Under Wide and Starry Skies - Fifty Sailing Destinations in Seas Less Travelled.
by Nick Coghlan 10 Apr 10:00 AEST
Under Wide and Starry Skies © Nick Coghlan
Back in June 2024, SailWorldCruising.com was kind enough to publish an excerpt from my book, Sailing to the heart of Japan, for which I am very appreciative and grateful.
I now have a second book out: Under Wide and Starry Skies - Fifty Sailing Destinations in Seas Less Travelled.
Each chapter consists of a story, hand-drawn charts and practical information about the remote locations selected, which range from Robinson Crusoe Island (Chile) to Saint Helena (South Atlantic) and Summers Bay (Alison Sound, BC).
The book's title is a reference to Robert Louis Stevenson's poem Requiem, which is also the epitaph on his grave in Samoa:
Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
The excerpt below features what is perhaps the most unusual of all fifty destinations in the book: Al Kwasir Island, on the Blue Nile near Khartoum (currently inaccessible on account of the civil war in Sudan).
About the author
Nick and Jenny Coghlan have covered 70,000 miles at sea in two successive Canadian-registered 27-footers: Tarka the Otter (an Albin Vega 27) and Bosun Bird (Vancouver 27). In between voyages, Nick worked first as a teacher, then as a diplomat; his final posting was as the first Canadian Ambassador to the new Republic of South Sudan.
Nick is the author of three books covering his diplomatic career and, as well as Under Wide and Starry Skies, two more on sailing. Winter in Fireland: A Patagonian Sailing Adventure follows Bosun Bird through stormy waters off Cape Horn, while Sailing to the heart of Japan has her crew venturing through the islands of the western Pacific to Japan's Inland Sea.
More information and contact - website and Twitter: @NicholasCoghlan
Under Wide and Starry Skies is available in hard copy and as an e-book at all the usual outlets, including here.
Excerpt - Chapter 40
Alkwasir Island, Khartoum - Sudan
When you’re living in the middle of the Sahara Desert and the government is an Islamist military dictatorship it can be a challenge to find fun things to do.
The work could be quite interesting. As the sole Canadian diplomat resident in Khartoum (Sudan) I had in 2000 a vicious civil war to report on, that had cost two million lives and had been running for 17 years. And after 9/11 it fell to me to look after journalists who had come to see where Osama bin-Laden had got started. I would show them the chemists’ shop where he’d once had an office and we’d go out and meet his ex-cook, who’d tell us how Osama loved Basmati rice and liked to play with small children. For good measure we would throw in a visit to the site of the al-Shifa pharmaceuticals factory that had been destroyed by American cruise missiles in 1998; the custodian would show us a piece of rocket motor on which you could make out the word ‘Boeing.’
But the terror-tourism became tedious with repetition. For relaxation there was nothing better than getting out on the river, for Khartoum is located at the junction of the Blue with the White Nile.
Back in the 1920s, when this was a British garrison, it occurred to the Colonel of the Regiment that a good way of keeping the young officers out of trouble might be to establish a sailing club. The first problem was that there were no boats. Indeed, there was hardly any wood to be had either, the nearest forest being 2000 km to the south. But there was a large pile of galvanised iron that had had been hauled up laboriously from Cairo in case one of the garrison’s old gunboats needed repairs. A reputable yacht designer was commissioned – Morgan Giles – and the result was the Khartoum One Design. This is a steel 18ft sloop based on a Sharpie, with buoyancy tanks, a retractable centerboard, a Bermuda-rigged mainsail and a jib. Starting in 1932, about fifty were built.
The clubhouse of the Blue Nile Sailing Club (established in 1926) is similarly ironclad: H.M.S. Melik (‘King’ in Arabic). The Melik is one of four gunboats that were ferried in pieces past the six cataracts of the Lower Nile. They were re-assembled in situ as British forces approached Khartoum in 1898, seeking revenge for the earlier killing in the capital of General Charles Gordon by the messianic figure known as the Mahdi. The Melik played a part in the Battle of Omdurman, where its deck-mounted machine gun was used to devastating effect, inspiring Hillaire Belloc’s short poem:
Whatever happens,
We have got
The Maxim Gun
And they have not
The Khartoum One Design fleet would race twice a week in winter just before sunset, then there would be a longer race on Friday mornings (the Islamic weekend). For the Friday races we would often beat down the Blue Nile to its junction with the White and run back against the current with a usually strong northerly behind us. Jenny and I were a little nervous the first time we took a boat out on our own. The current of one to two knots would inevitably take us downstream in the direction of Cairo (about 3000km and six sets of cataracts) and while the wind would tend to bring us back, late evening calms were not uncommon.
It was also clear that, should we capsize, then righting a heavyweight like the Khartoum might be challenging. The Commodore, a genial and very large man in a flowing white djellabiya that sometimes would catch in his tiller when going about, was nonchalant when we very cautiously inquired if the club had lifejackets:
‘No, no Mr Nicholas, Miss Jenny…do not worry about that. Our Nile is warm.’
But he hesitated.
‘There is one thing…If you do capsize, please to do so on the Blue Nile, not the White. You see, there are crocodiles on the White. And….er….do not stand on the bottom of the river. There is, how do you say, Bilharzia? It is a worm; it is not good.’
We were generously allocated a boat of our own. The arrangement for temporary residents was that you were welcome to fix-up one of the ancient dinghies – being steel they were robust – as long as you bequeathed it once you left. About one third of the members were expatriates. Our Sudanese fellow-members would offset the cost of rehabilitation by seeking sponsorship – from Pepsi, or maybe the local cooking-oil company – and displaying their logos. We contented ourselves with a sparkling paint job in Canadian colours (red and white), a maple leaf on the bows and the grand name Canada One.
Racing around the buoys on weekday evenings was often a robust affair and we rarely did well. In theory the usual racing rules applied, but in reality the terms ‘Starboard!’ or ‘Water!’ were taken to mean ‘Get out of my way!’, and were held to be binding as long as you got in there first.
The club employed two ‘boat boys’ who filled in as skippers or crew when numbers were short. Farouk was in his eighties, Mohammed Bahar a few years younger but impaired by a severely crooked back. On the race course they were demons. Of course, they knew every eddy, every wind shadow, the location of every sandbank. A common ploy was to lead trusting ‘khawajas’ (foreigners) over such a shoal, having surreptitiously hauled up their 1-meter centerboard without our seeing. On one memorable occasion we were thus stranded directly in front of the grand Republican Palace where Gordon had been speared to death. It was strictly forbidden to loiter around here. The AK47-carrying soldiers who began shouting and gesticulating at us, as Jenny stepped out to lighten ship and move us off the bottom, gave us some cause for concern.
We twice snapped our wooden mast in Chinese gybes but by next race-day Farouk had spliced the joint together again, just making the mast a little shorter. Dents resulting from collisions would simply be hammered out. One foreigner took things more seriously. On leave in the UK, he strolled into a venerable sailmaker’s on the Solent, anticipating a little quiet one-upmanship:
‘I’d like a new mainsail for my dinghy, please.’
‘Oh yes sir, what class might that be?’
(Smugly) ‘A Khartoum One Design…’
(Coolly) ‘Of course sir…Hmmm, I do believe Mr. Giles sent us a set of drawings, but I must say I don’t think we’ve cut one of those for a while…1945 maybe? When do you need it?’
Most clubs have their own historic annual races. One of ours, described in the Club Rule Book, was to Gordon’s Tree. Long ago felled, it grew at the point on the White Nile where in 1885 the relieving British force sighted smoke in Khartoum and knew they were too late to save the General. At a skippers’ meeting prior to this race we were all asked to take note of the fact that a particularly aggressive hippopotamus had been seen in the grounds of the Hilton, where the Niles meet; he (or she) was ‘to be avoided.’ Another race involved swimming to and from your dinghy; this favoured the expatriates, as very few locals knew how to swim. But the highlight was the overnighter to Alkwasir, a small uninhabited island eight miles up the Blue Nile; the name means ‘fierce beasts.’
We would set off in the late afternoon and it would be a leisurely run down-wind as the sun sank and the call to prayer would be heard from minarets all over Khartoum. There would be blue woodsmoke in the air from the dozens of brick-making kilns that lined the banks. Once away from the city, the only sound was the rhythmic chugging of ancient Lister diesel pumps, taking water from the river to the adjoining fields. As the light faded we’d pull our heavy boats up on the sandy beach of the island. A few people might bring tents, but most of us would sleep out: it never rained in winter.
There’d be a bonfire and then the expats would come into their own, especially the diplomats. As we were among the very few people in the country with legal access to alcohol, there was a quiet expectation that we would bring along the ‘tea’ (the euphemism for Johnny Walker Red Label). Once that was exhausted, it would be on to the local homemade ‘araki’ (date-based firewater); next morning’s long beat home could seem very tedious to some.
It was only on these morning sails back from Alkwasir that we expats could beat our Sudanese friends, in fact. For we were more experienced, you see, when it came to tea drinking.