The China Voyage by Tim Severin

Author:Tim Severin [Severin, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2015-05-04T04:00:00+00:00

10 - FLOATING BIRDNEST

‘I think Rex has gone mad,’ said Joe with a grin. ‘Look, he’s trying to drink seawater!’ I turned and saw Rex in shorts and T-shirt kneeling on the outside edge of the raft, with his bottom high in the air, and his face pressed against the surface of the sea, just as if he were drinking from the ocean.

‘Definitely mad,’ added Joe a moment later. ‘Now he’s talking to a plastic bag.’

Rex’s beaming face with its fringe of red beard had emerged from the sea, and sure enough he was speaking solemnly to a plastic bag in his hand. He was also wearing a bright yellow face mask which set off his gingery fringe of beard and hair and bright pink sunburned skin. ‘I’m doing a hull growth survey,’ he called back to us. And bowed down to resume his strange rump-in-the-air and face-in-the-sea posture. Some minutes later he was again hanging over the side of the raft, this time level with the cockpit, and peering down into the water. In his hand was a small tape recorder sealed in a plastic bag. ‘Station Five,’ he intoned into it. ‘Upper bamboo layer — light cellophane weed, three goose barnacles. Middle bamboo layer — medium to heavy weed, light coating of barnacles. Lower bamboo layer — heavy grass weed, no barnacles.’ He broke off his note-taking. ‘I’m checking all marine growth on the hull at various points around the raft. In future every time the water is calm enough I will take another series of measurements to see what changes are taking place as we sail across the ocean. I’ve already found quite a number of goose barnacles and bright pink acorn barnacles, as well as what look like worm casts. But there is surprisingly little weed. If this was a normal wooden ship we would expect perhaps six inches of weed growth, but Hsu Fu’s bamboos don’t seem to offer a good home for weed. Most of the seaweed is barely ten centimetres long. And all the longer streamers of thirty-centimetre weed we had a month ago have disappeared.’

‘Maybe it’s fallen off because of the change of water temperature, or perhaps it’s been eaten by fish,’ I said.

‘I don’t know, but I tried eating the short crisp seaweed myself, and it doesn’t taste too bad, a bit crinkly and thin. That’s the one I’m calling cellophane weed. The other weed isn’t much use — short and grey and a bit slimy.’

It was a bright sunny day, with very little wind and a slight choppy sea. The sun was sending shimmering beams of light five metres down into the blue water, and shoals of the little yellow-and-black-banded pilot fish swam through the sunbeams. Trondur reached under the edge of the raft, and broke off a small cluster of barnacles. He showed me how they had formed a curve around the shell of the bamboo.

‘Easy to take off,’ he said. ‘They can’t stick on the bamboo.’

Trondur had spent

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