Nothing compares to the absolute silence of sail!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

Like damp flannels we were draped around our small wooden beds, sodden with sweat and drowning in boredom. On the rare occasions it stopped raining, the humidity left you drenched. This wasn’t what I’d expected when I booked a two week visit to Tahiti in 1984.

I was sort of hitching around the world, flying over the oceans and taking boats across the seas. How bad could a fortnight on a tropical paradise be, travelling from California en route to New Zealand? A better question would have been ‘How powerful is our ability to fall for the hype?’

Tahiti turned out to be an active outpost of the French Empire. Luxury resorts were laden with super-rich tourists, while the locals squandered an existence out of underpaid jobs and exorbitant prices, imposed upon them by far-distant Paris.

These days taking a year off in your 20s to travel the world is almost ‘de rigueur, dwarlink’ but back then there was no market for it. Neither food nor fun we could afford; no place to stay, except this room where we four weary travellers lay: excluded, demoralised, fighting off mosquitoes the size of tennis balls.

Tim, a Kiwi lad with a deep voice and dry wit, turned to me.

“I’m out of here tomorrow.”

“Where ya going?”

“Got me a ticket on a boat to an island called Huahine.”

“You’re kidding!”

On my last day in San Francisco I’d wandered into a curious little shop in North Beach and saw a tiny map of an island. The coves and curves, hills and lagoons satisfied all of my childhood treasure map dreams. Reaching into Blue Bag, I handed the map to Tim, who leant back on his damp rancid mattress.

“Bloody eh. Looks like you’re coming too, mate.”

The next evening I found myself lying on the deck of a small ship laden to the gunwhales with cargo and people. Covering every inch of space, families were stacked over each other. Tim voiced concern about how there were only four lifeboats.

“They get some pretty bad storms out here.”

Watching the sun set across the South Pacific, my mind wandering back to the sterile world of marketing I’d left behind, I was far from fear. Aping his Antipodean cousins, I suggested:

“She’ll be right, mate!”

My love of boats goes back to my teens, when instead of going to university like a sensible chap, I worked winters in warehouses and hitched around Europe in the summers.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.