Some things are more plain sailing than others

Hmmmm
El Capitano
Yellow submachine
For fear of including only jealousy provoking blogs about my lakeside evasions, I shall make this one only briefly and leave you with photos rather. Yes, I went back to the lake on Easter weekend. The appeal was too great, despite my rather shattered physical state (after the Lucius escapade!). It was in honour of a long-awaited reunion with my main contact in Malawi from my previous trip- Mr Neville Bevis. This man needs a full blog to merely paint a superficial portrait of his oh-so-varied-and-amazing life. In just a few words, he is a 60 odd year old widower and retired teacher from Harrogate, who’s been in country for >10years running an ‘orphanage’ by the name of Open Arms. He has recently opened a new branch in Mangochi, near Lake Malawi, and that is no mean feat. The level of organisation and dedication it takes to run even one of the ‘orphanages’ in Blantyre would scare the hell out of most normal good meaning people I can think of. He hates the term ‘orphanage’ with the same passion my friend Caleb hates ‘AIDS orphans’. Not least because, over here, these terms attract stigma and, rather than help, simply exacerbate the problem.
Besides his charitable credentials, Neville is also an experienced sailor and has spent the last couple of years spending his retirement money on his dream, that of building a sailing boat. That, he did pretty well here using local people and materials as much as possible. And this weekend was one of the early trial runs of his new baby. With his physically eager ”moussaillon” it was only a question of shouting out the orders before the sail was raised skywards, the anchor swapped (requiring an acrobatic and divine dive into the deep lake to reach it) and the catamaran moving (with the anchor-boy back on board after a rather Latissimus-testing scramble). The rest was a fairy tale fuelled by a heat-induced partial delirium and lack of food! Let me add that that was not our intention . Food we brought with us for sure, but little had we anticipated the spillage of fuel that turned our bread and cheese sandwich into a highly flammable carcinogenic timebomb... Not that I didn’t try to eat it at least, but the violent rejection from my tastebuds was a reaction I could hardly ignore!
What better way to test our weakened, beer-thirsty souls then, after some 4hours hard sailing and boiled lake water drinking, than to put a squall just at that spot where we decided to take down sail. I had no idea what and where it came from but it was like we suddenly left the eye of a cyclone to get right into its chopping jaws. How we managed to bring the sail down without getting hammered to death by these raging metal-fringed canvasses is a mystery to me! By then I was on my very last legs indeed and all that kept me going till the coast was a beer-gilded mirage. And Oh did it taste good!

Next day, we had a renewed trial with an additional member. By then, thankfully we had ironed out most of the teething problems from the day before (I’d like to take some credit for this). And this time we did have a plain sailing venture into the vast lake... under the same beating sun and drinking the same lake water tea, but less the squall. We had Mwera instead (a localised bad weather formation on the lake) in the morning but wisely waited for it to abate. By the next morning the Bwera had scaled up a few notches and any sailing would have been beyond our wildest ambition. But there was no need for any such death wishes then, because we had done the sailing we set out to do and it was our time to head back home anyway. This we did along some pretty fascinating Bwera-free landscapes environing the exquisite natural gem which is the Liwonde National park. I was one satisfied and sore-boned terrestrian stung by the sailing bug! PS: I do apologise for failing in my aim to keep this one brief, but I hope you’ll understand why I couldn’t!
escape...