How
we
built
the
boat
of
our
dreams
By Gideon Malherbe,
Skipper
Wavescape
will offer an
ongoing series
of stories
written by
Gideon and based
on the
adventures he
has had in
Indonesia.
As skipper of
the Indies
Explorer, he
plies the
"surf
route" off
Sumatra and
offers charter
trips. Click
for more info.
Part
1.
The
boat
we
built
We had paid an Indonesian fishing boat captain to take us surfing for a few
days and now we were anchored in the kidney shaped bay of Mause Island.
The
only thing Mause is close to is the equator, so if you run your finger
around the globe, somewhere during this circumnavigation you will come close
to it. Which is about as close as you will ever come.
Unless you own a yacht
and are one of Vasco's descendants, you don't stand a chance of ever seeing
Mause.
So let me describe it for you: A rather common or garden tropical
island with dense palm trees facing a white beach on the lee side, clear
turquoise waters and a coral reef which knows nothing of dynamite or global
warming. It is a testimony to its own inaccessibility. Nobody lives on
Mause. But when I
first
walked around the island I was shocked to see foot
prints in the sand ahead of me. Only when I had been following this intruder
for a while did I realize that it was none other than myself.
Ancient
Indo
skills
at
work
Ready
for
launch
It
took
two
spring
tides
But
it
was
worth
it
The tide came
in and those footprints were gone too.
But not my memories of Mause. Things were not the same for me after that
trip. At the end of 1996,
I found myself back in SA. A one-year surf trip
that started in Sumatra, made a U-turn in Oz and ended in the Philippines,
was over. Welcome back to the Real World. You've had your break, you've
surfed your brains out, now its time to knuckle down and continue with your
law career. But I could not forget Mause.
The Indonesian archipelago consists of more than 15000 islands. I wanted to
go back. I had to go back. My dad Deon wanted to know what I was going to do
with my life. He was under no illusion that I was going to follow in his
footsteps at Walkers Attorneys. So I told him of my 'plan'. Which was more a
dream really. "I want to find 4 or 5 partners, raise the finances, build a
cheap wooden boat in Indonesia and explore the remotest parts of the North
Indian Ocean".
He did not laugh. Just looked me in the eye and said:
"What are you going to do about this plan?"
"Uuuuh...I dunno."
"How are you going to raise the finances?"
"Uuuuh...I dunno"
You get my drift. I was clueless. Although it was a great topic to discuss
with my mates over a beer at La Med, the nuts and bolts were missing.
My biggest asset is my dad. He helped me shape the dream into a document.
The document was called "PROSPECTUS: The Indian Ocean Expedition, promoter:
Gideon Malherbe". That prospectus became my alter ego. It was the embodiment
of a surfer's dream. It was a powerful document. Eventually 7 men and 1 girl
were swayed by its charms. Later on the girl became my wife, Chantal. But
I'm getting ahead of myself.
By March 1998 (about 18 months after writing the prospectus) I had enough
partners and enough finances to build a boat. Where the boat was to be built
and exactly how much it would cost was still a gray area. But it soon became
evident that South Sulawesi was one of the most renowned wooden boat
building areas in Indonesia, supplying a majority of the vessels in what is
nowadays the only surviving commercial sailing fleet in the world. These
cargo carrying sailboats are called Pinisi schooners, and with their gaff
rigs, sharply raked bows, distinctive bowsprits and a total of seven sails
they are a relic of the forgotten spice trade.
I knew that my dream of exploring the North Indian Ocean was going to take a
detour through a boat yard in Indonesia. But I did not realize that this
detour would take a year. And I could not have known that this year, spent
with the Bugese people in the Kepaluan Bontobahari, South Sulawesi would be
a definitive period in my life, more so than what any surfer's self
gratifying search for 'the perfect wave' could ever be. Chantal and I
became members of a community who have weaved an intricate pattern between
their original animist beliefs and Islam, where the Koran is at its most
benign, where a village breaths a single breath, and when it breathes, it is
not the sound of lungs that you hear, but the knock-knock sound of hammers.
A community who do nothing but build boats.
On 8 August 1998 our boat builder Haji Damang laid the keel of the Indies
Explorer. The keel consists of two black Irian Jayan ironwood trunks, each
17m long, 30cm thick and 30cm wide. The keel laying ceremony is as ancient
as this race of people, with their unique alphabet and language. But this
sleepy town has a notorious past. This was the home of the south sea pirate.
At the height of the spice trade, the Bugese people found themselves
strategically situated between the busy port of Makassar to the west and the
Moluccas to the east. The reputation of these Bugese pirates spread across
the globe. Don't you still fear the Boogeyman?
>From that day in August, when the Haji's team wrestled those two mighty logs
into position, I was transported to a place where time does not always flow
in a linear fashion. When I first arrived, I was armed with 'quality bonus'
and 'speed' incentive schemes. How to make workers work harder, faster and
better. I should not have bothered. These guys work seven days a week. They
love their jobs. They know nothing else.
The name of the village is Tanaberu. There use to be a dense teak and
ironwood forest here. But nowadays the only thing left unchanged by
centuries of boat building is the beach. And despite the fact that Tanaberu
no longer has a local supply of wood, boat building has continued
unfettered. Not only because these mariners could simply use their own boats
to find wood elsewhere, but because the beach at Tanaberu is unique. It is
perfectly suited to launching boats. Nature has unwittingly combined a
perfect shore profile with substantial tidal variation and as a result
Tanaberu withstood the test of time. In some places the sawdust and wood
chips are waist deep. All along this beach, for a distance of about 4km's,
above the high water mark, boats are under construction. It is a living
museum, a showcase of carpentry and boat building techniques of a bygone
era, of an era yet to see the industrial revolution. Tanaberu is a relic of
the past.
Boats here are not measured by the length of their deck, but the length of
the keel. This is a consequential distinction. If a Bugese shipwright was
God, he would first have made Adam's skin, and once this 'sack' is complete
he would stuff it full of ribs and all the other bones. Adam would have had
a very thick skin indeed! The rest of the world, when building a wooden
boat, would build the ribs first, creating a frame, like the carcass of a
whale. Once the carcass is complete, the hull planks are fitted to the ribs.
'Not so' says the Bugese shipwright.
Here in Tanaberu the Bugese build their boats from the keel up, skin first.
Hence the importance of the length of the keel. Even Adam was only as tall
as his backbone! The secret to this unique recipe lies in the thickness of
the skin or hull planks. On our boat they were 8cm thick, thick enough to be
pegged together edge to edge, creating an outer layer which does not rely on
its ribs for its integrity. This translates to an extremely strong boat.
And so the Indies Explorer grew. Eventually we had to use a ladder to mount
her sides. She stood 4m tall, and by the time the last hull plank was
joined, she was 8m wide and 34m long. Her builders had become ants. One
could fit a tennis court inside her cavernous torso. In the mean time one of
my partners, Gus, a ships engineer by profession, was in Singapore, in
pursuit of an engine.
Gus has encyclopedic knowledge when it comes to ship's systems. He is
meticulous, does not accept second best and was the perfect man for the job.
He had a tough task, made even more so by the constraints of our budget. He
decided on a second hand Cummins 400hp straight six diesel engine. Once the
decision was made, he spent a month in Singapore completely rebuilding the
engine, fine-combing every inch of its metal innards. Little did I know how
much we would appreciate that month Gus spent in Singapore. A ships main
engine is its heart. Our expedition would take us far from any shore support
and technical back-up, and that Cummins straight six diesel was where the
buck stopped.
But it took exactly a year before the Indies Explorer was ready for launch.
And for that year Chantal and I lived in a small sea side village called
Bira, about 16km's from where the Indies Explorer was coming to life. It was
fortuitous that Haji Damang, our boat builder, owned a house there. It was
situated at the edge of a low cliff, featuring its own staircase to the
coral gardens below. Suddenly two Cape Town yuppies found themselves living
in what has to be a westerners perception of a tropical paradise. Each
morning I zoot off to the boat on our Honda scooter. But as soon as I'm back
at the house I would resume my love affair with free diving and spear
fishing. I got to know the underwater topography in the area around the Bira
peninsula better than the streets of my childhood Higgovale. Chantal and I
would spend hours floating and snorkelling in our own coral playground,
where Chantal fed a Moray Eel and I hunted for the illusive Spanish Mackerel
where the coral plateau suddenly fell away into a bottomless blue space.
Where I watched a Manta ray as big as a hang glider fly past me, dipping a
wing to bank around me in a wide arch before continuing along a seemingly
random route.
But it was hard for us. We were lonely. Far away from family and friends.
Only 2 telephones and one fax machine serviced a district the size of the
Western Cape. The young Muslim girl who worked at the fax office could not
understand that the fax works even if she's not there to collect the pages!
So at 5pm every afternoon the fax machine was switched off until the
following morning. If you combine this operational procedure with the fact
that South Africa is 7 hours behind, you have a very small window for
communication! Chantal tried to explain to her that when it's daytime in
Indonesia, it's nighttime in SA. "Who told you this?" she asked Chantal
incredulously.
