Our first evening after leaving Niue, we grilled the remains of the tuna we’d been given by Lionel on the BBQ. As I munched away, my mouth felt dry, a little prickly. It felt like I was getting a mouth ulcer. Or maybe scurvy… I only managed a couple of pieces before deciding that I wasn’t enjoying it much, so Neptune had the rest. I took a sip of my rum and lime and felt a hot flush come over my face. Woah! That’s quite some rum, I thought. Then I started to get a headache, and felt decidedly strange. I popped below to take a look at myself in the mirror and saw that my whole head and neck had gone hot and red. Hmmn. Something not right here. I asked the others if they were feeling OK – no, they weren’t – Eva had a headache and Dave was starting to get tingles in his fingers and toes. Not a good sign. It had to be the fish. But tuna, a pelagic fish, never has ciguatera, the toxin that reef fish pick up, the reason we’ve not been catching and eating reef fish on the islands. Feeling a little concerned, I thumbed through the “poisoning” section of my offshore fishing book. We were truly on our own, 100 miles downwind of Niue and at least that still to go before Tonga. We were all getting worse. I really hoped it wasn’t going to turn into an epic. None of us usually suffer allergic reactions to seafood, yet that’s exactly what the symptoms were. Hot, red neck and head, restricted breathing, raised pulse, headache…
Diagnosing that we’d got scombrotoxism*, I read “bronchospasms and general respiratory distress, shock and possibly death can result from serious cases… get to a doctor if possible … evacuate the stomach … administer antihistamine”. Erk. By this time, maybe half an hour later, I was starting to feel a lot better, and decided to wait it out. The others didn’t show signs of deterioration, so Dave took the watch and I took a nap. Phew, I thought, nice to be through that. But after an hour or so of sleep, I felt another wave of reaction coming on; headache, dizziness, flushed face and neck. I got up and woozed around for a bit, drank some water, and again after about half an hour symptoms went away. I think that was it – I didn’t get another round, but the others had a tougher night. By morning, we were all normal again.
As we got better, the weather got worse. Through the day, the wind picked up, and the seas got larger. Thankful that the weather had been kind while we were feeling rotten, we prepared for a bumpy night. I turned in while Dave took the first watch in the building gale. I was woken by a shout from the cockpit.
“We’ve lost the instruments! Autopilot not working!”
I came on deck to see Dave wrestling with the wheel as Rafiki charged down the face of some fairly meaty waves, with just the third reef in the main sail and wind whistling in the rigging. Oh great, what a time to have a systems failure. It could at least have been daytime. First, a quick check below the cockpit – all mechanical systems were OK. It had to be an electrical fault … which means it could be anything from a corroded connection (any of hundreds) to a software failure in any one of the components on the network. I spent the next two hours trying to get the thing working again, tracing wires, isolating different parts of the system, climbing in and out of the cockpit locker with a torch in my mouth as the boat lurched and lunged over the waves, careering through the night. There was a blinking red light on top of the autopilot computer, so I dug out the instruction manual and flipped to the troubleshooting section.
“Network error. Call Raymarine technical support.”
Ugh. So I dialled up American support on the satphone, figuring they were the ones likely to be awake. Ten expensive minutes later, I was still on hold. Expecting to be told “replace part X”, and of course not having a spare part X on board, I figured this was a dead end option and hung up. After trying everything else I could think of, I gave up for the night. The whole system was down, not just the autopilot. Wind speed, depth, boat speed, GPS – all blank. I hoped that the problem, whatever it was, hadn’t also damaged all the components. I disconnected the chart plotter from the network and switched it to use it’s internal GPS sensor … so at least we knew where we were and where we were going.
The three of us took turns helming through the night, in the pitch black darkness, with only the red glow of the compass and the feel of the boat under our feet to guide us down the waves at the right angle. Tiring work. Morning brought a watery grey light, but the howling wind was still hustling us along at maximum speed. By the time the night had fully turned into day, we’d rounded the top of the Vava’u island group of Tonga, which sheltered us from the south east swell – making a huge difference to comfort and our ability to keep the boat under control. We tacked our way in, between the entrance islands in calm water (but 40+ knot winds), and then motored around to the main town of Neiafu. Conditions in the sheltered water couldn’t have been more different from those just a few miles away out at sea. Off came the wet weather gear and life jackets, replaced by shorts and sunglasses, the tension of the passage burned off by the warm sun. Tired, and relieved to have reached port, we tied up to the wharf to start our check-in procedure.
* The Scombridae family of fish (tuna, wahoo, mackerel) have something called histidine in ’em, “more prevalent in red and oily fish” … and when bacteria munch on this, they produce toxic by-products. It’s the toxin that got us. We thought that as we’d grilled the fish to almost charcoal we’d have killed anything nasty, but toxins are not living and persist through cooking. The book says “reject any meat with the sharp or peppery taste characteristic of these toxins” … next time I sure will!
Road and Ocean 