Actually our passage out through Lombok Strait was gratifyingly easy and, once in the Java Sea, we had fine sailing. Jessica, contentedly convalescent, was busy getting caught up in her Journal or sunning in the cockpit while Ted reeled off fabulous stories on his watch. I, tired for the moment of serious reading, turned to a tale of high adventure at sea. So overloaded was it with drama that I fell to considering the whole difficult problem of trying to communicate a very meaningful experience. How, for instance, could I convey to a reader the wonderful adventure of just being at sea; the thrill I sometimes felt, lying in my bunk and listening to the whisper of water flowing past, in thinking, I’m doing it! I’m actually sailing around the world, just as I planned and dreamed! This is my ship, my life, my adventure, and nobody can take it away from me! Perhaps it is necessary to “juice up” a story, or nobody would ever read it, but although I felt sorry for the hero on the night he crashed into a reef—my own memory of a similar mishap was that it is more like a sickening crunch. And yet, crash or crunch, how is it possible to get across a feeling to one who has never been there? More and more I was grateful to Barbara because she had known instinctively that this experience was one that we had to share, since no words of mine could ever have made this vital part of my life real or meaningful to her if she had stayed behind.
That night on watch, still struggling with the problem that confronts any writer, of trying to capture and share an experience through words, I was led to speculate on the subject of sounds at sea. Some are ominous, such as the snap of a jerking anchor chain at an uneasy anchorage or the wind rising and beginning to whistle high in the rigging; others are merely annoying, like the slapping of halyards or the banging of a block on a quiet night, if one is restless. While musing over sounds, it occurred to me that by now I had classified every sound my boat made (I had spent hours tracking down each one in the first months when every noise was a possible harbinger of trouble). At that precise instant, from the darkness of the cabin below, I heard what can only be described as thump—pause—plump—pause—plop—pause—thud! That was a new one! I shone a light below. Nothing. Now I did have something to occupy my mind throughout the rest of my watch.
The next day, during lunch, there was a lull in the conversation. Suddenly Manuia appeared at the porthole. She leaped lightly down to Jessica’s desk—thump—then across to the table—plump—then down to the plastic-covered couch cushion—plop—and finally to the floor—thud.
At least one mystery of the sea had been solved!
All along the coast we passed numerous praus. I was always conscious of the possibility of being hijacked by pirates, and whenever one changed course and came over to take a look at us, we mustered all hands—and a couple of rifles—and waved heartily. Invariably, they waved back and shouted cheery greetings and we each went on our way.
A more real danger turned out to be that of running down, at night, an unlighted prau at anchor. On the night of the 29th we had two narrow escapes from such a collision, the second one literally by inches. This shook us quite a bit and I debated following the local example and simply stopping for the night to anchor in the shallow water along the coast. Finally I decided to carry on, stationing a man forward with a searchlight in addition to the man at the helm. Naturally, having made the decision, I began to question my own judgment, with the result that there was still another man on duty for the rest of the night—me!
The next day we were far enough along the coast to hope to reach Jakarta before dark, but the day was misty and, although we were close to shore, it was difficult to tell where the water met the land. We could find nothing that looked like a harbor of the size we knew must be at Jakarta.
At last we spotted a channel through which small-boat traffic was moving toward shore and we worked our way in, sounding as we went. At four fathoms, while still fairly well out, I gave orders to drop the anchor.
“Why we don’t go in until eight feet?” asked one of the crew with sweet reasonableness. “Then anchor?”
Since we draw almost eight feet, that would hardly have left enough margin for error, tide, or rapidly shelving bottom.