A Smarter Way to Travel

Day 4 : St Helena to Ascension Island

Monday, March 7th 2022

I wake up with a start, and sit bolt upright in bed.

Somehow, without even looking at the clock, I know I’m late. VERY late.

I look at the clock.

“SSSSHHHIIITTTTTTT!!!”

It’s 6.21am, and I was meant to leave the house at 6am to get to the airport for a 7.30am flight. To the most important work meeting of my career.

It’s at least a half hour drive to the airport, on a good day. With no traffic. And check-in closes at 7am.

The pessimist in me says there’s no way I’m going to make it. My mind races furiously, thinking of excuses I can text my boss, who is also flying in to Melbourne to meet me.

But my dominant optimist won’t give up. Not yet, anyway.

I leap out of bed, get one foot into yesterday’s work pants that are draped over the chair, and hop to the bathroom, where I start cleaning my teeth while pulling on the pants with the other hand.

As soon as the pants are fastened, I start dialling a taxi – there’s no way I’m going to have time to park the car at the airport as I usually do.

Sydney taxis in those days were booked using Interactive Voice Respsonse – a system that struggled to cope with my Scottish accent at the best of times, but is even more hopeless than usual on this particular morning, between my panic and a mouth full of toothbrush.

I’d long since learned the secret keypad code to get put through to an operator, and I beg the nice lady who answers to send someone FAST as I throw on a shirt and tie, grab my laptop and satchel, and head for the apartment door.

It’s 6.28am, and the taxi hasn’t even been dispatched yet.

Outside my apartment door is a lift, and the door to the one other apartment that I share this small landing and floor with.

I stab the lift button repeatedly. Glory be – it’s already on my floor, and the door starts opening.

Inside, staring at me like it’s the most normal thing in the world, is a cat. Just passively looking at me.

It blinks. I blink back. Time passes.

I’ve no time to process this, or be weirded out. It’s just a cat in a lift. Why not?

I step in and push the button for ground, and as the doors close, the cat slips through the gap and onto the landing. Dammit. Ah well, its going to have to wait there. My neighbour will no doubt sort it out when she leaves for work.

As the lift descends to the ground floor, I start searching in my satchel for my wallet.

“NOO”!

I hit the “2” for my floor, but have to wait for the lift to reach ground, doors open, doors close, and we start ascending again.

I rush out, past the still quite passively content cat, and open my apartment door – the cat bolts inside as soon as the door is cracked.

What fresh hell is this???

I spy my wallet on the coffee table and grab it immediately, but my feline friend has decided now would be a great time to play hide and seek. I can’t leave the cat there all day, so I get down on my hands and knees to try and coax the cat from under the coffee table, and get swatted a couple of times for my troubles.

“I’ve got no time for this, cat”, I hiss, and reach under further, grab it by the scruff, and frogmarch/carry it to the door, and into the lift with me.

On the ground floor, I put the cat down, open the door of the lobby, and the cat follows me out, meowing something that sounds for all the world like a “screw you”.

The taxi is waiting for me.

And as my driver breaks all known speed records to get me to the airport on time (they still sing songs about him in Sydney), I find myself reflecting on cats and lifts.

How does a cat, with its walnut sized brain, process the concept of an elevator? It gets in on one floor, and after some random period of time, the door opens and the entire universe has changed. There could be no way for the cat to understand what’s just happened. It is, for all intents and purposes, a teleportation device.

And that’s exactly what the cat would think, if it had the capacity to even understand what a teleportation device was!

Instead it just walks in to a small room. The door closes. The door opens. The world has changed entirely. It shrugs and walks on.

I didn’t have much cause to think about this again until this morning. It just remained one of life’s mysteries.

But when it came time to write my daily passage blog, and I started to type about wind angles, and pulling down the spinnaker as wind was too strong, and gybing, and struggling to make our destination by Tuesday night, and blah blah blah, all the usual stuff that you’ve already seen me banging on about many times before, I thought instead it would be more fun to write a blog from Coco’s perspective.

And here’s the thing. I can’t.

I don’t have the imagination to be able to fathom what’s going on in that tiny little brain of hers.

How on earth does she process life on a boat?

She spent her entire existence in one huge room with 20 other rescue cats. Then suddenly, and without anyone asking her, she’s scooped up, put into a box and transported in a noisy swaying machine for an hour, then moved into another tiny rocking machine with a buzzy engine and moved for another 5 minutes until she’s deposited in her new, floating home, with two humans. Never to see her friends again.

Or at least that is what she would think. If she even knew what floating meant.

Every now and again, a loud growling noise from under the floor signifies that her entire world is about to start rocking and swaying. And even when the growling stops, sometimes then her home is now at a crazy angle, rocking backwards and forwards. But sometimes not.

Sometimes all of this happens for a few hours, and then just as suddenly it all returns to normal. But sometimes it’s for a few days. When it starts, she has no concept of how long it’s going to go on for.

You might think that this would an apt description of hell for a cat. But for the most part, she seems quite content with her new universe. Unlike Dixie, she has no real interest in getting off the boat when we’re tied up in a marina, for example.

We were in V&A Marina in Cape Town for two months, and after a few days, she plucked up the courage to jump off onto the dock. But after only 30 seconds she got scared and tried to jump back on. And misssed. Jen managed to scoop her out of the freezing water, and after a shower and lots of hugs, she was right as rain. But she’s never showed any inclination to leave the boat since.

Perhaps she’s smart enough to have worked out that when all the noise and motion stops, she’s in a different location than before.

I imagine that if she has worked it out though, she probably rolls her eyes at these silly humans spending days trying to get to new places in their noisy, rocky, rolly machine.

They should just use one of those teleportation rooms instead.

Day 4 Statistics:
Time on passage so far: 3 days, 16 hours
Distance Covered: 536 nautical miles
Distance in last 24 ours: 154 nm
Average Speed: 6.0 knots
Distance to Go: 267 nautical miles

Number of people who’ve commented since yesterday’s blog that they wished THEY would receive 21 nice emails in a day: 3 (for the record, 9 of those emails were from the one person, that I was having a backwards and forwards with, and 3 were with someone else. But still, I’m not complaining, at all )

Number of smart-arse friends who sent me a one word email in response to yesterday’s blog: A very disappointing 2 (I would have done it, for sure)