Reflections on Aroha’s Arrival
Every now and then… well, quite often actually, both Helen and I are struck by the “what the hell are we doing here?” question. If this trip was the fruit of a lifelong dream, then I don’t think we’d have that feeling. A feeling of satisfaction, relief, perhaps, but not bemusement. The fact is, this adventure came about because circumstances allowed us to entertain the thought that we now summarise as “it seemed like a good idea at the time”. Sometimes I think that the lifelong dream would have been easier to justify.
As Aroha sits at anchor in perhaps one of the most idyllic places I’ve ever visited and with a promise of further adventures, I think back to the day she was ‘born’ into our world…
Bavaria Yachts has a great business model – they don’t start building your boat until you pay for it in full. What that means is that you part with a substantial lump of cash about four months before she is built, and six months before she is launched. That gives you plenty of time to reflect “am I being just a little silly buying this big toy?”
We’d tracked the cargo ship on which she was travelling all the way from Hamburg to Dubai, arriving in the middle of Ramadan 2006. She averaged 22 knots – the fastest she’ll ever go! Helen’s contacts at Jebel Ali port told us she’d be offloaded at 8 pm. We high-tailed it to the port and talked our way right onto the cargo ship before setting up camp in the car on the dockside to wait for her offloading.
It was a long night full of false starts and plenty of Ramadan prayers and rest breaks. She took second priority after a pile of motorboats which had been loaded on at the Genoa boat show, but she was finally offloaded at about 5 am the following day. I don’t think I’ve ever been more nervous than seeing my life savings being hoisted high above our heads in just a couple of slings.
We saw her landed on the dockside, and then had time to drive home, shower, and go straight to work. Adrenalin and excitement of things to come kept us awake for the rest of that day. We didn’t expect at that time that she’d bring us to the Maldives and beyond.
13 May 2009
Helen left back to Dubai a few days ago and now I’ve settled into something of a routine.
My mother arrives in about a week’s time for a two-week visit – the first week of which will be on board with me and the second will be in the local resort. My sister, brother in law and nephew will arrive about a week after mum and will stay in the local resort for about a week. After that, Helen will return to Gan with two of the kids, Alex and Erin, and we’ll continue our adventure south to Chagos.
After that our plans have changed a bit. With all the reports of Somali pirates getting more and more daring and making raids close to Seychelles, we’ve decided to give Seychelles a wide berth. I’m quite disappointed by it as I was looking forward to visiting the varied terrain of Seychelles perhaps even more than the Maldives and Chagos. The other factor putting us off was the two thousand plus mile journey back to the UAE. A passage of more than three weeks at sea was something that neither Helen nor I were looking forward to as we both find long passages a bit boring.
After about a month in Chagos, we’ll head back here to Gan, apply for a 30 or 44-day cruising permit and cruise north through the Maldives. After that, it’s a relatively easy 12 or so days to Muscat from the north of the Maldives.
When we told another cruising couple last week of our fly-in fly-out plans, they christened it ‘Jet Setting Cruising’. Surely a contradiction in terms.
I know that I’ll be busy from when mum arrives, so I’m making the most of the downtime now by diving once or twice each day (mostly with the local resort), doing odd jobs on the boat (there’s always something that needs fixing or improving…) and exploring the local islands.
The boat chores seem endless, there seems to be something each day that needs some attention: engine service (I’ve managed to put that off for the last week, but I know I can’t ignore it much, longer…), light bulbs needing replacing (one in the bathroom – easy, one up the mast – not so easy…) and then the ongoing improvements like trying to make the fridge more energy efficient or finding an easier way to hoist the dinghy on and off the deck. I do find the chores to be a bit relentless sometimes and find that I need to maintain some discipline to fit them into my days without them gathering up to the point where together they become daunting.
My friend Bernd also arrived on board ‘Chimani’ yesterday. He left Fujairah about six hours after us, arrived in Uligamu a few days after us, and now I see him here too. Is this guy following me!? Of course, it’s good to have a mate to yarn with and have a few beers with.
It’s a nice sheltered anchorage here, with shops, the local resort, restaurants, internet cafe etc all within an easy walk. It’s a perfectly civilised place to spend the next month.
11 May 2009 – Hulhumeehoo
Yesterday was parliamentary elections day. The Maldives hasn’t seen too much in the way of democratic elections for the last thirty years or so since the now ex-president Gayoom has held a pretty tight grip on power for six consecutive five-year presidential terms. The Lonely Planet guidebook gives him a pretty poor rating, accusing him of imprisoning political opponents, awarding lucrative posts and contracts to friends and family and living a fairly lavish lifestyle. At the end of his presidency, his offices were audited for the first time in thirty years – he had 250 cars (amongst a bunch of other stuff) for his private use! Male’s only four square kilometres – god knows where he drove them, let alone kept them!
The presidential elections in November last year were held following intense international pressure and ended the privileged life for him. Yesterday’s elections were for MPs from all the Atolls, about 170 positions all up. Feydhoo, the island next to where I’m anchored, has a population of about 5000 and had fourteen candidates vying for the position. Apparently it’s no biggie for politicians-to-be to buy votes for between a hundred and five hundred dollars. Candidates record (or commission) songs to be written encompassing their ‘policies’, and hire trucks with huge loudspeakers to drive around the streets sharing the message with everyone, at high volume. Feydhoo is only about a kilometre long, so there’s plenty of political processions to be seen and heard.
My (shipping) agent here accepted a free trip (paid for by one of the candidates) to his home island (and electoral) of Hulhumeedhoo about ten miles north across the atoll, on the hope that he’d earn his vote. I accepted his invitation to tag along. Hulhumeedhoo is known in the Maldives for being strongly Muslim. Legend has it that a shipwrecked Arab trader converted the locals to Islam several hundred years before the rest of the islands. The people here seem just that little bit more conservative, although it could also be because they’re just that little bit more disconnected from the tourism industry.
We visited an old cemetery, oriented towards Mecca, and featuring beautiful carved coral block headstones. What a spot of paradise – I wouldn’t mind resting in peace in such a beautiful location. There were also a number of WWII fortifications, machine-gun posts, etc. The Germans (according to my guidebook, Japanese according to my agent) actually torpedoed a British ship here in 1944, which is now a local dive site.
My agent found the time between showing me around and introducing me to his family, to cast his vote. I didn’t ask if was for the speed boat ride provider, but I was grateful all the same for a nice day out.
16 May 2009 – Rain
It was raining cats and dogs yesterday – not just as squalls passed over as is usual but more or less continuously for the whole day. This gave me plenty of practice in collecting freshwater. We’ve experimented with a couple of different techniques and the favoured one is to allow the first ten minutes of the downpour to clean the boat, then ‘harvest’ the freshwater with a simple hand pump as it flows down the side decks. I collected about 220 litres in the morning, filling both the forward and aft tanks.
The wind was gusting to the mid-twenties during the more intense squalls so I didn’t want to leave the boat unattended. Also, I love being on board when it rains, finding the rhythm on the coach roof and hatches quite therapeutic. I think living in the barren and dusty Middle East gives you a special appreciation of the rain.
I could only procrastinate for so long by watching Nicole Kidman film ‘To Die For’ (not bad, not her best work…) on the laptop, updating my dive log, and having a midday snooze… and then I couldn’t put it off any longer.
Yup, it was time for the engine service. I’ve never really had too much to do with engines. When my older cousins resurrected my dead go-kart when I was a kid, I thought that they were more akin to magicians rather than simply knowing something about the wonders of the internal combustion.
Over the last two and a half years of boat ownership, I’ve done more and more of the maintenance and chores myself. It pays to be self-sufficient when the nearest authorised Volvo Penta service agent is many hundreds of miles away. I am mighty proud of myself that I changed the oil, oil filter and fuel filter, the first time I’ve done each of them myself. I find a lot of these chores quite straight forward once you go through the motions the first time. I know that next time it’ll take me about a third of the time to complete.
18 May 2009 – Confessions
Anyone who has worked with me knows that the day when my sailing magazine ‘Yachting Monthly’ is delivered is the day that I lose twenty minutes productivity, as I can’t resist having that first quick look through its pages right then right there. YM is full of new boat and gear reviews, skippers tips, cruising experience write-ups, and on the last page, a regular column called ‘Confessions’, where yachties ‘fess up to their mistakes. I’ve decided to try writing my own “Confessions” column…
Before I’d even left sunny Mirdiff, I tried baking bread, for those future long spells away from Spinneys. My first loaf had a consistency such that Helen suggested that I could take it as a spare anchor. That’s not kind.
A confession on Bernard’s behalf; he also moulded a second flour-based spare anchor en route to the Maldives. He blamed it on the gas running out. The real confession comes when I went to use the oven two weeks later and noticed… that he’d left the gas turned on. Luckily there is an automatic safety valve, preventing me from turning Aroha into a mushroom cloud next time I put the kettle on.
I’ve heard many a time of sailors on night watch swerving wildly to hitting the moon or some other celestial body. I didn’t swerve but do admit to reaching for the binoculars to study a faint, distant light off our starboard beam, being… earth’s very own moon.
During night watches, I’ve also cleverly identified several times the reflection of our own bow lights reflected in the curve of the stainless steel pulpit: “Christ, we’re heading towards something with a red and a green light on it!!” Oh yeah, that’d be the front of the boat…
The tuk tuk drivers in Galle were so timid that after a misunderstanding on my part, I succeeded in negotiating a fare UP to almost two times the requested fare (as Helen was kind enough to point out). The final fare was about USD1.40, so it wasn’t too painful a mistake…
When we first cleared into Galle harbour, we moored alongside a floating pontoon. It wasn’t ideal as both wind and surge were on our beam. Our agent suggested we move to an alternative location on the other side of the harbour and took me there on the back of his scooter for a look. “It’s very busy here. Is there good security?” I asked. My agent gestured towards two nearby security posts. One was manned by port security with a twelve-gauge shotgun, the other by navy personnel with a submachine gun. His look was slightly apologetic, inquisitive as to whether this is the level of yacht-protection I’m accustomed to. “Yeah, that’ll do.”
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