Mireille Day

At one point, one of the men tried to board the boat and Jean put up his hand quite, you know, authoritatively and said no.

And the dog really went off and started barking.

And what he said then in sign language to the person that looked like the leader of the, might be a step too far to call them pirates, the locals, we need food.

We will come to the village.

We will come with you to the village.

And they seemed okay with that.

They seemed to understand.

The guy repeated the gestures and he understood that.

So when the canoes rode off and we were supposed to follow, we just hightailed it out into the high seas and left.

And I still don't know to this day whether we might have been parking in their fishing ground, you know, in their driveway.

We were fairly close.

We just pulled up.

not knowing where we were, or they might have been pirates and they were looking over the ship quite furtively and deciding after all that, you know, a ship that was falling to pieces probably wasn't worth pirating.

Well, that was the worst encounter and next was the best encounter.

And we were so tired by this point too, the night before we'd been up all night, you know, wrestling with the wind, et cetera.

And where we could see palm trees now and we actually got up quite close to this island.

It was a series of islands called the Karamata Islands.

I think they belong to Indonesia now, but they're quite a long way from the other islands of Indonesia.

Yeah.

And we'd only just pulled up and sort of heard the swish of the boat on the sand.