Free Casting Off by Emma Bamford

chataranga inches from the (stinky) cat litter tray, using the starlight and lightning flashes going off all around me
to see by as I changed asanas.
    Conversation turned to future plans. Steve wanted to know where I wanted to travel to. I was still desperate to visit Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, which were the same
places he was planning to go with the boat. He asked me how much time I had to do it in.
    ‘Oh, I don’t know – six months?’ My only previous experience of long-distance sailing was crossing the Atlantic Ocean with the Clipper race and we had done that in nine
days, so six months seemed a reasonable amount of time.
    Steve was thinking more along the lines of two years.
Two years!
I explained that I had a finite amount of time and money, that I wanted to try to make it to my brother Tom’s
wedding in December and that at some point I would need to find work. He knew a woman in a marina in Thailand, he said, who could help me get a job as crew on a superyacht.
    ‘And, if you want, I’ll stop cruising for a few months while you work and I’ll just concentrate on doing jobs around the boat,’ he offered.
    I didn’t know what to say to that. It seemed a very over-the-top gesture to make – I had left the UK just three weeks before and had been sharing a bed with this man for only a week
or so (and was already having doubts about that) and here he was offering to make long-term plans with me. I felt guilty that he saw this as a committed partnership while I just viewed it as a
fling. Now John was gone, Steve wanted to pick up where he thought we had left off.
    It was windy where we were anchored and the wind roughed up waves that hit us on the beam (side) of the yacht, so that we were rolling over and bouncing up again like a weeble, the glasses and
crockery clinking in their cupboards. A look at the chart showed us a shallow, protected anchorage nearby, called Mitford Harbour. It was surrounded by coral and we had to creep our way in, Steve 8
metres up the mast sitting on the first spreaders, keeping a good lookout for large coral heads, or bommies, and me on the autohelm and throttle, creeping us forward and adjusting our heading on
Steve’s directions to sneak us slowly and carefully along through the deepest water.
    Inside the harbour it was magical. There were no other boats and no signs of human life. There was an awful lot of animal life instead. Every few minutes a shoal of tiny silver fish performed a
spot of synchronised swimming, leaping out of the water to avoid a predator. From a distance I couldn’t tell they were individual fish; their timing was so immaculate that they looked like
one large spurt of water from a fountain. We took the dinghy ashore in the afternoon and immediately spotted monkey footprints in the sand, about the size of a toddler’s but rounder and with
clear imprints of opposable big toes. The only human footprints were those Steve and I left.
    The white beach was dotted with tiny pearls of sand, thousands of them, stacked up next to holes about the size of a pea. I bent over to look at one more closely and caught some movement in my
peripheral vision. Turning my head, I saw a little translucent crab. This was his hole he had dug out, working the discarded sand into ball shapes with his pincers. Once my eyes adjusted I could
make out hundreds of these ghost-like crabs all over the beach. Despite their near-invisibility I didn’t have to worry about stepping on one for as soon as my flip-flopped foot came anywhere
near they darted off across the sand at incredible speeds and shot down into the safety of their holes.
    Steve had reached the few scattered mangrove trees across to the right so I walked over to join him.
    ‘Any luck with monkey sightings?’ I asked.
    ‘No. You?’
    ‘No. Only the tracks in the sand.’
    ‘Shh!’ he said, holding up one hand. ‘What was that?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Can’t you hear it? A kind of