The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [205]
Westerners cruising for pleasure have a very different maritime experience, if indeed they have one at all. Today some cruise in small yachts, others travel on vast cruise ships. One gets little ozone in their accounts. They do not describe a liminal experience. One author wrote acerbicly that cruising yachts come into the harbour under power, not sail. 'For them the harbor is motel only, a stop along a longer passage, a stop promising a yacht-club mooring, a yacht-club hot shower, a yacht-club dinner.'45 An account by an Australian woman of her travels with her husband in 1992, on a voyage Singapore–Galle–Oman–Aden–Red Sea–Suez Canal, reinforces this. Between Galle and Oman,
The days seem short and the nights tediously long. I take the first watch until midnight, and my second from 4 a.m. to around 7 a.m. After that I can sleep for as long as I like but to my annoyance I invariably wake around nine. By the time I do the usual morning things – breakfast, wash up, clean and tidy the boat – the morning has gone. After lunch we read, listen to music, and enjoy being together. Alan [her husband] keeps radio skeds with other yachts every six hours and these are often fun if there is a 'Recipe Swap' or a 'Trivial Pursuit' or some other light-hearted attempt to brighten the day. Their greatest value, though, is in the passing on of information about conditions ahead: sea state, wind strength, weather, traps and nets, other shipping, floating objects, schools of fish.
On fine days she washed her hair, shaved her legs and baked bread.46 So also on the vast cruise liners, where it is the bars, restaurants, gambling facilities and duty-free shopping which seem to be the main attraction. Modern stabilisation devices mean that there is hardly any sense of being at sea at all.
At least this cannot be said of the round-the-world racers. Some see these as mere indulgent showing off by people with more money than sense, especially as when one gets into trouble it appears to be requisite that the nearest land state provide all possible assistance, regardless of cost, and with no thanks given. Others see them as merely opportunities for sponsors to hawk their brand names. Yet at least this is extremely maritime. Racing along in the roaring 40s and furious 50s at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, speeds of 22 knots (25 mph) and even 30 knots can be achieved, albeit hazardously and with great discomfort. One Whitbread competitor, nearing Fremantle, wrote that 'Everything's broken, everybody's hurt, we stink, the boat stinks, we haven't been out of our foul-weather gear for 16 days.' 'It's scary to have a 30-foot wave chasing you.'47
Other modern seafarers are rich first world people who anachronistically make replicas of 'traditional' craft and sail them. Examples are many: the various replicas of the ships of the European early voyagers: Columbus, Captain Cook, the VOC ships the Batavia and the Duyfken. Thor Heyerdahl did this, and we have quoted his account of his reed boat earlier. In 1979 Tim Severin began to build a dhow using authentic materials. It was 97 feet, with cotton sails, and held together with coir, though it is revealing that he had to import craftsmen from the remote Laccadive Islands to help, as no one in the Gulf, where the boat was made, had experience in making sewn boats. His long account, in both a video and a book is at least an attempt to find out for today what dhow sailing from the Gulf to Guangzhou was like 1,200 years ago. Other dhows are still being built for oil