Known as the ‘pearl of the orient’, the island of Penang is separated from mainland Malaysia by a channel about 3 miles wide at its narrowest point. The main channel is the northern one, Selat Utara, and this is the one by which we had entered in Aeolus after the landfall at Kedah Peak.

Two days later, much of which was spent in sleep, I changed back to Kay Sira for the next passage some 85 nautical miles down the coast to the South, to a place called Lumut, which I had visited in my youth, for it is the departure point for ferries to the small island of Pangkor, which was then, and still is a holiday resort known for its clear waters and coral.

On this, the first leg of our two-leg journey to join the Raja Muda Regatta at Port Klang, there were 2 newly-qualified Day Skippers and the instructor asked us to share control, and my leg is next. For the leg in which i was not practicing as skipper, I was asked to prepare the Pilotage for the voyage, which is needed to convey the boat from harbour to clear open water. It is necessary to prepare a route using charts, tide tables, and almanac, and to take control under the skipper for that part of the voyage.

I found the first part of the pilotage to be well within my growing capability, with the number of potentially catastrophic silly mistakes fewer in number than before. I conned Kay Sira through the suspension part of two huge road bridges at the southern end of the island, one of which is still under construction.

The limits of the local chart were reached after the site of the second bridge, the newer one, which is not shown on it. I had thought that this was the end of my Pilotage, but no, it was necessary to move to a smaller scale chart for the last part of the pilotage, eventually to arrive at the ‘Safe Water Mark’.

We arrived at this transition at the same time as darkness, and so I had to scrabble together a pilotage plan from nothing tp cover the last 7 miles. It was hairy and my inadequate knowledge of the night lighting and day marking of the various buoys seemed to be holding us back.

However with the patient help of the instructor (Barry this time) I muddled through and revealed that I need to learn up these facts by rote.

I had thought that I could not possibly endure a passage of longer than the 60 miles from Lankawi to Penang, but here I am after 85, and still writing. But I lost 6 hours of sleep via the watch system so must now rest and face the next leg later…

Authority afloat emanates outwards from self like the relationship of tree trunk through boughs to twigs and foliage. If the trunk is sound the rest of the tree can thrive, as the material of the ship and its crew can be nurtured and controlled by the skipper. As from the sub-conscious, there is a ground source of sustenance in the skipper from which the sap arises. It feeds the limbs and leaves, enabling their reciprocal contribution; the employment of the cunning that drives the ship safely and quickly to landfall.

My first short spells of command were assigned whilst cruising in Lankawi waters. We pootled about and found a safe anchorage one night hard against an island with a face. Here is part of the general setting, in a tiny jungle-covered archipelago offering shelter from the expected North-East winds; although contrary winds can blow.

Rejecting a hollow island in this group that houses a million bats, it was the weathered face of this one where the snuggest spot was found.

Next morning I had to plan my first tiny voyage from here through a narrow and difficult sound to a depth line from which my opposite number training like me for RYA Day Skipper could take over.

There were so many things happening at once. My uncertain navigation skills tottered on their legs like a new-born calf. The extra responsibility for ship and crew on passage on these inshore waters of danger was crushing and I felt the full weight of it as I desperately tried to answer the well-placed questions posed by the instructor.

“On which side is the safe depth of water?”

“How do you know when to turn?”

Causing a safe and a good course to be steered is initially an effort of will that created within me such a heat of anxiety that I held back a torrent of blind words that threatened to   outflow like lave from a tortured volcanic cone.

I managed this, with the help and guidance of the instructor, and on reflection I was already beginning to need that essential humility without which no man can call himself a seaman. A humility that accepts the ignorance of complete information and honestly acknowledges it.

This process of commanding brings intense delight, yet is full of fears. The next morning we  continued our practice in the broad waters of Bass Harbour, where our sister ship, beloved Kay Sira. often flaunted herself majestically, like this.

I hope I have explained that this week I have been assigned to Aeolus the second of the three school boats in which I have served.

Slipping our moorings that same night at 11pm, after an afternoon reset at the marina, we sailed for Penang, 60 miles south, after a violent rainstorm.

I took command at the historic landfall known to the ancient Indian sailors seeking forest products in exchange for cloth and iron tools, the mighty Kedah Peak (Malay: Gunong Jerai).

I have waited all my life to make this landfall. This mountain broods over the Penang of my youth. Its face, subtly changed in aspect as seen from my childhood home, was captured in oils by my mother and now hangs in my office at home with a rejected study unfinished below.

And now I was using the wireless masts at the peak as a component of an excellent three-point fix, the first in which I had full confidence. In the seas below there are four islands, nicely angled, laying the navigator’s task out for him as an excellent butler disposes a table for dining. In the shot above you can just see the edge of one of these: Pulau Bunting. Here is the massif of the Gunong taken with the telephoto lens.

And here is another of the islands, Pulau Telor (Malay: Egg Island), ditto.

There was still over a third of our voyage to go. I went off watch and rested, only to be told when I emerged again, by a grey-faced instructor (he had hardly slept at all because his skippers were so new):

“I am feeling unwell. I must go and lie down, will you take command?”

It was like a body blow. I gulped and nodded, and after a glance all round the horizon, I rushed below to establish our position exactly, using GPS for the first time (in sorrow rather than in anger). When I had determined this, and with some satisfaction concluded that I did indeed know where we were. I could confirm the GPS by bearings on Gunong Jerai, a convenient island in that chain, and the south eastern headland of Penang itself.

I was surprised to see Simon our instructor still quietly sitting in his favourite place with his back on the man-overboard kit. And then it dawned on me: it was a trick and I had been fooled! Good lesson! I had done the right thing.

Bringing the ship into the know waters of Penang roads revealed the excresence of high rise building new from my youth.

And now my greatest failure to date occurred. Willingly relinquishing command for entering the Straits Quay Marina (a picture of which forms one of the banners of this blog), I was ordered to drop the mainsail, and I asked another crew member to assist me. I tried to  explain how to do the ‘flaking’ procedure which folds the sail in loops over the boom to the colleague, but either due to failure to make myself clear, or perhaps due to a deliberate sabotage, his end of the operation was sloppy, messy, and insecure. His end of the sail was all ruckled and his ties so loose that all the flakes collapsed in a heap on one side of the boom. Running backwards in my temper I pulled up one of his ties and shouted:

“Look at this – loose as a girl’s knickers! Get this tightened up you bugger! Look! Like this!”

The poor man, loaded with his own particular incidental pains, was all fingers and thumbs and I became at that instant his mortal enemy. I had utterly failed in the human relations department, and the heady wine of my new-found pretensions to be a skipper turned to a sour and undrinkable corkage. ‘I will never be able to take command’, was my over-reactive thought, for I will always be undone by my anxiety so that I cannot inspire people to follow me. My fifty years of seamanship in small boats, my new found navigation skills are all as nothing if I can only, like Captain Bligh, excite the hatred of my fellow man, turning his joy to mutiny, his effort to dumb insolence, and his aspiration to failure.

Ach, it was a bitter blow for the new skipper, and the fall from grace magnified. It was not quite like that imagined by Milton:

‘Nine days he fell, from dawn to dewy eve’

But nonetheless I arrived at my ‘own place’ in hell, at ‘bottomless perdition, there to dwell in adamantine chains and penal fire’. Needless to say, this was somewhat over-dramatic. In this morning’s light i can look into the mirror and take command of that main force from which the skipper’s gentle and humble exercise of power begins, the quiet centre of the soul, wherein lies the self, ineradicable except by death.

‘I was lost, but now am found’, I hummed to myself  following the class room training in chart work. The next step of this intensive course gives the opportunity to practice these lately-learned skills in the real world.

Under the watchful eye of the instructor, we had to play the role of skipper, in turn with our fellow students. This additional dimension adds another strand to the learning process, but the greatest difficulties I experienced were

• Moving from seascape to chart and back 
  It’s essential to know exactly where you are and then to read the dangers of the sea bottom over which the boat will pass
• Relating compass courses and bearings to direction in the real world 
  After the need to know where you are we need continue monitoring the exact place(s) which we expect to arrive at soon.

Once I have cracked these I can start calling myself a navigator; it’s as simple as that. The first step is to make a passage plan flexible enough to stand the unexpected circumstances that are certain to crop up. Getting this right does not require excessive brain power, more a dogged determination to follow a process which will assure the accracy of position and course.

Several times I have been let down by my inability to relate compass bearings (numbers in the range 0-360) to direction, so I have no inbuilt sanity check. For example when progressing from North to South I calculated a course alteration to 355º without thinking that of course this number is nearly 360 so would mean going back towards the north instead of making a small alteration from an existing southward course of 160º.

I don’t think I will make that mistake again, but there are so many pitfalls that at times this week I did begin to have self-doubts. But more of these in my next post.

Meanwhile here is a shot taken with the monster ‘boy toy’ telephoto of Kay Sira. This week I have served in Aeolus, a 37 foot Beneteau-built yacht, with our landside instructor, Simon, as skipper, so I was able catch a few pictures of Kay Sira as we passed each other in the breezy waters of the Bass Harbour roads off Kuah, the capital town of the favoured island of Lankawi.

I have received a request to post this photo, so here it is, warts and all.

Sunday at Royal Lankawi YC Marina started quietly enough. The first ritual out of the boat is the wash house, which is at least 200 yards away on the shore. Forgetting my wash bag I  was faced with a considerable round trip to retrieve it. However, having dispensed with shaving 2 weeks ago, and now that my athlete’s foot has been zapped, the only thing I really need is soap.

So instead of the dual trek, I filled my left hand with liquid soap from the dispenser at the washbasins and still had enough left when I had begun to sluice myself to do the business.

I’m getting pretty relaxed….

“Very creative, Austen”, was the dry but generous response by our instructor Simon when I explained that the dog had eaten my magnifying glass, and so if he were to penalise me for not doing my homework, it would be ageism as I cannot see some of the smallest symbols on the chart in the dim midnight light of the great cabin in the huge catamaran, Lady Nena.

“Not to be used for navigation’ is prominently displayed on the two training charts supporting the Day Skipper practical course for which I have just earned my second certificate. As I have already mentioned in an earlier paper, these charts are composed of a large number of real topographical sections, so that the shape of the bottom and the landforms are entirely authentic, but of course they do not actually represent any real place.

It is thus that the RYA present a learning aid that enables us to practice the chart-table side of navigation at sea without exposing any vessel to ruin on overfalls misinterpreted, nor to run aground in a misread minefield entered by proceeding exactly 180 degrees wrong – which is very easy. A major objective of this week in the classroom was to make us familiar with the use of the Portland Plotter and dividers.

These objects which although tantalisingly evocative and highly romantic to me in my initial state of utter ignorance, have now started to become, as is necessary for a navigator, mundane extensions to our eyes and hands. In the twinkling of an eye I can now rotate the plotter to a ‘True’ bearing and plot a course to follow in what would be the ‘real world’ outside the training room. I can adjust the lovely brass/stainless dividers to the scales at the borders of the chart to prick off distances in nautical miles.

As you can see from the photo above, the plotter is well-signposted with directional arrows  indicating the direction of bearing and the direction of North. The whole art of using the plotter depends on pointing the instrument the right way from start point to end point. Then a convenient one of the many references lines in the sliding compass part can be aligned exactly with north-south, or east-west rules on the chart, ensuring ‘North Up’. This enables a bearing value aligned with the large zero point to represent a number that you would see (after adjusting for variation, etc) on a real compass mounted in the binnacle or hand held in the boat.

Get this right and you can start to be a navigator – one who can find his way in the trackless ocean by funnelling planetary measurements, via the chart, into the course to steer.

Romantic? I can hardly breathe with my excitement! However, a more sober approach is really required if I am to become a reliable skipper. A very methodical approach is needed as an initial error can quickly turn into a very big problem as its effect is magnified by later calculations thus rendered utterly false. My chart work will have to be undertaken with as much religious accuracy as befits a Japanese tea ceremony.

With apologies to the real Mr Men

Mr Brash had a big boat and although he was not in the least bit lonely, he liked to have company, so he invited Mr Brainy and Mr Modesty to dine and sleep. As they went along in Mr Brash’s rickety old car, Mr Brainy was still thinking about dummy GPS waypoints, used to track bearing and distance to a real waypoint that is quite different from the dummy. Having difficulty with understanding this? Well so have I, but it was meat and drink to Mr Brainy who behaved outrageously in class, drawing arcane diagrams on the board and taking over from the teacher. Poor Mr Brainy, he had such a lot of trouble holding up his enormous head!

Mr Brash drove his car very gently and skilfully, such that it was a pleasure to be chauffered by him and both Mr Brainy and Mr Modesty got an overwhelming sense of safety and the immense courtesy of Mr Brash, which of course sits at odds with his name and his exterior. Mr Brash is also a biker, and by preference he wears a brief black cutaway Harley Davidson top which shows off his extensive tattoos extending down from his right shoulder to just below the elbow.

Mr Modesty described how he loves his kids to Mr Brainy and Mr Brash. Mr Brainy didn’t listen very well and so he said the first thing that came into his mind.

“A father’s relationship with his son is always closer than to his daugher.” This was a really silly thing for him to have said, and in fact is exactly dead wrong, but Mr Brash was too polite to point this out, but Mr Modesty did say, very mildly, that he had expected it to be the other way around.

They needed to get some food to eat, so they went to the supermarket. Mr Brainy had a rather complicated scheme. He started to calculate how to add to the leftovers from the previous day, but before this plan was complete in his head, Mr Brash had already selected and chosen some chops. Eventually Mr Brainy got himself together and managed to select some rather tired vegetables and some rather green bananas. Mr Modesty was keeping very quiet because he had never been to the boat before and so very wisely decided to let the other two lead. This suited Mr Brainy down to the ground.

By the time Mr Brainy had chosen some vegetables, the other two Mr Men had already been to the liquor store and had bought mixers, beers, and wines. The three met up again after queuing to pay. Then they continued in the rickety old car to the Royal Lankawi Yacht Club where Mr Brash’s enormous ocean-going catamaran was moored. Mr Brash hurried on ahead. Mr Brainy explained about Mr Brash’s super yacht to Mr Modesty. After a little while Mr Modesty told Mr Brainy that he already knew about it. Actually it was not a super yacht but a detail like this was nothing to Mr Brainy, and he took no notice.

Mr Brash had hurried on ahead to make sure that the boat was nicely ventilated for his guests. Mr Brash is very thoughtful and he set about the practical details of cooking the chops and adding a bottle of pasta sauce to the plain macaroni that was left over from the day before last. Mr Brainy offered Mr Modesty a gin and tonic which he did not really want, but he was too polite to tell Mr Brainy. Then Mr Brainy started to teach Mr Modesty some English Literature, and he quoted most of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan so that Mr Modesty would be sure to get the message.

Mr Modesty had learned Shylock’s speech about this jewish man’s common humanity at school, so very politely he unpacked the memory and recited the text, since it seemed that it was the right thing to do. Mr Brainy drummed his fingers while Mr Modesty spoke but even he was moved by some of it – for example

“If you prick us, do we not bleed?”

Quite soon Mr Brash had finished cooking and he came out into the cockpit to serve the food to the other two. They stuffed themselves with the delicious food and Mr Brash and Mr Modesty drank quite a bit of the red wine that they had bought at the supermarket.

After dinner, Mr Brainy went off to write his blog and the other two Mr Men got down to some serious drinking. Mr Modesty started playing pop music on his iPhone, which sounded tinny to Mr Brainy, but instead of blocking off his ears, he got out his iPod and listened to Beethoven. Then he went to bed. The other two fell asleep on the benches in the cockpit and started to snore heavily, so I wasn’t able to observe any more of their behaviour.

During their sleeping periods I began to organise my views about each of the Mr Men and I have summarised them thus: Mr Brash is actually more brainy than Mr Brainy and slightly more modest than Mr Modesty. Mr Modesty is a gentle spirit with a very giving nature, but he has an assertive side and when that side is given free rein, he can be more brash than Mr Brash. Mr Brainy is almost always more brash than Mr Brash, and sometimes less brainy than Mr Modesty.

The next day the three friends were a few minutes late for the start of their class. At this stage they were being taught how to adjust course for leeway and tide. These were the last building blocks in the process of learning how to calculate ‘Course to Steer‘ allowing for these influences in the fluid on which their bark swims.

‘Yoked by violence together’ is an adverse comment on punning, if I remember Jeremy’s classes right, by Samuel Johnson, the Great Cham. This piece was conceived before dawn as the full moon reflected a beam of inspiration from the waters outside my cabin porthole.

As far as offspring goes I have a double aspect, both female. The elder is a normal woman, although highly successful as she contributes to society as the Head of Psychology at a well-known private school. In her spare time she pursues the drama. When spending a sabbatical year in Sri Lanka (which I was fortunate enough to have the chance of helping to initiate) she spent a lot of her time on a wonderful updated Shakespearian piece. Recently she has taken a large role in the York Mystery Plays, also playing several crowd scenes with my two-year-old grand-daughter, whose first memory may sometime prove to be on the boards. She has performed at the Edinburgh Festival as well, and her latest intersection with my younger one was on a flying visit to that city last summer (well for you in UK – the seasons are different here).

Unfortunately my younger daughter is not normal, but an alien, her bright blue skin clearly visible in a recent photo. She tried to cover this up by saying it was all for a charitable cause, but I know better. How, you may ask, could she be an alien if I still acknowledge paternity? Well, as I used to tell her when she was little more than a toddler, cocking my head on one side and seeming to listen intently:

“I can now admit that I am an alien myself. As I can hear the spaceship coming to take us away to Bubble Planet I am permitted to reveal my true identity and to take off my human mask”.

I would then grasp my double chin or the sagging aged loose skin of my neck (normally covered by a cravate in temperate climes) and seem to drag off my face revealing a hideous howling and snapping insect underneath. I really think that the first time I did this, I was for a moment believed, for I know that children love to live in the imagination which I think is held under a thinner skin of the subconscious than it is for older people. A controlled thrill of momentary fear is the spice that provides the spine of all archetypal fairy tales.

Spaceship – SPESHiPS – this could be my yoke. the partly capitalised word being a mnemonic I put together for the operations needed to make a yacht ready for sea. Whoops, unfortunately not for springs are not really a part of this. So I had better come clean at once and explain them.

In Hornblower and the Atropos the eponymous hero uses a spring attached to his anchor chain to escape from the large but old-fashioned Turkish warship that was trapping him. By securing the spring line to the anchor chain (suspended over the bow) and taking the line back amidships or further, he could swing the ship very quickly by hauling in on it. So clever! Such a marvellously thoughtful seaman! For most of my life I have not understood how to deploy such a line nor how vital it can be to a safe mooring.

Kay Sira is often moored with a bow line, a stern line, and two springs which fan out from the fat midships. The purpose of the bow spring is to prevent the vessel from going astern, whereas the spring at the stern prevents it from drifting forwards. If there is any wind, tide, or turbulence, one of these warps will be under load.

My biggest mistake so far in this adventure was to release the stern spring, which was under load to tidy it up. The boat was propelled forward by the wind blowing on the stern and the beautiful skin of the bows approached the rough edge of the dock.

“Oh dear,” I cried, “I have made a mistake”.

Barry, our instructor, and the ever patient Principal of the School immediately apprised the situation and told me to hold the bows.

“Is she marked?” he asked anxiously.

“No, she didn’t make contact” I replied.

He then explained patiently that I should either have made my operation a two-man job – on on the boat and one on the dock, or rigged another spring so that I could have safely adjusted the first.

“Let’s not make a drama out of a crisis” he finished generously, as I choked out my shocked apology.

Thus have I learned a lesson about the usage and abusage of that most important of mooring warps – the spring.

I started my second week of training today. It is shore based. Each trainee has two wonderful dummy charts marked ‘Not to be used for navigation’. Apparently the coast lines are composites of real places with imaginary names (some amusing) provided instead of the real ones.

My friend and coursemate (illustrated above) who owns a catamaran on which he is kindly putting me up estimated that the number of symbols found on Admiralty charts is about ten times the number found on OS maps. Charts, in fact, have all the land-based symbols as well as a plethora of marine symbols which stand in place of the manifold features and dangers of the sea. Perhaps the most tantalising one seen today was ‘minefield’!

I have always loved maps and charts, and particularly the symbolic representations that model specific features enabling a cognoscento to interpret the actual seascape and to convey a huge amount of information in a compressed form. Until now I have been quickly baffled by most of the symbols but from now on I have the enormous satisfaction of being able to discover their meanings via Admiralty Chart no 5011: ‘Symbols and Abbreviations used on Admiralty Paper Charts’. Without this publication and an understanding of how to use it (via the ‘Contents Key’ in the back cover) you could not raise yourself from your current level of knowledge (or in my case, ignorance).

I have used a Portland Plotter and wonderful brass-footed dividers for the first time, enabling me to take compass bearings and determine distances along a track. Along the borders of a chart the co-ordinate references (latitude & longitude) are conveniently displayed in degrees, minutes and decimal fractions of a minute. These are repeated every so many grid lines in the body of the chart, and together with that most romantic of diagrams, the compass rose, enable us to determine our position on the surface of the globe with great accuracy.

I ended the day in a mood of euphoria, for I had always thought I could understand charts if only I had the keys to hand, and now I have been shown these keys! There is a great deal to learn and I can already see that the two examinations which will take place this week will not be easy, but after the principles are well understood I believe that with methodical care I shall be able to pass them.

I am already aware of how easy it is to make mistakes with bearings and lat/long position refs by transposition of figures and many other causes. Only rigorous checking and re-checking in such a way as to avoid repeating an error can we expect to produce accurate results which really do identify the present position and enable us to devise safe and accurate courses to our destination.

Life – especially shoreside life – is not so simple or so definite, I am afraid. Many a good navigator can find himself aground in a human situation when he or she would never run that risk at sea.

I have obtained my first sea-going certificate of competence, and I notice on a detachable part of the certificate that the Royal Yacht Association (RYA) ‘know how hard… [I have]… worked to obtain it’. They may know in general terms, but they cannot know the blood, sweat, toil, and tears I have given, mostly willingly, nor can they know in detail what any other individual has seen and suffered.

In my case, there has been very little blood, just a few minor scrapes and nicks. However, there has been a superfluity of sweat, associated with the extremely hard toil of hauling and handling ropes and unfamiliar tackle. The tropical heat has been like the heavy weight of Pilgrim’s Burden, constantly gnawing and worrying on my back. Tears I just held back when I was recounting the experiences of my uncle Peter, who spent two days in a life-raft in winter beyond the arctic circle, with two companions, one dead.

I had shared this publicly to underline the importance of good seamanlike practice associated with emergency procedures in life and death situations including the abandonment of a sinking vessel and use of the self-inflating life-raft which should be lashed securely to the foredeck but capable of very quick release and deployment in the event of needing to use it.

I said above that this was my first sea-going certificate, but that was not in fact true. Quite early on in my Merchant Naval career, I obtained a certificate of competence in the French language. This entitled me to attach a small tricolour badge to the upper sleeve of my cold weather uniform reefer jacket, and to receive a small supplement of pay.

I had taken the necessary examination, run by the Berlitz School of Languages, during a spell of leave, when I attended the P & O Head Offices then in Leadenhall, in the City of London. This location in the vast urban canyon of the city from which a quarter of the land surface of the planet once was ruled, must have been very close to the site of East India House itself. This was the Honourable East Company (HEIC). It was from there that our Indian trade was directed. The inevitable interactions with native powers created the conditions under which the British Indian Empire was first acquired and then governed. This continued, with P & O eventually replacing the Company’s licensing of its own ships, until the time of the Mutiny in the middle of the 19th century, when the Company’s remaining powers were subsumed into an arm of the British government.

I passed the test, but was only called to use the French qualification in anger twice. The first time the ship was anchored off Ajaccio in Corsica and being served by local launches to take the passengers on trips ashore. The Radio Officer in the shore party was a bit of a wag and he sent back a message by radio to the ship to get me to instruct the launch captains to ‘pass around the stern of the vessel and come alongside the after companion ladder communicating with the Promenade deck’. To his great satisfaction I completely failed to make the Corsican Captain understand a word of what I was trying to convey.

The second and last occasion was, strangely enough, also in Corsican waters, this time in the Bonifacio Straits which separate that island from Italian Sardinia. There had been an earthquake in Southern Turkey and very strange meteorological conditions resulted in a force 10 hurricane strength wind associated with very high seas, but with unexpectedly good visibility. The distance between the wave crests was not so great as it would have been in open waters, but even so, the 38,000 ton liner was pitching and yawing like a rowing boat steaming up the crests and falling down into the troughs. It was 0600 and all the non-watch keepers and passengers were still asleep when I was awoken by a general tannoy announcement requiring me to report to the bridge. I flung on some uniform and ran, taking care to avoid being seen by any passenger since any action that suggested emergency was absolutely forbidden.

When I arrived on the bridge the Captain and Officers of the Watch were standing around a radio telephone which continuously squawked:

‘Le Northern Star, ou etes vous? Repondez s’il vous plait’ …. then a slight pause before the same message was repeated ”Le Northern Star, ou etes vous? Repondez s’il vous plait’ – on and on.

They must have been waiting for some time in a tight circle like that while this communication was being repeatedly transmitted. Then the Captain had decided to hoik me out of bed and my summons was broadcast to every cabin and public space on the ship. This time I was able to translate all the messages that the Captain said to me in English into a good enough French to be understood by the Francophone shore-based radio operator. I had to ask what was the height of the waves at the entrance to Ajaccio Harbour and to convey the response.

As a result of the information which I translated the Captain decided to cancel the ship’s visit to Ajaccio and to continue directly to Gibraltar, our next port of call.

No such emergencies dogged our circum-navigation of the Island of Lankawi, some 124 nautical miles, which took 6 days, and involved 7 hours of night sailing. We made 3 landfalls, and conducted many evolutions on the way, including about half a dozen ‘Man Overboard’ drills involving ‘Bob’ a big fat fender, whose body was represented by a coiled warp and whose face was drawn in indelible marker on the side of the buoy. It was pretty easy to bring Bob back on board after he had been caught with a boat hook, but of course a real human casualty, perhaps unconscious, would be much harder to recover, since Kay Sira’s rails are about six feet above the normal level of the water.

Each evolution involved back-breaking work hauling in the huge genoa sail furling it onto the forestay, only to haul it out again ready for the next merciless cycle of that training. At one point our Instructor announced that we would not turn home to dinner until we could recover the ‘casualty’ in under 5 minutes. In the end we achieved a time of 2 minutes 53 seconds and I am sure that we all felt 10 feet tall.

I found the work particularly hard on the feet, which still are tingling whilst I sit typing. My ankles swelled up and I reported this. The instructor, Barry, and his wife Lynette looked at my ankles and recognised the condition as one they had seen before. They recommended a visit to a pharmacy, as in this country they are licensed to do simple diagnoses. I obtained some anti-diuretic tablets and after my third daily dose the condition is improving.

Next week we spend in the classroom exercising only the opposite part of the body – that is the head, as we learn about passage planning, chart work, basic navigation, compass work, tidal flow and extents, weather patterns, forecasting, and more.

To summarise what was learned this week I would say that there was a strong familiarisation process with the boat. It had to become like an extension of each crew member’s body. Only when this analogue has at least a foundation in each crew member can the vessel be operated smartly. In apposition to that intimate physical and psychological learning process was development of a human angle, in which each crew member learned to rely on the concerted actions of each other, sometimes well executed, sometimes clumsily, but always as an essential complement to one’s own actions.

To start with I was a little over-anxious and took on too much. but I soon found that I had to learn some moderation as in the enormous heat the continuous toil quickly took me towards my current limit of endurance. I hope to become stronger as time passes and I practice more, but it is a salutary lesson that I must rely on the hard work and contribution of others to preserve my own strength so that I can reach the end of an exhausting day without needing to lie down.

It was sad to part with two of my first shipmates, Jenny and Joerge, after developing such a close working relationship, but we humans must learn to be more like the ever-changing tides and currents that can carry us to distant shores.

Here is the sun setting on our 5th day at sea.

Compressing and expanding our experience of time by effort of will cannot be guaranteed because ‘the mind is in its own place’. Your inbuilt Lord High Admiral can order his fleet to sea, but cannot entirely command his meanest deck hand, who like the subtle nerves at the finger ends, blindly transmits sensations that can unseat admirals and knock them into a cocked hat.

Certainly my own time experience over the last two days has overloaded my critical functions close to whiteout. Viewed by the almighty, our small meanderings around the south eastern side of many-cliffed Lankawi would seem like small beer indeed. but from the lowly vantage point of the sailor under command our evolutions were strenuous, overwhelming, and had the unexpected effect of a team-building spirit in which each shipmate looks out for the next and relies on her or him.

Like a planet our bark slept each night in a different port and this is the second place where we have laid our weary heads. The first is already lost to the fanatic accuracy of my internal clerk, though a wrack of photos have been left behind as incontrovertible evidence of things that took place too long ago to be directly re-created for you in your armchairs.

There is also some scrawling in my ‘Where’s Wally?’ notebook a gift from a dear friend who knows my love of stationery. On these I will rely to research the temps perdue of the last two days.

In the meantime I can offer you a portrait of the author as an old sea dog, taken during my spell at the wheel by a thoughtful shipmate.

Note: Thanks to those readers who reported the absence of the above. Your vigilance is appreciated. The omission was due to rotten phone reception in the bowels of the berth. Belatedly I have been advised that the reception is a lot better a few 100 metres away in the Royal Lankawi Yacht Club in which I am for the nones a squatting member. I am sitting now in their grand lounge at 0836 in the morning and feeling a lot more satisfied with the prospects for publishing more pictures as one old friend has demanded.