Blog 048 – Landfall, Lies, and Lobster

The Long Goodbye

wow.. when I wrote the draft for this blog it was about 10 days ago... so much can happen in 10 days which make that subtitle so poingant... (read at the end)

The silence on Sawasdeekat had become a living thing. Not the peaceful quiet of a calm night watch, but a dense, prickling fog of resentment that filled every corner of the saloon more completely than any sea mist. The jovial crew who had joined us in Gibraltar were now distant memories, replaced by four strangers sharing a broken, leaking vessel pointed towards Grenada.

We limped on through those final days, nursing wounds both mechanical and emotional. The generator sulked. I diagnosed a dead starter battery and ran the port engine for an hour to coax it back to life. Pookie played freezer Tetris, consolidating our dwindling provisions into one unit while preparing meals in a galley that had become a war zone of dietary contradictions. I monitored fuel gauges and battery percentages; cold, hard numbers that offered refuge from the human chaos unfolding around us.

Danny remained entrenched in his mood, but occasionally emerged to commit acts of such baffling disregard they almost became performance art. He decided to do sit-ups one afternoon. Did he use the rubber gym mat we'd thoughtfully provided? No. He fetched the decorative pink velvet cushion from his cabin and placed it on the grimy, salt-crusted cockpit floor. Then he sweated on it. I watched, speechless, as he soiled something pleasant for no reason other than his own transient comfort. It was the perfect metaphor for our entire crossing.

A Helping Hand (and a Cake)

Kenet continued his quiet campaign of saintliness. When Danny left his customary tribute of crisps and peanuts scattered at the helm, Kenet simply swept them up without a word. When the night shifts brought their own quiet absurdities, Vikki somehow logging a boat speed of 650 knots on a particularly imaginative evening (we had either broken the sound barrier or the speed log; given our luck, we assumed the latter); we simply added it to the growing collection of inexplicable moments.

The atmosphere hit new depths when Danny "helped" with a winch and managed to weave the main halyard and genoa sheet into an inseparable braid of nylon. He saw no issue with this and wanted to continue. We disentangled it in weary silence.

Then came time-change day. We shifted our clocks from Cape Verde to Grenada, which meant each watch would sit an extra hour until we realigned. Danny celebrated by leaving yet another open crisp bag at the helm to soften mournfully in the humid air. But Pookie and Kenet, in a valiant effort to summon joy from the ether, baked a cake. It was a small, sweet rebellion against the gloom and near silence coming from the couple.

We finally coaxed the generator into reliable operation and decided to leave it running permanently, a mechanical heartbeat keeping our lights on and our water flowing. We were a fully operational, miserably silent ship.

The Final Acts

The last days blurred into a tense slog. Danny, for reasons known only to the navigation gremlins inhabiting his head, turned the boat almost 180 degrees and had to be redirected by both Pookie and Kenet. His dietary claims shifted direction too: the man who was lactose-intolerant suddenly decided hard cheese was acceptable. The food rules, like our course, were apparently arbitrary.

At midnight, a reefing line snapped. The mainsail erupted in a violent, flapping frenzy, breaking a lazy jack wheel in its tantrum. Kenet and I wrestled it under control in the dark, reducing us to a single sail with hundreds of miles still to go. But the sea, as if apologising, offered compensation: we landed a mahi-mahi and two yellowfin tuna. Kenet's knives flashed in the cockpit light, a return to tangible, useful purpose. For an hour, we were simply fishermen, not consoling flatmates on a fractured ship. Our fishing tally had reached an impressive fourteen mahi-mahi, two tuna, and an amberjack before the Sargassum seaweed arrived in thick, sandy blankets that made further catches impossible. The ocean, at least, was still providing.

Pookie made one final attempt at peace. She sat with Danny at the helm for a full, silent hour, then tried a gentle joke about Vikki's dinner preferences. His response? He lifted one earphone. "I don't know." Then, with a finger to his lips, he shushed her and pointed at the sail, a sail he hadn't glanced at once during her entire vigil. The rejection was breathtaking in its petty clarity.

On the final night, Kenet and I shared a weary, consolatory drink. Danny appeared for his shift and decided to inspect the world through a canvas side panel. He leaned into it with such force that we heard sickening pops. Later, I found three press studs ripped clean from the canvas. His parting gift: structural damage.

Landfall

The waves gave us a few last, mocking slaps on the beam as we rounded Grenada's coastline. Then, there it was: Port Louis. Emerald hills, solid earth, the end of 2,700 miles.

The marina was lined with people. The Viking group had been discreetly alerted to the threats made during that dreadful halfway-point confrontation. They'd offered port police. I declined the spectacle, but they ensured customs would be ready for us in case Danny and Vikki left without letting me clear them off the boat.

Then Danny produced the passports.

He clutched them in his hand like a winning lottery ticket, these small books that should never have been in his possession. A captain holds the passports of everyone on board during an ocean passage. It's not power play; it's legal responsibility. When authorities ask who is entering their country, you account for every soul. You prove no one is jumping ship, no one is slipping through borders unnoticed. It is a duty, plain and simple.

Four days earlier, without asking, without mentioning it, Danny had opened a file inside my private office drawer and removed them. He had kept them hidden somewhere in his cabin while we sailed through the final leg, while tensions festered, while he offered to fight me in my own boat. And now, on the dock, he presented them back to me like a favour, expecting me to process him through customs as if nothing had happened.

I was having none of it.

With officials waiting for him I told him clearly: he could process himself. The paperwork, the queue, the questions, all his. If he wanted to treat my private space as his personal filing cabinet and my authority as optional, then he could discover exactly what a captain's role entails by doing it himself. The look on his face suggested this was not the grateful reception he'd anticipated.

As Sawasdeekat settled into her berth, the journey ended not with cheers but with a quiet, firm boundary. Documentation complete, Pookie and I, emotionally scuffed and utterly exhausted, insisted they leave. Immediately. They had already mostly packed anyway, possibly to enjoy a short break on the island whilst using Sawasdeekat as a free base, but at the moment of our landing that ship had sailed. They gathered their things, stepped onto the dock, and onto a different planet where an expensive hotel bill undoubtedly awaited them.

The boat seemed to sigh with relief. The human bilge had finally been pumped.

Danny's Compendium of Curiosities...

In the decompression of landfall, with solid ground underfoot, the sheer scale of Danny's fantastical autobiography demanded an airing. Over two weeks, between crisps and silences, we'd been treated to a masterclass in self-mythology:

On Business: "I owned my own printing company… they sent me to Holland." If you own the company, you send yourself. He claimed it was "the biggest in Europe," with "thousands of staff" and a worth of £6 million ( a sum that wouldn't cover the wage bill for a hundredth of his claimed workforce). The numbers didn't add up; they didn't even wave at each other from across the street.

On Military Prowess: "I was a commando in the army." British Commandos are Royal Marines, not Army. The only "Commando" in the Army is a qualification, not a fighting unit.

"I trained Gurkhas how to climb." Yeah of course you did because the legendary Gurkhas, famous for being the toughest in the world and born in the Himalayas, need climbing instructions from a man who can’t swim and gets seasick in a light swell.

On Athletic Fame: "When I was a semi-pro runner…" Semi-pro? Paid to run? In an era when even world record holders like David Moorcroft had day jobs, the claim had the distinct whiff of fantasy league rather than cinder track. My brother ran for his country during the same era, he was in the world cross country champs and all he got was a paid of running shoes.. that was a different era and you were not a "semi pro".

A Theory of Crisps

So what did we learn from our Atlantic ordeal? We learned that crossing an ocean is the ultimate truth serum. The vast, uncaring blue strips away pretence. You can't maintain a façade for 3,000 miles. Eventually, you run out of script, and your core programming is revealed.

Some reveal resilience, like Kenet. Some reveal serene toughness, like Pookie. And Vikki? She was pleasant, cheerful, genuinely willing to help wherever she could. On another boat, with another partner, she might have been absolutely fine, a perfectly decent crew member navigating her first ocean passage on a small boat with good humour. But she had anchored herself to Danny, and in doing so chose loyalty over clarity. A new marriage it seems, is thicker than any amount of evidence. She stood by him, not because he was right, but because she was his husband. I can respect the principle, even as I lament the outcome.

And then there was Danny. He revealed himself to be something else entirely: a walking compost heap of tall tales and crisp crumbs, held together by entitlement and a dubious grasp on basic facts and responsibility.

Our nightmare crew wasn't evil. They were just profoundly, spectacularly wrong for the confines of a catamaran and the democracy of the deep. As we watched them disappear down the dock, a profound peace settled over Sawasdeekat. The leak would be fixed. The floor would be glued. The broken studs would be replaced. Simple, solvable problems.

We (Kenet, Pookie and I) popped the cork on that long-awaited Prosecco. The sound was sweet, definitive, a small explosion of celebration that finally drowned out the memory of ripping canvas and slammed doors. The Atlantic had been crossed. The boat was ours again.

The Adventure Begins Anew

And then, wonderfully, absurdly, the adventure did begin again.

About 3-4 days earlier during our crossing, Pookie had received a message that left us both baffled and delighted. The Grenada Tourist Board, aware that a MasterChef finalist was sailing their way, had extended an invitation: would she consider demonstrating a dish showcasing local ingredients to mark their Independence Day celebrations?

We expected a photographer and maybe a cameraman. What awaited Pookie was a gaggle (what do you call a gathering of film crews? A production? A chaos?) of lighting technicians, cameramen, photographers, interviewers, and assorted media folk, all utterly focused on her every movement.

She created a lobster calypso dish worthy of the Governor General himself, adorned with pineapple stars cut to match the Grenadian flag and local flowers she'd discovered by a roadside the day before. She crafted a cocktail and two crispy tuiles in red and green - the flag's colours made edible. And she finished with her famous Piña Colada Panna Cotta, a dish that had graced the MasterChef kitchen what felt like a lifetime ago.

We had arrived five days before Grenada's Independence Day. The timing was impossibly perfect.

Island Life

The universe, as if finally deciding we had paid our dues, opened its doors. The event sponsors proved extraordinarily kind, inviting us into their world. One such invitation came from a remarkable woman at Clark's Court Rum Distillery, who gave us a personal tour and introduced us to her family. Clark's Court holds a unique distinction: it is the only black-family-owned and operated rum distillery in the entire Caribbean. We walked away decidedly merry and considerably more educated, clutching bottles of their finest with the protective grip of new parents. (if you go.. try it.. its great!)

We toured a cocoa plantation up in the hills, watching chocolate's journey from bean to bar while the sweet scent of fermenting cocoa nibs hung in the air like nature's perfume. We bathed in waterfalls, the cool mountain water washing away the salt of the crossing and replacing it with something that felt suspiciously like pure joy. Pookie floated on her back in one such pool, staring up at the canopy of green, and I watched a woman who had spent two weeks being tossed about by the Atlantic finally find stillness.

For two weeks, Grenada wrapped us in her emerald embrace. The island rises from the sea like something a god designed on a particularly inspired day, all lush mountains and dusty red roads winding through rainforest so thick it feels private, secret, yours alone. Raw and stunning and impossibly green, the kind of place that makes you understand why sailors kept sailing once they found it. We ate oil-down until we could barely move, drank rum at beaches where the sand squeaked beneath our feet, and watched sunsets that made the Caribbean Sea blush various shades of pink and orange. We walked through St George's with its red-roofed houses tumbling down to the horseshoe harbour, a town that looks like a postcard artist's fever dream.

Then came the farewell. Kenet, our gleefully smiling, unshakeably calm, utterly charming Kenet, had to leave. He was shattered but had been our rock for a month, the calm eye in our personal hurricane of inexperience and enthusiasm. Watching him walk away brought that familiar pang, the one that comes with this life we have chosen. But here is the thing about ocean passages and the people who share them: they arrive in your life, help you through a chapter, and then sail off into their own stories. The trick is to be grateful for the chapter, not mournful of the ending. And we were. Immensely.

We stored Sawasdeekat with the usual anxiety that accompanies leaving your floating home in someone else's hands, but also with something new: confidence. She had carried us across an ocean. She would wait for us here, in this friendly harbour, while we went off to chase feathers and samba.

Because next on the list: Rio Carnival. After the Atlantic crossing, after Grenada's warm embrace, after everything, we deserved some feathers. Some samba. Some strategic forgetting of the less glamorous moments, like that incident with the pink cushion and the lee cloths that we have all agreed not to mention again.

Join us next week as we fly to Rio and discover whether Carnival can cure anything. Spoiler: it absolutely can, especially when accompanied by caipirinhas and the general Brazilian approach to life, which seems to be "dance now, worry later."

I think we are going to fit right in.

And the quip about the Long Goodbye?

I received a phone call from my Mum hours after the previous post... rather a brief one actually as normally we spend a long time chatting. This one carried the news of the passing of my father. I wanted to write down my thoughts.. wierdly I had been asking Ai how to descale a Delonghi coffee machine and I just typed into the space on my phone: "Hindsight is a beam of light on the past, showing you how life could have been had you had the foresight that makes hindsight look so obvious.

if you knew that you only had 5 more chances to see someone, to spend time with them, to hold them... what would you do?

many say they would never let go.

life is so transient, so ephemeral, so delicate, and yet we somehow manage to take it all for granted... like someone does to the simple things, like being able to walk. We accept it that it will always be. But time is a cruel master, a vicious deliverer of the realisation that things, sometimes, will not always be this perfect.

every hello contains within it a future goodbye. People we love are loaned to us rather than given. But if you have your health and people around you that you love, and they give you love in return, then you are truly blessed and you shoukd cherish every moment.

Grief steals ones voice. its like a sound killer that silences every effort to express oneself. I hear poignant music for this moment of sadness and loss.. and I am unable to vocalise without a dry hand seemingly coming across my throat that strangles my vocal ambitions into a quivering mess that used to be a coherent sound.

it seems my throat, like my ambitions for vocal recollection of loss has dried up The sad spittal gone, as if the moisture is in full demand by my eyes that dont want to stop crying salted rivers down my cheeks. I have never experienced familial loss as close as this.." Ai sympathised and said how beautiful those words were.. but I remained empty and like Auden's poem, life will never be the same and never be as full again.

RIP

Mr Allan Tredell - My Dad