Once Is Enough

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After lunch I upset the linseed oil over the newly painted washboards. John didn’t even say, ‘Some mothers have them,’ as he was heard to do when I pushed a screwdriver through my finger in Honolulu. He said, ‘I’ve got to paint them again anyway,’ and Beryl thought that it would do the deck good. It was quite obvious that everyone was determined that ‘crew trouble’ wouldn’t mar the trip. The washboards never did get painted again because this was the last of the paint-drying days.

Next day we had a wind from the north-east and we made sail after breakfast, under full sail and the Genoa. The sea was calm and there was the same long swell. Tzu Hang sailed along unattended all day. I did ‘laze around all day’, but Beryl and John must always be at something. John had persuaded Beryl to knit him a Fair Isle jersey, and they were now busy trying to work out the pattern.

Pwe was full of activity also. She kept dancing up to us sideways, her ears back and her body arched, daring us to do something. It was about this time that she invented her main game. Siamese cats are not very original in their ideas about games, and this was inevitably a mouse game. She would fly up into my berth, a canvas bunk on two poles, and then stare over the pole at her victim. If he did not respond she would complain vocally, but none of us could resist her. The game consisted of running a finger along under the canvas, while she pounced on it. There were two variations; one was to run a finger along the side of the pole, while she hid inside and tried to grab it by putting her arm over the pole, and the other was for her to sit at the end of the berth and await for a finger to appear from under the canvas. This was extremely tense work and as the finger approached the end of the berth, excitement grew to fever pitch with both participants. She never let it get the better of her, and although she always caught it, she only dabbed the finger with a paddy paw. After she had caught it, she would swagger away, like a boxer who has floored his opponent.

In the afternoon we heard a soft sigh come faintly through the hatch, and then another, and another, and knew that we had a school of porpoises with us. We went on deck and John filmed them, crisscrossing in front of the bow and breaking water together in threes and fours. Sometimes they would haul off to one side or the other, and one of them came leaping along almost continuously out of the water, and falling over on to his side at each jump. They stayed with us for some time, but eventually tired of the play, and dropped astern, lazily rolling a dorsal fin out of the water, before they went off on some other business. Pwe stood with her forefeet on the cockpit coaming to watch them, with her ears pricked and in a rather alarmed and elongated attitude. They are horrible animals, she thinks, and will never venture further on deck if they are about. We always love their visits, they are such merry creatures, and feel strangely gratified by their attentions, and sorry when they leave.

The blue whale also seems to be a friendly animal, and is the only whale that likes to accompany us. We have seen quite a lot of them, sometimes longer than Tzu Hang, and they have often steamed alongside, to the delirious excitement of Clio’s small brown dog.

We were now 200 miles south of the south-east corner of New Zealand, in longitude 170° east and latitude 50° 30´ south, and the wind was freshening from the north-east. On January 8, with the wind still blowing freshly from the same quarter, we were nearly down to 52° south. We could not make much headway against a roughish sea, and the starboard tack would take us back to New Zealand, while the port tack would take us further down towards the iceberg zone. I felt that there were enough hazards without going further south, where we risked the chance of meeting up with some ice, and I didn’t want to lose any sea that we had gained. So we hove to and waited for the weather to change. For the last two days of the second week we lay hove to. It was the dreariest period of the whole trip: cold, and grey, and uncomfortable.