Securely connected

An hour after sunrise, and the water in behind Iririki Island is glassy. Like every other boat here in the inner harbour of Port Vila, we sit motionless at our mooring. In an hour or so, the breeze will kick in , and we’ll be glad of it.  It’s already very hot, hotter than usual, the locals say. But I sleep well. On.a secure mooring, even when the air is thick with moisture and a sheet feels heavy and clammy over your body, there’s nothing to wake you except thirst and dreams. Here’s something I wrote after the festival had ended in Ambrym, when sleep was much more difficult.

September 1, Rodd’s anchorage, North Ambrym

(the picture above is taken from our boat at Rodd’s Anchorage during the festival with the British Oyster Sea Rover on the left, and the French Ovni Sea Lance closer in).

I’ve been awake for most of the night, it seems. The bully wind is rushing the boat, pushing and shoving it roughly this way and that. We are the lone yacht left on this northern coast of Ambryn now, a straggler. Every one else who came to the Back to My Roots festival has moved on, but we are delayed by a familiar cause, crippling pain in Alex’s lower back.

He sleeps in the main cabin, unable to lift his body onto the higher-than-average bed we usually share in the front of the boat, the forepeak. I am alone with the creaks and groans of the anchor apparatus, which is housed at my feet – and with my imagination. My imagination is the rogue element. The anchor, I know, is unlikely to let us down.

In the city, what disturbs my sleep late at night are house alarms, drunks, car doors slamming, over-stimulated neighbours who party on at home after clubbing and, finally,  the pre-dawn rumble of the 443 bus. Those are the main culprits. There are others. I am not a heavy sleeper. The city and I co-habit uneasily during sleeping hours.

In the islands, sleep comes early and quickly. After a day under the tropical sun, whether we’ve been underway or doing whatever we do at anchor, the body welcomes the dark. By 8.30 pm, I am slumping at the table if I am not already heading towards book and bed. My legs automatically compensate for the slight motion of the water beneath the hull. Even when the weather outside is grim, we’ve rarely found ourselves rolling and pitching at anchor. The focus of cruising is to find yourself a well-protected anchorage and stay there until you’d used up its interest quotient, or you know that an imminent weather change will make that anchorage untenable so you move on to somewhere better. Experienced sailors don’t generally find themselves exposed to filthy weather at anchor.

But there are glitches. We are anchored in deeper water than is desirable for this wind strength for the amount of chain we have out. There’s a ratio, a rule of thumb to apply. It goes roughly like this. In calm weather, you multiply the depth of water you are anchored in (for argument’s sake, call it 10 m) by 3. So you put out 30 m of chain. Alex always puts out 40 m in such circumstances. He sleeps better with more chain, he says. The worse the weather, the higher the multiple. Theoretically, with scope (the technical word for the amount of anchor chain or rope you have out) at a ratio of 10 to 1, a boat will stay put in a hurricane (given that it has a solid anchor and what’s called “good holding”, of course). Last year on the Queensland coast there were a couple of occasions when we had out scope of 9:1. But we were anchored in comparatively shallow water, no more than 8 m. That’s the problem here. We’re anchored in 17 m. The bottom is good – volcanic sand is lovely stuff for an anchor to grip into. Good holding. But we have only 75 m of chain out. There’s not much left in the anchor locker, about 15 m. The wind sounds worse than it is. It always does. The rigging shakes, the wind generator rattles its blades, the boat shudders around its pivot, the bow. A gust of  25 knots which would put a smile on my face if we were sailing sounds, when you’re at anchor, like a city express roaring through the tunnel towards the platform at Town Hall, taking its punch on the nose.  

So I’ve been awake off and on all night, I swear, listening to the snubber (a heavy rope which takes the strain off the anchor windlass) straining on the cleat. The snubber shields me from hearing the rumbling chain, and for that I am grateful. There is nothing so un-nerving in the night as the rumble of anchor chain on the sea floor below you. The snubber pulls up against the force of the wind which blasts down in “bullets” from around the volcanic cone above us. It’s a dead volcano, its perfect sweeping sides covered in jungle, not ash.. The two famously active volcanoes of Ambryn are to our west, spewing out thick streams of dirty smoke and, when the clouds are set right above them, lighting the sky orange. They are bending the wind too, whipping it around their barren, ash-covered slopes and spitting it across our bow like missiles from a slingshot. Still, we are secure. The anchor alarm is silent. Alarms make me grumpy in the city, but I’d gladly have my sleep disturbed to know that the boat was dragging. A pity my imagination cannot be set to activate in the same automated way.

I’ll take up the tale from there, and lightly brush over the weeks between the festival in Ambrym and our arrival back in Vila.

With Alex’s back still in a somewhat fragile state, we picked our time between strong gusts to lift the dinghy back up onto the deck with the spinnaker halyard, and got ready to move down to Ranon where the anchorage is shallower and slightly more protected than at Rodd’s.  I was at the bow with the remote control to the electric anchor windlass when it failed to respond. That caused a moment or two of anxiety until we realized that the windlass control in the cockpit was still functioning. Alex pulled apart the remote and fixed it. Within that short statement lies so much of the measure of the man.

After a couple of nights at Ranon, Alex felt strong enough to cross over to Port Sandwich, on the east coast of Malakula. The channel between Ambrym and Malakula was a bit wild and the next day the Vanuatu met office issued strong wind warnings for the whole island group. The situation deteriorated, as they say. The seas outside Port Sandwich were running a 3.5 metre swell but inside the boisterous gusts coming over the hills barely ruffled the surface of that lovely waterway.

We were very snug in there, and the days passed quickly. For us, Port Sandwich was a healing place, in various senses. The road which led away from the anchorage was well graded, the best we’ve found in Vanuatu’s outer islands. We walked long distances, up to the Catholic church at the point and around to the coconut plantation in the other direction. Everywhere we saw pigs and chickens living the good life, ranging free.

We took great pleasure in casual conversation, in the play of children, and in the beauty of the flora. Gradually Alex’s back loosened up. So did our thinking about what we should do in the immediate and long-term future.

We ate well in Port Sandwich. Perhaps that’s what helped most! Just across from the wharf there’s a small restaurant which also sells fresh produce and bread. It’s not signposted, but the locals know it as Rock and Noella’s place.  Rock and Noella Luan are about our age, with five children living in Vila, two still at school and three in the workforce (that’s called a successful family). The restaurant, which is open every day to yachties and locals, is their “retirement” project. They lived in Vila for years, shepherding the children through their education. Rock was a kava merchant, Noella cooked for other people. Now they’ve come back home to build up something for themselves on their family’s land (no individual “owns” land, Rock explained to us – they have a traditional right to use land which belongs to their clan).

Their garden is beautiful, with a big mango tree offering lots of shade but their house very basic. It has one solar panel connected to a car battery which powers three 12 volt lights, much like torch lights. There’s a gas burner but no fridge. But this is a restaurant with character. Noella serves huge helpings of good, tasty food in a covered annexe to one side of the house. The first day we ate with them, I gobbled down my plate of rice and pork stew for which she charged us 200 vatu, or $A2.20 (we urged her to increase her prices but she told us that locals find that quite expensive – so double it for yachties, we told her). We sat around their long table and talked and talked. As the days drifted by, we always either ate at Rock and Noella’s, or popped by to say hello. They had an easy way about them. We found them to be people like us – we had a lot in common. Of course, our life is not their life, but they showed no sign of wanting our life and every sign of being very happy with theirs. It wasn’t hard to wish them every success, and to hope that we would see them and Port Sandwich again.

We crossed from Malakula to the west coast of Epi island, intending to loiter at Revellieu Bay. But the anchorage was horribly rolly, so at first light the next day we set off to sail 55 miles back to Havannah Harbour on Efate. Usually we average our speed out at 5 knots, so we’d anticipated coming in through Little Passage after dark, relying on radar and the waypoints given in the electronic cruising guide (the nautical charts in this part of the world are notoriously inaccurate). But Kukka flew. She just flew. We had 15 to 20 knots coming from the ESE, and were sailing with a few rolls in the genoa and a reef in the main. By 2 pm we were entering Little Passage with the sun high in the sky, perfect light for picking out the channel, and by 3 pm we’d dropped anchor in Esema Bay, where we’d begun our island cruising two months earlier. Kukka had averaged just under 7 knots for the trip. It was an exhilarating ride. The master trimmer had our boat beautifully balanced. As always, she responded in kind. I sat up on deck, taking the spray and  watching the deep navy sea whoosh under her lovely hull. I could have cried for happiness. It isn’t often that everything comes together so well at sea. The sky was clear, the swell and current manageable, the wind constant and as we approached Efate, it shifted even further towards the east, exactly where we wanted it to come from. Alex relaxed into his troublesome spine. I pulled out the iPod (which we use much less often than you’d imagine) and selected Old Dogs, a buoyant, tongue-in-cheek country music album that never ceases to make him laugh at its smart, unconventional lyrics. “I don’t do it no more, I can’t do it no more…” It was a grand finale to our cruising circuit.

Havannah Harbour (seen at twilight under a new moon, above) is another safe haven, like Port Sandwich, and we stayed a few days there too, resisting the siren call of Vila with its abundance of food (the berries in the photo below are in season at the market, as are tomatoes – heaven), laundry service (in the photo below, Kukka gets her sheets changed), internet connection and friends already in port. But we finally allowed ourselves to be reeled in. We’ve been here just over a week (on the moorings, below) doing boat jobs, re-provisioning, eating out, saying hello and goodbye.

Cruising yachts are on their way south as the cyclone season approaches. Our friends on Nada, John and Ange, left last Thursday and are en route to Bundaberg. Bertil and Agnes on Panacea left day later for Noumea. We were sitting in the shuttered shade of Au Peche Mignon, a café of sorts on the Lini Highway, as they motored out across the shallows parallel to the sea wall. The traffic between us and them was nose to tail, minivans and trucks carrying full loads of human and vegetable cargo. The heat was stifling. It would have been good to be going to sea again, but we had been waiting on parts to clear customs, and when they unexpectedly showed up on Friday morning, we’d been caught on the hop. We hadn’t done our supermarket shopping, or fuelled up. We hadn’t been to see customs and immigration. Customs and immigration won’t clear you out over the weekend. Ticking the bureaucratic boxes is a chore, but one you can’t ignore. We could have pushed ourselves, but we decided that morning that we would wait until after the weekend. We weren’t ready in other ways to leave Vanuatu.

We’ve had time to get to know Vila better. It’s a town I’m much more sympathetic to this time around. I’ve been amusing myself by reading a small self-published collection of anecdotes about pre-Independence Vila (disguised by the author, herself disguised, as Lapitaville). I met an old yachtie the other day who has been marooned in Vila for 10 years with her cats, acquired en route in Venuzuela. She was buying the same little book (called Tales from Tapahiki, by Sophie Lefroy), having promised the author, a friend, she’d try to place a review in a local paper. We met again in the market on Saturday, and I felt that if we’d had all day to talk I wouldn’t tire of hearing the gossip and scandal of this rotten little tropical port – rotten, because all ports are, and despite being the Big Smoke in Vanuatu, at heart just a village.

I was in the arts and crafts market, hunting for another basket (there’s always another basket!). In Stall 15 I met Ruth. It’s impossible to browse here without a conversation. Ruth, it turns out, comes from Loltong in north Pentecost – yes, she knows Anna, she said. Anna is married to her brother Tony. Oh, Tony – has he found a job yet? I ask. No, he’s driving a minibus for us while his party is in opposition, Ruth says. She too used to be in politics. Her husband is a former prime minister. Is his name Lini? Alex asks. Yes, she said. Ah, so it’s normal to find an ex-prime minister’s wife running a market stall? Ruth laughed. Nothing could be more normal, it seems. Half an hour later, walking along the side of the road (you’d hardly call it a footpath), I saw a face I recognized. “I know you!” The bearded young man looked surprised, but not unpleasantly so. “You’re the French anthropologist from Ambrym.” He was, and he smiled broadly, and we exchanged inconsequential pleasantries. After all, there’s not a lot to say to a man you met in a rainforest when you were both stomping your feet in the dust and swimming in your own sweat. But still, it made me feel part of the place, to meet Anna’s extended family, to bump into the French anthropologist. Almost everyone in Vila, it seems, is from somewhere else and when you have been to their island, to their village, you feel less of a stranger, and Vanuatu less mysterious. Both these states may be illusory, of course, but I hope that the shift I’ve made towards imagining future adventures on a boat is not.