A Night Among Sharks
The three main attractions of French Guiana—the jungle, the prison and the space centre—will not be covered in this report.
But there will be a glowing wake, sharks, dolphins, stowaways and a dinner snatched away from the crew.
Lady Mary is heading north through the Atlantic along the South American continent. Sharks circle the yacht (remarkably, throughout all 23 days of our Atlantic Ocean passage, the children and I deliberately peered into the blue abyss but never saw a single shark). Besides the crew, an entire zoo is spending the night aboard: a gull (a tern?... we’re not real ornithologists, we’ve just heard words like that), a tropical butterfly (two of them), a couple of horseflies, a lizard and shore mosquitoes. You go ashore in South America and come back with all sorts of things :)....
Stowaways
She is trying with all her might not to notice either me clicking the camera shutter or the curious eyes of the young sailors a couple of metres from her tail....
The tired bird did not dare rest on the water—perhaps she knows about the sharks teeming there. A flock of her friends called down from the air, “Come on, let’s go home,” circled directly above the deck and flew off towards land, barely discernible on the horizon. The stowaway calmly settled on the rail and began preening her feathers before bed.
“She’ll crap all over the deck,” the captain pronounced gloomily, then filled the ocean expanse with a hearty, frightening whistle. After tearfully promising the captain that we would wipe every trace of the bird’s stay from the deck (and tired gulls usually leave plenty), the young sailors and I issued her a permit to spend the night :).
The next freeloader—or rather, butterfly—appeared straight out of the darkness while we were setting the spinnaker pole for the genoa. Perhaps she urgently needs to get to Suriname and a suitable vessel happened along, or maybe she is afraid of sharks too, and feels safe with us :)? The tropical beauty displayed a complete lack of brains and a tendency to follow the beam of the torch straight under the sailors’ feet. We hope no one steps on her overnight. Besides the butterfly, a gigantic horsefly hurled itself into the torch beam a couple of times out in the open ocean, for which the first mate mercilessly swatted it.
A nocturnal daytime butterfly :). Beautiful, but rather dim, as befits a lady. ... And the mesh size of the young-sailor-proof net is 5 × 5 cm.
“Northern” Lights
“Marin, Marin!” I jump up in the middle of the night, woken by the captain’s voice.
“Huh?! What is it?!”
“Come quickly, look! Dolphins!”
“As if I’ve never seen dolphins before,” I mutter under my breath, trying to find my yachting slippers.
Tumbling out on deck, I gradually wake up: bright blue, shimmering trails cut through the ocean water. Splash! A large shadow appears above the surface for a moment, then once again draws phosphorescent arrows through the water. The dolphins have put on a genuine light show, slicing through plankton that sparkles with every movement. For a long time we watch the sea glow to the rustle of the waves and the splashing of large living torpedoes.
“Thanks for waking me!” I tell the captain gratefully, forgetting that at first I had thought rather differently. I go back to sleep until two o’clock.
.
Night watches at sea are a good time to write in the journal. The moon peers down from the sky like a bored orange segment. (If an orange segment can actually be bored and peer at anything. It’s half past three in the morning; my brain is still asleep, sorry :)). Sheet lightning flares astern, but there is no thunder—perhaps it will pass us by.
The evening sky over the ocean instead of nocturnal dolphins. The camera was asleep at night; it’s entitled to 🙂
A light dead run and the Guiana Current gently push Lady Mary northwards. The sails are wing and wing and the sky is stuffed with stars—a quiet, warm night watch. The captain and the youngest junior crew member are snoring in the aft cabin; Nastya has dozed off on a cockpit bench. The yacht rolls from side to side like an old goose. By lunchtime we will reach the northernmost point of the Guiana coast—the mouth of the Maroni River, with another country, Suriname, already on its left bank. About 30 miles upriver there is an anchorage—or, rather, a mooring-buoy field—and a place where we can complete our outward clearance from France’s largest overseas department.
The ocean winks with wandering blue lights. Most of them are in the wake, which glows in patches like in the Soviet film The Secret Fairway.
Ancient mariners probably invented their legends of terrifying sea monsters with the Basilisk’s burning eyes on nights like this. Perhaps those flashes are the trails of the very sharks that have been following us almost since the shore. These are the first sharks the crew has seen in the wild in three years of sailing. Their appearance excited the bored young sailors and completely killed the entire crew’s desire to swim. The captain, admittedly, claims they are too small to be dangerous, while we watch the “small and harmless” creatures greedily pounce on anything that falls overboard, even if it is an accidental half-tin of condensed milk or an apple core.
— First sharks, then dolphins Eat at night, and you’ll sleep badly
Our bloodthirsty fellow travellers left us without dinner. And yet a plump tuna was already flapping right beside the stern, and Nastya had almost scooped it up with the landing net! But two sharks shot out from under the yacht like lightning and snapped their teeth right in front of the tuna’s nose. Our catch bolted with all its might, and... an empty hook leapt onto the deck. We are not sure whether the wounded tuna saw its wife and children that evening, or became dinner for those nasty gluttons.
Time flies while I write, and dawn is already breaking somewhere astern. Through the creaking of the rigging, I can make out... the chirping of a cricket... hmm... another lodger? The morning inspection of the deck has already revealed that our onboard zoo has acquired another gecko—a small, pretty lizard that briskly ran away from me onto the outer hull at the bow. The first gecko, larger than this one, treacherously moved aboard the yacht a couple of weeks ago. Since then, he has lost the tip of his tail but has flatly refused to move out (and both of them refused to pose for the camera, alas). By morning, mosquitoes—clearly brought aboard from the shore twenty-four hours earlier—were buzzing in the cockpit. Two of every creature....
In the morning we found this one, now an entirely nocturnal moth. She must have been the one who chased away all the birds, the sharks and her beautiful but rather dim relative 🙂
The cricket chirps, “Go on, go on!”; the sky turns pink; the eldest young sailor shivers in her sleep from the morning chill. I cover her with a blanket and go below to wake the captain. Six in the morning—time for a nap :).
The sharks didn’t manage to gobble this one up 🙂
P.S. We need to add this to the list of Murphy’s Laws for Sailors: If you want a nap, drop off the instant your relief gets up. Otherwise, the bright-eyed captain will rig the fishing tackle as soon as he wakes, and half an hour later you will have to help turn a freshly caught tuna into breakfast.
This small tuna was plied with rum right up to its gills and completely satisfied the crew’s morning need for juicy steaks, lightly fried with onions and soy sauce (a simple and delicious recipe from our friend Ksyusha in the Cape Verde Islands) :).
Incidentally, no one came for the fish guts thrown into the sea that morning—the sharks, having lost all hope of getting a bite of anyone, left us alone. Though at last they could have had a snack ).
What Should Have Been at the Beginning 🙂
A week before this day-and-a-half passage, we left the friendly Dégrad des Cannes marina (which, incidentally, will close in January next year), stopped at the Salvation Islands, also known as the Devil’s Islands, wandered among the ruins of one of the world’s most horrific prisons and caught the moment of a rocket launch (!) from the Kourou space centre.
More about that in the next report.
Following the sun and new adventures
Wishing everyone kindness and smiles!
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