Boat rescue!

Claire and I had just finished putting up our tent at The Butterfly Space. We were stood in the camping bit, right on the edge of the lake, gazing out at the water when it came into view. Out of nowhere came a giant construction, floating on the water. It was a flat platform, with a few wooden beams pointing upwards and a metal prow. On this structure were around fifteen local guys all using wooden beams to paddle it along the lake. They were singing and chanting in time as they moved it slowly along the water. And, out the front, Claire and I could just about make out a white guy in a kayak towing the giant thing along behind him. It looked like hard work on behalf of everyone. People gathered at the shore to take a look and see what all the commotion was about. We joked that it was Justin’s houseboat. Justin, from Joy’s place in Mzuzu, had told us that he was building one and it was moored up on the lake, so I took a picture and sent it over to Cameron with the message – ‘Look, we’ve found Justin’s houseboat’.

It turns out that it was Justin’s houseboat, but what was to follow was, for Justin at least, incredibly stressful. I continued to potter around the camp site whilst Claire went for a swim. Around half an hour later she came running over and pointed at Justin’s boat. It had been anchored just off the shore from where we were, but was now drifting out towards the other side of the bay where the water was crashing against some rocks. All of Justin’s crew had disembarked once it had moored up and were refusing to go and help him recover the vessel. Justin was screaming at them to go and help from his little kayak, and in his stressful state Claire offered our help. Justin accepted her offer before speeding off to try and rescue the boat. There was, at this point in time, still one loyal member of his crew on board.

Claire swam off on her own to try and offer Justin another pair of hands, whilst I changed into my swimming shorts. Then, before joining her on the whopping three hundred or so metre swim towards the other side of the bay, I thought it would be a good idea to see if I could convince some of the fifteen man crew to come with me. We were going to need plenty of hands on deck. I sat down and spoke to one of the crew. “What’s going on?” I asked. “The boat is floating away,” replied the man. “Shouldn’t we go and help?” I asked. “It is too far away,” he said. “But if we don’t help it will get broken up against the rocks,” I added, loudly enough so the rest of the crew could hear. “We can’t swim that far,” was his response. I told him that my girlfriend was already swimming over, and that I was going to go and help and that they should come with me. But they refused and remained sat in the deck chairs watching as the houseboat drifted nearer and nearer to the rocks. I jumped in and started swimming, unsure as to whether Claire and I would be able to offer any actual assistance. By the time we swam all the way over to the boat Justin had managed to get a local boat with an outboard motor to come and help him pull it away.

Claire had a head start on me so she got to witness the tense moments when the boat was actually crashing against the rocks. She was bobbing in the water metres away, watching as Justin’s investment dangled by a thread. “When I arrived,” she said, “there was one guy left on the boat, I think it was Justin’s carpenter, and he was using a plank of wood to try and push the boat away from the rocks. The guy was on his own and was screaming ‘Justin’ loudly. And then suddenly Justin came around the corner on his motorboat and said ‘I’m coming!’. It was very stressful. I thought the houseboat was going to smash into a million pieces. You could hear it bashing against the rocks and they lost of a few planks of wood from the floor.” Luckily, once the other boat turned up we weren’t needed so Claire and I swam all the way back to the bay, which was the most exercise we’d done in quite a while. By the time we got back to Butterfly, his crew had all disappeared. This was our first hour at The Butterfly Space. We got back to the shore, sat down and had a well deserved beer.