Jon Sparks
The following articles are copyright to Jon Sparks, and may not be reproduced in any form without his consent in writing.
A Life on the Ocean Wave (Yacht Cruising: Romance and Reality)
First published in Wanderlust, August/September 2003
Imagine...
A moonless night in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia below the horizon. A meteor streaks across the sky. I am alone in the cockpit of Peer Gynt II, the trade wind pushing us westward at a steady six knots. When I look over the side, green flashes of phosphorescence dance hypnotically in the waves as the hull slices through the swell. The Milky Way arches high overhead, the Southern Cross hanging from it. Close by, the glittering span of stars is broken by the unfathomable blackness of the Coalsack.
Imagine:
A wide bay: low granite cliffs, miles of coral sand slowly turning pink as the sun dips to the horizon. Just two yachts are moored in the calm blue water. Fat steaks of tuna sizzle on the barbecue; it’s only a few hours since the metre-long fish was hauled from the sea. Seven people, the entire population of the scene, consider whether they prefer beer, wine, or something stronger.
But then - imagine:
Imagine a life where you can never stand up fully in your own bedroom. Imagine that every drop of water, whether for drinking, cooking, washing or cleaning, has to be pumped by hand. Imagine the nearest neighbours being over the horizon and instead of chatting over the back fence you have to call them up on scratchy VHF radio. Imagine being a thousand miles from the nearest pub - and even that only serves Australian beer.
Bad enough? Imagine this:
In the middle of the night, in the middle of the ocean, your tiny home is suddenly thrown on its side. Moments feel like hours as you wait to see if the mass of the keel will wrench her upright again. Slowly it happens, and the boat resumes a wild pitching ride. By unsteady torchlight you discover cracks in the cockpit coaming, broken rigging and guard-wires, inch-thick stanchions bent like pipe-cleaners. Although the storm eases a little by dawn, the winds stay high and the seas rough. In this ocean, where most islands are guarded by reefs, it will be five days before you reach an anchorage you can safely enter; five days before you can fully inspect the damage, assure yourself that the hull is still sound, and then sleep round the clock before attempting even the simplest repairs.
Clearly there's a bit more to this cruising lark than a kind of grown-up gap year.
At least readers of this magazine aren't likely to have to ask why anyone would want to sail around the world. It must be one of the ultimate expressions of wanderlust, as close as most people raised in the privileged West are ever likely to get to becoming nomads. It is about as far as you can get from a package holiday.
But then cruising - at least the long-term, round the world type of cruising - is not a holiday. In fact, forget conventional dichotomies of 'work' and 'leisure' altogether. This is neither, and it is both. As the cruisers I met kept telling me, it's a way of life.
For a start, two years is a short time for a circumnavigation; three is a more sensible minimum. This allows you to pick relatively favourable seasons for all the major ocean passages, and to spend a reasonable amount of time in some interesting places along the way.
A three-year circumnavigation is what my hosts on Peer Gynt II, Rod Hall and Bridget Carter, embarked upon - ten years ago. When I joined them they were only just over half way round. First, there were just so many interesting places to see. And, when you know you’ll almost certainly never be there again, you do want to see everything. You can understand why schedules tend to become elastic.
However, even in paradise, there are bills to pay. A modest cruising boat costs nearly as much as a small house to buy, but a lot more to maintain - and your life depends on it being well maintained, as it rarely does in a suburban semi. There’s food to buy, too - living off the land is not that easy - and, just occasionally, a rum punch or cold beer.
Schedules may stretch, but funds don’t. Bridget learned the essentials of sail-making and made some money doing repairs for other boats, and Rod is pretty handy at most jobs. Even so, by the time they finally got to New Zealand, they were seriously short of cash. The boat in which they’d left the UK, a 35-foot wooden sloop called Mijbil, had been damaged in that knockdown between Tuamotu and Rangiroa.
In the end they both went back to full-time work for a couple of years. Still living afloat and saving hard, they eventually managed to sell Mijbil and buy Peer Gynt II, ten feet longer but about twice as spacious internally. Their first long trip in her was the crossing to Australia, where Bridget worked for another year while Rod carried out some major modifications.
And so, in due course, to Cairns, where I joined them. Cairns would be the last real town for at least a month. Then there was Darwin, and then nothing for a very long way, so there was a lot of provisioning to be completed. Bridget’s heartfelt comment after a hard day was, 'This is what they don't tell you about sailing - it's ten per cent sailing and ninety percent stowing.'.
In most respects, the journey up the east coast to Cape York was easy sailing: fine weather, light winds (occasionally too light), calm seas in the shelter of the Great Barrier Reef. But I got just a hint of what it might be like. One evening we had just dropped anchor off the Flinders islands, when we picked up a warning of a cyclone forming off New Guinea. A long conference ensued between Bridget and Rod on Peer Gynt and Chris and Karin Grice on Rocard, with whom we were sailing. It might not develop... it might not come this way... but if it did... If a cyclone hits, small boats need to be in a very secure anchorage, sheltered from the waves and lashed fore and aft to something solid. The nearest such ‘cyclone hole’ was in the Lockhart River, 150 miles away.
And so, after a swift meal, instead of settling down for the night, we set off again. These waters are littered with reefs, hard enough to see even in daylight. At night you just have to have faith in the charts, and in GPS. The reefs generally carry lights, of course, but one light on a three-mile long reef is not totally reassuring. And you also have to keep a look out for other shipping. We were in regular commercial shipping lanes. A tanker or bulk carrier can come from below the horizon and run you down in under 20 minutes. Day or night, a prudent watch-keeper scans the entire horizon every ten minutes at least.
The cyclone never got very far, or very big, but it still reminded us of the utter vulnerability of a small yacht to malevolent weather. This was something I only got to hear about, not to experience first-hand - not that I was totally disappointed to miss out. Quite apart from the Pacific knockdown, Bridget and Rod had been through plenty of storms.
'The worst thing about bad weather is the endless noise,' Bridget recalled. ‘The rigging screams, the boat crashes and groans. Rod summed it up: 'Sometimes you just don't want to be there any more.' More than once they’d determined that they would sell the boat at the very next port.
Thus far I hadn’t even experienced seasickness. I wondered if these experienced sailors ever did. ‘Yes,’ said Bridget, ‘Every time you hit an ocean swell when you haven’t been in one for a while.’
It’s one thing to get seasick on a Channel ferry, where you can just curl up somewhere for as long as it takes. On a small boat, with just two of you on board, you still have to stand watches, tend the sails, check your position. If it could be tough on Peer Gynt II, it could be a lot tougher on Rocard, with two small children on board (3-year-old Lauren and Ben, just 10 months). Karin mentioned that she couldn't take seasickness tablets when she was breast-feeding. I didn’t even try to imagine what it might be like, breast-feeding while throwing up!
Most people get their sea-legs after a few days. Even after that some people feel queasy when they try to read or do other intricate tasks. Even in the calm seas off Queensland I never felt like reading while we were under way. When we came to the more open waters of the Gulf of Carpentaria, nausea did rear its ugly head. With reading out of the question, what is there to do? Out of sight of land, the scenery doesn’t change much. Almost anything you see - a bird, a sea-snake, a flying fish - becomes the subject of intense scrutiny and comment. Some people seem to enter a mystical communion with the ocean. Others just get very bored. I must admit I seem to be in the latter category.
This is part of the key to the biggest surprise about the whole cruising lifestyle: actual sailing is a relatively small part of it. Big ocean passages are the essence of ocean racing, but for the cruising sailor they are basically an ordeal to be endured when necessary and avoided whenever possible. Coastal sailing and island-hopping is vastly preferable, but a great deal of cruising seems to be about stopping. Travelling hopefully is all very well, but cruising yachties do seem to like arriving. (Wasn’t it Robert Louis Stevenson who said that travelling hopefully was better? But didn’t he eventually disprove his own maxim by settling in Tahiti?)
The great thing about having your own boat, of course, is that you can get to places that no scheduled service, let alone a package tour, has ever reached. And when you do get to such places, you spend some time exploring them - snorkelling or diving, perhaps, or climbing an island peak, or - as we did in the Lockhart - taking a dinghy up-river to look (very carefully) for crocodiles.
The other surprise about cruising is that it is intensely sociable. Perhaps in defence against the impersonal vastness of the ocean, cruising yachties often sail in loose flotillas, and certainly arrange to meet at the next anchorage. Even when there’s no-one else in sight, there’s the 6 o'clock session on the VHF. Peer Gynt and Rocard were planning to sail together all the way across the Indian Ocean and possibly beyond.
I came back from my experience of cruising with my preconceptions in tatters. Generalisations are almost impossible to sustain. The life can veer from lotus-eating one day to a desperate fight for survival the next. Sometimes it’s insanely hard work: at other times - perhaps in compensation - no-one does indolence better than a bunch of cruising yachties. Images of blue waters, coral reefs, and cocktails on the poop deck tell less - much less - than half the story. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, but I’m fairly sure I don’t want to do it full time.
There’s a twist in the tail. After I said goodbye, Peer Gynt II and Rocard left Darwin to head out across the Indian Ocean. Their last ‘civilised’ port of call for a very long way was the Cocos Islands. While they were there, Rocard’s skipper Chris Grice was stricken with acute appendicitis, and had to be whisked by a chartered plane to hospital in Fremantle.
I’m happy to report that at the time of writing he was well on the way to full recovery but, even with the benefits of keyhole surgery, needed several extra weeks in port before he could consider hauling on sheets and halyards. And while a few extra weeks at Cocos Keeling was not, of itself a great hardship, it did bring their departure time uncomfortably close to the onset of the cyclone season.
Even so, it could have been a lot worse. It might have happened in the middle of the ocean, away from shipping lanes and beyond helicopter range of land.
Imagine...
First published in InFocus on ukphotographics.co.uk, June 2003
A horrid crunching as I tried to focus was the first sign of trouble. Then I couldn’t get a sharp image of anything over a metre away. Our Karakoram trek had barely started - we hadn’t even seen the glaciers yet - and already my zoom lens had turned from all-rounder into macro-only. During a bumpy, dusty jeep ride the lens had swallowed a piece of grit and somehow the focusing rack had jumped a groove.
I stuffed it back into my rucksack and reviewed my remaining options: a 24mm, a 50mm and a 2x converter. It seemed a total disaster. This wasn’t just the ‘holiday of a lifetime’: this was where I was going to stake my claim as an outdoor photographer. And now I didn’t have a lens longer than 100mm.
Seven weeks later, when I saw the processed slides, my overwhelming reaction was relief. Somehow I had some good shots after all. Still, it took a while before I could reflect calmly: how many shots had I actually missed? How many times had I actually seen a shot that cried out for that extra focal length?
Maybe it hadn't been a total catastrophe, but it was a long time before I saw anything positive about it. I only began to get the message after subsequent trips, when I lumbered myself with three times as much gear, but didn’t get three times better pictures. Maybe, I began to think, less is more.
Travelling light has some obvious advantages. Roads don’t go everywhere - thank goodness, or there’d be no wild places left to photograph. But the further you get from tarmac, the more you need to think about what you take. It’s easy to throw everything in the back of the car; it’s another story when everything goes on your back, up hill and down dale.
If you’re climbing K2 or crossing Antarctica, every gram is critical: it may even be a matter of life and death. For the average landscape photographer, saving weight is more a matter of comfort. But comfort counts. Being uncomfortable is not an aid to concentration. And travelling light also means you can travel further, or faster. It may mean getting to the top of the next hill before the light goes, and being able to breathe when you get there.
But it isn’t just about comfort. My Karakoram lens disaster didn’t save me any weight - I carried that dead zoom for several weeks before throwing it down a crevasse when the going got really tough - but it did make my life simpler.
It was physically simpler, for a start. My small selection of gear could be instantly accessible, allowing me to react fast, whether to changing light or to other opportunities, like a line of porters forming a particular pattern. The saving in time also meant less disruption in the rhythm of the walking. This is no small factor on a month-long trek which included some 12-hour days.
Life was also simpler in a specifically photographic sense. I had just three lens options - 24, 50, or 100mm. This saved further time because I usually knew straight away which lens to use. As time went on I found I was ‘seeing’ more and more shots before looking through the viewfinder.
This sort of seeing makes photography infinitely more intuitive. It’s a major part of the process of visualisation, of which Ansel Adams wrote so eloquently. To anyone who has trouble with framing (a much better word than ‘composition’) or finding shots, I would advise dumping most of your lenses, especially the zooms, and going out with just one or two fixed lenses. It should bring home another lesson too: there’s a vast difference between zooming in on a subject and physically getting closer to it.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing; with long-range hindsight I can now see that my ‘disaster’ wasn’t such a disaster after all. In the end it did me more good than harm. It took a while for them to sink in, but many lessons from that trip have stayed with me, including the subtler benefits of travelling light.
However, travelling light doesn’t mean throwing everything out, willy-nilly. Paring down is fine, but paring down to the point where you can no longer get the results you want defeats the object. So part of the process is being clear about what you do want to achieve. Clear - and realistic. You can never cover every possible eventuality. I might have got a good shot of a Himalayan Brown Bear if I’d had an 800mm lens ready for instant action. But if I’d tried to carry an 800mm lens and a suitable tripod, I probably wouldn’t have survived the trip.
When working out what you need to carry, it helps to look at what you actually use. If you regularly go out with x, y and z in your bag but use them once in a blue moon, you can probably leave them behind. What you do use, all the time, is a good guide to what you actually need.
All this was part of the background when I took on my biggest project yet, documenting the Scottish islands for a major ‘coffee-table’ book. This didn’t only involve landscape photography: there would be architectural shots, inside and out (everything from cathedrals and stone circles to a public loo!), wildlife, indeed a bit of almost everything.
This might suggest that I needed everything bar the kitchen sink, but in fact I did virtually all of it with just the gear that would fit into a Lowepro Mini Trekker backpack. I knew that many of the best locations (including stone circles and chambered cairns) were only accessible by long and sometimes rough walks.
I also wanted to get around by bike where possible, for several reasons. As a landscape photographer, I’m bound to care about the landscape, and avoiding unnecessary car use makes environmental sense. But it was also eminently practical. On the smaller islands the slower speed of travel was never a problem and sometimes an advantage: on a bike you undoubtedly see more and ‘tune in’ to the landscape much better. It also means you can stop just about anywhere, which you can’t do in a car.
For quality’s sake, I wanted to use medium format wherever possible, and after careful study of available systems I chose a Mamiya 7. This rangefinder camera produces 6 x 7 cm trannies yet is actually lighter than some 35mm SLRs (admittedly most things are lighter than a Nikon F5!). My budget wasn’t bottomless and I had just two lenses for it. The 43mm wide-angle is equivalent to around a 21mm lens on 35mm, though the different format shape makes the comparison imprecise. This was to be my main landscape lens as well as being used for many other shots indoors and out. I also took an 80mm standard lens. Both produce absolutely superb results: the extra quality does show on the printed page and I’m sure it was worth it.
However, I couldn’t use the Mamiya for everything. I knew I needed wildlife shots, for instance. I still needed to carry 35mm gear, based on a Nikon F90X body. And yes, I did carry both systems virtually all the time. Clearly this isn’t everyone’s idea of ‘Travelling Light’, but it all went into the Mini Trekker, and without being superhuman I was able to do some long days with it all.
My exact choice of lenses for the 35mm system varied according to circumstances. In prime wildlife areas I carried a 300mm f/4 (a lot more portable, and affordable, than an f/2.8) plus 1.4x and 2x converters. I could usually squeeze in a 50mm macro lens too. On other occasions the 300 was replaced by a 70-200 f/2.8, which is a wonderfully versatile lens for general ‘long’ shots.
While both cameras are eminently suited to hand-held use, I aimed to use a tripod as much as possible for ultimate quality. Most ultralight tripods are virtually useless as soon as they’re faced with a bit of breeze, or the mirror-slap of an SLR. Instead, I took a deep breath and splashed out on a Manfrotto carbon-fibre model, with magnesium-alloy head. This turned out to be as good a £300 as I’ve ever spent. With all locks tight, and weighted down with the camera bag, it proved remarkably stable in some pretty wild weather.
The total weight of all the gear, including a few filters and rolls of film, and the bag itself, was around 9 kilos. This doesn’t include food and water or spare clothing, which were obviously needed on longer outings. This was quite manageable when walking, or cycling on the road. My Mini Trekker is quite a few years old and I have something of a hankering for a new one - they’ve improved the carrying harness, among other things - but unfortunately Lowepro gear just doesn’t seem to wear out.
Of course there were times when this was too much. And for many other projects I don’t need both formats - and I certainly wouldn’t carry both unless I needed to! When technical climbing is involved - as it was on the Cuillin, for instance - I often revert to my old faithful Nikon FM2 and a couple of lenses. Nor would I carry a substantial back-pack when mountain-biking: my balance isn’t that good anyway!
There’s light, and there’s ultra-light. But even in extreme mountaineering or adventure racing, most people want some record of their experience, and some need shots of professional quality. The obvious solution would seem to be a compact, perhaps with a zoom lens if you can manage the extra 50 grams. Digital cameras are also beginning to stake a claim, but battery dependence and doubts about how well they’d stand up to extreme conditions mean they are still unproven.
Personally I’m not convinced by most compact cameras. Many simply don’t have good enough metering to cope with difficult (or inspiring) conditions. And there’s one crucial failing on just about every compact I’ve ever handled: the viewfinder. I just can’t see enough to ‘get into’ the shot. However, some people do get superb, regularly published, results with the likes of a Leica Mini Zoom (now discontinued), while the Ricoh Gr1 (in various incarnations) seems to be almost standard issue among extreme mountaineers.
When I really want to go light, I’m still inclined to dig out my ancient Olympus 35RC. Yes, it’s a bit chunkier than most modern compacts, but it has rangefinder focusing and the option of full manual exposure control. Admittedly it only has a fixed 42mm lens but at least that keeps things simple. And if it ever needed replacing, I would be looking seriously at the Voigtlander Bessa range and the few other 35mm rangefinder cameras still available.
Which brings us full circle. Light is also simple. Carrying too much gear doesn’t just weigh you down physically, it can also clutter you up mentally.
But lightness isn’t everything. If my experiences illustrate one thing, it’s that the choice of what to carry is always a compromise. And you have to balance lightness with quality. If the gear doesn’t stand up to the conditions, it can rapidly turn from ‘light’ to ‘dead weight’. And if it you can’t trust it to deliver the results you want, what’s the point of carrying it at all? Travelling light still needs to mean travelling right.