A low moment occurs on the third day out. The government allows for a three-day search, and when we don’t see any planes or ships, it comes as a blow. By the fourth day, we know the government has called off the search. That’s a worry, ’cause, by then, we’re dangerously low on water. I’m so sure of them finding us within three days. I keep on sayin’, “It’ll be right; it’ll be okay.” Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. Being the ever-optimistic new chum, I think it’ll be so easy to spot us from a plane. A plane covers so much area. Now we have to seriously ration the remaining water. We’re clean out of food. You can go for some time without food, no worries, but without water you are up shit creek.
When high moments come, it’s usually in the afternoon, after battling with the sun all day. When it sets, we have a good drink. Little things cheer us, like when we find a floating onion. Anyone would think we’d hit the jackpot. We’re rich, even though the onion is half-rotten. Then it rains, so we have water, the onion, plus a coconut. This is the first time we get a buzz. The rain sometimes comes in tandem with a really bad storm; it makes you paranoid. Showers arrive with a really nice wind; you feel your skin softening up, and your eyes opening.
I left everything behind in Tarawa, including my razor, and my smokes. It doesn’t matter that you can’t smoke, ’cause, when you’re dry from the heat, and you have a cigarette, you’ll be dyin’ for something to drink, that’s for sure. So I have to give up things. I don’t need booze, nor do I need to get on a plane; I don’t need to have a good time. Before this happened, I’d be out with my mates; we’d smoke the odd joint. It’s nothin’ much, just a bit of grass. We couldn’t do anything, if we weren’t smokin’. If we’re watchin’ a movie, or out on a bush walk, we take along some grass. Now that we’re lost, I don’t need it. When I get home, my mates’ll say, “Oh, man, you must’a gone crazy out there, not smoking!” Grass is the last thing on my mind.
What I don’t fathom is nobody comin’, but then, bein’ lost in the islands is an everyday event. I hear them sayin’, “Ah, they’ll beach up somewhere; they’ll come across one of the islands, and they’ll beach up.” People usually get lost in larger boats than this, and avoid having to brave terrible storms stuck in a little tinnie. I hear people sayin’, “They’re gone! Those guys are done, for sure!” Especially bein’ this time of the year, when the weather is so difficult to fathom; weather is up and down this time of the year, and people don’t even think about travelling. We gambled from the very moment we decided to take off. I have faith in my uncle; he knows the score. He’s done it many times, and he’s been lost for months. We place our trust in this man. The problem lies in having a really small tinnie, with a small engine. I had doubts as we left. We should have angled the boat in a different direction; it was the wind and the waves pushing us off course. There was the terrible moment we came across the winking lights of Tarawa. So tantalisingly close, and we didn’t have the fuel to reach it. That was tough, lookin’ at the lights, driftin’ further and further away.
My youngest aunt, Tiene, said from the get-go, we shouldn’t be on this tinnie. “You should stay here!” She’s really getting up my mum, “Leave Ben here, and go yourself!” I always stay with Tiene when I come back. My mum makes this plan to go with another aunt and her friends to Maiana, and Tiene isn’t happy about it.
Now she’ll be going bananas.
Now we’re stuck at sea, the main worry is our transport – seein’ to it that the tinnie remains intact. The next worry is storms: that we can battle storms, do it right, so that we might pull through. Running out of water is a constant problem, and then there’s food. We’re all the time thirsty, and I keep sayin’ to my uncle, “I need to have a drink.”
“Yeah I know, you can never get enough water. If you really feel you need to drink, then you better have one.”
“Will you have a drink?”
“Nuh.”
So I say, “Nuh.” We’ll fight it out.
You reach the point where you can’t fight it anymore. We need a drink about ten o’clock, when the sun comes up. You have a drink and try to hang in, cover up against the sun. I’m talkin’ about a mere half an inch of water, maybe a cupful. You just run it down your throat, and spray it around your mouth, getting some moisture. The next drink is at lunchtime, about three o’clock.
There are days when you get some relief from the heat, and you don’t feel too bad. At the beginning, we had a banana in the morning, and again in the evening. We tried saving the bananas, but seawater got in, and ruined them. We tried saving the skins, but they soon dried up, so it was like eating salty cardboard. You couldn’t even chew it.
Every time we go through a storm, we meet a current moving through, and it carries rubbish, bits of rags, bags, ropes, logs, or maybe we even bump into a coconut. There’s always little fish hanging around. They come to the side of the boat. I’m pretty handy at catching small fish. We have a skinny line, handy for small fish, and a thick line for big fish. The bait we use is what we cut from the bottom of our feet. You can catch small flying fish with skin from your feet. We catch birds, we gut them, and fish come nibbling on the guts. Birds hunt the fish; you wait for them to land, and then slowly creep along the side of the tinnie, grabbing them by the legs. We rip the birds apart, but keep the feathers, using them as flies for bigger fish, like Wahu. A Wahu looks like a trevally, only larger, with a big forehead.
Out here, with so much time on our hands, your thinking apparatus tap-dances around the whole shop, slippin’ an’ slidin’ in the present one second, then into the past in a flash. This is maybe the way a mind deals with a crisis. I think of ways of changing my life. If I ever get out of this, maybe I’ll give up on drinking, thoughts like that. When I arrive back, and I see my mates, they’ll be sayin’, “Jeez, we’re glad you’re still the same!” I have friends who are into drugs, and others who are straight out pisspots. I’ll still hang out with the mates who are into drugs. I might have a toke with them occasionally, a joint, but I won’t want to go back to poppin’ pills with them. “Look,” I’ll say, “I’ve run out of luck. I’ve been through a few dramas, and I’m not gonna push it any further.”
“Ah, come on, Ben!”
Then I’ll think about Neville, and how good he was at locating bags of speed, bags of grass. He’d say, “I found something of yours, and I’m bloody disappointed. I’m gonna flush it down the toilet!”
“Don’t do that; they’ll come an’ kill me!”
This sea is about survival. It’s a fight each day, every moment. Whatever faces me, I have to fight it through.
I’m surprised how burred I get, thinkin’ about how we might be rescued. I can’t believe I’m still here, actually pulling through with each breath. You have to keep lookin’ around, if you want to survive. The birds are here, and they survive on fish in the water. We grab a bird, and we eat it; normally, you wouldn’t think of putting raw bird in your mouth, but that’s what you do. When things are bad, we even eat the build up of algae off the side of the tinnie. There’s no hesitation when it comes to putting foreign things in your mouth.
On day six we come across a floating line of rubbish, with lots of fish amongst it, and that’s a surprise. We grab a stick and pull some items on board. Every month, the big waters come along and carry all this stuff out to sea, or maybe it’s been dumped off a ship. We haul in some bits of plastic and sticks and construct a make-shift shelter from the sun. We call it our cubbyhole. I pull in a whole heap of thongs and bind them together to make a pillow.
On this day we shift gear into another world, leaving the days we knew further and further behind. There’s not a lot to do in a small tinnie; you just sit and wait, and hope. You’re reduced to a small area, shared between three people, and there’s very little else in that space. I watch the ocean. The waves are like mountains, shifting mountains of water. I watch them, and I try to give them a name. “Here comes the Eiger followed by Mount Everest.” I expect to see something coming over the next watery crest, a city maybe, made out of wobbly jube buildings, floating over the next rise. It’s like hypnosis. We’re in a strange zone of living. Nobody talks; we’re off in our own thoughts.
I have plenty of thoughts, like, about my family, and Mum, ’cause she has high blood pressure, and worries about me, and she’s, by now, on the way to a nervous breakdown. I hope she thinks I’m still alive out here. I think about Neville and his family in Armidale, knowing they’ll be doing their best for me. They’ll be thinkin’ about me at work. I’m due back in a couple of days. I have two dogs. What’s happening to my dogs? I hope Neville is feeding my dogs. I try not to think too much about things ’cause it can deliver you in the dumps, and you end up bein’ emotional. Once you’re emotional, a grey blanket of depression drops over your head, it’s hard to swallow, and you get worked up, scared and upset; it’s really tough snapping out of it. I start thinkin’ about my son, and how I haven’t seen him in a long time. I think about The Alice and Tennant Creek. I imagine myself back in normal society, drivin’ through the red desert dust to Darwin, or just bein’ in Alice, hangin’ round, slippin’ into the Tennant Creek Club for a fat steak, with salad and fries, doin’ all the things I take for granted. I think then, this is it. In a few days, if nothin’ happens, I’m gonna be taken out of this world.
My mind is back on the line of rubbish. It brings all sorts of different fish. They hang around with the rubbish. As they go by the boat, they’re automatically attracted to something bigger; they come to the boat for protection against larger predators. We have lots of little fish hangin’ around, but they aren’t quite big enough. Then the birds start flyin’ around us. They pull up close, and we catch some that land. One is coloured dead white, while others are jet black, with a stripe of silver. The birds are pretty alert, so you have to creep up on ’em, wait until they land. Catching a bird and keeping it alive for twenty minutes to half an hour can take your mind off how bad things are. It’s like havin’ your own little pet. Then when you’ve gotta kill it to stay alive, it’s hard. A thing about the birds is, when you pluck ’em, you get itchy. At the time we’re buggered, so we don’t bother to work out why we feel itchy.
Each day is different. There’s always some little drama, somethin’ that goes wrong. Sometimes you wake up, and you get the shits, ’cause Taea bumps you with his elbow during the night. He invades my little space. Most days you wake up, turn your head, and say hello.
After the torture of the equatorial sun, comes the agony of the night. The chill wind enters our bodies like thieves, moving down through flesh, until it reaches our very marrow. We take on then the shapes of statues, clinging to each other, pressing for the least amount of warmth. There’s no embarrassment in these embraces; it’s a way of staying alive. There’s no sign of faces in the inky darkness, and we just lie that way, clinging for dear life, until the light of a new day re-enters our world.
Uncle’s attitude is usually not to talk much, ’cause he’s mostly worried, I guess. He keeps askin’ how we’re feelin’, an’ sayin’ if we can’t handle it, we should take a drink. If you can, then you don’t have a drink. Taea is restless, moody, and says, “F—k, what’s goin’ on?” My attitude is similar to Taea’s, except I talk a lot more, like, to my uncle, things, like, what did you do when it happened to you? I ask Koraubara shit loads of questions. What did you do when you saw a ship? Did you wave, or just wait? If one comes along, they might think we’re just fishin’ if we wave.
We see our first ship on day seven. It looks like a yacht at first, but as it pulls closer, we can see it’s a ship, a Korean fishing trawler. We see Chinese writing across the bow. It’s eight in the morning, and we feel pretty good, energetic, ’cause we just had a feed of birds and raw fish. It doesn’t matter what it tastes like, it won’t kill your tastebuds; they’re down, anyway. You just swallow it with a struggle, you don’t have a choice but to put it in your mouth; it’s slimy, and it feels as if it’s still alive in your mouth.
It’s a nice, calm day as the Korean boat comes straight towards us, getting closer and closer. I grab the stick and Uncle’s sarong, ready to use it as a flag. I start waving, and the boat gets even closer, before it swings away onto a new course.
“What’s goin’ on?”
My uncle knows, ’cause he’s been in this situation before. The boat is no more than six hundred metres away. I see the faces of the people looking at us.
“What the f—k are they doing?”
My uncle is quiet when I look at him.
“Just keep wavin’.”
“Do we crank the engine, and go after ’em?”
“You know what’s gonna happen if we start the engine?”
“No, what?”
“If they decide to help, they’ll come straight over.”
Taea is climbin’ all over the tinnie like a hyped up monkey.
“What are we doin’?”
“We go after ’em!”
I crank the engine, and the fish disappear immediately from under the boat. Off we go, chasing them. I’m overtaking the Koreans, getting close, but then they go for another course, clapping on more speed, and buggering off. Taea and me, we whistle and yell until our lungs are sore. Uncle comes and turns off the engine. I throw down his sarong angrily.
“F—k! What’s the matter with ’em?”
“Listen, fellers. That’s exactly what happened to us. We came across heaps of boats that did just that.”
“What in the hell are they thinkin’?”
“They save our skins, and get hauled for bein’ in illegal fishin’ waters? No way!”
This really wrecks us. We hardly speak to each other for a long time after, but we know now how much we figure in this world. It kicks in really bad, wrecks our whole day. I look over the side of the boat, and the fish are gone, the little fish that amused us through our days. All gone. Our system is wrecked. Birds are flyin’ straight past now; they’re not circlin’ round us, or nothin’. We don’t talk until the sun goes down, until we notice rain clouds banking about six in the afternoon; so we go rain chasin’. We’re stuffed in the water department; down to no more than a couple of inches in the bottles. We’re in the kind of mood where you feel so bad you just have to laugh. We joke that there’s nothin’ much we need. We don’t need a three-course meal, with champagne and caviar, or a walk in the park. Who needs to call up a chick on his mobile? The rain chasin’ gives us something to do. I crank up the engine, knowing we can’t afford to waste petrol; we need it for when an island pops up. One thing you should never do is go chasin’ rain clouds. It’s pretty tricky, especially when they’re movin’ in the ocean. You come up to a cloud, get lined up, and it doesn’t rain from the front end, it rains in the back. You take off, reach that area, and it starts rainin’ where you just left. Clouds are weird things: they act like little bundles, and they pour down like it’s meant to rain on that very spot. It’s not a smart idea to go chasin’ rain. We eventually find a dash of rain, and we stop the engine. We scramble to our chosen positions and start licking, sucking at the tinnie for the least bit of moisture. Uncle came up with that solution. We heard him one time, heard this slurping sound, like, he’s bent over the engine, sucking at the boat. This is a real comedy, man! He’s even found ways of getting to tricky spots, say in a corner, and he’s in there, tonguein’ away, and it turns out to be salty! He’s a funny bugger, this uncle of mine.
On this particular night, someone pisses in the boat. I know it isn’t Uncle; it’s more probably Taea, but I can’t be a hundred per cent certain. I smell my pants, and they definitely have piss on them, and that piss has gone everywhere, mixing in with the salt water.
“Somebody pissed themselves in the boat, and that’s pretty f—king disgusting! You can just as easily piss over the side. Why not piss in the water container; why not piss in that?”
That’s what we do in future, piss in the container. With crappin’, you hang off the side of the tinnie, in a really awkward position. Another way is to let go in the water. Taea, the pissin’ feller, stands guard, watchin’ out for sharks. That’s what happens for the first few days, but soon, crappin’ is nothin’ but a memory. It’s goodbye to crappin’. I can’t believe it!
“F—k! Nothin’ is comin’ at all!”
You try to do a crap, but there’s only a little heap, not enough to feed to the fishes.
“What’s goin’ on? I’m not shittin’!”
“When it comes, it comes,” says my uncle.
“No worries. You promise?”
I keep lookin’ at my piss, how it’s gone from yellow to dark brown, like soya sauce. So I start freakin’ out in that department, too. I start thinkin’ about my health, and the circulation of my blood inside my body; I’m shuttin’ down. I even struggle to get up, I crawl around, and when I do stand up, I’m lookin’ to stop tippin’ over the side.
Stories are our lifeblood. We go through so many stories, we run out of the energy to talk. Plenty of talking in the morning, before the sun starts comin’ down on us. Then we fade away into our zombie-like lives. If you have any energy, you use it to tell the other fellers you can’t handle the heat anymore. I’m peeling heaps. My skin is peeling all over the shop.
“I’m gonna jump over the side, and have a swim. I can’t handle this heat anymore.”
“Do you think you’ll have enough energy to hop back in the tinnie?” asks Taea.
You don’t want to be a pain in the arse, ’cause the tinnie can easily tip over.
“Okay,” says Taea, “go for it!”
Taea starts watchin’ round for sharks, as I move with great relief through the cool, blue water.
With boredom, the thing to do is keep on thinking. You look at the birds, or see a splash in the water. Maybe a whale will come by, or a bunch of dolphins, and then you know it’s safe to swim. When the dolphins rock up, or there’s a storm around, we hop in the water, and go crazy, and then realise the dolphins have pissed off, and we all yell, “Shit!” and hop back in the tinnie.
As for sleeping, I don’t know I’ve been doing it until I wake up. I drop off, my eyes go shut, and I have a dream. When I ask the fellers how long I’ve been sleeping, they say they don’t know. It can be ten minutes or ten hours, for all I know. Then I get hit by a freak wave, “Bang!”
“Aaahhh!”
Taea and Uncle look at each other, and have a bit of a grin.
“That’s good, Ben. You’re hangin in there, okay?”
We sit there and giggle, have a bit of a laugh and burst into song.
“We are sailing, we are sailing
Home across the sea
We are sailing, stormy waters,
To be near you, to be free.”
We aren’t doin’ too bad. What we need is more rain. Then we can fill up the containers and other little bottles we collected. If we can do that, we’ll be very comfortable, we’ll be laughing.
On the twelfth day rain starts building, and then it comes down; it just happens. It pours like a bastard, and we’re smiling and drinking at the same time. I save the water with a small piece of tarpaulin, steer it into the containers. We laugh as we wash out the smell of petrol and bacteria.
The “praying business” starts up pretty much after we accept the fact we’re lost. It’s an interesting daily happening, depending on whose turn it is to pray. We do it in the morning, at lunch, and late in the afternoon. It becomes a regular thing, along with counting the days. We use an old screwdriver to mark the day on the inside of the hull. My uncle is good at prayin’. We both copy Uncle, ’cause he’s good at doin’ it.
“Dear Lord, here we are again this afternoon. As you can see, we’re still sufferin’, and hangin’ in here. We pray for the things we really need, more food, and more rainwater. We pray for the families we left behind. If you can do something, let ’em know we’re doin’ well, we’re not doin’ too bad out here. Please give us some hope. We’re in a place you know about, it belongs to you, and if you can help us out with the weather, help us out with our health; that’ll be good.”
Koraubara pauses as he runs out of requests to the powers above.
“Is there anything you want to ask for, Ben?”
“Yeah. Give us one more tomorrow.”