A coral atoll revealed the sea in its true colors
Issue 122: Sept/Oct 2018
As a boy, I felt very lucky to grow up at Leigh-on-Sea, on the north shore of the Thames Estuary in Essex, England, where the tide really goes out, leaving about two miles of thick mud. There was a small fishing industry in the old town, and before the banks would dry out completely, shrimp and cockle boats would feel their way in or out along a long creek.
One way I had of raising money as a young lad was to buy charcoal prints from a local artist, color them in, and sell them to tourists. I knew to depict the sea in black, the color of the Thames. I’d seen postcards of the South Pacific showing the sea colored in beautiful blues and turquoise, but I tended to surmise that these colors were simply added, as I added color to my prints.
Growing up, I spent most of my time afloat on boats. My father was a research scientist and had a passion for the sea. He owned several lovely old working fishing boats and yachts. He refitted them at Leigh, but in the summer he preferred to keep them farther north, on the River Crouch, where they stayed afloat whatever the state of the tide.
In my early teens, I started racing GP14 dinghies at Leigh with my pals. Needing money to buy my own, I worked on the local cockle boats for £1 a day. This was good money in the late 1950s and early ’60s, much better than a paper route (besides, I could never get up that early for anything other than the tide).
As a young man, I left Indonesia’s Java Island on my first ocean passage aboard Kalayanee, a ketch I was delivering. We passed through the Sunda Strait, between Java and Sumatra, where the volcanic mountain of Krakatau loomed menacing and magical to starboard.
After we’d been at sea a week, Australia’s Cocos (Keeling) Islands came into view. Four enormous bottlenose dolphins played around the bow and escorted Kalayanee through the entrance pass at midday and we dropped anchor close to the old telegraph station buildings on Direction Island. The one other yacht in the anchorage was flying a German flag.
I could see our anchor where it sat on the bottom in about 20 feet of water a wonderful light-blue color. Only when I looked around at the shades of blue and turquoise water in the lagoon did I really see that those South Pacific postcards weren’t fake!
I’ve since enjoyed a full sailing life and have visited quite a few coral atolls all over the world. However beautiful many of them have been, nothing has quite compared to my first time seeing the wonderful blue colors of the sea.
John Simpson grew up on the north shore of the Thames Estuary in England. His early experiences aboard his father’s smack imbued him with a lifetime’s passion for sailing and the sea. He considers himself lucky to have turned this passion into work racing, coaching, and delivering yachts, while also making several personal adventurous voyages.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
