Kijana by Jesse Martin Read Free Book Online Page B

on the threshold of an amazing adventure, free to go wherever we wanted and do anything we wanted, yet all we could feel was – sad?
    Being the lucky ones about to sail the world hadn’t made us immune to being sad. In fact, I suspect it had made us more susceptible to every emotion. It was as though we had been on a high for weeks, and now that we were finally on our way we were hit by an amazing downer as the reality of actually being out there and doing it dawned on us. With so much freedom at the tips of our fingers it scared us a little.
    Josh dried his watering eyes and continued. ‘I just don’t want to let everyone down – the office and all the time they’ve spent away from their families. All the hard work we and everyone else have put in. I just hope it’s worth it, that people can say they’re glad we did it.’
    The wind picked up slightly that night, but over the next four days our slow progress did little to lift our mood. One night we actually drifted backwards.
    On one of these calm days Beau cooked a breakfast of bacon and eggs to everyone’s delight except Josh’s. As our resident vegetarian, Josh was the butt of jokes by Beau and I over what he could expect to be served up in Papua New Guinea.
    â€˜What are you going to do when they serve you up a slice of wild pig from a wedding ceremony?’ we’d ask. ‘You can’t say no ’cos it’ll be an insult.’
    However, he had a good answer: ‘If it’s part of a cultural experience then I’ll try it.’ It soon became his mantra.
    On the fifth day out of Sydney the wind returned and filled our sails and lifted our spirits.
    The crew looked to me as their sailing teacher, but as much as I told them about how I did things on Lionheart , I was learning just as much from them. I discovered some of the crew were better at doing tasks than others. I found that I had to make a conscious decision not to always ask Beau and Josh to do the work. They’d spent more time on the boat, so had more sailing knowledge, and they also attacked each job with more enthusiasm. My major concern was that if one crew member began to dominate a particular job, the others would leave them to do that job all the time. I wanted everyone to be competent in all tasks, just as I had been forced to be on Lionheart . In an emergency, whoever was on watch had to be able to fix the situation.
    It didn’t take long before I noticed Mika and Nicolette were beginning to drop behind in the number of tasks they performed, relative to Beau and Josh. They were seasick again as soon as we hit some swell, taking comfort in dramamine and spending a lot of time in their cabin.
    On the sixth day out of Sydney I woke to shouts of distress. Nicolette was on watch and I dashed up the steps to find her leaning over the stern. The inflatable dinghy had come loose and was dragging behind us, held to Kijana by only one hook. The other hook had straightened out under the weight of the dingy as it bashed about in the messy sea.
    Soon everyone was up on deck to check out the commotion, Josh with the camera rolling. The sea was very messy, tossing Kijana about and damaging the inflatable dinghy as it bashed against the hull. I grabbed a rope and gave one end to Mika while the others unhooked the dinghy until it dropped freely into the water. We weren’t moving quickly enough to worry about losing it, but there wasn’t enough time to sit and think about it either.
    I grabbed the other end of the rope and jumped onto the upturned dinghy. I was in my underwear and the water was freezing. I tied the rope to the dinghy before Kijana travelled too far away, while Beau tied the other end to Kijana . We dragged the inflatable dinghy alongside Kijana and tried to lift it onto the deck, but in the choppy sea the dinghy proved too heavy. Our only option was to tow the dinghy to land so we could lift it back on board and fix some of