We are four days into our crossing from Bali to Borneo. The wind free crossing has been two things- brutally hot and crushingly boring. We became so overwhelmed with both today that we stopped the boat and took a swim break. We’d done this yesterday and it had somewhat revived us. Little did we know, this break would give us more than our fair share of excitement.
As soon as he cut the engine, Boyscout leapt from the boat and into the sea, dispensing with the shark lookout formalities from yesterday. Kitten followed shortly thereafter and then I too followed suit, jumping in a rather haphazard vault over the rail, for it was too hot on the deck to take the time to climb over. Brazen (our newest crewmember that we picked up in Bali) and Adub held back, either too brain boggled by the heat to change into their bathing suits, or unwilling to coat their bodies in salt.
The emergence of the boat video camera convinced them, or our cries of relief, for who can resist both a home video cameo and a chance to reduce his body temperature below 100 degrees? The boys went below to don their bathing suits and join us in the sea.
As I said before, we had dispensed with the formalities of a shark watch. Moments after Kitten, Adub, Boyscout and I had all jumped back in, two things simultaneously happened. One: Brazen flushed the toilet, which pumps out to the sea… unfortunately right next to where Adub and Boyscout were treading water. This caused the two of them to flail, yelping, away from the stream it released into the water around us. Two: I turned around and spotted, about five feet away, two rather large sea snakes gliding towards me. Yells of “Oh God, Brazen, no!” quickly changed to “Snake! Snake!” as I sounded the alarm and the rest joined in. Boyscout and Adub were already on their way up the swim ladder and I clambered up as well, desperate for Adub to move out of my way as the snake came within about a foot of my scrambling form. Kitten, seeing the congestion on the ladder, took a more logical route and swam around to the stern to escape, then evacuated the water via the rudder. Gasping and laughing once we all flopped onto the deck, we watched the snakes until someone shouted “Shark!” Sure enough, a grey and white form glided beneath us.
New excitement broke out and we rushed to open a can of tuna for our new friend. As he tentatively munched, in true stupid young people form, we challenged each other to jump in. We peered at his rather small form a few feet below the surface, but couldn’t get a good look at him. Eventually, Brazen worked up the courage to put on a mask and pop his head into the water to take a closer look. Our shark had no dorsal fin, which probably made him a fish, but box shaped jellyfish floated close to Brazen’s head. It was, perhaps, not our wisest choice of swimming location, but it made for a good story, an excellent home video, and at least (if you ignore the bit where we swam through human waste) we all got sort of clean.
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