South
Atlantic

It was October 1986 in Gibraltar. My father went to the chart depot to buy charts for the run home to Durban. On a whim he bought Chart 1769, Islands and Anchorages in the South Atlantic. He had no plan to use it. It was the chart he ended up using.

I was thirteen. I was the oldest of three. My sister Candice was nine. My brother Antony was seven. The cat was Pusskins.

The boat was Chricanto. Fifteen metres. Twenty-seven tonnes. Ferrocement. My father built her in the front garden in Durban. When we got her out of the garden we knocked over a gate pillar. We had built her too big.

By 1986 we had been aboard six years. Plymouth. Vilamoura. Gibraltar. From Vilamoura we worked the coast and went up the Guadalquivir to Seville and round the corner of Spain. From Gibraltar we had cruised the Balearics. We had come back to Gibraltar. My father bought the chart.

We sailed on October 20. It was foggy. The fog cleared. The Levanter came on. By dusk we were clear of the Straits.

The twin headsails were poled out wing-and-wing. The main was reefed. The wind generator turned. The autopilot was steering. The Atlantic was empty. It was a good night to be aboard.

A day out my father asked me to stand a solo watch. I said I would. He briefed me. He went below to sleep in my parents' bunk. He did not come up again until I called him.

It was pitch dark. The wind was steady.

After a while I heard clicks coming through the hull. They sounded like dolphins but they were not dolphins. I saw a dark mass off to starboard. Then off to port. They were warships running blacked-out. A helicopter came in from dead ahead and passed over us and turned and flew back the way it came.

It was a fleet exercise. American out of Rota or Spanish or both. Nobody answered on channel sixteen.

My father came up. We watched the warships pass us and disappear east. We did not say much. The wind held steady from the east.

Seven days later we made Porto Santo. Patrick Green was anchored next to us. We had not seen him in four years. He had come ten days before us from Fowey. In Funchal a few days later Ed Davies was anchored ahead of us. We had last seen Ed at home over a braai.

We climbed Pico Ruivo. All five of us and Patrick. It was November and cold. We slept above six thousand feet. Antony was seven and warm in his sleep. We put him in each bed in turn until the sheets warmed. He liked it. It cooled him down.

The next morning it rained. We had no waterproofs. We cut head and arm holes in plastic bin liners and walked down the mountain. They were not very good.

We sailed for La Palma. A gale came on. We diverted to Tenerife. We sailed down the coast to Los Gigantes. The surf broke right across the entrance. You had to time it. We made it in. Then La Gomera. No airport. Quiet. Leaving her, the trade winds picked up. Seven days under twin running headsails took us to Cape Verde.

Ilha do Sal was the staging post for South African flights round West Africa. The SAA office at the airport was between Aeroflot and Cubana.

The people were kind. Every car stopped for hitchhikers. The SAA technicians took us round the island and showed us the salt mine and fed us lobster.

Antony held up a three-and-a-half-kilogram crayfish. It almost weighed as much as he did.

I stubbed my toe in the water. It got infected. The veins climbed up my leg in a dark line. The foot went dark. I had a fever. There was no hospital. My mother gave me antibiotics. She sat with me. The line stopped. The fever broke. The colour came back.

We left Sal in a hot east wind. By morning there was sand on the deck from the Sahara. We sailed for Brazil. Visas would have taken six weeks. We did not have six weeks. We sailed anyway.

We crossed the doldrums without the engine. When the wind died we swam alongside the boat. One of us watched from the cockpit. The water was two thousand metres deep. It was strange to swim over.

One morning my mother said quietly that we should come back aboard. We did. She pointed out two fins twenty metres away. The sharks passed. We did not swim for a few days.

Eighteen days out, twenty dolphins took us into Fernando de Noronha.

Fernando was a Brazilian prison-island. The Navy tug Almirante Guilhem came in at night. They capsized in the surf the next morning. We hunted for floating Coca-Cola cans on the beach for hours.

The captain invited us aboard for dinner. They gave us all their ice cream. Their football team won a televised match while we were on board and they fired green flares to celebrate. They were the best navy we met on the trip.

We sailed for Recife. We anchored at the Iate Clube and spent Christmas there. The exchange rate had been ten thousand cruzeiros to the dollar when we anchored at Fernando. A week later in Recife it was fourteen thousand. I changed a hundred dollars and walked out of the bank with one and a half million cruzeiros. I felt rich for an hour. The government cut three zeros off the currency soon after.

On December 30 we sailed for South Africa. Three thousand three hundred and seven nautical miles.

The wind was poor for two weeks. We listened to coastal Brazilian radio. We swam alongside when the wind died.

On January 17 at half past one in the morning a line squall came out of the southeast.

We were at 29° 53′ S, 24° 12′ W. Twelve hundred miles from South America. Seven hundred and forty from the nearest land.

The genoa pinned aback. The deck went over. The mast came down across the port side. It was sixty-one feet of mast and it took the lights and the antenna and the rigging with it.

The wind died. It was suddenly quiet. The mast was thumping the hull. My mother was thrown out of her bunk for the first time in six years aboard.

My father drew a circle of two hundred miles, the radius of our fuel, on Chart 1769. Tristan da Cunha was seven hundred and forty miles south. The wind and current were favourable. We headed for Tristan.

A white-tipped shark turned up at first light. He stayed two weeks.

We built a jury rig. A trysail for a main. Two cut-down jibs poled forward. A storm jib hanked upside-down on a backstay. My mother and I worked the windlass. Candice and Antony each worked a winch.

The first day under jury rig we made sixty-seven miles. After that we made five or ten a day. The rig was useless to windward.

Once a dorado swallowed a piece of hacksaw blade my father had thrown overboard. We caught it later. The blade was inside it. My father threw the blade back. Another dorado swallowed it. He stopped throwing things overboard.

Seventeen days in, a fishing boat passed. We fired eight parachute flares and four hand-helds and a smoke float. We called on channel sixteen. The boat steamed on by. White hull. Asian fishing boat. My father wrote "apparently devoid of life" in the log. We did not see her again.

On the morning of February 7 I went to look for the hake we had been saving for landfall. It was a small one. Hand-sized. He had been with us for weeks, nibbling weed off the transom. He was gone. The rest of the family had cooked and eaten him while I slept. I have not entirely forgiven them.

At 15:15 the mist cleared. Tristan da Cunha was fifty-five miles dead ahead. Cloud was wreathing the peak. Our navigation had been good.

The wind veered north that night. We spent it beating five miles off a pitch-black island. At first light we edged in toward Edinburgh-of-the-Seven-Seas.

My father flashed SOS on the Aldis lamp. A launch came out through rough seas. We spoke to people who weren't each other for the first time in forty days.

Roger Perry, the Administrator, met us on the quay. We had been saving Brazilian Guarana bottles for landfall. The bottles looked like beer. We drank them on the quay at seven in the morning. The islanders gave us strange looks.

The ground did not stop heaving for days.

We did not try the last fifteen hundred miles to Cape Town. The boat was leaking. The Roaring Forties were between us and home. We stripped Chricanto on a Sunday morning. The island government bought most of what was left. They beached her on the rocks. By the time we left three months later she had begun to break up.

There are three hundred and fifty people on Tristan. They share seven surnames. Until the war they were paid in potatoes.

We lived in a bungalow above Boatharbour. Pusskins was the only cat on the island. The kids came to see her. The cattle ran away from her.

I went to St Mary's school. I made friends with the island kids. We climbed Pigbite to the Ponds. We took the launch to Nightingale for a day. We helped tow the longboats out for the fatting trip. It was meant to take five days. The weather kept them out for a month. They came back fine.

In May we left on the M.V. Tristania for Cape Town. We stepped off in Cape Town weary and a little sad. Chricanto is on the rocks at Tristan still, somewhere.

That a mast can come down in the middle of an ocean and you can put a smaller one up. That a thirteen-year-old can stand a watch. That my father was unwavering when the end could so easily have been tragic. That my mother has an inner strength second to none. That the most dangerous part of the night is not the squall. It is the moment afterward, when nothing is making any sound and you cannot yet see what is broken.

My father wrote a book about it. I helped him put it together. The full version is his. This is what I carry.