Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
launched the desire in me to build a boat and escape the dull confines of a life in suburbia.
I know Gavin felt the same way. I recalled the games we had played when we were small
and when our back garden was a huge unexplored island.
This was our first deserted South Sea island. We were close on the heels of Robert Louis
Stevenson here. I thought I saw a one legged pirate frantically digging a hole to bury his
treasure chest, his parrot squawking at the inconvenience. There behind the row of palms I
saw the black, web-like silhouette of an old buccaneer's schooner with a saucy rake to her
two yellow masts. A bandana'd crewman with big buckled shoes was rolling a wooden wa-
ter barrel up the beach, cursing pirate profanities and struggling. “Shiver me timbers, you
bloody scurvy swabs, ain't none o' you lily livered bilge rats goin' to 'elp an old salt of 'er
Majesty's pirate navy?” he ended in an almost insane cackle from a toothless, bearded, and
ugly mouth.
Instead, we saw a high water fringe of twentieth century rubbish: flotsam from modern day
boating people on modern boats and ships throwing their plastic, aluminum, rubber, and
glass refuse over the side. A fraction of this had fetched up on this little gem of an island,
once pristine in the pure blue water.
Admittedly, there was a lot of driftwood and we poked about in this ocean dump for a
while. There was a lot to sift through. Rubber slippers that could not be matched. Corks
that could be used for fishing. Several fishing net floats of the foam variety, useful some-
where. Gavin even found a dead puffer fish in perfect condition.
Great pieces of promising driftwood lay waiting to be sanded and their tell-tale grain de-
termined. Some of these turned out to be exotic hard woods and would varnish up very
nicely. Slowly around the island we walked, bent over, preoccupied, scrutinizing and pok-
ing with sticks. Sometimes there was an exclamation upon a discovery. The debris pile
soon thinned out and pickings become rather slim and predictable. We soon tired of this
and returned to the dinghy with a pile of treasure. The pile was severely edited, and the few
remaining ubertreasures survived the trip back to the boat.
We rowed back in silence. I was missing Penny and felt a little depressed. The sun was
setting, and we decided to have a glass of wine for happy hour. I found a book to read,
and Gavin busied himself with a new bait idea he had thought up. This consisted of whole-
wheat flour mixed with a little can of sardines. He soon brought in a few little minnow
sized fishes which he then stuck wriggling onto a larger hook and waited patiently, gazing
into the distant future over the horizon and beyond the castles in the clouds.
Between puffs of cigarette smoke from Gavin and slurps of satisfying, sweet white wine
we thus passed through to the evening twilight. I lit a paraffin lamp and made a light meal
