Sea Legs by Guy Grieve

Author:Guy Grieve [Grieve, Guy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780747595427
Google: _ds_AQAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0747595429
Publisher: A&C Black
Published: 2012-12-31T14:00:00+00:00

The next day dawned blue and breezy and after breakfast Juliet and I looked at the chart. ‘Right, where next?’ I said, tracing a finger down to Grenada. We need to get to Trinidad within a week and it’ll take twenty-four hours to get there from Grenada … working backwards I’d say we can only afford two more days in the Grenadines.’

We flipped through the pilot book to the Tobago Cays, an archipelago of five tiny uninhabited islands, four of which are encircled within the spectacular four-kilometer-long Horseshoe Reef. The approach looked tricky and I winced as I saw the plan, which showed mostly yellow, marking the areas of coral. There were complicated directions for the approach, involving leading lines, depth soundings and sketched elevations of the islands. Every instinct within me wanted to give it a wide berth, but I felt it would be defeatist to suggest it, so we lifted our anchor and set off.

It was only about five nautical miles to the Tobago Cays and as we drew near we found ourselves sailing through a zone stippled with sharp peaks of coral, little islands rising from a sea of perfect aquamarine and treacherous shallows where the coral showed green, yellow and brown through the water. Juliet steered whilst I hovered over the chart down below, calling out our course and double-checking our position on an almost constant basis, as even the slightest deviation from our course could lead us into terrible trouble. And yet even as we dreaded the danger that lurked beneath, we were utterly captivated, feasting our eyes on the kind of seascapes that we had only ever seen in our imagination. Following the leading marks, we steered towards a minuscule channel between two cays, Petit Rameau and Petit Bateau, and it took a great leap of faith, as we couldn’t see the channel and had simply to steer towards the land. The depths beneath us fell steadily and we checked and rechecked and checked our course again, until at last, miraculously, the channel opened up before us. We inched our way along it, hoping that a boat wouldn’t come in the other direction, as we had to stay exactly in the middle to have sufficient depth. The boys sat as still as stone, not uttering a single sound, as they knew now not to distract us when we were sailing close to or even beyond our capabilities. At one point we had three feet of clearance between our world and destruction and no space to turn if it grew shallower still. I began to sweat and willed the depth gauge to show a larger number – eventually it began to creep up again with agonising slowness. After a sharp turn to starboard, we drifted into an exquisite green pool set behind a reef that fizzed white with breaking waves filling the air with the scent of iodine and ozone. The reef provided shelter from the swell and we had an odd feeling of being both protected and exposed, as the ocean crashed and boomed all around us.

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