Four men on a raft: snookered at sea
At the age of 84, Anthony Smith is crossing the Atlantic on a raft. This week his crew battle with a broken rudder, and enjoy life atop an ocean of food chains.
Anthony Smith's raft bobs on the ocean 'like a bouncy castle'
12:52PM GMT 14 Feb 2011
To be on a raft at sea is to be on a snooker table whose frame rests on a bouncy castle. The structure stays happily intact, but the actual angle at any moment is the castle's choice. As for the poor balls, they go wherever gravity dispatches them, be they a desired pen, a pair of specs, a pan of food or the mere human in pursuit.
Unfortunately it is only the four of us who can grab a passing handhold. The pen, specs, food and whatever are only halted when some other thing gets in their way, whether mast, cabin, water barrel or circumferential netting.
The human balls change their colour according to circumstance. A black period definitely ensued when I realised a pernicious pharmacy had sold me a stack of hearing aid batteries all empty of energy. From now on, I will live more with my own thoughts than those expressed by others. Further blackness ensued when the toilet roll, neatly encased within several plastic bags, managed to acquire water donated by a passing wave.
Of course, there are better times too. Sunset and sunrise are always a joy, whether pink or blue or just suffused with yellow. Reds are the most common. The sun is the dominant feature of our days, though at night a zillion stars try to outdo in their numbers the single globe that highlights day.
As expected, there seem to be few fellow travellers on these waters. A single cruise liner has been spotted; a few aircraft have strobed their passage through the sky; and a gathering of dolphins once graced the water ahead before departing, sad perhaps that we had no great bow wave with which to impel their bodies into extra bursts of speed.
No whales as yet, and it might therefore seem that the ocean is a lifeless place.
Not a bit of it. We placed a plankton net in our rear, waited five minutes, and then hauled in a cornucopia of living things. There were little shrimp-like copepods and amphipods, each paddling so busily until warmth, I assume, got the better of them. There were Volvox lookalikes, round balls of little creatures fused together to make a sphere of life rather than a separated quantity of what books like to call animalcules. Undulating past them were the smallest of jellyfish, less than a millimetre in diameter, but precise replicas of their bigger brethren we may see when swimming nervously among them or treading between dead giants washed up along the shore.
An ocean, in short, is alive with food chains. The smallest, perhaps mere eggs or larvae, are eaten by those a trifle larger. These are then consumed by creatures higher up the ladder, and so on, until major animals are doing all the eating. It is a world on its own down there, beneath our raft, beneath the turbulence, and whose apparent lifelessness is nothing of the kind.
All of this was forgotten when our rudder broke last week. A steel pinion snapped and its attached marine ply then broke, half of it to float away. Tragedy? Yes, but not without a happy remedy.
My three crew members jury-rigged a replacement, more of a steering oar than a rudder, but in fact the four daggerboards suddenly proved their worth.
More like tabletops with us than any weapon, these have been constructed in ancient Peruvian fashion near the four corners of our craft. We immediately discovered, by lowering one or two of them, that we could steer effortlessly in the required direction.
At the moment we are heading more or less south-west to gain advantage of the trade winds which will take us towards our destination on the ocean's other side. Our snooker platform is therefore doing as it should, even if the balls sometimes go merrily elsewhere, whatever their colour and the time of day.
That is the nature of the craft with which we are voyaging so contentedly. Being on a raft is amazingly pleasing, whatever the turbulence.