Casting Off Read Online Free Page B

surface.
    ‘I’ve never seen yellow sea before,’ I said. ‘Brown, maybe, off the east coast of England, but not yellow.’
    ‘It’s the palm oil companies,’ Steve said. ‘When they cut down the rainforest for their plantations, the soil gets washed into the rivers and then the seas.’
    ‘So when we get past the rivers the water will turn blue again?’ I asked.
    ‘Yes, it should do.’
    ‘Great.’ Back on perfect-adventure-setting track.
    During the three-day passage we fell into a rough routine. We were both awake during the day, mainly motoring along because there was little wind. Steve would be downstairs doing ‘boat
jobs’ while I was on deck, keeping an eye on the autopilot and looking out for ships or big floating logs the size of entire trees that we really didn’t want to hit. Every now and then
Steve would stick his head up and declare it ‘a sailing breeze’ and the sails would come out and the noisy engine go off and we’d sail in blissful silence for a while until the
winds died and the engine had to come on again.
    He taught me how to use the radar, how to trim the mainsail to get the best out of the light winds, to tell if one of the rare ships we saw was on a collision course. He was a very experienced
sailor and I was a little bit in awe of him and flattered that he felt confident enough in me to let me keep watch over his boat alone. At night, he’d get some rest while I stayed awake on
watch until 3am or 4am. Then I’d try to sleep but I was usually woken up by the heat and bright sunlight a couple of hours later so I’d invariably doze off in the afternoon as well.
Sleeping at odd times meant missing meals. If we were both awake one of us would cook something, which was a bit of a struggle as I’d forgotten to tell Steve I was a vegetarian before I
arrived and he had an aversion to most forms of carbohydrate, except beer.
    ‘What do you mean, you don’t eat rice?’ I asked, incredulous. ‘You live in Asia.’
    ‘I just don’t like the stodge. I need protein.’
    As well as rice, his list of foods he didn’t like to eat much of included pasta and bread – basically the main parts of a vegetarian diet, apart from, obviously, vegetables. He loved
meat. Apparently we’d have to work out some recipes both of us could stomach, once we could get to the shops. The boat’s stocks were meat-heavy and so for the first two days, excepting
the tiny plane meals, I ate only one tortilla filled with pinto beans and cheese, a packet of three dry crackers and a salad made of raw cabbage, long-life feta and half an apple.
Good chance
to lose a few pounds, being as how I’ll be mainly living in a bikini
, was my first thought. It was swiftly replaced by painful, gnawing hunger.

    Those three days were my introduction to the boat and how everything worked. I’d spent a reasonable amount of time on yachts by then and I knew to expect a run-through from the skipper on
the use of various equipment like radar, autopilot, the man-overboard system, which rope controls what, where the switches are for the navigation lights, and so on. On
Kingdom
there was a
fair bit more to the induction, especially where the saucepans were concerned:
    ‘The washing-up has to be done in a specific way,’ Steve said. ‘First wash with salt water, then rinse with a minimum of fresh. And remember which foot pump controls which
tap.’ I nodded. The list continued.
    ‘Always fasten doors open on their catches.’
    ‘No metal implements to be used in the saucepans.’
    ‘No hot saucepans to be placed on the work surface.’
    ‘Pans and lids are to be placed separately back into their original plastic wrapping after use and stacked in precise order inside each other before being returned to the
cupboard.’
    ‘On deck, handles stay in the winches but must point forwards at all times.’
    ‘All ropes must be folded into “elephant’s ears”.’
    ‘Everything on deck – cushions, dan buoy, spare