Mysteries on the scanner
Part three of our voyage to Fiji, aboard MY Olive, with Paul Henry and Skipper Dave Lloyd.
If the story of this voyage is split into three parts, our heroes spent the first third vomiting for New Zealand - almost at New Zealand - and they spent the second third staunchly smashing into a terrifying storm. Any kind person might give them a break in the final third and let them happily sail on to Fiji.
The storm had passed and we all happily sailed on to Fiji.
Happy? No? I thought not! Well, you’re in luck.
The sun was shining and the climate was noticeably warmer than the winter-time Auckland we’d long left behind. Any hint of the storm that had hit us overnight had dissipated, existing only as nightmarish memories.
We all happily sailed on to Fiji.
Only joking. Last time, I promise.
Peering out one of the three portholes in my quarters, I watched the sea water swamp the glass, as Olive swayed rhythmically with every swell. While mild compared to the terror of the previous night, those were still some big-as swells.
Up on deck, I took another look and came to a similar conclusion: big-as swells, but spaced far enough apart to apply a band-aid of mellowness to the day. A welcome shift.
Taking full advantage of these chiller conditions, Paul, Dave and I congregated in the saloon and began preparing for a game of Pub Quiz - Australia Edition. We’d play against one another, but there was a separate tally-of-interest: how many Aussie Rugby League questions could we collectively get right?1
Not one to enter a game with friends without a snack, I stepped up to the galley and pulled out the chopping board and a sharp knife to get slicing. If this was a cruel hidden camera show, this is the exact moment you’d choose to make the vessel roll. The sure-fire entertainment in me scrambling to keep myself stable, with a sharp kitchen implement flying free, would have audiences chortling with delight. As it happened, the boat did roll drastically at this very point on my timeline, but (sadly/fortunately) minus any hidden cameras.
It was a roll so unhinged and violent against the theme of the day, that it caught all of our attention. I looked out the galley window and saw the oh-so-familiar sight of water towering all around us. Deflated, my mind whispered the cliché line “here we go again” and, indeed, there we went again.
Paul and Dave bolted into action, moving to the wheelhouse to survey the situation. The boat rolled steeply again, the other way. This time, it was enough to send the nice, wooden and heavy galley table - which someone had prematurely untied - sliding across the boat towards me. I stopped it before it took out a vital organ and slid it back where it belonged. Then, squatting, with my left arm on the cupboards, right on the table, I held everything in position like a fleshy tribute to Christ The Redeemer.
“It’s a really confused sea!” remarked Dave. It really was.
I wish that had been the only time I’d heard Dave use the words ‘confused’ and ‘sea’ together in a sentence, but that was roughly the 887th time they’d come up on this trip. Readers of parts one and two may thank me for writing around them until now.
Paul had grabbed the wheel and was helming Olive manually. Waves smashed us from two separate directions, the ship comfortably riding over half of them, while the oddball biggies from a totally different direction collided with our port side, driving the extreme rocking. I had not felt Olive roll like this once on this passage.
It turns out no one had and Paul quickly spotted one of the reasons why.
“The stabilisers are off!” he said, perusing the small LCD control panel that commands these wonderful pieces of kit; wonderful pieces of kit that we were currently and mysteriously without.
“Oh shit!” I said from my Stretch Armstrong pose in the kitchen. A mild response, given I’d just about birthed a live kitten on the galley floor. I knew how much we’d relied on those magic fins and didn’t wish to think about the rest of the journey without them.
Fortunately, Paul, having worked one or two computers in his time, had a plan: turn them off and on again. Dave dashed to the engine room and powered them off. After waiting a minute or so - like all good computer restarts - he booted them back up. The screen in the wheelhouse showed a loading progress bar ticking up. It reached 100% and ‘ding!’2 we were back in business. Thanks for calling IT.
In the couple of minutes this had lasted, the ocean seemed to make its mind up and decide what it was doing. App crashes and shifting swells: everything happens all at once at sea.
Autopilot resumed its role and we returned to the saloon, eager to find out who knew the most about the Newcastle Knights.
Hours passed since the app crash and everything was running just fine. We were even heading almost directly towards Fiji! Almost.
“Guys, there’s a ship on the AIS!” called Paul. Dave and I bounded in to the wheelhouse, eager to see our first sighting of something inorganic, since that stray fishing buoy sidled past two days ago.
We crowded round the LCD touchscreen, marvelling at the find - a cluster of pixels, arranged into a tiny triangle. Gosh, we’d been at sea far too long.
Paul clicked on the ‘vessel’ and its information flashed up on the screen. Name not available, status: sleeping. It showed its speed was 0.1 knots - almost stationary - and it was roughly five miles off our port. It soon fell out of range, leaving us alone for yet another fun edition of Shandy O’clock as the sun set.
Two hours later, however, Paul called again. “That ship is back! And there’s another one with it.”
Having disappeared to the south of us, the mystery vessel was now apparently some ten miles northeast, off our starboard bow, and it now had a friend. Two triangles, what a day!
Both vessels3 had the sleeping status and were barely moving - quite impressive, when you think how one of them had seemingly travelled at least 15 nautical miles, around us and beyond, in just two hours! Was it a nuclear sub?4
“I’m going to turn on the Olive lights,” said Paul. “In case anybody out here thinks we might be Russian.”
‘Excuse me, what? Russian what?’ said what was left of my heart from this trip.
He pressed a blue button on his giant panel of custom blue buttons and several bright LEDs sparked to life on the sides of the ship, lighting up the name Olive. I walked out to the bow to catch a glimpse of the colourful spectacle. Even while potentially being stalked by military submarines, loaded with torpedos, hundreds of nautical miles from anything resembling safety, there was something quite calming about being out on deck under the night’s sky. It was the first time in days the conditions had allowed such a thing!
The others seemed to forget about the mystery flotilla. I didn’t. Pub Quizzing the evening away, I would occasionally leap up to go and check the screens.
“You’re becoming quite obsessed, Dunc,” Paul truth-bombed me. He was right, I was fascinated. If I had a scanner I could take hiking, one that showed me all the other hikers in the vicinity - um, creepy thought, but bear with me - and I went hiking in a really, really remote place, I would be both amazed if someone popped up on it and slightly engrossed as I nervously watched their movements. This was but a deep-sea equivalent and I was fully onboard with the awe.
As it happened, the triangles moved off the AIS screen and we never saw them again. At this point I feel I should apologise if you were hoping for a tale of two US submarines, out patrolling the South Pacific, that decide to investigate a strange ship on a weird zig-zag course to Fiji and, in doing so, send crew aboard, who find themselves sweet-talked by the TV celebrity owner, plied with alcohol-free shandy (just one between them) and end up returning to their vessels with the feeling they’re waking up from an awesome dream. I am sorry.
In fact, the disappearance of those enigmatic triangles bookended our dramas at sea. If this were a musical, we would have woken the following morning to an overly upbeat swing number, danced our way around the boat, wiping encrusted salt from all the stainless parts with raised arms and a triumphant foot-tap, before gathering on the foredeck to give several grinning bows5. The show was over.
Tuesday was our final full day at sea and with it came a couple of notable events. Firstly, we stayed on a true bearing to Fiji, travelling a solid 7 knots, for 15 hours straight; a passage record. Secondly, Tuesday was the first day since our departure that I ate all three regular meals of breakfast, lunch and dinner. I wanted to, as well.
As night fell, the GPS showed we were just miles from Kadavu Island, one of the Fiji’s southernmost islands. If daylight had waited around for us, we might have been yelling “LAND AHOY!”, but it didn’t. We would have to wait until morning for our first sight of land in nine days. Just one sleep to go.
“LAND AHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOY!” I found myself shouting at the glass of the portholes in my room, groggily stirring from my sleep. It was hilly and rolling, its prominent shapes looming, but still a long, long way away. No matter: we’d been at sea for days, what’s a few more hours?
Those hours really passed swiftly and the beautiful sight of Fiji’s largest island, Viti Levu, grew larger and larger. Grassy hills, interrupted by the occasional giant black patch where a fire had been set, soon dominated the horizon. It had been ordeal to get to this point, but there was finally nothing else to look at but land!
Sea-worn, well spent and salted all over, Paul Henry, Dave Lloyd and Watch Officer Dunc Wilson migrated to the upper deck to see Olive into Port Denarau. They all happily sailed on to Fiji.
Next time: I try hiking from the sanitised marina town of Port Denarau to the town centre of Nadi - a walk I guarantee no one ever does and you’ll see why!
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Always none.
Sound effect added for, well, effect. It was silent in reality.
If indeed they were vessels and we hadn’t imagined them - anything was possible at this point!
A quick glance at marinetraffic.com in this area of the Pacific shows a lot of unspecified vessels, so it appears we were most likely suffering from supercharged excitement over nothing, a common affliction caused by ‘spending too long at sea’.
A bow on the bow, getit?