Friday 10th October 2008

I woke up feeling pretty good although the sea had been very rough all night. I decided not to have breakfast or my meds until after we reached dry land, after all we were going to dock at 8:00, weren’t we?
WRONG!
As there was still no sight of the port by 8:30 I took my meds and was talking to God on the big white phone by 9:15. This was bad, fairly violent seasickness and I was really concerned about being able to ride the bike. I shouldn’t have been concerned. The first bad sign was when we were called for an extra free meal at lunchtime. We were now stationary, hiding in sheltered waters. I felt well enough to try the free lunch and joined three Arabs in traditional clothing. They spoke surprisingly little French but were good company and when they discovered I was Irish they decided that I had brought the bad weather with me and announced this loudly in Arabic to everyone in earshot. Perhaps time to keep a lower profile? The main course was vegetables and meat. My fellow diners were not eating the meat, presumably for religious reasons. I was eating very little of it though for digestive reasons rather than religious. A whisper went round the non meat eaters that there was fish left over in the restaurant and suddenly we had four portions of fish. They had decided that I obviously didn’t like meat so therefore they would look after the benighted, hungry foreigner and get him some fish. I know when I’m beaten – I ate the fish and spent the next two hours lying down very carefully on my bunk.
There wasn’t much information being given out by the crew but we did hear that Nador harbour was still closed because of the storm – perhaps we would just stay out here until we ran out of fuel? Everybody was now feeling bored and trapped, nobody was in the mood for conversation and I had no book to read. In a particularly bored moment and with my stomach threatening to take centre stage again, I couldn’t escape the thought that, if we’d been in a plane we would have, in the words of Billy Connolly, ‘gone into the ground like a f***ing dart’ by now and it would all be over. Tragically, my French was not good enough to enable me to share these words of wit and wisdom with my companions.
Now we got a really bad sign – there was not enough food left to make dinner. We got a paper bag each with a can of fanta and two sandwiches made from stale bread rolls and something unidentifiable. This created a bit of grumbling but some humour as well but I knew that if the mint tea ran out there would be really ugly scenes. Interestingly the mood on board had changed and people now seemed to want to talk again. As they had run out of things to say to their friends they started to form new groups. I had people I had never seen before come to me to offer advice about my bike trip. It might have been better if any of the advice had been about anything other than the likely catastrophes that would surely befall me. Well, if it made them feel better. One thing I was sure about – I did not want to ride the bike off the ship with nowhere to go to in the dark.
I managed to find an English speaking ship’s engineer who told me that it would be too dangerous to try to dock the ship at dark in these circumstances (good) so they had decided to just let the ship drift during the night (not so good?) and they would dock sometime tomorrow if the weather improved (probably good?). Trying to explain all this to the crowd of French speakers that then formed around me completely wore me out so I just gave up on considering my likely chances of survival and went to bed.