Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
It was stifling hot here near the equator, although the farther north we sailed, the cooler it
became. The change was almost imperceptible. We kept in practice our evening habit of
happy hour. One glass of wine or one beer was all we felt like. I would sometimes play the
guitar, or we would read a book or play I Spy or maybe even call back some memories of
a girlfriend or an incident.
We had on-board an old Yaesu Single Side Band radio receiver. It did not transmit but
would pick up government-sponsored radio stations of different countries. Some nights we
would sit and listen to Radio Moscow and be amused at the heavy Russian accents with
their serious newscasts and heavy music programmes, mainly opera or classics. We would
listen in the sultry black of an evening to Radio New Zealand, or the BBC, or even Radio
RSA from our home country when we could pick it up.
Our favorite was Radio Australia. We liked their format. There was music, world news, and
even plays. It was entertainment after all, and there was not a whole lot we could do except
sit night after night in the cockpit of a slowly sailing yacht on the vast plains of the lower
North Pacific Ocean.
A typical evening would unravel thus: when the sun started to sink on the pink horizon,
whoever was not on watch at the helm would go below and pour out the daily libation ra-
tion. This would be sipped in agonizing slowness to last longer, punctuated by several ci-
garettes that would burn at “full speed.” This we could not slow down. I would sometimes
puff peacefully on my pipe. Talk would include the girls we wished we had with us now,
what we were going to do in Hawaii, and the wish for more wind. We also started to fan-
tasize about delicious food as the weeks progressed and our supplies started to run out. We
would sometimes see the green flash as the sun dipped below the horizon.
Radio Australia would come in at twenty hundred hours, and we would listen in fascination
at the world news and would loudly articulate our views and impressions of the broadcast.
We would then be eating some sort of dinner to the musical programme or be listening to a
play. The dishes were left in the sink at night as it was too dark really to see, and we wanted
to conserve battery power and paraffin for the lamps.
It would then be about twenty one hundred hours, and our attention was turned to our latest
sport: cockroach spotting. We would leave a little lamp in the galley turned down low. All
the dirty dishes from supper were in the sink, and the cockroach population could not resist
the wonderful aromas they produced. At first we would watch them in fascination. They
crawled literally out of the woodwork. From under the sink, from out of the cupboards,
from behind the curtains and the topic shelves, they even came in from outside for their
nightly snack.
