A Twist of Sand

The unpleasant taste left in our mouths by Stein's visit was to worsen a day or two later on the fishing grounds into something more sinister, almost a sailor's superstition that he was a harbinger of evil, through a strange incident. I took Etosha out into deep water at the spot where I judged the plankton, which comes up in the cold currents from the Antarctic, would be when it meets the warmer seas of the tropics. Judging the right place -- in that wilderness of waters -- is the measure of a skipper's success as a trawlerman, and it may mean everything between prosperity and adversity. Skippers have their favourite (and jealously-guarded) secrets of wind and weather which will bring the fish. One I know worked out his bearings on the fishing grounds by a thermometer trailed in the water astern, at a depth of four fathoms. He claimed it worked, and his holds were certainly never empty,

I had tried in vain to replace the boats smashed in the eruption, but had had to be content with a double-ended substitute which turned out to be a surf-boat. It was certainly quite appropriate to its work in breakers, but not much good for the open sea. The lack of boats was to play a big role in the events which later took their toll of lives.

The net had been out since dawn and Etosha was patrolling the great open South Atlantic with the leisurely gait of a policeman on beat. It was about two bells in the first dog watch. And a policeman would not have seen anything to disturb his thoughts in the calm, easy swell, with the sun dropping towards St. Helena far in the west. We'd had a fair haul of pilchard, stockfish and maasbanker, but not what I was hoping for when we met that elusive marriage-point of plankton and tropic waters.

"All aboard for the yachting trip," said John lazily, yawning and stretching himself on the bridge-rail. He swept the horizon with his eyes.   "Not a damn thing in sight --  I all alone in a wide, wide sea!'

The immensity and stillness of the coming evening had put all thoughts of Stein away and I would not have wished anything but the present idyll of sea and sky merging, somewhere in the east, into Africa.

"I think we must be a little too far south," I murmured. "The water's probably a bit cold for the fish."

"Lucky little planktons," grinned John. "Nothing to darken the shadow of their one-cell lives. Oh happy, happy plankton! Why not try the thermometer trick?"

"To hell with that," I said, falling into his easy mood. "Why don't we pour some whisky over the stern and make them all drunk, and then we can be sure of catching the drunken fish at the end of the bender."

The helmsman eyed me quizzically, not knowing whether this was the white man's humour or not.

"At this rate we'll be out here for a week," replied John. "Hallo, a stranger coming into the nest."

I followed his pointing finger, but it was a minute or so before I saw the flash of white in the south-west. I think the habit of vigilant, never-ceasing watchfulness, the hall-mark of the submariner, had become an unconscious part of John's life. The sea -- it always is the enemy.

I reached for my binoculars and focused them on the white triangle rising above the sea.

"Pirates in these waters," I remarked, still in the easy mood of the last hour of daylight. "A windjammer. Stand by to repel boarders."

John watched the sail rising quickly.

"She's crackin' it on, all right," he said, "and I'll eat my boots if she isn't that old Grand Banks schooner from Luderitz."

I kept my glasses on her.

"She's got a wind that we haven't," I said.

I saw the gleam of flying jib narrow, the sun catching it with a yellowing shaft.

"She's altering course towards us," I observed. "She was lying a couple of points nearer north a moment ago."

"I'd have loved to have seen her in her heyday and not under Hendriks," said John watching the lovely sight of a sailing-ship at sea under full sail. "They say, though, he's not such a bad skipper for a Coloured."

"A throwback to some of his Malay ancestors. They love the sea," I said.

The three masts of the schooner were in full view now, although her hull, dark-painted, was not clear to the eye yet.

"He'll sail the masts right out of the old Pikkewyn if he's not careful," said John. "I hate his guts for those jackyard topsails, though. Why couldn't he leave her clean, as she was ? I never thought I'd see her under three jibs, though. That old hull must have a lot of life in it yet to stand ail-that sail."

I smiled at John's fastidious appreciation of sail.

The old Grand Banks schooner was a brave sight. The sails were yellow Bushman-ochre on a ground of grey, for all the world like the rock the old primitives used as their desert canvas. The slant of the sun and the distance concealed her age and neglect. She was a lovely, living thing, young and alive in her glory.

"She's coming our way -- look at the bone in her teeth," cried John as a nicker of white creamed under her forefoot. "Eleven knots, if she's moving at all."