Free Casting Off by Emma Bamford Page B

side. As they say, you can take the girl out of the
city… but you can’t put her in one of the wildest places on earth and not expect her imagination to go into overdrive.

    That afternoon we were trying to repair the leech line, the rope that runs through the back of the mainsail, when Steve said: ‘This is doing my head in.’ I thought he was referring
to the sewing.
    Then he added quietly: ‘I’m going to ask you to move back into the forepeak.’ Just as abruptly as I had ended up in his cabin, I was now being kicked out of it. An enormous
rush of relief flooded through me.
    I had stayed in that aft cabin for two weeks but I had had very, very mixed feelings about what I was playing at. I knew Steve liked me a lot – always touching me and telling me he adored
me and would do anything for me. He made it obvious that he wanted a girlfriend. I should have sat him down, right at the beginning, and spelled it out to him but, hating confrontation as I do, I
was too much of a wimp. It wasn’t fair to him and it was a very silly thing for me to have done but done it I had. I had made my own bed and for a while I literally had to lie in it.
    It was a surprise, his asking me to move out – perhaps he was more perceptive of my feelings than I had given him credit for – but now, I thought, there would be no guilt that I was
leading him on and we could have fun and enjoy making each other laugh without any added pressure.
    ‘We can still sail as friends,’ Steve said and made up the bed in the forepeak for me, tucking me in that night. I felt like a weight had been lifted.
    The other issue that had been preying on my mind was the money situation. Back in the UK, when I had been chatting with Steve over email, we’d had a brief discussion about finances. He
told me he normally charged people £25 a day, plus a share of food, alcohol, fuel, gas, laundry and marina fees when they were on board short-term. Over a longer period of time it worked out
cheaper, he said. ‘When I was cruising with my girlfriend it worked out at about £15 a day each.’ We’d passed the free two-week trial period and I’d asked him a few
times for his bank details so I could set up a standing order but he’d fobbed me off with, ‘Oh, it’s not all about the money, is it?’ I wanted to get it sorted out so I
pestered him again for his details and he gave them to me. I knew John had paid the £25-a-day price with us and Steve hadn’t charged him extra for any alcohol – and he’d
drunk a lot over a week – and I had been here a month so I set up a payment to him of £15 a day and told him that I’d sorted it out. Another problem solved. Things were looking
up.
    Fair winds blew in and we took advantage of them to move to the Turtle Islands, where we’d read there was a sanctuary and a hatchery. We took the dinghy to Pulau Gulimaan, where, the
Lonely Planet
had informed us, hawksbill turtles went ashore to lay their eggs. But this was not their breeding season, the book said.
The
Lonely Planet
is wrong
, I
thought after we landed on the island: there were turtle tracks everywhere, distinctive wide marks where the female’s belly had been dragged up the steep beach, lined on either side by small,
deep indentations left by her claws. We thought the tracks might have been old but when we reached the other side of the island we found a hatchery with 13 egg collections labelled as having been
laid the previous night. It looked like a sandy allotment. A pair of white shorts were drying in the sun outside a hut but there were no workers around. We cleaned up plastic bottles from the beach
and I found some turtle egg shells. With hard but flexible skins and spherical in shape, they looked and felt like deflated ping-pong balls.
    At dusk we returned to the island, hoping to spot a turtle come ashore by moonlight to dig her nest and lay her eggs. There was a stony-faced warden at the hut who told us we had to leave
because we