Starting rather slowly with lessons on safety, conducted in port, the day became extremely strenuous by 2pm when we set sail and began to learn how to operate as a team to handle the boat.

In particular I was exposed to the full tropical sun almost during the hottest part of the day, at a time when, in Penang, I had retreated to delicious air-conditioning for a short sleep.

We did endless tacking, gybing, and the four trainees took turns with each task, streering, or hauling on the right ropes in the right order. We inched in to a new marina as evening fell and had another meal ashore.

Here is a typical view during the afternoon.

I am tremendously tired and unfortunately my eyes are stinging, probably because of  getting a mixture of sun cream and sweat into them

I must sleep now….

 

 

Coming aboard a new ship as a crew member for the first time effects an emotional transition as well as the mere physical stepping from the dockside. I well remember this internal struggle as I joined my first ship P & O ss Canberra 46 years ago. Despite my long experience this transition from drab landsman to smart seaman took me by surprise.

I arrived at the meeting point for this voyage outside the marina office some four hours early because of timetabling of available flights and sitting with my bags in a strange zone of silence in the untended cafe section of the adjacent supermarket I tried the phone number in the joining instructions, as prescribed for early arrival. Using my UK phone the internationally prefixed number rang briefly with a strange tone, but then a voice – mercifully in English – told me that the number was not available. The phone displayed the message: call failed.

I was not uneasy as I told myself that phone service is often chancy. There is little likelihood of this whole setup – for which I have paid in advance – is some internet scam in which unsuspecting trainee seamen are fleeced of their small resources. Putting aside this type of thinking and also the lesser problems such as business failure, I determined to ‘man up’ and make inquiries at the Marine Office.

Clambering up to the second floor of a smart square blue building, following signs to the Marina Office I entered a large space tenanted by a single woman who delayed looking up at me until the last possible moment.

“Hello, I am looking for Mr Wickett of Kay Sira. I cannot contact him through the telephone number I have been given. Can you help me?” I inquired courteously.

“If you student must wait downstairs” was her gnomic utterance in reply.

“Ah, no, I don’t think you understand. I have arrived four hours early and I need to follow the instructions in this paper to make contact with Mr Wickett. I only have a UK phone – can you ring this local number and ask Mr Wicket to come?” I showed the lady my joining instructions, and borrowing a highlighter from her desk, I helpfully indicated the local number. Very reluctantly, she reached for a phone and dialled, but alas, she got the same message as I.

“Must wait downstairs. Cannot stay in office,” she said and at that moment a radio telephone started to squawk and she lovingly picked it up, offering her lips to it like a lover, and spoke in rapid Malay. When the radio conversation died down, I rejoined:

“Can you please show me where Mr Wickett’s boat, Kay Sira is berthed?”

“No cannot”, she immediately replied, with some satisfaction, as if she had seen a pretty obvious trick designed to catch her out.

Fast forward to the next morning. The crew is awaking and I must make tea.

More later.

 

“Is it a nice place to be?” asked my wife Jack, with whom I can now chat using FaceTime every day.

I did not know whether the question refered to my sister’s house or the wider environment of this island set shield-shaped about 4 miles from the Malaysian mainland, located at the north end of the Straits of Malacca and containing Malaysia’s second city, Georgetown.

Just a moment, I must pause as La Traviata reaches its supreme sacrificial ending on my iPod… OMG if I were Alfredo I would have looked after her more. But then again, perhaps she casts herself as a victim and cannot play any other role. Oh how it pierces the heart to hear her say she is getting better as she slowly dies in imperial dignity!

But back to Jack’s question, first I will say that to me the house is not far from ideal. It is located in a slightly cooler area than the narrow and previously marshy coastal plain, some way up Pearl Hill. It is on a terrace, dug in at the back into the side of the rising hill, but the road on which it fronts is almost level, passing at right angles to the slope. The house is detached and there is a fairly narrow concreted path all the way round, with a ‘parit’ (Malay: storm drain) under the deeply overhanging eaves. There is a broad verandah on one side and a jungly patch on the other. It is set back 6 metres from the road, with a well designed garden infrastructure of paths and beds, supporting a riot of flowering shrubs and including some moderate sized trees. At the front is a car port and another broad verandah inhabited when it rains by the three dogs.

Inside there are 2 bedrooms with A/C each with a bathroom, a broad hall giving access to the bedrooms on one side and the sitting and dining rooms on the other. There is a kitchen behind the dining room and a vast scullery leaning-to across the back of the house, incorporating the parit, which is neatly bridged with aluminium grill panels. There is a third bedroom without bathing facilities, or perhaps sharing mine. Every window is protected by diamond-shaped metal grills. These are hinged to allow access to the verandahs. This high level of security is needed against the penchuri (Malay: robbers) which might otherwise come in a gang by night and pass your possessions out in a chain.

This happened to our parents in the 50s, when a servant inadvertently left a grill unbarred one night and the lithe oiled bodies of the penchuri flitted soundlessly from room to room. Our mother, who was a small person, but very fierce especially when at bay, nonetheless woke and at first she thought in that pre-air-conditioned age that a firefly had come in from the night. When she realised it was a dimmed torch she leaped up with a huge shout and the men in the penchuri chain dropped whatever they were passing at that moment and as one man took to their heels, leaving cameras, radios, record-players, tins of food, in fact all our possessions, strung out across the very extensive grounds we had in those days, including two full-sized games courts.

At that time it would have been awkward for us to keep dogs. For one thing there was no fencing between the individual plots of government housing, and indeed it had to be easy for the Public Works Dept (PWD) gardeners to move smoothly from house to house. For another it would not have sat well with our servants, who were Malays to whom, being Muslims, dogs are unclean animals.

Another difference is that my sister’s bungalow is guarded on the road front by a huge electrically operated security gate. The back is too steep to allow access and abuts more private property. At each side there is a strong fence demarcating the gardens of the adjacent houses, and as I have said, we allow the jungle to take back a bit of its lost luxuriance. These picturesque predispositions have earned my sister the soubriquet of ‘the  jungle woman’ locally, for all our neighbours hack slash and extirpate, allowing only a few sparse and uniform lines of specimen plants.

So to me this house is supremely comfortable and deceptively spacious, affording perfect settings for cool breakfasts in bed, tiffins under slowly rotating fans, evening ginslings as the brief tropical dusk fallsgolden, and secure comfort for dining and reclining. Nights can be noisy with dogs barking, but the backgound scream of cicadas is absent here, although nowadays it would be completely muffled by aircon.

If however Jack’s question was directed at the wider environment of this island which some have called the jewel of the east, then I will start off by saying that Georgetown has become a world heritage site, its grid plan still reflecting the urban plan laid out by the founder, Francis Light, in 1786 before which almost the whole island was impenetrable jungle.

It’s said that to start the clearance Light landed his ship’s cannon and loaded them with silver dollars, firing them off each day at dawn to encourage the workmen. After eight years of hard work, Light died off form fever, but by then he had overseen the first development of the town which subsists to this day, and although he names of the streets have been malayanised, the original proper names have been consistently preserved, so that Light Street has only been changed to Lebuh Light, and Scott Road only to Jalan Scott. Maintaining these links with the past is of course a wise move from the tourist point of view as the sense of continuity reassures foreigners, but it also perhaps suggests that the islanders still retain a sense of their old independence from the mainland government.

I am horrified that the coast road, which in my youth was a simple two-track affair, with occasional cars, and many pedal cycles, have become six-lane highways, choked with 4x4s and all the bicycles have become cheap Japanese motorbikes. I am aghast at the development of high-rise housing, invading the foothills of the mountainous centre of the island. So far the dense jungle of the higher slopes has in the main remained untouched, although since 1903 there has been a railway up to the cool top.

From the Convalescent Bungalow, located almost at the summit, you can on a clear day look out to the answering majesty of Kedah Peak (Malay: Gunong Jerai), the greater range adjacent on the mainland, a characteristic shape supported by a huge sprawling base, penetrated by many rivers. As you move about on the more populous east side of Penang island you continuously catch glimpses of the Peak across on the mainland, each from a slightly different angle, but always familiar.

Well, as you see, I am trying to paint a favourable picture of both the immediate and the wider environment, my waiting room as I prepare myself to join the yacht in three days time. You will see that this shore is anything but strange to me, and even now, when my parents who lived here are long dead, there is a part of me that recognises this island as my childhood home.

 

 

Capturing and controlling volatile stuff that is difficult to handle without damaging it can be achieved by a ‘decoy’ method in which the stuff is initially enticed into the large end of a cone-shaped enclosure. It is encouraged to move by degrees into the smaller end until its freedom of movement is so constrained that it can cannot escape and it can then be manipulated easily and safely.

I am deliberately using this method to effect my transition into retirement, and I have invented the ‘Prequel Procrastination System’ (PPS) to regulate and control it. Are you worried about making the change from a working life? PPS is designed to soothe and swale away all the anxiety and sting!

PPS depends on forward planning – all the virtue is contained in the long run up. Last March I happened to meet my boss at the security turnstiles  on our way into the factory and in answer to his courteous inquiry I told him that I was excited because about to book up my two-month RYA Yachtmaster course. This would necessitate my retirement in early October, said I.

This set a terminus so distant in time from the event predicted that for many months my job seemed to run along just as before, as the critical analyst in me – the person who looks out at my reflection in the mirror – gradually prepared me for the pain of parting from so many work colleagues that I count as friends.

PPS has a layered model, like an onion where each skin’s time envelope protects. I started this blog in the UK run-up – the few days between leaving the factory and my flight to Penang, Malaysia. I was already full of enthusiasm before boarding the plane, but now I am within the next, and indeed the last little envelope of time before my adventure begins. I am staying with my sister who lives here in Penang. I am practically bursting as I live through the short remaining time. It races past with extraordinary intensity, bright as tropical flowers.

As is often the case before the voyage, there are quite a few shoreside complications.

 

Winged words were spoken by the camera salesman into whose hands I had delivered myself. I was putty in his hands and I was enjoying it. The possibility of love between me and my single-lens reflex seemed remote to start with, but his proposal to mend our relationship by offering a renewal of that doubtful commodity struck a chord.

Explaining that I had not got on very well with it, I had told him that just maybe a telephoto lens was needed, and he cleverly engaged me by simplifying the issue to a straight choice – either this one which is basic and cheap, or this one, modestly more expensive but including some automatic stabilisation against camera shake. I’m pretty sure he had already classified me as a prospect that would be tempted by the best that money can buy. If so he was right – I always incline towards the more expensive choice in the hope of getting value. I care less about preserving my hoard of money than the self esteem it buys.

I am struggling with the display of images resulting from my purchase. I wanted to show details of a tiny island about a mile offshore from the island of Penang where I am staying for the few days before my seatrack begins. I would have like to show two images side by side, one shot with the new telephoto lens, the other with an inexpensive compact camera on full zoom.

Alas my technical skill with this new computer and the new WordPress software I am using to generate this blog, is not yet sufficient for my purposes.

This is a cropped picture of Pulau Tikus (‘Rat Island’) at high tide, taken with the lens I bought from the salesman.

Here is one taken with my small Fujfilm FinePix on full zoom, taken the day before at low tide.

What I want from the new telephoto lens is to be able to capture distant objects within a narrower angle of view than is possible with a standard lens. However it is obvious to me that my photographic skills need a great deal of attention.

Well my current levels must serve me during the sailing course which starts in six days time. But maybe when I get back to London, I shall put photographic training on my list of activities!

Anyway, as for the salesman’s promise, I think the most that can be said at present is that we are still getting to know each other!

‘Finding your way by sea’ is a literal definition of navigating, but the word is so powerful figuratively to the ‘English-speaking Peoples’ that the term and its associations have been widely borrowed for related uses. It now very commonly serves when you describe finding your way by land, by internet, and in the ‘course’ of your life.

‘Getting your bearings’ is such a common way of describing the need to assess your position in life that saying this is no longer a metaphor. An uncontroversial theory of language development argues that such a phrase does start out its life as a startlingly new and apt way of enlightening one thing by associating its characteristics with those of another thing, but that this ‘metaphoric quality’ fades into the established background of secondary meanings over time.

I think Shakespeare has a bearing on this. For example when Sir Toby Belch exhorts his friend to stun the lady of his affections with language ‘fire new from the mint’, the idea of ‘minting’ a new way of saying something was genuinely new and striking, but four centuries later it is a cliché.

The first object of navigation in boats and life is to establish your present position. Unless we can do this with reasonable accuracy we have no hope of choosing an appropriate direction to somewhere new.

At sea this position can either be expressed as a mark on a chart, or as values in the agreed co-ordinate system – latitude and longitude – which we use to indicate a point on the surface of the sphere on which we live. On a chart we first try to draw a ‘position line’ by lining up visible objects (landmarks or seamarks) that are located at different distances from us (and so are horizontally separated when not aligned).

We next try to establish our position on that line by taking compass bearings of two or three other visible objects at widely separated angles. To get this right, we need to take account the fact that compass needles do not align exactly with the rotational poles of the world. The difference between the magnetic north and the direction of the geographical pole is known as ‘variation’.

Thinking this over at the dead of night, while suffering jet lag due to my relocation yesterday some 9,000 miles east by south-east, I mused that in life and work there is an important difference between the direction that a magnetic leader takes you and a ‘true’ direction.

Another problem in life is ‘deviation’. At sea this describes the deflection of a compass needle due to the interference by magnetic forces other than those generated by the poles, including metal on the boat, or other anomalies. On land ‘deviation’ can cause a wide range of dangers!

However, I must now post this and get some sleep, or I will just be a ‘wreck’.

‘Esiotrot’ is the title of a wonderful story of mature love by Roald Dahl. This name is formed from reversing the letters in ‘tortoise’, which Dahl mischievously defines as a very ‘backwards’ animal, or in the present context, a ‘golb’.

When I started this blog, I did not at first appreciate (doh!) the effect on the reader of this ‘backwardness’ inherent in the formation of a stack of entries pushed down one place by each new topic.

I just got started by over-typing on the ‘sample page’ offered by the WordPress software I had selected in almost complete ignorance. For several days my headline bore the legends: ‘Home’ and ‘Sample’.

On this page ‘Home’ is not a live link, but a statement of where you are. But ‘Sample’ was a live link and it just led to some boilerplate text. The editor is meant to replace it (immediately, if you are not as esiotrot as I). So at length, I have now finally caught up. I have replaced ‘Sample’ with ‘About’ (see above).  In that page I have explained the underlying purpose of the blog and introduced myself a bit, and of course on that page ‘Home’ is a link which delivers you back to the top of the stack.

Check it out!

Changing your role and way of life is a trial by ordeal. This trial, this ordeal, is exacted by the groups we leave and join, but also by ourselves as it seems to help us visualise ourselves anew.

The giving of the gold watch that used to be the symbol of the rite of retirement is one of these ordeals. Those that had suffered it wore the watch as a sign of their changed life, just as in some tribes it is necessary to bear the pain of widespread tatooing before you can be accepted as an adult member of the tribe.

I instinctively avoided any public show when it came to be my turn to finish working. Since I was 11 years old I have always found transitions difficult. I stayed on an extra year at school but even then my grades didn’t thrive. I joined the Merchant Navy and re-took my exams so that I could go to university, but once having achieved this I was again reluctant to move on and I returned to the navy between the second and third year of my first degree.

This is a photo of a post card I sent to my university tutor showing me playing at being a sailor when I should have been sitting my finals. This turned up many years later when one of the alumni, who had become a professional collector, gathered all the remnants of that time together in a web site ‘most dear to those that know’.

If I had found it hard to leave school, it was four times harder to leave university. I managed to extend my time there to seven years. But that ‘was in another country’, and is a story for a different day.

For the point of this little essay is to heap praise upon myself for the incredible despatch and smoothness of my retirement. I delayed only one year after the traditional age of 65. I made the announcement of my leaving date in March, and duly carried it out in October. Now is my autumn of good content, and the rite of passage that I have designed is a sea trial, an ordeal by water, a marine odyssey.

Read on for adventure!

 

 

 

Hunched & sprawled under Hungerford rail bridge, within a stone’s throw of Whitehall’s Downing Street, there is a specialist shop selling the technical kit that sailors and divers need. Just to visit such a shop as Ocean Leisure enlarges your soul and enables you momentarily to join the tribe it serves and represents.

As when you go away to boarding school for the first time, you get a list of what’s going to be needed in your new life. It fills you with an excited mix of trepidation and expectation, fear and joy, as you visualise the use of the unfamiliar items.

With the willing advice of a young man made wise by the stored experience of generations of sailors I chose these gloves to fulfil the second last item on my list. They are beautiful objects to the technical eye, protecting the palm and gripping digits from rough ropes, yet leaving the sensitive finger ends unencumbered. Designed to perform well when wet, they won’t fall off because the velcro strap can be tightened as needed.

In the olden days, when a sailor on shore leave was caught by the press gang he might pretend with the ready invention and instinctive role play needed for his main occupation that he was a gentleman, and therefore not subject to be impressed to serve in HM ships. The seasoned petty officer, serving perhaps under a lad of good family in nominal command of the press crew, would then ask this ‘gent’ to show his hands. In those days these meaty appendages would be deeply and indelibly engrained with the tar that was used to protect all hempen ropes from rot by the salt water environment. With these gloves I could easily pull the wool over this Petty Officer’s eyes, if indeed the elegance of my turn of phrase had not instantly caused him to tug his sparse forelock in apology for the roughing-up that I would already have suffered!

The other item needed to complete my list was footware. On board Kay Sira, it was explained, we would go barefoot. Even this remark makes me tingle with expectation of the feel of the well-cared-for wood of the decks. But on numerous expeditions to wild beaches we would need to be able to jump into the sea with everyday agility, regardless of  sharp shingle, urchin spines, and sea snakes. With the help of the young man I was nudged towards these:

You might think that the bit of aged leg you see is apparently superfluous to the info provided, but no. I have included a view of the scar left from the operation needed to mend my fibula with a plate of titanium and seven screws.

As I have said, it was the period of enforced idleness resulting from this accident that led me first to dream of this seatrack. And now this doom is nearly upon me – gulp!

There is one screw in my leg for each of the seven seas on which I shall now be a wanderer.

 

“Keep a journal…and stay away from pirates” was the advice of a dear friend, and so here I am learning to blog as I go. Only yesterday blogs were things I could read but not write, but the internet collapses wait time and amazingly just one day later I am making my first tentative steps. This is my second post, and already I can’t wait to see what it will look like when I upload it against the first one.

The title of the blog – seatrack – as I have already said refers to Churchill’s phrase about the difficulty of hunting the German pocket battleship Graf Spee in the ‘trackless ocean wastes’. And of course he was describing something he knew well for many times he like me had cast his eyes around the circle of the horizon without finding the tiniest spot of dry land, but only ‘water, water, everywhere, nor any a drop to drink’.

However we humans are contrary fellows – we are at one time both ‘angel forms’ and ‘poor bare forked creatures’. It is a fact that in this trackless waste my lifetime experience has been the most grounded. In this directionless mass I have found my best and truest directions. Trusting in this I return as a pilgrim, at the outset of my next chapter of life.

Although of course all life began in the sea, the curious ape you see in the mirror every morning cannot now live more than a few hours on it, unless supported by artificial flotation and shelter, and above all unless it can operate some method of locomotion. Of these methods by far the most harmonious is of course the employment of wind. By cunning we can borrow a little of its force to make our track in the waste, and come at last by design to the welcome lights of the home port.