Bro! Boet! Jrrrrrjassussfok! High fives, chest bump, wooooohooooo! Sausage party! Bear-fest! Warwick Leslie, Justin Rollinson and the author feel the vibe.
St Brandon’s atoll lies smack bang in the middle of the Indian ocean. From Mauritius it’s a 28-30 hour boat ride on a loud but comfortable supply vessel. I imagined we were like the A-team. Riaan, the hard-as-nails Afrikaans ex-military type (now financial guru) would definitely deal with any pirates we might encounter. He probably knew first aid and could shoot the beak off a pigeon from 200m with a .22. Warwick, the MD of pimp-my-bakkie specialists Alu-Cab, would definitely be the MacGyver in the trio, fixing the 9000 DB diesel motor should it fry a piston, or fashion a life raft if we hit a reef and sank the vessel. Me? Well I was terrified, but took comfort in knowing that should the boat sink, I had a luminous orange bag that floated, so that could buy me some
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time until the plethora of pelagic shark species got hold of me. I’m used to big seas and rough weather on boats, but there was something about a crossing of that distance and how remote we were that didn’t sit well with me. I also don’t react well to sleeping tablets and all the other pharmaceutical cocktails the rest of the guys were slamming. I would be awake and on edge for most of the voyage. I won’t bore you with the misery of what a 30-hour boat trip in shitty weather is like, but the final few hours of the evening before we anchored were pretty electric. Everyone had woken up in time to catch the last rays of sun as we started to see land masses and some shipwrecks
W W W. T H E M I S S I O N F LY M A G . C O M
