We sail out of Victoria, the capital of the Seychelles, at 11.30 am at Monday 11th March. Pete Lucas takes Wolf, Gaby, Frank on the Orphee. Caroline, Steve and I go on Vaka-lele with skipper Hartmut and Alexandrine. The breeze is good and the boats look great in the strong bright light. Ceres follows towards the end of the afternoon (Nico and Willy take Tom and Peter Goreau and Roman).
Our bearing to the destination is 135 degrees - South East, roughly speaking. A favourable breeze means we make good speed without the help of the motor, and for a few hours Hartmut runs the Vaka-Lele under sail only, making around 4.5 knots (nautical miles per hour) over the ground. Nevertheless, by around 4.15 we loose sight of the Orphee, steaming on ahead under motor power. She's a much more powerful boat - steel construction and around twenty tonnes to our seven.
The sun on this tropical sea burns down and up: in the middle of the day rays reflected from the sea are almost as severe as those from above . After just an hour or so on the helm around midday, Steve's hands are burnt bright red. 'It's like I put them in a chip fryer' he says. I get sunburnt on the chest even through a thick cotton tea shirt.
Then, bananageddon! - a large bunch of bananas hanging from starboard rigging has been mushed against the wire by the motion of the boat. There is banana goop everywhere. Clearing it up on the rolling moving fore-deck I feel sea sickness coming on. A moment of dread: on other ocean trips I have been almost incapacitated by nausea for days at a time. Once it was so bad that I would have rather thrown myself overboard and died than kept on experiencing it, but did not have the energy to move. I am not exaggerating. Fortunately, the moment passes.
For much of Tuesday 12th there is no wind to speak of. We go by motor alone, averaging around 5 knots. Today we feel a bigger rolling swell of the open ocean for the first time. Harmut says this what the Polynesians call the 'breath of the ocean'.
Seven tenths of the earth's surface is sea. Preoccupied as we mostly are with apprehensions that seem more important, we seldom stop to contemplate what that means, any more than we dwell for long on the vastness of space.
The largest continents are dwarfed by the oceans. The Indian Ocean is one of the smaller of the world's oceans, but is probably larger than Asia and Africa, the world's two largest continents, combined. And yet within this vast extent corals are - or were - a tiny proportion. Reefs occupy represent less than one fifth of one percent (0.2%) of the world's oceans. But they are home to around a third of all fish and other types of marine life. As Tom Goreau put it, "compared to a reef, the open sea is like a desert".
By comparison, tropical forests, which probably comprise around half of all land plants and animals occupy some 6% of the total land surface - a proportion of the whole some thirty times as large. Of course, in both cases, reef and rainforest, the fortunes of the ecosystem is inextricable from developments in the wider world.
Evening skies in the Indian Ocean should be seen. There is little point in trying to describe the subtlety, variety and splendour of the shapes and colours. As sun disappears below the horizon into nautical twighlight, the horizon itself seems to become at once closer and more distant.
The first two nights of our journey are fantastically clear. Even the faintest stars are brilliant. The Milky Way sings out. Our mast and sails reach up to heaven: in these conditions you're as much cosmonaut as thalassanaut. Behind us, the 'plough' (Great Bear), upside down, points to the pole star way down below the northern horizon. Ahead, the Southern Cross speaks of something new.
Around noon on Wednesday 13th, we enter a region where the sea surface is broiling and churning. This is an area of upwelling where waters press from deep down towards the surface. It's almost as if it's bubbling. We are running along the spine of the Mascarene ridge in an area where the waters are probably 1000 to 1500 metres deep (the drop off on either side goes down many thousands more).
Over the night of Wednesday / Thursday progress towards the target is very slow- probably no more than 3 knots. Around mid morning on Thursday two enormous container ships cross the horizon in front of us from West to East. These are the only other ships besides our those of our own expedition that we see on the entire 4-day journey. Late in the afternoon we see many pods of pilot whales. There are several score individuals - characteristically black, with the curved top to the dorsal fin, within a few hundred feet of the boat. "My babies! My babies!" says Caroline, in great excitement.
Finally, at around eight on Thursday evening, we come to the rising edge of Saya north bank. The seabed rises from many hundreds below to around 50m (160 feet) before falling to level plain at around 70m (225 feet). On Vaka-Lele's sound system Jimmy Buffet sings the great hymn 'Cheeseburgers in Paradise'. This is followed by his immortal ode 'Why don't we get drunk and screw?' (I learn later from Pete Lucas that Buffet - Jimmy, not Warren - has a more soulful side: his 'Mother Ocean' is something of an anthem for sailors on the Indian Ocean. It certainly beats Rod Stewart's 'I Am Sailing').
Hartmut has found two bottles of fine cognac at the bottom of the chain locker. The first glass goes over the stern in homage to Neptune. We spend much of the night crossing the centre of the north bank towards our destination on its south-eastern edge.
Caspar Henderson
© GrainOfSand Ltd 2002 | To see the world in a grain of sand, And heaven in a wild flower,
|