with a green roof, but the Cathedral de Notre Dame (built 1875) is even better -- bright yellow and scarlet! They seem to shout ‘God can be good fun’. How different from the greys and browns of the Anglo-Saxon world.

The Presidential palace was quite something too, an enormous old-time edifice, with impressive iron gates and a fountain in its front courtyard and with half a tree-lined boulevard of mixed and matching other official and ceremonial buildings to hand. The important looking war memorial, which was surrounded by freshly laid wreaths, celebrated a different area of war to those I’ve been used to hearing about.



I duly ‘did’ the market – the traditional mixture of food and the favourite tourist items – woven bags, fantastical hats, and racks and racks of the Tahitian pareo, the brightly coloured all-in-one garment that spells ‘Tahiti’ to the rest of the world. I suspect at least some of them were ‘made in China’, but they certainly were colourful. (I found out later there was a second floor to the market .. but one floor did me fine).






I passed a delightful colonial building – perhaps once an hotel – painted up in red white and blue and labelled Kuo min tang and something in Japanese, I passed the dim, discrete and not very royal-looking Royal Papeete Hotel, I walked by all sorts of eateries and drinkeries, ranging from the fondly familiar little gloomeries of yesteryear, to glistening brasseries (with a small beer at $10NZ a pop!) and an up-to-date Internet Café, elbow to elbow with a sinister looking nightclub (men $1000 entry, girls free!). I passed, alas, a MacDonalds too. And it was full. But as I stared sadly, an old man walked past me, sucking the milk from cocoanut through a plastic straw. Long may he live.

Back on the waterfront – such activity – a whole section of shabby old booths getting repaired and licked with paint, a funfair under construction, a huge up to date arena with state of the art sound and lighting .. apparently this is all in preparation for the 14 Juillet festivities .. which I understand get off the ground here some time before the end of June! The juxtaposition of the splendid arena and the shanty booths summed up Papeete nicely.

And I liked it.

Back on board for a cold shower, a few cold beers, a bit of lunch, a snooze, and down to the gym. I put the bike up to the porthole, and as I dourly pedalled my 10km I had the joy of watching a hundred or so little coloured one-paddle skiffs racing across the harbour. A few eight-man longboats varied the entertainment, but I liked the skiffs best. Modern, lightweight boats they may have been, but once again, watching the men plying their paddles like Olympic canoeists, I enjoyed the mixture of old and new.

Bit by bit, the rest of our ‘family’ returned. Everyone seemed to have passed his or her day in a difference way, and each and every one of us had had a thoroughly good time.
And, good grief, I didn’t spend one cent.

Hey! We’re moving. It’s 11 o’clock already … time to go up and wave goodbye to Tahiti. Until next year…

Tahiti

The Equator Party

Happily, any event (and I’m not talking about Russian Independence Day) is a good reason for a party at sea, and we duly partied in the approved style with a barbecue dinner and flowing beer-chests on the bridge deck…

Biddy was duly serenaded and presented with the ritual cake by chief stewardess Svetlana



and the early evening rolled into mid-evening into late evening into night as we chatted and danced and beered the hours away…




I met up with my friends of the last party, and made a few more. Yevgenji, the Bosun, 29, the ship’s undoubted jeune premier speaks excellent English and I discovered to my semi-surprise that he’d begun life as a ballet dancer before taking to the sea. Then there was Valery, the demon barber of this afternoon’s proceedings.
I also did my best to have a conversation with our chef, who was all willing, but alas has about two more words of English than I have of Russian. And I feel may have also had two more beers than I.
Anyway, Bosun and chef duly posed for the imperative Gänzl camera, with the very decorative Viktoriya between them



Another splendidly relaxed evening in delightful company …
And just to prove that I WAS still standing at the end…
(no, I am laughing at Valery trying to point my camera at us, and the gorgeous Natalja is NOT holding me up!)

Crossing the Line

13 June 2007

Its Wednesday. And we are in the Southern hemisphere. We’ve actually been in the Southern hemisphere since 8.00.40hrs local time yesterday, and I have photographic evidence of the fact. (see below)

Yes, all those zeroes at the top mean that we were plumb in the middle of the waistband of the world .. and since we only stayed there for something less than second, and that my Kodak has a delayed reaction of an amount which I have never been able to quantify, you will understand that enormous algebraic skills (or something) were put into use in order to capture that moment at which everything begins to turn the other way.

Yes it does. The story about the bathwater going down the drain the opposite way in each hemisphere? It’s true. I actually knew it was true, because I can remember, years ago, on one of my ships, standing at the sink in my cabin watching and waiting as we crossed the equator. OK, so its not instantaneous, but it happens. And its not just the bathwater, cyclones do it too, and so do the oceans’ currents. That I didn’t know, but our beloved Captain, with the aid of an orange and a felt tipped pen, demonstrated what is known as the Coriolis effect (or was it force?) for us in the bar before supper on the relevant night, and Dion dug up the right spelling of the damn thing in the Mariners’ Meteo Manual on the bridge, so that I (who thought it had an h in it) wouldn’t make an idiot of myself in this blog.

Since leaving Panama, life has been wonderfully uneventful. Well we did have some rain, but since we’ve hardly seen any on this trip, that was more a diversion than anything else. So a day inside, which I put to good use taking a lesson from Lyndall on how to upload music on to my computer. This experience made me realise that I should be profiting from being surrounded by young folk to expand my computer horizons. Today I have been introduced to ‘memory sticks’ for the first time, and perhaps more significantly to the ‘ipod’. Michael (age: 20) was able to download the whole of the 480-part photo archive that I’ve put together since setting out in March onto his ipod, and can now dole out the various pictures that the other lads (and lasses) would like to have to them at leisure. After supper, I shall pillage Lyndall’s photo store…
Ah! Modern science….

Otherwise its been the usual blue, calm sea and warm to scalding days, punctuated by the usual food, drink and exercise mental or physical. Feeling that it was now safe to go out of the house without a shirt again, I spent a whole day up on deck sunning myself. The result will be visible below… I am somewhere between Mexican and Maghrebin, and (with a little assistance from my Hoar Cross Hall SOS cream, and the Hawaiian tropic sunblock brought on by the agent at Panama) I sort of glow in the dark.

If the first days out of Panama were uneventful, one certainly couldn’t say the same for yesterday. Apart from crossing the line, with all the ceremonial that entails, we had two birthdays to celebrate – our Biddy from Zimbabwe, who was hitting more milestones that day than the equator – it was her 70th! – and Sacha, **** perhaps the rotundest of our crew, but with height to match and the classic teddybear gentleness as well. And, apparently, it was also Russian Independence Day. Although no one could tell me independence from what.

We started our busy day, straight after breakfast, on the bridge deck, toasting Biddy in early morning champagne and awaiting the precise second of our arrival in the Southern hemisphere. That precise second which I have preserved for eternity and the blog, above. After which everyone retired to his or her cabin for a personal experience of the Coriolis business.
The next event was the day’s Main Event. At 3.30pm the ship’s complement was summoned, by King Neptune himself, issued (or so one would imagine) from the waves, to attend his court on the poop deck. Well, old salts like yours truly know what that means. It means a rather messy ceremony, redolent of the old army and university ‘initiations’, involving the usual sort of indignities practised on the usual sort of victims, in this case anyone who hasn’t crossed the equator by sea (planes don’t count). Now, the principal sacrifical cows today were clearly going to be our very own Tikeibank Fab Four – the cadets Grev, James, Dion and Michael – but there had been all sorts of veiled threats and hints coming out of, in particular, the purser’s department for the past weeks, so one wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Particularly as I had a shrewd suspicion that the ‘rules’ could very easily get bent.

Anyway, the victims of the day had two things in their favour. Firstly, there were ladies aboard, which meant some of the umm more extreme bits of the ‘initiation’ process were out. And secondly … King Neptune – imposing in an ankle-length ‘grass’ skirt, a fish net, some Xmas decorations, a tin foil crown and a cottonwool beard -- bore a striking resemblance to birthday boy Sacha!



The Fab Four were the first to come under the trident of Neptune. Our bondage man, Steve the purser, soon had them (reasonably) tightly tied to a set of plastic chairs … the Captain read out a list of their Misdeeds to date … and then it all began .. first the ordeal by vinegar (wouldn’t have bothered some NZ wine drinkers), followed by raw vodka (we think!), then the oceanic barber! Michael and Grev got their initial shaved into the back of their head .. Grev was given an impromptu Mohawk, James a couple of handles over his ears and Michael .. well, I’m not sure what Michael’s was supposed to be, but he also got part of his luxuriant chest done as well (although it stopped there, in modern day fashion) ... Dion, whose rather impressive haircut obviously impressed Neptune as well, escaped more lightly.



Then came the goo. I think its flour and water, coloured with cochineal, but it’s the sort of stuff you see being flung round the stage in pantomimes, and its clammy as all get out. Bosun Yevgenyi, equipped with two casseroles and a huge ladle, supervised operatons as the filthy stuff was poured down back and chests – INSIDE the boiler suits (and here was another part, thanks to the ladies, which was abridged from the days of my experiences) – after which Oleg, the ***** brought out the ship’s firehose. I suppose you could call it ‘pressure cleaning’ but his idea didn’t seem to be very cleansing. A thorough dowsing was more to the point.



At the end of the affair, when the lads lined up for a ‘team photograph’ with King Sacha, they were drenched, coloured and sporting a very original set of hairstyles!



The second set of victims went through much of the same routine. Minus the barbering. This time it was Natalja and Viktoria, the two ‘new’ stewardesses, Lyndall – in spite of the fact that she was sure that she had popped across the Equator at the age of three or so – and Philip, a genuine novice. This round was a tad less boisterous, although it can have been no coincidence that the Bosun let the hose linger on Lyndall’s chest much longer than normal until it was quite clear to all that under the sodden yellow T-shirt was a dark blue bra! Sorry, boys. The splendid Natalja didn’t even wait for the same treatment .. she quite candidly hoiked her T-shirt up ..



Philip put up a great show.. and, by the way, thank you, Philip. I have just a tiny suspicion that if you hadn’t got on at Panama that, in spite of my long Equatorial record, that 4th chair might just have been filled by me. That’s what I meant about bending rules. Next time I must bring my 1972 Neptune certificate, just in case!

Although, come to think of it, I need a haircut.

Postscript: Michael has today solved his bad hair problem by simply shaving his head. I suspect that dinner time may see a few more tonsorial changes in the cadet department!
Double postscript: It did! We have three monks! Grev somehow doesn’t look any different .. but I didn’t recognise James. Hmmm. I wonder if Dion will be allowed to ‘survive’…

Two Birthdays: Sacha & Biddy

Equator

Bunkering

Kurt out of the Canal

Friday 8 June

Well, it didn’t happen.

I take back all and anything complimentary that I said about Panamanian efficiency. We did not leave Gamboa when the fog had cleared. We did not leave Gamboa at 8am, nor at the announced (by them) time of midday, nor indeed at the re-re-announced time of 7pm. We finally released our buoys and set forth towards the Gaillard Cut at something more like 8.30pm.

And thank goodness for that.

We had a delightful day bronzing on the upper decks in the sometimes fierce tropical sun, watching the procession of huge container ships and bulk carriers passing first one way and then the other on their way through the canal. The entertainment was varied by the occasional flash little yacht (American flag, inevitably), the occasional long, winding train, laden with containers, which – with a shrill and piercing hoot – snaked its way along the dark green banks, and by the antics of the giant crane with the improbable name of ‘Rialto M Christiansen’, which turned out not to be a fixed item, but officially a dredge and mounted on a barge. Like everything here, it seems!





It was well and truly dark when we steamed out of Gamboa and took a gentle virage to starboard, past the Chagres River bridge and into the newly widened (to almost 200 metres) Gaillard Cut. What a sight! One would say a fairground on water, or the airstrip of Fairyland Airport. The more or less straight ‘Cut’ (and that is exactly what it is, a C19th ‘cut’ through the original hills) simply glitters with lights of all kinds, lights which rebound from the daytimely-uninviting brown surface of the water in a delicious festival of dancing colour. The bright directional pillars of gold and green, lined up on the adjacent banks, which in the sunshine hours are such ordinary-looking aids to navigation, now, lit up, are almost exciting. The little gold ‘alligators eyes’ which mark the edge of the waters, water-level blue lights and green lights all with some doubtless vital meaning too obscure for a layman, the huge ‘radio masts’ higher up the hills with their irregular silver flashings, like the RKO logo gone mad on all-white firework night .. and, creeping darkly towards you, in a flurry of tug-light, in this wider two-way portion of the Canal, the shadow of an other-way-bound ship, with just its red and green navigation lights showing. Here a maintenance barge, equipped with all sorts of looming equipment and blazing with busy ‘overtime’ light, there a coven of tugs bathed in their own busy little brightness, and there again a team of busy dozers and diggers, working through the night, behind glaring gold eyes and under vast panels of floodlight.

Since my last passage of Panama, six or seven years ago, the widening works then in progress have been completed, to be replaced by goodness knows how many other endless kinds of amenagement. However, the most noticeable change is a whole new bridge! Whereas before the Bridge of the Americas (which actually isn’t strictly ‘in’ the canal) was the only span over the water, now we have what is called the Ponte Cucaracha or the Cockroach Bridge. This isn’t a comment on its cleanliness but simply because it sprouts from a piece of the canal known as the Bordava Cucaracha (which may very well have been such a comment, back when it was named). It seems to lead from nowhere to nowhere, although I did spy a few lights amongst the dark vegetation on the previously untouched southern bank of the canal. Anyway, it is apparently, if relatively useless, determinedly commemorative, and wherever it comes from and goes to, there it is, a nice modern suspension bridge, outlined in the traditional halo of electric lights, with the occasional vehicule buzzing across its span like a glowworm with an outboard motor.. a fine addition to the tourist scenery.





It seemed like no time at all before we glimpsed, down the ‘runway’, beyond the bridge, a veritable city of lights and the Pedro Miguel locks reared glitteringly up before us. And, with it, eleven o’clock reared up as well. The ice bucket was empty, and the festive whisky bottle seemed to have taken a bit of a bashing too. And since one lock is pretty much like another, and we’d already had one bridge, the last Monkey Island survivors decided to call it a day. Or, rather, a night. Graham (who had slept much of the early part of the evening) later crept up to watch us through the last locks, just after midnight, but the rest of us cried happily ‘enough’. I watched the first Pedro Miguel ‘hoist’ from my private porthole and then went contentedly off to sleep.

Alas, I have no photos to illustrate this very pictorial part of my story. Given the humidity here – which has reached 100 percent at times in the last couple of days – the lens of one’s camera insidiously fogs up, resulting mre often than not in pictures of nothing but a humid, foggy blur. Oh well, you can’t win em all.

The morning of Friday 8 June dawned to find us parked out in the Pacific Ocean, in misty sight of the Bridge of the Americas, and of the tower blocks of Paitilla on the Gulf of Panama, in a gentle warm rain which had – from the evidence of the inundated decks – previously been very much less gentle. Limpeted to our side was a very punctual sludge barge, downloading our waste oil. It has gone now, but is soon – or not soon -- about to be replaced by a fellow barge (largely late, wouldn’t you know it) which will upload the fuel which will take us through the Pacific.

So … here we go! En avant and Tally ho for Tahiti!

When Panama gets its act together.






Scenery, or Officer Cadets at work:

Kurt in the Canal

I didn’t expect to see too much of the Panama Canal this time round. We were scheduled for a 6.45pm transit, and in spite of the floodlights that blaze over the operating bits of the locks, and the lighthouses that dot the hills above the canal, lighting the path from the Atlantic to the Pacific, much of the trip was clearly going to be little more than a voyage through the tropical darkness.

‘Clearly’ turned out to be the key word.

We sat in the bay off Cristobal through the afternoon, the uneventfulness of the day enlivened only by the comings and goings of the various official launches. One of these brought what looked like customs folk, a fellow with an ominous looking sprayer, and the latest addition to our passenger quota. Philip, a retired business writer turned writer-writer from Bournemouth, had made has way to Cristobal via the ‘Queen Mary’ and a variegated selection of buses down through the southern parts of the USA to Mexico, Guatemala and so forth to Panama. Not without a certain eventfulness. The night prior to joining us, he had been mugged in that delightful city named Colon, and today the launch bringing him to the boarding gangway simply refused to back up in the fashion required for him to transfer. Incompetence or engine/gear problems? They claimed the latter. Anyway, in the end the launch in question had to go right back to port, Philip was transferred to a larger and more competent vessel and he finally made it aboard!




Things got rather more competent from there on in. Our tugs turned up on time and at the time appointed we – number four in an unbelieveably small westward convoy of four – duly glid off towards the Gatun Locks, and the entrance to the canal.



As I’d suspected, night was falling fast when we all gathered topside for our buffet supper and a first experience, for all save myself and Graham, of the Panama Canal. In fact, the whole Gatun area looked rather magnificent by night, with its blazing floodlights making the place look like something excitingly colourful and romantic something out of a space or science fiction movie. The shabby bits, the scrub and the mess that I remember from my twentieth century visits were (if they are still there) gratefully hidden in the gloom outside the range of the lights.
We set up some ‘front stalls’ on Monkey Island, and duly made our way into and through the Gatun locks. When you get to your umpteenth lock, their fascination begins to somewhat diminish, and as we steamed out past the Gatun Dam and into the Gatun lake, the ‘front stalls’ began silently to empty. Michael and I were the last survivors, and at 10.10pm, as the ship headed on into the blank darkness, we tidied up the chairs, the lolly papers and the beer cans, and descended to our bunks. Maybe, with any luck, I would wake up around 1am (I so often do) and I could creep up and see us go under the Bridge of the Americas.



Shortly after I’d headed off to bed, that soupy, smelly tropical fog, which makes its mysterious looking appearance in ‘Indiana Jones’ and ‘The Piano’ type movies, had come down over the Panama Canal and – literally unable to see the next light or corner -- we had been obliged to pull up. Instead of being at Balboa, we were moored half way through the Canal, at Gamboa.

I’ve passed Gamboa many a time. A scruffy little settlement, set in the greenest bit of the Canal Zone, at the mouth of the Chagres River, and sporting one big crane and a selection of rickety looking wharves. Why, I can remember thinking years ago, does this place exist? Well, now I know one reason. It’s a passing bay. And we are in it . And we will be in it until lunchtime, because this is a one-way Canal and it’s now the turn of the ships coming in the opposite direction to us to have their turn at the ‘highway’.

This hold-up is doubtless an irritating event for those involved in running the ship, but for us – the seven merry passengers – it’s a delight. For we are going to get the chance to see the Canal both by night (and that was definitely worthwhile) but also by day. When we thought that the Gaillard Cut, the Pedro Miguel and Miraflores Locks and the Bridge of the Americas would all have passed us by under cover of darkness, now we shall be able to see them all.

The Caribbean

6 June 2007

I’ve sailed the Caribbean Sea many a time during my life. The first was in 1972, on the dear old ‘Northern Star’, heading for Australia on our ‘deep sea’ trip, with a dozen twice-nightly shows to play and sing and … laryngitis from the air-conditioning system. The next, the next summer, was a solid four months or so, on the benighted QE2, a season which at least gave me a chance to get around and visit–cum-explore a good number of the islands. I remember happy times visiting a barren lighthouse in Aruba, scaling the heights to visit John Nash in the posh part of Saint Thomas, sheltering under the leaves of a banana tree in a rainstorm miles from anywhere in St Lucia and, above all, making the adventurous tour on foot of the lovely island of St Martin/St Maarten (half French half Dutch) …

Since then, of course, I’ve traversed various areas of this same sea, twice a year for a number of years, on the Blue Star ships between New Zealand and Philadelphia. Blue Star used to call in at Jamaica for a cargo of rum, but the Tikeibank is already carrying rather more explosive stuff than rum, so we just press on, past the Tropic of Cancer, down the straight between Anguilla and my fondly remembered St Martin/St Maarten (where my binoculars pick up some worrying looking objects which seem to be – please, no! – tower blocks) towards Panama.




The delicious sun-drenched, blue-skied monotony is broken only by one boat drill, the inevitable three large, cooked meals a day, the odd session at the bar, an occasional bird or fish sighting (boobys and dolphins) and the usual amount of reading. 

The latest book bundle has been particularly successful:
‘Falling Angels’ by Tracy Chevalier: a delightful, simple, not-too-long novel of Edwardian England, beautifully written. I really, really enjoyed this one.
‘Balham to Bollywood’ by Chris England: a true life tale of English actor-cricketers making an Indian film in India. Funny.—sometimes very -- when it doesn’t try too hard. Normally I find books that make Margaret Thatcher jokes to be really klutzy and pretentious, but this chap ultimately redeems himself with a real and delightfully original tale.
‘The Master Butchers’ Singing Club’ by Linda Erlich: atmospheric and nicely written, but its ‘saga’ ambitions lead to the killing off of too many supporting characters in whom one has become interested. Unusually for me, I didn’t expect the final twist. Sagas don’t normally have them. Enjoyed the first ¾ a lot.
‘Barbra Streisand’ by my ‘heritier’ Christophe Mirambeau. A very tidy star biog which hits just the right tone. No fan-type gush, no fabricated scandal, a genuine ‘biography’ or rather ‘biographie’, because its in French.

There is one more thing which has, in the last four days, become a feature of my shipboard life. Lyndall’s fault. In spite of my announced scorn of the gym, I’ve started working out. Just a little. No weights or anything impossible like that. After all, I’m sixty-one, and given my mostly sedentary life of the last 35 years, grotesquely unfit. So we settled on the exercise bike as being likely to be beneficial to my cardio-vascular being, also perhaps even to improve my blood pressure problem, which is not being aided, I am sure, by bacon for breakfast.

I started gently on day one. Fifteen minutes. At the end my pulse had gone up from 88 to 118, and several minutes after finishing it was still 108. Not good. The machine told me I had burned 100 calories. Lyndall says that is half a slice of bacon. Sigh.

Four days later, I can report that I am doing decidedly better. I now do 10km (364 calories) before breakfast, and 10km (more calories) before cocktails, and I’m gradually pushing up the speed. I have brought my 10km time down from 33 minutes yesterday to this morning’s 27 minutes 28, and the recovery times are improving gradually. My Jacques Esclassan-type sprint for the finish this morning took me up to pulse 141 but, 3 minutes later, I was down to just over a hundred and falling. A long way to go until I win the Tour de France, or vanquish the blood pressure thing, but I shall persist.








If nothing else much changes as we press on into the Caribbean, the heat does. It has been getting progressively hotter and, last night, after dinner – a gloriously clear night – we were able to sit outside in the glasshousey air with a beer or two and watch the constellations go by above. These days I can only recognise Orion, and there he was full frontal. Next trip I shall bring a star map.
In the distance, we could see the flashing, bolting lights of a typical Caribbean storm. Wonderfully dramatic and suitably far away. This morning it was still going on.

6 June and 8am.

The cycling done, breakfast done (sigh: four slices of bacon, two croissants, some melon and coffee), two showers – hot then cold -- already, and all the emails answered …

In about 4 hours we are due to arrive at the breakwater at the Panama Canal, ready to take our place in the queue. At which time it's very probable that not only will the smoke stack start to spout little black oily burning cinders, but the biting beasties of this not very salubrious area will also doubtless be out. I think a little stripped-off laze in the sun is called for before then, because afterwards it will be time to cover up ….

Birthday on the Briny

There’s something special about a barbecue party in the middle of an ocean that simply can’t be reproduced on land. And last night’s one was no exception. It was a gross shindig!

It was 6pm takeoff, and by the time we arrived up on the bridge deck it was laid out with trestles and tables and chairs – fairly polite ones for the passengers, and one large (and, as it proved, not wholly steady) affair for the serious partiers. Which meant just about everyone. The trestles were heaped with salads, ferried up by Svetlana, Natalya and Viktoria from down in the depths, and Vladimir, our chef, was poised over a broiling barbecue turning vast heaps of bleeding meat of all descriptions in vast heaps of mostly much less bleeding meat.




Needless to say, we were also provided with plenty in the way of liquid refreshment – beer, wine, the spirits which are so hugely cheap at sea, and even a few soft drinks for the less hardy and those who were about to go on watch.

This ship’s barbie was a little different to any other I’ve experienced in my cargo-ship voyaging. On the one hand, instead of the English-speaking Filipinos of the Blue Star Line, the junior officers and crew here are Russian. And I don’t have two words of Russian. Unless you count Belka and Stroika. So how to make contact? How to party together?
Secondly, the girls. Ladies. Svetlana, Natalya and Viktoria. And that’s not even counting Lyndall. Nor Claudi from Paris and Biddy from Zimbabwe. Blokes party differently in a stag atmosphere than they do when there are ladies, especially young and attractive ladies, not only around but perhaps even to compete for the attentions of.

t started slowly. All the passengers and the cadets down one end, the Russians down the other. But there’s no way our Captain would allow that sort of thing to go on for long, and no way convivial creatures like K Gänzl, Ms L Soule, and Mr G Cole, not to mention our exceptionally lively young quartet of cadets, would allow that sort of thing to go on for long. The loosening up process would soon begin.




The climax of the food part of the party came with the arrival of the birthday cake – a birthday cake for two – Happy birthday Captain Peter (30 May) and Greville (31 May)..

And then the Captain sent for the vodka, and the party moved determinedly into a different gear. I have never seen a bottle of vodka vanish so quickly. A swift series of glugs, and a dozen or more not-so-little glasses are filled with an inch or two of liquor, a communal ‘clink’ and .. down the hatch! Once, twice, three times …
I grasped my can of Guinness firmly in my hand and clinked with that. After last night, I was steering way, way clear of real Russian vodka. Michael, the youngest of the cadets, got himself well and truly caught up in the clinking and hatching, and what! There’s Lyndall at my elbow clinking and downing with the best of them. Once, twice and three times…! Lyndall who didn’t know what Martini, Drambuie and Cointreau were until last week!
One more round of clinks, the now empty vodka bottle was promptly replaced by a full one ..

I

And little by little I began to discover that not a few of the Russian men spoke a little or even quite a lot of English. I chatted happily with Oleg, a huge, gently-spoken ‘motorman’ (surely this is not the man whose party piece is taking off a bottle top with his eye socket!), with Nikolai, another ‘motorman’, but above all with Sergei, an oiler and turner, whose command of the English language was quite amazing. We swapped family histories. He is 38 years old with a wife back home in Eastern Russia, a little girl of 11 and a wee boy of 5. I don’t know how many times during the night I was asked about my family. But every time that I said that, no I didn’t have a wife, and no I didn’t have any children, I could feel six gallons of compassion sweeping my way. But then someone said cheerfully: ‘But you are rich’. Well, I suppose I am by Russian standards. Anyway, that was apparently all it took. I was no longer a man to be pitied!

As the day flowed on into night, our numbers began to dwindle. Michael went first, sagely, realising that his legs had gone all bendy in the wrong places, and heading for a safe haven. Little by little, silently, almost imperceptibly, people faded out of the merry circle to duties or to a needful bed. Lyndall, I noticed, had disappeared. I should have known better than to be concerned, she was simply up on Monkey Island having a mid-party (but, I doubt not, vodka assisted) snooze on a sunbed!

By 11pm only the hard core remained. Grev and Graham, both definitely vodka tainted but plunging practisedly on, Nikolai and Natalya, Viktoria and someone I hadn’t officially met, all sort of dancing to the stereo, and Sergei perched what looked like perilously on the ship’s rail with a can of Tiger..







And then even the Tiger was all gone.
At midnight I put my watch back the necessary hour, and bid everyone goodnight. I can’t do that silent slipaway thing. It was handshakes all round, and a swift buss for Viktoria. I guess you’ld call it ‘making an exit’. If so, I mucked it up. I’d just got stripped off for bed when I realised I’d left my camera up on the bridge. What the heck, the die-hards would still be partying, I’d just slip on some briefs and hop quietly up the stairs and get it. And as I went up, the partiers came down. Some exit!

It had been a great, great party. The communication problem hadn’t been one, and the girls – well, they were great too. I hope by next time I get on the Tikeibank, Viktoria and Natalya have made large English progress, so we can talk. Svetlana is already the ship’s star linguist. Of course, I suppose I could try a little Russian study: but, hey! It’s they who are going to need the extra language, not me.

Amazingly, there don’t seem to be too many pale-faced people around the ship today. Maybe vodka is good for you. And the valorous Michael, although admitting to being just a tad off form, has reaped the reward for his timely retreat. Grev, mind you, who was just about the last man standing, is spending his birthday on Lyndall’s sunbed, up where the breezes blow strongest!

So thanks Captain and thanks Grev .. and whose birthday is it next?

Between the Azores and Madeira

28 May

The Azores and Madeira.
Such memories.
Such memories of 35 years ago, when we sailed the ‘Northern Star’ to those then unknown (to us) islands.
Madeira. How we loved Madeira. Never, as long as I live, will I forget Alison and myself scaling those craggy, half-made tracks to the top of the Pico dos whatever it was -- the highest part of the mountainous back of the island -- sleeping out in loft-hay in the hut on the peak, then racing down the mountain to the departing ship the next day, and making it in time only thanks to my appeal for help (in Latin) to a local priest and to the kindness of a priest-fearing lorry driver. Never shall I forget the little house by the river that its owner was keen to sell us. One hundred and fifty English pounds. Perhaps I should have, but in those days I didn’t have a hundred and fifty pounds in the world…

And how happy we were.

Well, I sha’n’t be seeing the Pico dos whatsit or the little house (probably now replaced by a tower block of apartments) this time, and perhaps its just as well. I’ll just keep those memories intact.

We are driving our south-westerly course slap bang between the two groups of islands, both well out of sight, and I doubt not that we sha’n’t see another dribble of land until we sail into the Caribbean.




Which means it is time for pure lotus eating, enlivened only by reading (not writing yet), eating thrice daily and drinking, and a large amount of optional evening chat.

My latest reports on the reading part
‘From Doon with Death’ by Ruth Rendall. Another good crime novel, though I guessed whodunit remarkably early on.
‘Out-Island Doctor’ by Evans Cottman the remarkable boy’s-mag adventures of an American schoolteacher who quit 1940s Michigan for a life on a slightly inhabited Bahamian island, where he hewed and built and, finally, became a touring medico, battling through the elements on his yacht to treat the islanders other folk couldn’t treat. First half a definite treat, second half still OK.
‘The Norfolk Nightmare’ by David Thurlow a disgusting voyeuristic true-life crime thing. I junked it after 2 chapters.
‘English Passengers’ by Matthew Kneale A stunner. An historical novel set mostly in Tasmania. Full of imagination and characters, and not too much ‘message’ until a dreary epilogue. A Whitbread Prize winner. The Booker lot just shortlisted it. And yet K Amis won. No comparison between the two works.
‘The Courts of Love’ by Jean Plaidy a middle-aged ‘for ladies only’ pastiche of the Eleanor of Aquitaine story.
‘The Grave Tattoo’ modern semi-thriller-whodunnit about yet another lost work by yet another famous writer, sought after by both a sweet academic and ruthless commercial interests. The formula is overworked, also I guessed the baddie ten minutes in, and the ending (priceless poem destroyed) as soon as I started.

29 May

A brilliantly sunny day, with picture-book-calm seas and a whole lot more lotus eating.
The only thing to arouse one from one’s lethargy was the sight of something floating in the sea where something shouldn’t have been. James, the deck cadet, spotted it first … then I spotted him spotting it ... and … something white, floating too far off for even binoculars to make it clear. It seemed to be, in fact, three white bits with gaps in between, and James’s theory is that it was an upturned catamaran. Oh dear. I wonder if we shall ever know?
And oh, disaster, I seem to be a little sore on the whiter parts of my stomach… not to mention a tad pink .. and I thought I’d been so careful ..
Better have a beer to cool down
And another
And another
And, hey, let’s shout ‘wine on the table’ for everyone tonight to celebrate the qualification as a racehorse of my homebred ‘Boris’ aka ‘Wings of the Wind’ news of which has just come through on the ship’s email…




30 May
Very pink, especially the shins
And a slightly sore head
Not to mention a rather hazy recollection of the later part of yesterday evening, spent in the company of Lyndall, and the two engineering cadets, Grev and Michael.
Wine and beer together, not a good idea.
I shall blame Boris.
Shade-bathe today, rather than in the sun. Watching the flying fish flitter by. And a nice nurofen.
Get myself in order for the evening’s entertainment. Captain’s birthday, to be celebrated in tandem with Grev’s which is tomorrow.

Au revoir, Europe

Thursday 24 May 2007

It’s a whole week already since I set forth from Wokingham at the beginning of the watery part of my travels. A whole week. It seems like a blip in the eye of time. I do hope the next four weeks won’t go as quickly…




We didn’t spend so very long in Le Havre. I thought we’d be there for perhaps a day or two, but all the loading was done by supper time, and out we sailed. There was nothing more to see beyond what we’d seen on the way in, but the weather was a little brighter, and it seemed sensible to re-take some of the incoming photos, so we all piled up on to Monkey Island for what would, theoretically, be our last port until Panama.

Theoretically is a good word to use around cargo ships.

But, anyway, out we sailed, heading along the French coast to Cherbourg, round the corner, and then to the South … destination …
Fifo
That’s what the Captain said.
And, no. You won’t find it on a map.
It’s short for “Finisterre for orders”.
We were sailing for Cap Finisterre, at which point – and by which time – the powers that organise (ie shipowners Andrew Weir and the charterers, Swires Ltd) would have worked out the logistics of getting us to rendez-vous with a sister ship from whom we would be able to pilfer the additional lifeboat of which we had need.
Then, and only then, could we continue on or way.

Well, they duly organised, and we know now – 48 hours later -- that we are headed for Lisbon. We probably won’t dock – both we and our sister are carrying ‘restricted’ cargo – just anchor off, and go through the palaver of lifeboat-swapping, but we are heading for Lisbon.

Of course, none of that makes any difference to me. I have slipped very nicely into my usual shipboard routine.
Up at around 6am or 6.30am, check out the outside temperatures, check the emails, breakfast at 7.30, up on deck with a book or three, down for midday lunch, straight up again having eaten, and stay there till five-ish after which its shower, change for dinner, cocktails, 6.30pm dinner and ... either more book, or some socialising, a little wine and/or off to bed for one of those sleeps one only gets at sea.

Really, the only variables are those caused by the ship’s organisation and the weather.
Yesterday, for example, was reasonably sunny and slightly cool-breezy. I managed some ‘shirt off’ sunning, and got through books number two (remainder of), three and four. Book number one, a large tome on the history of mapmaking by a chap with three names, had gone back to the library early. I only got up to Captain Cook. The facts were interesting, but the author’s style was unbearably self-conscious and thick. I suspect him of being an academic.
I went lighter and fictional for day two. No disasters but no unexpected triumphs either.
Anne Rice, as an antidote to the map-man. A book called ‘Lasher’. Well, you know what you are going to get with Mrs Rice, don’t you. Know where you are. And she’s eminently readable. This one was definitely a ‘ripping yarn’ in her usual style and manner, with something (sexual) for everyone, and more than a little cleverness in the plotting. All in all, good stuff.
Then a bit of Tom Sharpe. ‘The Midden’. As true to himself as Mrs Rice. I mean, no-one else could have written it. You can tell a Tom Sharpe blindfolded. Again, its good if predictable (in style) fun, But, just occasionally, Mr Sharpe pulls out a zany, wild, obstreperously bawdy scene that is distinctly better than just ‘good’, and this book has one of those. And better still, it comes right at the end. It had me laughing out loud. I shall read that last bit again when the library starts to falter.
Number three was a Kingsley Amis. I’m sure I must have read one of his books sometime, there are a lot of them, but I don’t recall it. This one ‘The Old Devils’ won the Booker Prize. Well, that’s what it says. And it has all sorts of quotes on the back saying how wonderful and funny it is. I think they need me on the Booker panel. Unless I’m missing something (and there are signs of the thing being a clef) it was run of the mill, not terribly interesting in its characters or its minimal tale, and indeed almost dull. Sorry, I prefer Mr Sharpe.

Today started off grey and windy. But I donned a sweater, found myself a niche where the wind didn’t penetrate, and settled down with ‘The Search for Nefertiti’ by Egyptologist Joann Fletcher. Rather a thick book, but the lady writes with mostly unaffected ease (she’s from Barnsley) and the story of the search – which is actually an attempt to identify a hitherto nameless mummy as being the iconic Egyptianess – was definitely interesting. Unfortunately, in the middle of her ‘search’, she puts the story into suspension and plonks in a potted history of the Pharoahs and Egypt which have all the air of having been written as a separate piece and sutured in here. I skimmed that bit, to get back to the archaeology, and finished nicely at 5pm.
I finished in my cabin, however, because Thursday is washing day. You get fresh linen in your cabin, and the seamen hose down and scrub the decks to rid them of those nasty, oily, all-ruining black smuts which rain, from time to time, in a sort of a nose-blow effect, from the smokestack. And ‘my’ deck is just below the smokestack. Actually, so far it’s hardly rained smuts at all, but the Captain says ‘it will’.

25 May

It rained. All night it rained on the newly washed decks, and all morning it rained some more. I did my best to take up my usual place on deck, equipped with one of the Cadfael mystery novels (as satisfying as they always are), but the rain having started to penetrate even the covered parts of the deck, I had to renounce. Instead I spent the afternoon curled up on my bunk with the autobiography of Eric Sykes. What’s it like? Well, if you skip the bits about golf and so forth, it’s … yeah, it’s OK. No scandalous bits which is a relief, though it was good to get a bit of grit about the successive and he-is-probably-right-useless heads of Television Light Entertainment in amongst the sunny stories.





The main entertainment of the day came after dinner, For after dinner, we steamed into Lisbon. I have been to Lisbon before, light years ago, on the Northern Star, but I don’t remember very much about it. All I really remember is getting out of Lisbon in order to go to a special place where they sold local pottery. I was mad for pottery in those days. I bought some for my parents, and I bought two plates and a mug for my cabin. 35 years on, I still have them. One of very few souvenirs of those extremely happy days at sea.
Anyway, I won’t be re-visiting, because we are only anchoring off Lisbon. All we get to see this time is Lisbon from the sea. A gentle wander down the estuary, past the famous statue on the hill, and under a spick-and-span bridge, to what looks quite a large and quite an attractive city. But it is really too grey and night-falling to tell.



26 May

Dawn proves that Lisbon is indeed a nice-looking city, this side of it anyway, even if we are really a bit far away to see any details.
And not long after that rather chilly dawn, the day’s bit of entertainment begins. At 7am, the SS Boularibank picks up the Lisbon pilot and, soon after, she steams into view, escorted not only by a grey speedboat which looks like a gun launch (but is apparently only a police one) and shadowed by a rather quaint vessel with a yellow funnel which is – Lord forbid! – a Greenpeace ship! I thought they had all been sunk years ago.
Why all this fa-lal? It appears that our sister ship is carrying not only a large amount of uranium but also a consignment of dynamite. I think being a passenger on her might be just a little less comfortable than this one!
There is, of course, the usual vast amount of launch-type toing-and-froing as this inspector and that official do their thing, but finally the sun bursts out in a really frizzling heat rash and the activity – the transferring of the dinky orange lifeboat (it doesn’t look big enough to carry 50 people!) from Them to Us -- gets underway.
The boat is lowered into the sea, and four seamen (A Russian, a Scot .. etc) head it towards our left hindquarter. The aft cargo crane drops a pair of canvas slings which are then attached to the top of the lifeboat, the seamen transfer agilely to a waiting harbour vessel, then its heave-ho, and up the thing comes to the deck. I mean, it’s not an earthshaking event, but its an uncommon enough one that even the crew are out taking photos.





It takes much more time to hoist the boat onto its destined cradle than it did to physically get it abroad, and before its finished I have decided that I’m lifeboated out and have gone downstairs for one of our best lunches yet: spicy cottage pie with hot beetroot and cabbage.
After lunch, back topside for a lounge in the intermittent blazing sun (15 mins maximum exposure is, I feel, good fishing) and a really good book. ‘The White Rajah’ by Nigel Barley. The story of Sir James Brooke, the amazing man who invented -- and became the first dynastic Rajah of -- Sarawak. It’s apparently a story that’s been much told before – even though it was totally new to me – but Mr Barley makes its stories of political and pirate-chasing battles immensely readable and, since this is the 21st century, he gets to demonstrate the fact that said Rajah was neither a hero nor a villain (he has been painted as both by interested parties) but simply a remarkable Victorian man. Also that he was into young teenage boys. Not easy in Sarawak.

We were supposed to steam out of Lisbon at 3pm, destination Panama (traverse: 7 June), however a bit of unfortunate timing got the pilot to us before the local agent had returned with the departure documents, so we got shuffled down the queue a bit, and didn’t get away till 7.30. Still, most of the days from here on in are going to be 25 hours long, as we pass through the various time zones, so although I’m writing this at 8.45pm, as we steam out of the harbour mouth .. I can see the seaside buildings through my porthole … it’s actually only 7.45pm as I say

Au revoir, Europe, until the next time round.

Tikeibank in Le Havre

Tuesday 22 May

As you can see from the above byline, we have sailed! I am now afloat, for the first time in … well, I suppose it must be seven years or more since Ian and I took our last Blue Star ship to (or was it from?) New Zealand. It won’t, of course, ever be seven years again, for me.

We stayed in Dunkerque for almost the whole of Monday, while the ship’s cargo was got aboard. I was quite puzzled when I saw those endless bags of flour being loaded from the barge tethered to the ship’s side, but all that was wrong was that I’d not done my homework properly. The Bank Line ships are not, as I’d rather automatically supposed, dedicated container ships, they are ‘general cargo’, so we get all sorts. I watched, for example, a huge box of truck or tractor tyres being swung into one of the open holds. But we don’t seem to have got the vast pile of windmill-parts that were heaped up on the wharf. Seems they went by barge.

Cargo watching is, however, not an enormously enthralling spectator sport, except for the utter cargo-ship neophyte, so I didn’t spend too much time at it. It was much more a (grey again) day for a little book, a little computer, a little e-mail, a little lounge-about, and the usual amount of eating and drinking. The ‘usual amount’ is rather a lot. Three meals a day – timed like a race programme, and produced by our two Russian chefs (1m 1f, I now discover) -- are there to be had and, since one is not doing anything else, one automatically attends them. Unless one has a certain strength of character. Lyndall has given the lead by already abandoning breakfast. I have not. Yesterday morning it was black pudding, today bacon and poached eggs with very nice blinis. And I have just demolished, as noontide luncheon, a large plate of really excellent ‘Russian Soup’ (a little meat, much strip-veg, and what I imagine is a beetroot base) and a nice thick piece of poached smoked haddock with a noodle salad. (The main course was pork chop with trimmings, so I am being quite sensible and selective!). This sees one through till 6.30pm when, tonight, I see it is spring chicken. And, I can report, it’s all of a very acceptable standard indeed.

But enough of things edible. After dinner last night (roast lamb with .. oops, sorry) the entertainment was ‘the departure from Dunkerque’. And it was a departure which turned out to be more entertaining than I’d expected, for the ‘Port Ouest’ is a locked port. The water of the harbour where we were berthed is more than seven metres higher than the sea. So the Tikeibank needed to be taken down a notch. And the operation had, of course, to be recorded -- in the age of digital cameras -- by each and all of our little group.
It was a grey evening, with quite a nippy wind to it, but some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, braved the open decks and Monkey Island for the occasion.
Our two tugs escorted us through the grisaille, down the waterways of the port, in the usual push-with-the nose, pull-with-the hawser fashion, past the colourful panoply of berthed ships, and manoeuvered us into position for the lock.







By the time the lock had done its work, and we steamed out, past what I assume were the famous beaches of the ‘Dunkirk Evacuation’, towards the harbour entrance, with its blinking lighthouses, twilight and the misty atmosphere had pretty largely put paid to our sightseeing and snapping. After some two hours up on deck, we descended to the warmth of the lounge, and the warmth of the last dregs of the last bottle of Jameson’s. (It’s OK, once we are at sea, Steve can and will replenish!)




By 10pm I was in bed with a book, by eleven I was in the land of very heavy Nod, and I awoke at 6am to find us already amongst the parked ships off Le Havre. So it seemed sensible to get up and investigate.
The port of Le Havre is much larger than that of Dunkerque. It stretches seemingly for kilometres. You come in through the harbour entrance, past the usual bornes and lighthouses – with a view across to the curving beach and what is evidently the main part of the city – and you see before you every kind of loading equipment imaginable – for grain, for coal … and, of course, the now ubiquitous container cranes – as well as some mighty port buildings. The first parts of the harbour are at sea level, but we have come deeper into the complex of berths, and have had to pass through another lock (dubbed, for some reason, Ecluses François 1er’) to get to our allotted tie-up. Looking out my cabin window (open! It’s permitted! Hurrah!), I see acres of silos and tanks of different sizes and doubtless purposes, I see cranes and chimneys – including those always fearsome looking ones that spout flame – hangars and towers meant for uses I understand not. Closer, there are the heaps of containers, some of which are obviously destined for us. And, everywhere, ships of all sorts and sizes, from a huge, ugly car carrier to what looks like a little Russian coaster. The port of Le Havre is a vast and busy place. A ship-spotters paradise, I would imagine.







So, here we are. Awaiting our load. For a day? Two? I don’t know. I don’t care. I’m not budging. Not going ashore. No-one has, except Michael the engineer cadet who has gone into town to buy a computer, and the ever-adventurous Lyndall who has gone in search of somewhere to spend her last two hours of French pre-paid Wi-fi.