Great Seamanship: Salt Water Spear Tips

Caught in a wall of lightning in a traditional sailing canoe, Thor F Jensen’s bid to sail around New Guinea is in jeopardy. Tom Cunliffe introduces this extract from Salt Water Spear Tips

When Thor F Jensen’s book, Saltwater and Spear Tips, arrived on my desk I was immediately fascinated by the subtitle, which reads: ‘The world’s first circumnavigation of the island of New Guinea in a traditional sailing canoe’. That’s not the sort of story you come across every day, so I opened the book and delved in to discover that this is a whole lot more than just a sailing epic.

It’s an adventure of the highest order. The boat herself, Tawali Pasana, is very much the real thing. She consists of an open, impossibly narrow hull, supported by two outriggers, built very much in the vernacular fashion to operate under sail and oar.

At the outset, Thor is no expert at sailing such craft, so his local crew are very much part of the action. Their expertise keeps the show on the road in the face of some awful weather and the daunting prospect of over 3,000 miles in tropical, often uncharted, waters.

Visit sailaufilm.com and you get to see what the boat and her people actually look like, and pick up all manner of in-depth information about the voyage. Right now we’re going sailing with them. They’re off the North coast of New Guinea, night is coming on and the prognosis is anything but promising…

Extract from Sail Water Spear Tips

Things never go as you expect on this voyage. Around 9pm the wind turned back to the south-east. This was what we wanted. “To hell with Yapen,” I thought aloud. I took a new bearing and we started running in a north-westerly direction towards Runi Island and its larger neighbour Wamsoi. The moon was increasing in shape and lit up the entire canoe; the wind was sweet and we covered good miles.

An hour later, Sanakoli had to throw his towel into the ring. “We take down sail and sleep.” I couldn’t blame him. He’d been steering almost all day and night, but we couldn’t rest now. We were still 30 miles from our goal.

I climbed out of the hull and up to the front of the canoe where Justin was laying. He was sleeping heavily. I woke him cautiously and asked if he could come and steer.

“We not there yet, hey?” he said, not trying to conceal his grumpy disposition.

“No, we still got four or five hours but the wind is good.”

He rubbed his nose and looked around. “OK, you give me one medicine bottle and I drink.” I pulled out a bilum, clinking with small glass bottles of energy drinks. My head was humming from lack of sleep so I also downed one of the syrup-like caffeine pick-me-ups as well. The two brothers swapped places and Tawali Pasana bravely resumed her course.

I was standing in the hull, locking the sheet with my left hand, my right hand either bailing water or looking at the compass to guide Justin’s course. There was supposed to be a lighthouse on a small island, Rasi, south west of Runi but I couldn’t see anything on the horizon except a few flashes of lightning in the distant sky.

The wind was still generous and Tawali Pasana’s bow chopped steadily through the black swell. The hours passed and there was still no sign of a lighthouse, instead the horizon had turned ink black, and the moon was smothered by ominous thick cloud. The flashes in front of us increased. It was now evident we were sailing straight towards a vast thunderstorm.

The next hours were of another world and the memory of that experience is still with me to this day. It was like being on the stage of a great theatre. The artillery barrage of lightning made everything contrast, changing from white to yellow to green. Huddled with the sailors in the hull, I was filled with fascination and wonder as well as dread and fear. The mast, with its metal point holding our flag and the wires running to the deck, was the only high point for 25 miles – this made Tawali Pasana a floating conductor, a lightning rod.

From the hull of the canoe, I could see it all unfolding – the clouds and the lightning made the sky almost seem tangible, as if we were sailing through a labyrinth of black caverns with testy giants throwing spears of electricity at each other. It was an otherworldly spectacle. It struck me with a sense of immeasurable gratitude to witness – but, at the same time, mindful of a sense of impending doom.

The blue wall

We were in the middle of an enormous bay and there were no other boats to be seen in the night. If there’d been fishermen brave or foolish enough to venture out, they’d have observed the silhouette of a triangular sail tracking steadily through the swells, a speck on a vast drape toning from dark blue to graphite grey.

In an instant, they would have seen the canoe lit up by a bright flash of white light, and surely these men would wonder how lucky this vessel was, gingerly plotting a course through the stratospheric havoc, avoiding the electrical supercharges. In the end, they might also doubt whether luck would follow this nimble vessel all the way to daybreak.

Suddenly, the lightning had stopped and everything was pitch black. I checked the GPS – only eight miles to Runi and safety. Then the sail flapped and the wind dropped. I turned my head north and saw another dark blue wall coming straight towards us. We’d been momentarily in the eye of the storm. Instantly my face was hit by a cold, humid blast of wind and the canoe started rocking. “Get sail down, get sail down,” Sanakoli hollered as he jumped up from the front and ran to the mast.

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The sail was let go and the spars hurriedly put on the canoe. In the same instant, we were hit by an even more massive blow. It was now so black that I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. The canoe was rocking wildly from side to side. The outrigger was dangerously facing the breaking waves, being pulled down with every hit.

Justin threw the rudder onto the platform and crawled into the canoe. Together we all held on to the spars and sail so they wouldn’t be washed overboard. I had no idea of how much pounding the outrigger could take before it broke off. I turned to ask my comrades, but words weren’t necessary, one look at their faces and I knew we were in great peril.

The waves kept crashing onto the outrigger and flooding over our platform. I asked Justin if we should call for help. He didn’t answer at first but then he said: “You call.” I first thought of the SOS button on our satellite device.

This would start a search and rescue operation, but in this part of the world such an operation could take a day to organise – or longer, and we were still afloat.

I then took out the VHF radio and called Pan Pan, the international signal for assistance. The canoe was jerking wildly. I kept on calling but there was no-one on the radio. I then turned my attention to the immediate dangers ahead; we were being pushed towards the rocky shores of Yapen Island. Sanakoli was bailing water and I told him to throw out the drift anchor.

I then looked at the GPS – the anchor didn’t seem to do much for our speed or position. We were being pushed sideways with three knots of speed. This meant we would reach Yapen in under five hours. We still had time and the outrigger was still holding. There was nothing we could do but hang on and wait out the dark. As the light slowly revealed itself over the horizon, my heart filled with hope. The wind decreased in velocity and the waves stopped breaking on us.

At six in the morning, we wrapped the sail and booms in rope and cautiously manoeuvred the heavy items onto the platform. It was a difficult task in the high seas. We were tired and cold but focus was paramount. Then we lifted up the storm sail, pulled it into place and hoisted it. It was such a revitalising experience hoisting that canvas; we were back in control.

The sea was still rough and the wind against us but Tawali Pasana was sailing and that was the most important thing. As Justin and Sanakoli navigated us through the still treacherous swell, I made us all a breakfast of biscuits, jam and peanut butter that was handed to the sailors which they quickly devoured without taking their eyes off the sea. Our perils were far from over.

Wrath of Zeus

My whole body was numb with fatigue. It was already afternoon. This was bullshit after such a night; we deserved to be on that island. It is right in front of us – so close but so far – white beach, coconut palms. There was no wind and, no matter how much we paddled, the current pushed us out. The sky was now red and we still hadn’t come any closer. On the contrary, the current had pushed us even further out. There were now 12 miles to the nearest island.

A pod of dolphins suddenly breached the smooth surface of the water with syncopated puffs from their blowholes. I turned off the music player and tried to catch them on camera but they disappeared. When the music was turned on again, they reappeared right next to the canoe (who would think that dolphins liked Johnny Cash?). As the light dimmed and we entered the fourth night of the crossing,

I saw something in front of us that made my hair stand on end and my heart sink.

With the new night, the wind returned. The fading darkness also revealed more ominous weather in front of us, with lightning flashes that were becoming more and more dramatic. The good thing was that we finally had wind again and Tawali Pasana was shooting steadily through the sea. The downside was that we were going straight towards the next belt of heavy rain. I don’t know what was running through the minds of my companions.

I thought, “Oh no, not another thunderstorm.” I asked Sanakoli, “Hey, can we tack up along the islands instead and then tack again in between them at the top?”

Sanakoli yelled back against the howling wind, “I don’t know, maybe the current will push us out?”

So, I said, “Let’s give it a try.” We turned the canoe and ran northward. After an hour it became evident that the current was still beating us. Dammit! We’d lost an hour and had to turn back towards the storm again.

It defied all my instinct to sail straight towards that menacing danger, but it was our only option: that or the full force of the Pacific Ocean.

As the hours passed, we slowly got closer to the islands – as did the thunderclouds. They were moving in from the other side now as well, as if they were growing out of Biak Island, which stood as a dark silhouette in the distance. It was as I imagined Mount Olympus, from where Zeus the King of the Greek gods would hurl his tridents of fire. As we passed below Rasi and its dead lighthouse, the waves fell and Tawali Pasana picked up speed.

Brooding horizon

The horizon in front of us had now turned into a massive, brooding, evil entity. I handed the last two ‘medicine bottles’ to Justin and Sanakoli, as they were the ones who were going to get us out of this alive. We tacked and aimed to hit Runi. The moon was covered by clouds and everything had turned grey. We had tacked too early and missed Runi. Suddenly, white waves were breaking in front of us. Sanakoli slacked the sail just in time and we made a quick turn back. I was ordered into the front to look for reefs.

On our second tack, we were on the right course for Runi but as we closed in on the small, dark island we encountered the great reef again. Justin spotted a small gap where the breakers looked less aggressive. Either side of us were ramparts of surging water powerful enough to turn our brave craft into splinters. The sailors yelled at each other, took the chance and, in a moment of seafaring brilliance, crashed Tawali Pasana through the shallow reef wall hurling broken corals in our wake.

The canoe was immediately lit up by a patch of luminous white sand lurking just below. We were inside the reef. There was some current flowing out between Runi to our right and Wamsoi to the left, but we were alive.

After half an hour of jig-jagging up through the channel, we finally reached dead calm water, paddling the last 50m to the sandy shores of Wamsoi Island. When Tawali Pasana had been secured with both a shore line and an anchor, it started to rain again – incessantly. We didn’t care. We just coiled up in our tarpaulin and passed out.

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