The Single-handed Sailor: Dustin Reynolds

this story was written for the Royal Cape Yacht Club Newsletter

Using your teeth as a substitute for a self-tailer probably isn’t in the competent crew handbook. But then neither is going cruising after only about a month of sailing experience. And if there was a sailing handbook for double amputees, Dustin Reynolds would probably have to be the one to write it.

Dustin, who was living in Hawai, lost his left arm and leg after being hit by a drunk driver while motorcycling.  He was bankrupted by the costs of his medical care.  After a difficult period of recovery he began reassessing his life.

He sold his business and his charter fishing boat and had just enough money to buy himself a 1968 thirty-five foot Alberg sloop.

He’d never sailed before so the two hundred mile inter-island delivery voyage, skippered by the previous owner, became his training. Learning was limited because once they had set the sails there wasn’t much else to do. Later he learned skills such as reefing by watching YouTube videos. On his first major voyage from Hawaii to Palmyra Island, an atoll over 800 miles away, he used only his headsail because he hadn’t learned how to hoist his mainsail yet.

After three months in the marina working on his boat a period of free mooring came to an end. He had the choice of leaving for another marina or, well, just leaving, which is what he did. In June 2014 he began his very likely record setting voyage as the first double amputee to circumnavigate.

When asked for his advice to sailors thinking of going cruising he answered: “Set a date and go. 

Don’t wait for the boat to be ready.”

Dustin has had many adventures on his voyage. His first boat’s engine had transmission problems. On the journey from Indonesia to Thailand, lacking wind as well as use of his engine he took twenty-four days to cover nine hundred miles. This was the most difficult period of the voyage. It became clear that the old sloop wasn’t going to get him around the world.

In Thailand he managed to scrape together enough money through crowd-funding and a loan from a friend, to buy his current boat, Tiama, a 35 foot Bristol sloop.

Dustin says that his favourite bit of kit is his wind-vane self-steering. The thing he would most like in his inventory is a self-tailing winch on his boom for his reefing lines. Up until now he has been tailing with his teeth.

The highlight of his trip? Catching a 90kg tuna. “It was one of the most difficult things I’ve done.”  It took him three hours to fight and another hour and two broken gaffs to get it on board.

Since being interviewed for the newsletter Dustin has received an award from the Ocean Cruising Club for outstanding courage and seamanship. At the ceremony, Alan Haefele and Pete Sherlock of the RCYC Cruising sub-committee presented Dustin with a self-tailing winch. Hopefully this will reduce wear and tear on the reefing lines caused by Dustin’s teeth!

From Cape Town Dustin is heading to St Helena, Ascension Island and then the Caribbean.

The RCYC wishes Dustin fair winds and safe passage as he continues on his record setting circumnavigation.

Update: Dustin sets sail today in a good south easter. 

Dustin is available for corporate speaking events. You can contact him through his website below.

Contribute to Dustin’s voyage on Patreon at: https://www.patreon.com/thesinglehandedsailor

Follow Dustin Reynolds’ circumnavigation on social media:  www.thesinglehandedsailor.com

Instagram and Facebook:  thesinglehandedsailor

For a great detailed interview with Dustin, with clips of him sailing, check out:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiCkCu4a37Y

The Englishman's Grave - Cederberg, South Africa

This story first appeared in SA Country Life Magazine - June 2018

 The Englishman’s grave stands on high ground next to the quiet Pakhuis Pass.  Enclosed by a wrought iron fence and marked by a military headstone, it overlooks the rocky, khaki-clad Cederberg Mountains located a couple of hours drive north of Cape Town.  Somewhere below the road are the trenches dug by British soldiers in the gravelly mountainside during the second Anglo Boer War.  I’ve heard that time and weather have all but erased them.  But I can’t look for them today because I am travelling with dogs and they are not allowed on that land.  Anyway, there is little there now but ghosts and the cool breeze.  And I’ve already found other defensive positions at the southern end of the range.

My visit is in the winter and the light is soft and pleasant.  The Englishman who lies in the grave nearby died in the summer and would have known the dry, weighty Cederberg heat sucking the moisture from his body.  He’d have known the hard light turning everything into monochrome.

His name was Lieutenant Graham Vinicombe Winchester Clowes of the 1^st Battalion The Gordon Highanders .  His unit was here to stop Boer guerrillas from infiltrating the Cape Colony.   He was killed in a skirmish on the 30th of January 1901. 

Today, the mountain range is popular with rock climbers, hikers and campers.  Off road enthusiasts test their 4x4 driving skills here and mountain bikers seek adrenaline rushes.  Mostly people come for the peace.  Large parts of the Cederberg have been declared a Wilderness area and hikers with permits can wander the range and camp wild pretty much wherever they like.  Visitors search the rocks and caves for art left behind by hunter gatherer San people who sought refuge in the range from African pastoralists and the encroachment of European settler farms.  They created rock paintings depicting people and the animals they revered and hunted.  Stories that we may never understand have been left as beautiful puzzles for those willing to seek them out.   Some of the paintings are mapped and easily accessible; others stumbled upon by sharp-eyed explorers.

I have driven from Cape Town through the pretty, fruit growing valley that surrounds the little town of Ceres.   For several hours I made the journey along the 4x4 only route, through the isolated hamlet of Eselbank and on to the Moravian mission village of Wuppertal with its pretty white church.   4x4 route is a little misleading as I meet a crowded, rusting Corolla crawling along in the other direction.      I wonder how much of its undercarriage has been left behind on the rocky track.

It’s a slow, rewarding journey through some of the more remote parts of the range. Dramatic red sandstone formations wind-carved from the sediment of what was once a warm shallow sea. The landscape wouldn’t have looked much different when Lieutenant Clowes was patrolling the range on horseback just after the turn of the previous century.

On the way to the Englishman’s Grave, I stop at the Mount Ceder resort in the southern part of the range.   I’ve been told that there are more old British trenches near here and I want to find them.  I’d searched for them unsuccessfully on a previous expedition.  I’d expected them to be on the river bank protecting the ford.  They weren’t there.

 This time a helpful staff member from the resort directs me back up the pass.  Here, with a commanding view of the valley and the road through it, I find the remains of the British defences.  A pile of rocks, once organised, now a jumbled crescent from the past.  It’s not surprising that the little fortification consisted of a rock wall and not a trench.  The ground here is stony and hard, an infantry soldier’s dread. 

This is an obvious defensive position situated above the road as it crests a saddle.   It was built just below the ridge so that the soldiers manning it would not be silhouetted against the sky.  I imagine them here, bored and homesick and drinking warm water from sun-heated canteens.  It was then and is still an out of the way part of the country.

One of the things about war is that the stories are often lost or smudged by time.  And so it is with the Englishman buried on the Pakhuis Pass.  There are variations on his tale.  The one I find most likely is that Clowes’ patrol crossed paths with Boer scouts.  A brief skirmish ensued and the young Lieutenant lay dead on the stony mountainside.  Simple, brutal and tragic.

The Cederberg wasn’t a major theatre during the war.  General Jan Smuts came into the area with a commando in a largely unsuccessful attempt to recruit Cape Boers but there were no major battles here.  According to the stories, Clowes had previously fought at the big battle of Magersfontein in 1899.   The British force had been deployed to relieve the siege of Kimberly.  Due to poor British reconnaissance and clever Boer tactics they suffered a defeat that stunned the Empire. 

It may have come as some respite for the young lieutenant to find himself posted to this backwater of the war.  Though there is no telling whether it will be a significant battle or an insignificant skirmish that will do for you in the end.

Lieutenant Clowes’ story doesn’t end with his death.  The story goes that his mother, so overcome with grief, travelled to the Cape Colony to visit his grave.  It is told that she had his body moved from where he was buried after the skirmish, to its current site higher up the mountainside.  It is said that she returned every year on the anniversary of his death.  This would have been quite an achievement.  First a long voyage from England, then an arduous journey by wagon from Cape Town which would have taken several days.  The long winding Pakhuis Pass through the Cederberg, now a good tar road, would have been little more than a wagon track.  Even one visit would have been an impressive undertaking by someone more familiar with the cool, green lanes of England.  Clowes was, after all, from Hitchin in the gentle landscape of Hertfordshire.

That evening I sit by my camp fire with the dogs sleeping at my feet and reflect.  In the great sweep of history, wars are reduced to a series of dates and famous battles and names of generals.  Occasionally one is reminded that the true costs of war play out in the lives of many individuals.  Some who live and some who die, forgotten by history but remembered by the families who survive them.   In the case of the young lieutenant who lies buried here, his mother remembered him by travelling to this hot arid place to visit his grave and to mourn his death, family paying the painful price of keeping an empire. 

Today there were flowers on Lieutenant Clowes’ grave.  Someone is still remembering him more than a century later.

Peace on the Kuvango: a story from Savate, Angola

There was a nasty battle at the dusty Angolan village of Savate.  I first passed through here in 2012 and paid it little attention, except to take a photograph of some political graffiti on the wall of a ruined house from the colonial era.   “Viva the People of Cuba!”  it shouted across the decades, its anger diluted by the years.  I had fought some distance from here in 1987, to the south and east of Cuito Cuanavale, and on my previous trip I was in a hurry to get back there.

Three years later I am passing through again. Today we’ve driven from Rundu in Namibia, and by the time we’ve endured the tedious Angolan border procedures, Savate, at 75 kilometres from the border, is a good place to stop for the night. 

This time I see the town differently because I have since met a man whose brother was killed here.  He was a white conscript fighting with 32 Battalion and became another small tragedy in a whole desert of sadness. 

32 Battalion, called The Terrible Ones by their enemies, was a unit of Angolans originally drawn from the beleaguered liberation movement the National Liberation Front of Angola, when rival liberation armies turned on each other after the Portuguese shrugged off their colony in the ‘70s.  32 Battalion was led by mainly white South African officers and was based on the Kavango River in Caprivi area of Namibia.

The expedition I’m on is an embodiment of an attempt at peace-making.  Our Land Rover carries some former Umkhonto we Sizwe members.  We are supporting a group of former SADF conscripts on motorcycles. The convoy is heading north from the Namibian border post of Katwitwi towards Menongue and then to Cuito Cuanavale, which, in 1987, was the scene of the biggest land battle fought in Africa since the Second World War.

Beaten by darkness, we find the local police compound at Savate.  The commander is a friendly, quiet spoken man who invites us to spend the night within the walls of his post.  He shows us to the rooms at the back of the station where there are bunk beds for us to use. Like most villages in Angola there is no electricity once the compound generator is switched off. Water comes from a tank in the ground; a bucket is lowered to collect it.

Some of us decide to forego the snoring of the dorms and opt to sleep under the stars. The lack of electric light means that the Milky Way sprays across the night sky as an unfathomable cosmic cloud. Before I turn in, I join some of the group across the road in a small family run restaurant. 

It’s an informal affair in a simple corrugated iron structure with a dim, bare lightbulb and a concrete floor. I’ve eaten from my own supplies but I keep a couple of the others company by drinking Cuca Lager while they eat. We smile occasionally at the two Angolan truckers who join us at the long table. The only language we all understand is the sucking of grease and gravy from fingers. They report that the chicken is good.

The next morning the expedition leader and former MK member, Patrick, has some minor repairs to do to the Land Rover. The motorcyclists have disappeared up the road towards Caiundo. I walk around the village trying to get a feel of the place. It doesn’t seem like somewhere men fought for their lives. Chickens scratch in the dust and a few people go about their business outside the mud or concrete-brick homes. Once there was a FAPLA unit garrisoned here and it acted as a lightning rod for their enemy, the SADF. 

They called it Operation Tiro Tiro.  On the 21^st of May 1980, 32 Battalion arrived along the Kuvango River and the two armies battled. Young people died. Today there are no soldiers in the village and people work their fields and draw water from the river. A long way away in South Africa a family remembers a son and brother who died in a place they have never seen. No doubt other families closer to Savate remember lost sons too.

Children have taken an interest in me. They request a photograph and group together to peer into the lens. One isn’t looking at the camera; something across the way has attracted her. I press the shutter button. I’m about to shoot another frame when a man, who has been standing close by, steps into the group of children and turns the wayward child’s head towards me as I take the next picture. It makes for a slightly comical pair of photographs.

Another man arrives on a new, clean, 150cc Chinese motorcycle. He’s wearing a blue checked shirt, pressed black trousers and smart shoes. In this scruffy, dusty town with so many poor people in ragged clothes, he stands out. Perhaps he is a local government official or maybe he works in the big town of Menongue, more than two hundred kilometres away.  We don’t have a mutual language so, perhaps to break the thickening ice, he gestures for me to take a photograph of him. He stands in front of his bike, slightly side on, a self-conscious pose as he looks beyond the camera and into the distance.

The rough gravel road stretches south to the border with Namibia and north to Caiundo where the tar eventually begins. It has given our motorcyclists some difficulty. They will have fallen a few times before they make the smooth black-top. Here in the village the home-made houses are linked by sandy tracks. Next to the police compound there are some new houses. They look like they have been built for government officials and the police officers. A new tarred street, lined with incongruous kerbstones, runs past their front doors.

I want to take the man who lost his brother something from Savate, something that will show the town in peacetime so that he will have an image in his mind other than his mental reconstruction of a dirty fight next to a river. When Patrick has finished tinkering with the Land Rover, we six passengers cram into the vehicle and clatter down to the Kuvango. It is a serene and beautiful place. The river is wide and the slow water swirls southwards towards Namibia, small eddies creasing its membrane. This flow will eventually pass the place where the young soldier was based. It will continue the journey he was unable to. His life dried up so violently in Angola, along with many others, while his comrades carried on.

I try to capture the peacefulness of the scene in photographs.  The war is long gone and the river still runs the same course and the reeds hush us and we speak in murmurs as our footfalls grate on the stony ground. I steal a stone from beneath the cold, clear water and then take a shot of the place.  For the man whose brother died here. 

As the philosopher, George Santayana wrote: “Only the dead have seen the end of war”. The remaining warriors must find peace as best they can.

The HALO Trust

(information to complement the War Ghosts story, below)

 

The HALO Trust is the largest humanitarian demining organisation in the world.  Their aim is to make the land safe for people in former war zones to live, farm and travel through.   It operates in 16 countries and has been in existence since 1988.  They train and employ local people who know the terrain to lift mines both manually and using various kinds of demining machinery.

HALO has been working in Angola since 1994 and has lifted over 68 000 landmines in around 570 locations around the country.  They also dispose of weapons and ammunition.

Between 2005 and 2015 the Cuito Cuanavale operation has cleared 25 minefields with another 40 still to be tackled.

 In Kuando Kubango Province The HALO Trust has destroyed around 32 000 anti-personnel mines and 14 000 anti-tank mines.  It is estimated that around 40 per cent of the mines have been lifted.  

Read more about the work of the HALO Trust here