Piggy

Lobsters in lobster pot: 0

Lobsters picked up off the reef at low tide: 9

1673 – ujelang

It has all gone a bit Lord of the Flies out here. No facepainting or murder as of yet, but the rest of the ingredients are all there.

We are on an uninhabited atoll hundreds of miles from anywhere, and you get the feeling that god might have had it purpose-built for Jesus to retire to in the event that he chose not to sacrifice himself for the sins of man. Paradise found. There are perhaps a dozen little islets ringed around a small lagoon, the biggest a mile long and 200 metres thick, the smallest circumnavigateable in five minutes (we sail between them, but obviously jesus could have just walked on water). Each island has a sandy beach facing the lagoon, a lush green interior, and millennia of coral met by breaking waves on the ocean side. Large schools of meaty fish swim up in curiosity, no fear of fishermen, as the squeaky calls of the dolphins travel to your ears from hundreds of metres away. There are no animals, insects or plants that can do you any harm on land, and even the sharks seem pretty mellow. The wind is subdued and the lagoon water petal still. It is easy to find low slung coconut trees that yield fat, sweet meat.

We arrived, as usual, just after dawn, and a large pod of dolphins met the boat at the pass, bobbing and breaching and generally being dolphins. They, and the voluminous cloud formations high in the sky, seemed positive portents. 

We dropped anchor on the main island and headed to shore. This island had been inhabited 30 years previously and, having had no fresh fruit or veg for some weeks, we were hoping that the previous occupants had planted fruit trees that we could pick from. We found pandanus and breadfruit trees, but nothing edible on them. An old church. The remains of a path running through the long abandoned village. Blocks of concrete, wells, rope and miscellaneous plastics. Dominating all of this, the thick jungle towering and making incursions all around, effortlessly reclaiming the space, hand in hand with the multitude of big, thick spiders webs, and the swarm of flies that followed each of us as we fanned out in the brush, hunting for fruit. Bzzzzzzz. Landing on runnels of sweat and open cuts. Bzzzzzz. Jump in the water for temporary escape but they wait for you. Bzzzzzzz. Why so many flies here? We made animal cries so as to not lose each other in the dense vegetation, and after one such ‘ai ai ai!’ I heard a big disturbance to my left, and looked across in time to see a family of pigs legging it from under a bush. Pigs! So pig shit, so flies.

After a while I found my crewmates in a copra clearing, climbing coconut trees in an amateur but ultimately successful fashion,  drinking down their prizes as the flies continued to buzz around. They had seen pigs too. Other Marshallese islands have pigs, but they are domesticated. The last wild pigs we saw were in the Marquesas, where men would go in gangs on horseback into the hills and hunt for them, big aggressive things with tusks. We considered whether we wanted to hunt a pig, and how we might go about it.

After consulting the ‘Collins Gem SAS Survival Guide’ and ‘Country Living’ book, before an indulgence in the ‘Joy of Cooking’ section on pork, I concluded that roast pig sounded very good, but that it would be very hard to catch one. There was no flexible wood to make a bow for a bow and arrow, deploying snares or other traps might catch a pig way too big for our needs, and a pig might easily snap a speargun line and disappear into the jungle with a valuable metal spear.

So we kind of forgot the idea and went again to forage for fruit on the island the following day, this time in the other direction. On this side of town there were loads of pigs, and if you were quiet they would trot, rather than run, away from you, and even then not very far. I tracked two little ones, mere toddlers, and then crouched behind a log as they sort of sniffed the air and wondered what was going on. Then one of them started walking towards me! I took a deep breath and got ready to spring, but in that moment he saw me, and bolted off at a right angle. If I had the Hunter’s Instinct, which I know from spearfishing I definitely don’t (too well fed probably), I would have managed to grab the little blighter, but as it was he was off and into the undergrowth before I even moved. I walked slowly back to the boat thinking of spare ribs in sweet and sour sauce, of belly pork in oyster sauce, of crackling, and of how much of a dude I would have felt to catch a pig with my bare hands.

I was last back to the boat and Tom, grinning, informed me that he had caught a pig with his bare hands. After a long and roundabout chase. He brought her to the boat. Black, perhaps 2ft long, tied to a piece of wood and sleeping. Until the cat attacked her, after which she became quite unsettled. I made her a little den in the dingy, gave her some coconut, which she devoured, and named her Esmerelda. Esme for short.

I have always really respected vegetarians. My only defence against the strong environmental, health and animal welfare arguments for not eating meat is that there are some methods of meat production that are (in 21^st century England) exceptions to the rule, and are necessary for both the existence of the animal and its habitat, and the livelihood of the farmer. For example, hiking in the Yorkshire dales reveals flocks of sheep that graze hillsides that have no other practical use, hillsides that are all the more beautiful for the short shocks of purple heather and gauze that the sheep help to maintain. The valley farm houses that exist to husband the sheep would make anyone dreamy of an idyllic rural existence*, and are surely more in keeping with our ideals than acres of heavily irrigated soybeans grown on former rainforest land in Brazil for the Tofurkey market. I reason that if the animal has not suffered in life and the land and workers have not been exploited, the odd meat feast should be a joyful and juicy occasion (the fact that I regularly eat meat that does not fit this criteria is something I am working on…). Similarly, the pigs on this island have no predators, a whole island to wallow around in, and as I was the one processing it, it couldn’t have satisfied my criteria better.

I also happen to think that you should, at least in theory, be able to kill any animal that you to eat. It was for this reason that I stood over Esme on the beach the next day with a sharp knife and a hammer. The little animal, held down on a tree trunk, seemed resigned to her fate. The first blow to the crown of her head caused her eyes to roll to the back of her head and she stopped moving. After the second blow blood started dribbling out of her mouth and nose and her body became limp. A pig’s main artery is on the left side of its neck. I found it with the knife as I slit clean across her throat and wind pipe, and at this the pig either woke up or started spasming in death: her legs pushed against the log and flecks of blood came out of her windpipe with what would have been screams if her vocal chords had still been connected. She was held tight and after perhaps 30 seconds stopped moving. I cut around the spine at the neck and twisted the head off, which we hung up as coconut crab bait.  It wasn’t pleasant but I wouldn’t say it was harrowing either.

Then the real work began. We built a fire and burned then scraped off the hair and outer skin with machetes, leaving the pink skin we associate with pork and a smokey, fatty smell that remained until we ate it and I thought was quite appealing. Then we tied it spread-eagled to a tree, cut around and tied up the anus to prevent the obvious, and then very gently made a shallow cut from there, down the length of the belly to the neck. Having a super sharp knife made all the difference and I managed to get the kidneys, heart and liver out before cajoling out the rest of the guts unruptured. Then back to the boat to shave off remaining bits of hair and wash the skin with baking powder.

The body was glazed with honey and oil, stuffed with grated coconut and our last can of mushrooms, and put in the oven. Emma fried the heart, liver and kidneys with pepper until the outside tiptoed on the edge of crunchy. Extremely tasty. In my only encounter with emma that hasn’t been full of warmth and understanding, we argued about how to get the skin crispy but keep the meat moist. French verses English methods. And then towards sunset the animal came out of the oven and we sat down to eat.

This blog is nothing if not honest, and I stay true to that by passing on my opinion that the eating of the meat didn’t justify the death of the baby pig. For starters, there wasn’t much meat on the thing – it was skinny and small and the only real hunks of meat were on the upper thights (hams). The ribs were the size of the pens you get in argos, and the meat between them barely worth bothering with. The skin, my favourite bit, wasn’t crispy (damn the French). It only fed four of us for one meal. Killing an older pig for a big feast or to preserve and eat over a long period would have been a better scenario, but we had no fridge and no wedding to go to, and there is absolutely no chance we could have caught a larger pig by chasing it down anyway.

However, if you add the whole two day process of plotting, hunting, considering, killing and preparing the pig to the sensory pleasure of eating it, I think actually it probably was worth it. It was only the second time I have eaten meat in about two months, and for sure I am going to appreciate (and moderate) any meat I eat when I am back in ‘civilisation’ much more. Paradoxically, the whole process makes me understand why so many people eat so much meat – I think it is a hangover (especially in China) from a time when meat was scarce, expensive, a massive hassle to get, and therefore a big luxury. Imagine waiting around for months a pig to be big enough to eat, watching it and feeding – you would appreciate that chop.  To be able to have it every day signified success and contentment. The trouble is that my generation has never experienced a scarcity of meat (in London it is cheaper to buy a hot piece of chicken and chips than a loaf of bread) and so we consume it mindlessly, fuelling the huge and disgusting industrial meat machine that is hidden so effectively from us.

So, in conclusion: ‘less meat, more feasts, thank you pig’.

The hunting continued on Lobster reef, opposite Pig Island. We spent a couple of hours nosunnomoondeepstars on the reef at low tide, ankle deep in lapping waves, looking for lobsters. The technique is to tie your headtorch on the end of a pole, then tiptoe along the reef with the torch casting a wide light over the shallow rockpools. If the lobster sees you before you see it it does this amazing backwards sprint using its tail, and you never see it again. If you see it first, you grab it by the tail, ignore it’s weird spasms, and chuck it into the bucket.

And as though to define the word ‘abundance’, next to Lobster Reef sat Coconut Crab Island. There are few things more angry looking than a coconut crab, whose DNA is less like the crab you and I know, and more of a mash-up of lobster, tank, and Nick Griffin. An adult crab is bigger than a dinner plate, with thick legs for climbing coconut trees, claws the size of a child’s fist that it uses to open the coconuts it finds, and armour that needs several blows of a hammer to get through.  Their coconut diet gives the large chunks of meat in their claws and legs a creamy, delicate flavour, and their entire tails are filled with a buttery, nutty, smokey fat that you can pour over your rice. The tips of the claws seem to be neither meat nor fat, and have the texture and subtle flavour of pate.

They live in holes at the base of trees, or under mounds of decaying palms, and are fairly easy to find. As a consequence of this, and their amazing taste, there are few of them left on inhabited islands, and the ones on Bikini are likely radioactive, so when we got to this island and found the place crawling with the bastards we were very, very excited. Once found, you wave your machete in their face, and they either grab it with their deathgrip claws, allowing you to lift them up and straight into the bucket, or they run backwards to the other side of their hiding place, where hopefully someone else is there to grab them from behind.

We caught four during a midnight stomp on the first night, boiling them on a driftwood fire the next afternoon and finding an anglo-french entente – Emma made a creamy pepper sauce, I did a sweet and sour with starfruit jam. Though really the flavour of the meat was enough by itself. Eating these crabs requires total concentration, and no one spoke as we selected, cracked, peeled and ate the meat. A huge weather system passed around us – numerous types of clouds, high and low, big rainshowers that moved past us, visible for miles, thick rays of sunlight in between adding to the colour and the drama. The pre-dusk air seemed to hold a  weight of expectation, as if this whole incredible architecture had been assembled for some god, and everyone was waiting for him to show up. It felt somehow unreal.

*         I have no illusions that the life of a farmer is a tough and unrelenting one, made all the more difficult by unfair supermarket practices, land prices and the glut of cheap meat available, but farmers are a hardy lot and surely would choose this life over having no farm at all.

          

Sketches of Sea

Ships, oceans, journeys, currents – they are nothing if not excellent metaphor fodder. So, let us begin with The Endless Metaphor of Steering a Boat:

Steering: Two hours on, six hours off. Wake at 3.45am, fumble for glasses, water bottle, hoodie. Stumble outside as the boat rocks hard in the swell, a greeting and briefing from the person currently on the wheel:

“270 degrees on the GPS, 255 on the compass. Swell has calmed a bit. The sails will jibe below 240 so be careful. Enjoy.” Wish them a peaceful sleep, take a piss, then settle down at the wheel. A moment or two to set the boat on a good course using the GPS, then look at the stars and find one to line up the mast with. Check the horizon for any other boats. Wonder where the moon is. Find it sneaking over the horizon to the east.

And now I am fully awake, the sea and the sky all mine, perhaps the only sentient being for hundreds of miles in all directions (if you don’t count the dolphins). Orion the constant constellation, the plough up there too since we got into the northern hemisphere, its handle dipping down to the ocean as if reaching for water to boil. The milky way to the south, an optical illusion of depth and yellow-blue mist and unhinged beauty. Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, direct ahead, or is it Jupiter?

I have an app that would tell me, give me its distance and position, but I have learnt that any distraction, even listening to music (apart from most latin music, which my brain seems to zone out of almost immediately, probably because it is made for dancing), lessens my steering ability. Because it is easy to keep a rough course, taking occasional evasive action when a swell from behind knocks the stern one way or the other, fluctuating within a 40 degree range, at the edges of which a big wave may tip the boat in a way that may rouse sleeping crewmates.

I realised after a week or so, however, that with full concentration and proactive steering, it is possible to keep the boat on a course within a 10 degree fluctuation, even in big swells and/or going pretty fast. One needs to feel the boat, the back and the front, and interpret each twitch in terms of what is going to happen five or ten seconds in the future, and adjust accordingly, perhaps just a couple of inches on the wheel. And then as the waves come in from behind or to the side, a bigger turn of the wheel, and there comes a point where you can feel the boat pushing against the rudder, and you hold the rudder there, matching the pressure but not exceeding it, maybe half a second or a second, and then the boat softens against your hands, all those tons of steel pivoted by some feeble flesh, and the boat rights itself back onto course.

And then you get smug, and think you are the zen master of boat steering, and the mind wanders off to what you are going to conquer next, and in these moments concentration is lost and the boat creeps off course, allowing a big wave to hit it at a right angle, and then another, and suddenly you are overcompensating, and the boat is jeering at you as it flicks back the other way, rocking, the water slapping hard against the tipping sides, and it takes a minute to start back over, finding the star, checking the GPS, feeling amateur but determined.

Life: 16 hours on, 8 hours off. Each at the wheel of our own boat, a task we take very seriously indeed. The rest of the metaphor kind of explains itself…

My favourite watch is 5-7am: sunrise. The watch begins in the dark and any music I might listen to (the wind vane is working now and we don’t have to steer) must be brooding – Gil Scott Heron’s Pieces of a Man, Cinematic Orchestra’s Everyday, Rachmaninov’s Vespers. And then the smudgiest smear of light grey in the east and I swear some chemical reaction takes place in my brain and I am more awake, as if a little extra oxygen is reaching each cell. And the music changes from brooding to brewing, and me and the sky, good mates by now, slowly receive light and lightness that swell up to an intense but fragile euphoria. I hug my knees to my chest and think of people and think of no one and just watch the rays slide around the cloud, no sound but the occasional slap of a wave on the hull, always taking longer than you think, and then BOOM it is up and a  minute later you feel it in your skin and ten minutes after that the rose red clouds and creamy rays have disappeared, it is morning, the day has come and it so happens that you are alive. The sun is working itself up to a heat you need to hide from and you best find your hat.

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The daily wash: squatting naked on the poop deck – a tiny deck just above the water line on the back of the boat. Attached by a harness incase of slippage. Pre-soaped up, dipping each limb one at a time and scrubbing as water sluices either side of you at around five miles an hour. Next,  grab on to the rope and dip in the whole lower body to your torso, holding on tight as you are dragged along like a fishing lure, refreshing to the max. And then, finally, dunking your head in as the boat rocks from side to side, in and out like a rollercoaster, water up your nose guaranteed, but wooo! Overall nice feeling.

Yesterday, dangling my legs in, we caught a yellow fin tuna, and I rushed back up to deck to bring it in. We put the line in again and another tuna bit straight away, but there was a big commotion in the water and when we got it on deck, 2/3rds of it had been bitten clean off by a shark. I finished of my wash on deck with a bucket.

‘Fish!’ – One of the reels buzzes out and someone shouts ‘fish!’. The nearest person grabs the line and starts reeling in. Another person grabs a bucket and the rusty Killing Knife and we watch to see the type and size of the fish as it is pulled closer and then lifted on board. If it is a fighter, someone leans on it with a large chopping board whilst another waggles the knife around in the fish’s brain and gills until it stops moving.  The cat licks her lips and starts squarking. On passages our usual catch is tuna – yellow fin, bonito, dogtooth – or mayi mayi, all good meat, and the captain’s taste for sashimi has grown on me. Millimetre thin slices of raw meat taken from the tender top of the fish are dipped in sashimi sauce (a heady mix of oil, jam, oyster sauce, ginger, soy sauce, lemon juice) or plain soy sauce. Not cooking it allows the gentle and subtley different flavours of each fish to come through. The rest of the fillets are baked or, if anyone can be bothered, rolled in flour and fried. In the event of catching a fish with more meat than four people can eat in 24 hours (we have no fridge), some portions are rolled in curry powder and turmeric and left to dry on strings on the edge of the boat. This is torture for the cat, and she acts like a crack head with a big rock just out of reach, pissing and moaning all day.

I should probably talk here a bit about the cat, called Cat, a white and ginger animal with no tail who has been on the boat for 10 years and will complete her circumnavigation of the globe when the boat reaches the phillipines.

I have always been suspicious of the way domesticated cats seem to be in complete control of their human owners, and contemptuous of people who treat cats like humans (if you really think this thing is a person why don’t you make it go out and get a job like you do your human children?). Dogs I understand. Cats are a)a distraction from the real business of learning to interact better with each other as humans and forwarding the revolution in general b) another reason the seas are emptying of fish so quickly c)the most boring topic of conversation I can possibly imagine. When things get bad, people talk to, or about, their cats. Why don’t they sort their problems out instead? I know with these statements I am alienating half my readership, but these have been my hitherto undisclosed feelings on the matter for quite some time. Probably because I didn’t grow up around animals. Possibly because cats don’t give me the attention and validation I secretly crave from every emotional being. Who knows. But if I have every pretended to be in any way interested in what your cat does, eats or thinks, or those of any cats you have seen on the internet, I was lying and think you are mad.

However, I have been living with this cat for seven months now and we have had a chance to size each other up. She is a particularly moany specimen, will let you stroke her for a while and then scratch or bite for no reason, and on the rainy, bumpy,  two week journey from the Marquesas to Fanning Island she pissed in my bed twice. I had to sleep somewhere else and wait ten days before we got to land and I could wash the smell out of my mattress. This did little to nurture my love. So for a time we lived in a state of silent, non-eye contact war, like two people stuck in a marriage for the sake of their kids. In my mind I cast her as Putin the aggressor, and me as litvenyenko the truth telling but ultimately doomed hero.  Occasionally I would accidently stand on her, and not feel at all sorry. However, as part of my current attempt at having a ‘flexible mind’, where I try and let go of preconceptions and unquestioned opinions and instead make judgements based on my actual sense perceptions and reason, I have tried making friends with the cat. I started to cut the bones out of the fish I gave her and patted her a bit now and then. I try and imagine she is actually a person that happens not to be able to speak. The results have been vaguely positive. She hasn’t changed her behaviour towards me at all, except she occasionally comes and licks my armpit when I am lying down and then curls up in the crook of my arm for a bit. I wonder if she is fed up being stuck on a rolling boat with a constantly shifting cast of characters who don’t understand her desires. But give me a wild animal glimpsed from afar, doing it’s wild thing, any day. Poor cat. (Update: it is a few weeks later now and we are developing a tentative fondness for each other)

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Excitement: Changing the sail at night. Which only happens if the weather changes suddenly or, worst case scenario, a sail rips (we have had a few worst case scenarios). Tom shouts ‘everybody up!’ in an urgent sort of a way and within 20 seconds people are putting on harnesses and not mentioning that they are about to get soaking wet and cold. Two or three people run to the foremast, a fast jiggle timed to avoid the extremities of the boat’s roll, and clip themselves to something solid. The waves fizz and boil, rodeoing the boat back and forth. The wind howls and the rain comes in at various angles. If someone fell off the side in weather like this, it would be very hard to find them, and herein lies some of the excitement. Sometimes there is lightning. Instructions are relayed down the line.  Sails are dropped, hauled in, unclipped and tied down. Ropes exchanged, new sails attached to cables, and then a couple of people pull hard on ropes and winches as the new sail is raised. There are inevitably complications, and each of us has had to climb the rigging or dangle off the side once or twice to rescue a swinging rope or untangle a halyard. The biggest morsels of bravery happen in the split second and go unnoticed, though the coolest thing I saw was when Laura was literally held by her ankles and lowered down to untangle the anchor as a particularly nasty storm was dragging the boat towards some rocks. Blow wind blow! Each of us containing a scream of both fear and ecstacy as we work, soaking wet and full of adrenaline.

And then we all huddle together in the cockpit, dripping, to see if the adjustments have worked. The odd rueful comment about having to get the sowing machine out again. Maybe we go back out, or maybe it is time for strategic dumping of wet clothes in plastic bags, lying back on damp sheets, counting hours of sleep till next watch and dreaming of a big plate of egg and chips with thick slices of ham at a Yorkshire pub as the boat pounds on through the night.

Bikini Atoll

Obviously the temptation here is to play all sorts of cheap word games that contrast the  two piece swimsuit with the set of islands it is named after. The set of islands in the Middle of Nowhere that the US government decided to use as a nuclear test site. Back in the days when advertising executives had a sense of humour. But there is just something too sad about the whole business, and besides, I forgot to pack my own bikini, so really I would be in a position of pun weakness even before we began.

Apparently one quarter of the entire WORLDS supply of celluloid film was in Bikini for the first test in 1946. Have you seen any of it? In history’s greatest ‘look how big our cock is’ moment, America took the flagship battleship of the otherwise destroyed Japanese navy, their own 800ft aircraft carrier, and over 100 other ships and submarines and put them in the middle of Bikini atoll, then dropped an atomic bomb on them. For a laugh. And to see what would happen. And, lest we forget, to ensure world peace. God bless em.  

Beforehand, the 163 permanent inhabitants of the island (who had just got rid of a different brand of uniformed mafia, the army of Japan) agreed to move temporarily to another atoll until the smoke, plutonium and cesium 137 had cleared and maybe a fish or two had ventured back into the atoll.

But America just loved those giant mushroom clouds – good for morale – and in 1953 detonated Bravo, a 15,000 megaton bomb, that blew a crater a mile wide. In total, the amount exploded on Bikini and the next island, Enewatek, was equivalent 1.6 Hiroshimas every day for 12 years.*

So almost 60 years after the last bomb, and the ground is still radioactive, as are the plants, as is anyone who eats them. The amount of dollars needed to (try to) decontaminate the island is in the hundreds of millions, and what with this, global warming and a mass exodus of Marshallese to the USA, you can see why the US isn’t pulling out all the stops to get it done. The Bikinian people have been relocated four times to four different atolls, and are no closer to coming back to their island.

What freedom we have: with a sailboat and our own food and water we had the ability to go and have a look for ourselves (you could too!). It was sort of on our way, and wouldn’t it be cool to try and find some of those wrecks? So we struck out north east from Ailuk and after three days of sailing entered the atoll by the light of a sunrise that, to me at least, had nuclear overtones. We were used to the atoll  landscape by now -  long, thin islands with coral on the ocean side; dense coconut, pandanus and breadfruit trees cycling life, death, decay and rebirth in the middle; white sand beach and coral reefs on the fringe of a lagoon full of turtles, rays and sharks. Bikini was particularly beautiful though. More sand, more birds (all the rats killed in the bombs – every cloud…) less wind. Why couldn’t America have chosen somewhere a bit more ugly to do their testing? Would anyone really miss shoreditch?

I swam to shore and, just behind the treeline, found a massive grass runway, a few patches of concrete remaining here and there. The airport. In the middle, a ‘terminal’ – a two roomed building with a few brightly painted wooden blue benches like a Cornish bus stop, a scattering of rusting tractors and an electricity substation with no door and three large switches: ‘runway lights’, ‘terminal lights’, ‘pump’. Overhead, power cables ran from this building deeper into the island, and I followed them. Proper exploring! After a few hundred metres sat a workshop containing four smashed up American trucks circa perhaps 1990, and then further again what looked like a construction workers dormitory, calendars on the wall showing last inhabitation in 1997. Spooky even in broad daylight. A generator room, and then some two man dormitories lined up like a youth hostel, this one with posters of girls in non-bikini swimwear, another with posters of cars and a half empty bottle of soy sauce, another containing neat graffiti in marker pen, an old reading lamp and a few pages of the ‘Pacific Rim’ Newspaper. Then a large office full of manuals for various machinery, reels of fax papers, calendars on the wall, vines creeping in the open windows. A dining room and kitchen. 

There was no wine cellar, but there were a few jars of unopened peanut butter, one of strawberry jam, one of grape jam, and some other bits and pieces. The peanut butter was BLACK, as was the tabasco sauce, but the strawberry jam at least had a hint of red, and jam lasts forever, right? 18 years is like the blink of an eye for industrially prepared conserve. I took the strawberry, and a roll of toilet paper (we had run out), and swaggered like Indiana Jones back to the boat.

The jam, when opened, didn’t taste like radioactivity, but it didn’t taste of strawberries either. So we went fishing instead, all four of us swimming to a coral head perhaps 300 metres away. After a couple of minutes, a shark came and had a look, swimming towards me. I don’t know if is nurture or nature that stirs such feelings of menace from sharks, though their flat, wide head and unblinking yellow-green eyes definitely have something to do with it. I certainly felt menaced. I made myself big and waved my speargun at it as I had been taught and done before to good effect, but this one didn’t seem suitably put in his place, and started circling around underneath me. Tom appeared from behind me and made towards the shark as if to touch it with his spear, which usually really freaks them out, but the shark instead flicked away quickly then turned towards him, fins flattened and mouth open! Shit the bed. We retreated and I was greatly relieved when, after maybe 30 metres, it stopped following us and disappeared into the depths. Perhaps it hadn’t seen humans before and was used to defending its territory from any invaders. Perhaps it thought we were americans and was still angry about the tests (the shark in the picture isn’t the actual shark). 

Can you see the shark?

We didn’t have a fish, and on the way back tom speared, but not killed, a big fat jack. It proceeded to make little ‘help me I am dying!’ noises and thrashing around, bloodying the water. It was my job to get in between the fish and any sharks that might come to try and steal it, and I held my breath as Tom struggled to get it out of the water. No sharks… and then the fish was on the kayak and I was trying to get the spear out when Michael shouted ‘Shark!’ and I put my head in the water to see a different, bigger shark circling around underneath us, wondering why he could smell and hear but not see or taste dying fish. We repeated the waggling of guns and exiting of the situation.

A couple of days later we moved across the lagoon to the main village of Bikini, where seven workman monitor radiation levels in the coconut trees, run a generator, and keep the place clean. Like most of the villages we have shown up at, we didn’t know if they knew we were coming (we have to get permission to visit each island from the representatives in Majuro, but that doesn’t mean they let people on the island know), and in such a remote place there is less of a safety net if we (or they) had misguided intentions. And local knowledge is essential.  So the initial hello is important.

We must have done ok because that night we found ourselves in the back of a pick up truck, heading to a beach at the end of the island where the entire population (all seven of them) were fishing and barbecuing. We brought a fish and some biscuits but lit up when they put turkey and sausages on the barbeque. Wow! I don’t think I have every enjoyed a low grade frankfurter so much as that night, and it made me think that I should probably only eat meat when I am of a mind to enjoy it that much (my digestive system agrees).   

All the guys there are on 3 or 6 month contracts, and seem to be quite happy pottering around taking measurements, especially as it is the only outer island with large scale fridges and freezers and occasional deliveries of beer. The Marshallese are very gentle, thoughtful people, and these guys were like a tight family, so the perfect people to sit round a fire with.

The next day we were shown around the island, not much to see except bunkers that had variously housed cameramen, scientists, and animals (pigs, goats – to see what would happen to them…), and coconut trees labelled with numbers that were being monitored.

Another peaceful sleep under the stars and then we headed out try and find some shipwrecks. Once again, this felt like Actual Exploring. Even though all the wrecks were marked with buoys, we had no GPS locations and so had to take clues from various anecdotes and rough maps as to where to look in the 250 square miles of atoll.

It was a choppy day and when we found the first buoy it was a hard job attaching the boat to it, then getting in the water and diving down to see what the boat was. There were more and bigger sharks around, and I wasn’t in the mood to find out where the line between ‘curiosity’ and ‘threatening behaviour’ lay. Besides, I can’t free dive nearly deep enough to see more than a dark outline of each ship. Tom can, however, and he reported the first boat we dived on to be a small one, the second to be an upside down submarine, and the third a transport ship. Not what we were looking for. So we went around in circles for an hour or two and had almost given up when we saw two buoys 100 metres apart – the length of the Nagato, the Japanese battleship. We dived down and there she was! From one perspective, just a lump of rusting metal, from another a source of deep fascination and significance. Mine lay somewhere in the middle.

We knew that the Nagato was sunk next to the Saratoga, the huge aircraft carrier, and so found it easily. This hulk sank right side up, and the bridge is just thirty metres from the surface. Tom almost touched it, I could barely make it out.

And then we headed to shore – a place called ‘bird island’ on account of the thousands of birds that live there. It is little more than a sand spit with a few little bushes on it, but enough for birds and turtles to lay eggs, and we saw giant turtle prints moving up the beach at various points. Being so close to natural processes one can’t help but be sucked into wondering what it must be like to be a turtle, or a gannet, and look at them and try and work out the purpose of this or that behaviour, and on what level and in what way to they ‘think’. And all the objects washed up on these beaches offer the same opportunity for thinking about people. Especially when you find boats, or remains of boats. There were two on bird island – the rudder and part of decking from a big catamaran, and then further along I was amazed to find a raft – a few coconut trunks lashed together with rope and buoyed by some polystyrene fenders: all materials easily available on a deserted island. Was it some doomed attempt at escape by someone stranded, or the product of a school survival summer camp in Hawaii? By what route and on what currents did it get here? You can turn it upside down and look at it from all angles and never know.

Curiosity sated, we left Bikini island via ‘sharks pass’, and dangled the carcass of a big dogtooth tuna we had caught and filleted on the way. Within two minutes there were a dozen sharks following the boat, and we sat smug on top of our 30 tons of steel and pulled the fish out of the way every time a shark went for it. Eventually a big bastard came from the side and locked his teeth around it. We pulled on the rope so the shark’s head came out of the water, oblivious to us and intent on the fish head, yellow green eyes gleaming in the midday sun.

·         I read that a delegation of Bikinians once accepted an invitation to go to Australia where a group of Aborigines had been similarly moved off their land for British nuclear tests. ‘What british nuclear tests?’ thought I. Turns out we carried out almost 50 nuclear tests in Western Australia and in Christmas Island, Kiribati. According to the book, Jack Niederthal’s ‘For the Good of Mankind’, the local Maralingan group of Aborigines have been displaced since the 1950s with no compensation and ‘were exposed to radioactive fallout from these blasts… Prior to moving forward with the testing, British government officials sent out one man in a jeep to locate [and warn] hundreds of aboriginal people, all of whom were spread out and wandering over 100,000 square kilometres of south central Australian desert… after a series of tests, they found an aboriginal family, the Milpuddies and their pet dog, sleeping in one of the craters which had been formed only days before by a nuclear explosion. The military officials who discovered them threw them into a jeep, sped with them to an army camp, forced them naked into showers, shot their dog, and began testing them for radiation sickness… the aborigines called the phenomenon of the nuclear blasts the ‘Days of the Black Mist’'. No surprise this didn’t make it into our history books.

Fish Food

Our daily existence on the boat is underwritten by the ocean and the sky. Together, they guide our activities and inform our moods. They provide food, drink, motion, colour, wonder, cool escape. An ceaseless, interactive canvas to talk to. That talks to us. Schools of flying fish like cheese falling out of a grater. Coral reef heads a foot underwater that appear and disappear with the angle of the sun. Meandering turtles. Iris blue, metallic blue, blinding white sunpatches. Oilskin wrinkles in late dusk. And then the stars come out…

This organic soap opera is a twofold reminder:  Firstly, that we are damn lucky to have the opportunity to participate in such an infinitely breathtaking universe in the first place, god or otherwise. Secondly, of the futility of attaching too much importance to that participation. The result of this knowledge, for us at least, is much pottering around, like winnie the pooh at a honey tasting conference, trying this and that with a jolly curiosity, and stopping often for a snack. Also like the fish on the coral, now I come to think of it.

 

I usually wake at dawn and plop myself down on a pillow to meditate. Some time is spent thinking back in vague bewilderment at any dream I may remember, and some of it is spent wondering who is going to make the pancakes for breakfast and the resulting topping implications. Occasionally though I slip into the zone: breathing slows and my inner dialogue is surrounded in a soundproof glass cube that I can detach from and observe bouncing around my consciousness like a Windows ’95 screensaver. It feels good.

And then I go and see if anyone has started breakfast.  

If anything is taken seriously on the boat, it is food. Breakfast is usually pancakes, occasionally semolina, both spread with sunlocked mango or papaya jam made by tom’s mum in the marquesas, or coconut molasses with lime juice, or shredded coconut with homemade chocolate sauce. The rest of the day’s eating is determined by whether or not anyone catches a fish. Spearfishing is a communal task, and as fun as it is difficult. Arming the gun is a technique in itself, and then you have to find the fish, get in range of the fish without freaking the fish out, shoot the fish in such a way that the spear get deep enough to prevent a wriggling escape, and then get the fish out of the water and into the kayak before any nearby sharks show up.

Fish look bigger underwater...

My first few attempts were pretty hopeless, more experimenting than hunting, but then I got into it and, whilst my technique is no high art – more smash and grab than clinical assassin – I do occasionally contribute a fish to the filleting board (the one in the picture is significant because it is my first, not because it isn't laughably small).

The two unexpected things I have really got into since arriving on the boat are repairing ropes and filleting fish. Who would have thought it? A description of rope repair even Douglas Adams would be hard pressed to make interesting, so I won’t go there, suffice to say that it is deeply satisfying to repair something using half millimetre thread that is then able to hold a huge sail in place against a strong wind. Fish filleting on the other hand fucking fascinating, and would be great reality TV. Different fish are best filleted in different ways, and the aim of the game is to get as much meat off the bones in as large chunks as possible whilst avoiding bones, organs, skin and the worst case scenario of ruptured intestines/bladder/stomach. And to do this using as few knife strokes as possible, feeling for right place to cut with the tip of the knife and then gliding along the ribs, or the stomach lining, or dinking around the top of the head or the cheeks.

 So fish for lunch, with anything else we have fresh, perhaps bread or sprouted beans, though usually everything else is tinned (veg) or dried (rice/pasta). There are fads: we might bake bread every day for a fortnight, or eat nothing but noodle soup with fresh veg when we hit a town, and I have worked out a dozen ways to get my sugar fix without actually eating plain sugar. My current two favourite Sugar Delivery Systems are 1) hot chocolate thickened with corn starch or coconut 2) baked coconut with butterscotch. Another thing I have learnt on the boat is that lots of things I thought were fiddly and longwinded to make from scratch are actually really easy – bread, caramel, sweet and sour sauce, tartar sauce, cake, chapattis… and all without eggs or dairy.

Cooking, cleaning and infact all tasks are rotaless and lie on anarchist principles: the priority is the good of the community, and there is an unspoken trust that each individual will help achieve this good in their own unique and autonomous way. We know that we can’t be individually content the community is not balanced, and so we enjoy our share of tasks and the resultant solidarity. Easily replicable in any household, workplace, revolutionary faction in my opinion. Just needs good communication. It helps that you can wash the teatowels by holding them above your head and diving into the 28 degree lagoon.

Tom reckons he has had around 180 crew in the 11 years he has been with karaka. We are just the latest incarnation. Recipes in the ever expanding ‘Karaka Cookbook’ offer insight into both the places she has been and the people who have inhabited her – Taro cakes, plantain cookies, Polynesian sweet and sour, caraway sauce, ‘Kimbap experience’, Cocktail ‘L’ambiance’ . And:

‘Easy Easy Dip – One tin beans. One onion. A lot of cheese. Tomato paste and chilli’

Mmm. The library (all four shelves of it) is also the sum of its readers, morphing and focusing over the years. The theory and practice of alternative, assertive living are well covered – radical politics, philosophy and economics; deep ecology and self-sufficiency; spiritual liberation. Between them, they cover the emancipation of the community/society, the environment and the mind. Plus a range of practical manuals from ‘the art of the sailmaker’ to ‘the pressure cooker bible’ to ‘methode facile pour accordeons’. Two ancient books of sea shantys and a good selections of books written by sailors about their voyages consistently give the impression of sailors as tough as nails but with intense camaraderie, deeply embedded customs and a constant awareness of both mortality and the immortal.

The fiction section is even more telling, and shows me the influence that books have had on my life: Steinbeck, for a long time my favourite author, has more than half a dozen of his titles represented here. Dog eared, purchased in all corners of the world, full of characters and stories that mine at the coalface of the human condition and hold the Journey up as the most glorious and ultimately desolate of all things. There is plenty of Hemingway, smatterings of Orwell, Kerouac, Hesse, several volumes of Roald Dahl’s short stories, choice Sci-fi morsels.  It is like meeting someone at a bar, getting on famously with them, then going back to their house and realising they have the entire Levellers discography on CD and being like ‘ah, that’s why our paths have crossed and we are vibing so hard!’. To the maxims ‘you are what you eat’ and ‘you play what you hear’ can be added ‘you do what you read’. Funny!

So we read. And talk about what we have read over pancakes. And write. And go on excursions, many of which are documented elsewhere in this blog. This morning was very calm, and at slack tide we rowed out of the lagoon to the Drop, where the ocean floor slides dramatically from 15 metres down to hundreds, perhaps thousands of metres (the deepest surface point on the planet, the Mariana Trench, 8000 metres below sea level, is a few hundred miles away). We tied a rope from the boat to some coral just before the drop and snorkelled about. These atolls were originally huge volcanoes, and the effect is of hovering above the lip of a volcano and looking down into an endless void. Dramatic as fuck. Big, ugly fish swim out of the rich, impenetrable blue, have a look at you, and wander off with a dismissive flick of the tail. We looked for lobsters in holes but didn’t find any, then lay in the dingy and relaxed our muscles over the gentle swell. Then the tide began to come in and we drifted back through the pass to the boat and a spot of lunch.

Afternoons are long and lazy and then sunset comes, perhaps with some playing of guitar or drinking of rum or hot chocolate. Bedtime is early. Well done everyone.

Rust & Extrapolation

1996. Just before dawn. A Japanese fishing boat ploughs south through the rolling waves of the central pacific, her huge engine ceaseless. The autopilot is on and, in the bridge, the man on night watch snoozes peacefully.  Below deck in the salon, between empty bowls and chopsticks, the engineer and cook drink brandy and play cards. Two bug-eyed, pickled seahorses silently watch them through yellowing jars.

 The radio man lies in his bunk, an SSB radio and related bank of equipment giving off low static next to him. He is frustrating himself in his attempt to write a meaningful letter to his fiancé back home. He looks again at the beautiful calligraphy she gave him before he left, the one taped with pride to the end of his bunk, and redoubles his efforts. The rest of the ten man crew are asleep.

And then, out of nowhere, a huge jolt jars the superstructure of the ship, followed by the sickening whine of metal scraping on rock. Everyone is awake and alert in an instant, and everyone knows what has happened: the boat has hit a reef. Alarms go off willy-nilly. The captain and his first mate are on the bridge within a minute, both in their pants, to find the watchman, eyes the size of golfballs, throwing the boat into full reverse. There is general panic and anger. The boat has stopped moving. The captain is white with both rage and the knowledge of a thousand implications crowding in on him. Liver spots showing on his skinny torso, all too human, he slaps the watchman hard across the face and then, some of his fury dissipated, looks out of the windows and takes a deep breath. In the smudge of dawn he can pick out a couple of islands to his right, and one on his left, each no more than 200 metres away. Silloettes of palm trees reclining in the still air, not giving a shit.

This must be an atoll, with coral running just under the surface between the islands. He tries reversing the propellers again, but the ship is stuck fast. It is high tide, and the Mai Maru is not going anywhere. 

 

No one died. It took 18 hours for the nearest fishing boat to show up and take them aboard, offering them makeshift beds and a different brand of ramen. This boat had its own fishing quotas to hit though, and the Mai Maru’s crew were stuck on there, politely ignored by this ship’s crew, for two weeks whilst the long fishing lines stretched for kilometres behind the boat, snaring tuna, mai mai, shark, dolphin, all gutted, packed and frozen in the hold. The radioman wasn’t sure which period of waiting had been worse. Those first 18 hours had themselves felt like two weeks: an initial freak out that the boat would sink and they would be truly Robinson Crusoe’d. The subsequent the relief as the boat held firm fading to a quiet desolation as they tottered on the reef like a giant whale corpse, the low tide exposing the unmoving coral below them, the high tide scratching the boat millimetres along the reef with each pounding wave, hard coral peeling the steel hull like a can opener on a tin of beans.

The mood had been deadly. The watchman, who after coarse interrogation admitted to being asleep when he should have been not crashing into reefs, was entirely shunned and didn’t leave his cabin. The captain remained on the bridge, the flawlessly blue sky and breathtaking beauty of the place only sharpening his misery, knowing his career was over. Knowing that this accident, rather than the previous thirty years of impeccable seamenship, would define his reputation and his legacy. The engineer and cook got back down to their cards and brandy, completely ignoring the gravity of the situation, or perhaps revelling in it, putting down all the money that they weren’t going to get paid on the table; focused on the present.

The radioman, red eyed, sent hourly status reports to the fleet’s head office in Kyoto and imagined the fevered activity behind the curt, blandly intoned replies he received. He wondered if anyone has told his family what is going on, or if they are keeping the whole disaster a secret from family and shareholders alike. He wonders if he will be treated as a hero for coping so well under pressure, or a failure for being part of the whole debacle in the first place. Later, on the fishing-boat-cum-rescue-ship, he realised he had left his fiance’s calligraphy on the cabin wall. Damn. She would be hurt unless he came up with a good excuse. Perhaps he could say he left it there to provide a flash of beauty, of human brilliance, among the rust and the waves and the wet bedding. Yes, he smiled to himself, that is suitably poetic. Someone might even find it one day. She digs that kind of cosmic stuff.

___

I found it. And worked backwards from there. It looks like this:

Twenty years later and the ship sits like a nautical Angel of the North, burnt copper, visible on the horizon, a rusty magnet of intrigue. We anchored in the lagoon and scaled the side with grappling hook and knotted rope, the ultimate boy scout fantasy, poking around, every salt-preserved map and smashed up cabin became a window into a thousand possible stories.

Prizes for the best translation...



-  Thanks to crewmate Michael for the amazing photos. His website is www.nothingunknown.com