Casting Off by Emma Bamford

needed permission from the other island, Selingaan, to visit here.
    ‘Let’s go,’ I told Steve but he wouldn’t budge.
    ‘Leave this to me,’ he said. ‘The Malaysians are so polite, we can get anything here if we’re nice and smile.’
    And he was right (again. Had I not learned anything yet?). Despite firmly ordering us off his land, the warden seemed happy to chat and took us to see a green turtle, about four years old and
30cm long, that he and his colleagues had fished out of the sea that afternoon. It was unable to dive and they were worried that the sun exposure would kill it so they’d brought it ashore and
placed it in a small saltwater pool built out of concrete next to the hut. In the adjacent pool was a team of hawksbill hatchlings (take that,
Lonely Planet
!), each about three inches
long. They were swimming around in a haphazard fashion, bumping into each other and the sides of their pen, wiggling their flippers out of synch. The warden let us help him put them in a basket so
he could release them on the beach. They were so light and quite soft and one hooked its back flippers around my little finger as it sat in my palm. Another fell on to its back in the basket and
couldn’t right itself, no matter how hard it waved its flippers in the air, so I turned it over. On the beach, the warden tipped them on to the sand about two feet from the water’s edge
and while some of them were off to the sea like a shot, others needed a bit more time to think about it and to build up either their courage or their sense of direction. It was a struggle for them
to swim out; every time a wave lapped on to the sand it carried a group of floundering hatchlings back with it.
    Steve stayed up half the night listening for turtles. He described it to me as a very human sound, like a diver gasping for air. The next morning, still full of excitement, we motored in the
dinghy to Pulau Selingaan to ask for permission to come ashore at night to take part in one of the turtle vigils they held there. We were flatly refused and, deflated, set off back to
Kingdom
.
    While we had been away another yacht had anchored close by us. Steve diverted to head towards it and as we approached a very tanned, forty-something man wearing a floppy hat, a lot of sun block
and a long-sleeved shirt came on deck to greet us. Australian? I wondered.
    ‘G’day! How’s it going?’ he said.
    It being a small world, you can bump into someone you know even when you’re on anchor hundreds of miles away from the nearest city in a country none of you can call home. Steve recognised
the Aussie, Greg, from a regatta in Thailand. Greg and his wife Debs, both in their forties, were cruising Borneo aboard
Southern Cross
. We chatted briefly, us sitting in the dinghy, them
crouching on their deck, and they recommended that if it was turtles we wanted to see we should visit Pulau Langkayan, a small island with an upmarket resort on it where the staff will radio you on
your boat if a turtle comes ashore at night so you can go and take a look. But Langkayan was back beyond where we’d come from and we were running low on fresh water reserves so we thanked
them for the tip and sailed off towards the town of Sandakan instead.

    Blue Steel
was at anchor off Sandakan yacht club – well, I say yacht club, but it was more a drinking venue for non-boat-owning rich Chinese locals – and we bumped into Ron
as we walked into the town centre for dinner. He had a case of lager balanced on his shoulder that he’d picked up from a local Chinese restaurant. Again, I say restaurant, but it was more
another drinking venue – this time for gambling, down-and-out Chinese locals. They didn’t speak any English other than ‘Eighty ringgit’, the price of one slab of Carlsberg.
We swung by to stock up.
    Ron was in Sandakan to pick up Flora, a traveller he’d had aboard a few weeks earlier for the World Music Festival near Kuching, and her friend Becky, who had