One night we went to take in the fishing lines. We had left it pretty late and in the darkness they felt strangely heavy, but without the tug of a fighting fish.
‘Feels like a plastic bag,’ Robert said.
The bag spat a jet of water at us, soaking our heads as we looked over the side, trying to figure out exactly what we had caught. A hefty pair of squid, taken on our lead-headed fishing lures.
‘Well I never,’ said Dad.
The next day Mom fried the squid in batter for lunch. Although the wind was still on the nose, it had picked up and we hunkered down on the main saloon floor with the table lashed against the bulkhead while Vingila threw herself at the waves. We ate the fried squid from bowls balanced on our knees. Something was wrong with Mom’s recipe; the batter had fallen off in the oil and formed brown floating balls which she had fished out and served atop the pale, contorted curlicues of sliced hood and tentacle. Frying oil, which could have been fresher, collected in pools beneath our mounds of rice. Mom thought draining food on paper towels was wasteful. Pepe had his own bowl in the corner with oil and crunchy bits. When he looked up, his beard was dark with fat.
‘Did you put lemon on this?’ Dad asked Mom.
‘Now tell me, where would I get a lemon?’
‘Tastes like lemon to me,’ Robert said. He was right. Perhaps it was because we’d been so long without lemons – or any other fresh fruit – but our calamari, although not too tender, had a delicate citrus aroma. It was delicious. After two hours of cooking and eating we were full and fell greasily asleep on the floor for the rest of the afternoon.
Some days later when Dad’s sights showed we were being pushed towards the coast by the current he said, ‘Why don’t we go to Ecuador?’
We were all tired of sailing by then and Mom was hoping she could buy some bananas. We turned Vingila so that the wind hit her beam, and she increased her speed by a fraction as she made for the coast of Ecuador where Dad found Baia Pinas, a settlement so small it scarcely appeared on the chart. We were very far from Quito. In fact we were far away from almost everything. A ring of mountains in a thick coat of jungle formed a backdrop to a tiny cluster of dwellings. There was a wooden hotel on stilts and an airstrip, a few huts and a small but secure anchorage crammed with smart, new, recreational fishing boats. In the evening, after the boats came in, giant marlin and sailfish were hung bill down on hooks while the men who had caught them posed alongside for photographs. Once or twice I spotted bare chested jungle people in loincloths and grass skirts drifting out from the damp, liana draped trees to watch. They never spoke a word. Inside the hotel, the walls were covered with the pictures of men and their fish. There was a ten to one club, for those who had caught a hundred pound marlin on ten pound breaking strain line, and a twenty to one club. In the corner a glass case stood filled with trophies. Against the far wall a stuffed and painted marlin at least nine foot long swam against the grain of the wood.
After the first night the manager of the hotel asked us to leave.
‘This place is for fishermen only,’ he said, ‘and we have a very exclusive clientele. I don’t want any trouble.’
‘What kind of trouble was he expecting anyway?’ Mom asked. She was upset because she hadn’t been able to buy any bananas.
‘Drugs?’ said Robert.
‘Don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Aren’t drug running boats supposed to be fast?’
Dad gave me the evil eye then, so I didn’t say anything more, though I could have.
Back at sea the wind had turned and the skies had grown clearer. We set our sails again for Galapagos. Vingila still wasn’t moving and we still hadn’t figured out she was dragging a carpet of writhing barnacles cemented to her underside. Around us, the sea teemed with billfish. Even at our low speed we caught a few, but they snapped our lines. We saw silvery torpedoes rocketing from the sea and tail-walking to the whirr and ping of our reels. We were fishing with 200 pound breaking strain tackle. We didn’t even belong to the one to one club, I thought, no wonder the manager had asked us to leave. But what would we do with a fish that size anyway, Mom wanted to know, who would cook it? One morning Dad found a few marlin on deck. As long as his thumb, they were perfect copies of their elders, right down to the dorsal fins that slotted into pouches on their backs. Lynnath put them in a jar of formalin.
‘As far as I know,’ she said, ‘baby marlin haven’t been described. I’m going to write this up.’
‘Another magazine article?’ Mom said. ‘That would be nice.’
When we started catching birds we knew we had reached the Galapagos. We had spent a month at sea crawling our way over 800 miles and even our onions were finished. Donella had arrived in the Galapagos a week earlier and Christian, over the radio, told Dad to clear in at Wreck Bay on Santa Cristobal before making our way to Isla Santa Cruz. Mountains rose from the sea like black teeth and the gannets wouldn’t leave our lines alone. They dived like arrows and we kept pulling in soggy, yellow-eyed birds, avoiding their beaks and unhooking them as they vomited seawater over the stern. We threw them back before Pepe got at them but a few looked as if they wouldn’t make it.
Mom came up with the pilot book.
‘I’ve just read,’ she said, ‘that this entire area is a nature reserve. So I think you should stop catching these poor birds.’
Lynnath agreed and we took the lines in.
The capitano of the parks board wasn’t pleased with us either.
‘Where are your visas?’ he asked.
Mom and Dad acted surprised. What visas, they said, we didn’t know about visas. The capitano had shiny hair combed back from his forehead and a black moustache. He was unmoved.
‘If you don’t have visas, you cannot stay. Please prepare to leave.’
Then Dad launched into a story about how we had had such a long and difficult trip, and we had run out of food and that Robert and I, since leaving South Africa had only ever wanted to see the Galapagos Islands, which was why we had started the whole circumnavigation in the first place. We only bought this boat, he repeated, so that our children could see the amazing animals of the Galapagos. This was news to me.
‘How can you turn them away now?’ Dad asked, casting his hand towards the bunk where I was sitting beside my brother.
I saw the capitano’s moustache quiver a little. His eyes lingered on my blonde plaits, making me wish I had washed them more recently. I gave a small, unhappy smile, glancing at Dad to see if that was what he wanted.
