Last Voyage of the Oliphant

Rio to Swakopmand (Namibia) - July 11, 2010 (4 days to the Jeffreys Bay Pro)

The fetid swampfire shorelights of Rio fade behind the loom of the horizon and the salt smoke of a South Atlantic storm. I have picked up passage on a small trans atlantic cargo shuttle calledThe Oliphant.The ship is tired, so tired in fact that this will be her last voyage. After she unloads a hold full of cheap plastic action figures, swizzle sticks and mardi-gras sequence buttons for the parties and brothels of Africa she will be broken up and redistributed as razor blades. After a few days at sea I though the move may have been premature, the bridge and deck seemed sound and she made good speed east. Once the storm set in it became clear that her best days were behind her. All of the mess decks leaked seawater through parting bulkheads and as the ship flexed in the long period swell the finest of all powders fluttered from the stressed lagging on the pipework - asbestos.

I am not ashamed to admit I have been seasick for the last 24 hours, the shape of this vessel is unique and I never got used to the way she rolls and corkscrews with the swell on her beam. Maybe it's just this ocean, The Atlantic. Every year is gets bigger...wider...stronger whilst the Pacific shrink just a little more. 150 million years from now The Pacific as we know it will fracture and divide. A world without The Pacifc..glad I won't be around for that. Tomorrow we make landfall on Namibia and the ramshackle port of Swakopmand. The name comes from a Germanised corruption of the native word for the nearby river - Tsoakhaub which means "excriment opening" The asshole of West Africa, a river that swells with the rains and carries mud, sediment, trees, dead animals and the bloated corpses of murdered, extinct villages into the rolling depths of The Atlantic. There were rumours of what the Germans had been searching for when they set up the town in the 1860's. Europe was ablaze with interest in darkest Africa and the search for arcane and supernatural artifacts was a very lucrative trade. Tales of villages that had at their heart huge glowing rocks that had fallen from the sky or enormous statues and monumnets of non-eclidian architecture that bewildered the observer. Many of these items were shipped back to Europe in the late 1890's but when German South West africa fell after World War I, many of the records of their final destination were lost or destroyed. Namibia rose from these ashes and in 1928 discovered what so many others before them had been seeking - one of the worlds largest sources of Uranium. By 2005 the mine was the largest open cut uranium mine in the world.

New stories emerged of the villages in the deep interior where the desert wind whips the clouds of yellowcake dust, the hamlets of the springs and tributaries of the Swakop River fed with the byproduct of 12 million tonnes of Uranium ore and the 200,000 tonnes of acid used to process it. Stories on what this had done to the villagers...how it had changed them.

Fishermen that work the mouth of the River in The Atlantic started reporting unusual findings in their nets, some species of fish and crustacea almost 3 times the size of what had been seen previously. Then in 2005, a group of 5 fishermen recovered a human corpse in their net that had washed from the deepest interior of the continent, it became known as The Trondheim Corpse and was immediately transfered to a classified medical research facility at Ramstein Air Base, Germany. The fishermen soon disappeared as quickly as their find. No one knows for sure what was different about the corpse they had found - what had raised so much attention. The only known photograph of the incident shows the 5 fishermen sitting in front of their boat with the seated corpse of what appears to be an eight foot human male, the image is correctly exposed and the fishermen appear in good focus. The corpse in front of them appears to be in an odd blur, a lens flare with a queer shifting vibration to the edge of it, the face and head obscured in a deep blue / white light effect.

I flicked through all of these notes in my bunk onThe Oliphant.First watch was coming up, my watch - I could feel the cold already, the pale green South Atlantic growing stronger every day..every night. Tomorrow we would reach Namibia and the cannibals would break up the ship into neat piles of brass, copper and lead. All of it bound for the scrap merchants and artisans of darkest Africa, the lost tribes that will marvel at the lettering under the ships bell and hang it in the sacred ruin of a forgotten christian temple in the heart of The Sahara. Whats left will be melted down to form the bullets and casings that adorn the bandoliers of the child soldiers that rampage through the nightmare of Sierra Leone and The Cote d'Ivoire.

2000m kilometres from Swakopmand to Jeffrey's Bay. Three days maybe? Time enough for a quick trek north 100k's to Cape Cross. No way I could get this close to it and not surf it. Figure I'll be a day late for the pro, no big deal - don't care who wins it at the moment now that Parko is gone, out for 6 months plus with a wound that looks more in place in an H-Block razor fight at Pentridge than the lineup at Snapper. The garish eco angle that Billabong will trot out at the pro will be all so much harder to stomach now without a world class surfer to bring any form of redemption to it.

I drift off to sleep for a second and see an image of Occy looking into the bathroom mirror of some flea bag motel, he catches sight of his reflection and immediately pulls his stomach in. An open magazine on the floor shows a full page ad for the great J-Bay rematch with Tom Curren. Beads of sweat trace along his forehead as the scene fades out.

"You got this...you got this..."