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The call came to set sail. My head reeled and my stomach balled up like a clenched fist. ‘Are you ready?,’ asked Captain Nimrod. ‘Absolutely,’ I lied. 72 hours earlier, David and I had arrived in Santa Marta, Colombia, the latest stop on a hitchhiking trip from Patagonia to the Arctic Ocean. The plan was to hitchhike a boat to Panama. When we stumbled upon a marina in Santa Marta we decided to split up and find a way inside. I slithered around the fence and made my way inside. I hissed, ‘stealth,’ to David, still stuck on the outside. He gave me the thumbs up. He walked straight up to the security guard, feigned a posh accent and informed the meathead guard he wished to check on his family’s yacht. He got buzzed through. ‘White privilege,’ he giggled. He always had a brass neck. Our initial attempts to secure a vessel met with failure. When the conversation came to, ‘so, boys, which vessel are you with?,’ our response of ,’hopefully yours,’ met with raised eyebrows and laughter. Then we hit the jackpot. Two Israelis on a circumnavigation mission invited us on-board for an interview. We embellished our nonexistent seafaring experience and convinced them we would be of great assistance. They stared at us for a while, we sweated. Then they nodded and extended their hands. We acted professional, until we were out of sight. Then we erupted into a fit of laughter and woo-hoos. We high-fived, hugged and danced around the marina. ‘David, my friend,’ I said, ‘are we peaking in life?’ The night before setting sail I came down with a spot of food poisoning. By the morning I still felt wretched. What should have been days of glory, morphed into days of shame. The Israelis sussed us out within an hour. It wasn’t hard to realize we were two charlatans. The swells got big. Sea sickness blurred with food poisoning. Like a wet lettuce, I flopped around on deck, side to side. One second I saw sky and the next I saw ocean. Every half an hour I dragged my carcass to the gunwale, squatted, held onto the guardrail, and sacrificed my guts to Poseidon. My best friend, and brother of the road, put his hands on his hips, shook his head and laughed at me. The Israelis looked at each other and sighed. I grunted. The second time I threw up I came to the brink of soiling my shorts. The third time, I did. I twisted my head around like Regan from the Exorcist and called for toilet roll. David asked me if it was to clean my face. I shook my head. ‘What else could it be for?’ I heard his mind think. ‘Oh, no. Thomas. Have you…’ he started. I nodded to him in confirmation.’ Days before, we had toasted to adventure. To youth. To the Caribbean. What were we but the sailors of seas, the lovers of exotic women, the drinkers of half-price rum? In a state of partial intoxication, David had waxed lyrical, ‘beneath the starry skies, we will contemplate the meaning of the universe. We will understand our souls and our purpose here on earth. Oh, for the stories we shall tell our grandchildren by the hearth.’ ‘Bollocks to that,’ I concluded at 3am on the first night at sea. Under the starless sky of a full moon, wave after warm salty wave splashed over my face, which poked out from under my soggy sleeping bag. The odd flying fish clonked off the gunwale or hitchhiked a ride on the deck beside me. I did plenty of contemplating. I contemplated existence, but not in the romantic way I had imagined. I just asked myself, ‘what’s the bloody point of it all? We failed at catching fish. We didn’t know our port from our starboard. And on our heroic arrival in Panama, the women wouldn’t come near us when they saw my shorts.