Lamu, Kenya

Finally having wrenched ourselves away from Kilifi, which had served as our home base for so long, we turned Northern Magic back out into the open sea. Our final destination in Kenya was Lamu , an overnight sail away.

It had been several months since we had last been on the ocean, and to our dismay we discovered that all of us had lost our sea legs, left behind, no doubt, in some thatched-roofed mud hut somewhere along the way. I was, as usual, affected the most, but this time no one was immune, and we all lay, green and queasy in our bunks, bracing ourselves against the sloshy, pummelling waves that have been characteristic of our experience in the South Indian Ocean. Every hour trudged by as slowly and ponderously as a day. We couldn't help but think about our next long passage, coming up so quickly. How would we ever survive days and days of this?

We arrived at the entrance to Lamu Island early the next morning, exhausted, bilious and feeling as though we had come through a storm. This was depressingly far from the truth, which was that the passage had gone very well, with Northern Magic fairly flying through the water. Our sturdy boat was ready for anything; it was her crew, too long at anchor, that was lacking.

As we closed on the coast, we found ourselves in what looked like Arabia, with undulating brown sand dunes and hardly a tree to be found. A heavily loaded train of donkeys trotted along the base of the dunes, flogged mercilessly by their whip-wielding driver, making us wonder whether we had accidentally emerged in another century.

As we neared the break in the reef that would gain us entrance to Lamu harbour, the ocean bottom reared up under us, going from a thousand metres to ten. With a strong southerly wind and an equally strong current at our backs, combined with the rising sea bottom and an opposing tide, suddenly we found ourselves surfing in on top of huge breaking waves that crashed and roared all around us. This is the worst possible way to enter a brand new place, especially one with a narrow channel. Each new wave seemed to pick us up and throw us forward towards unknown dangers. Our decks were awash. As we wildly pitched and rolled, all I could think about was that in a few days, we would have to head back out directly into these terrifying breaking waves and into the prevailing wind as well. If we thought this was bad, doing it in the opposite direction was unimaginable.

Eventually we rounded the point and the waves subsided. Northern Magic decided to have a little fun with us, and the engine began to overheat just as we were navigating the final tricky stretch into the anchorage. For a few minutes we thought we might have to anchor under sail, but in the end Herbert got it fixed and we glided in safely under motor power.

Once we had the boat anchored and our stomachs and nerves back to some state of normalcy, Herbert and I found we could barely move. Instead of bounding off ashore as we had planned to do, we both crashed and slept the rest of the day. The fact that we had been destroyed by a simple, uneventful overnighter played on our worst fears and made our coming two week passage loom up larger and ever more menacingly in our minds.

The next day we did go ashore, amongst the huge gleaming houses that dot the shoreline, looking like Arabian palaces with onion-shaped arches and shining white facades. One of them belongs to Princess Caroline of Monaco. We introduced ourselves to the owners of the Peponi Hotel, a Lamu landmark for more than 30 years. My sister Linda had stayed there with her family just a few weeks before, and the hotel's owners, Lars and Carol Korschen, kindly made showers and water available to us.

The kids were wild about the idea of going running and sliding in the huge sand dunes, so armed with Krazy Karpets from the hotel, we ran off into the desert hills on a shimmery hot day.

No matter what else happened in Lamu, the highlight for the kids would always be climbing these huge sand mountains and sliding or running down, the hot wind and powdery white sand blasting in their faces. Every day they returned for more fun until they had completely renamed the topography with names like Suicide Sands, Rookie's Road, Colossus Canyon and Buccaneer Bold. In the sands we also found some treasures: scoured white bones, the tiny, perfect and fragile skull of a gerbil, and a collection of shiny golden hollow nuggets, perhaps some kind of spoor, which sparkled and glimmered like baroque golden pearls. After the boys finished their sand dune running and sliding, sweaty and caked with sand, they splashed in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean, until we had to pull them out by force. Then we all refreshed ourselves in a delightfully cold shower back at the hotel.

We were anchored at Shela, on the tip of Lamu Island, a few kilometres away from Lamu town itself. To get to town, we had to take a ride on a dhow, a large wooden sailing boat constructed in the Arab tradition. We shared the dhow ride with many interesting local people, including several mysterious women robed entirely in black. When they saw us looking at them, they pulled up their veils to cover their faces entirely, only their eyes peeping furtively out. And as for taking a picture of them? Certainly not! If ever I was videotaping street scenes and one of these robed women came along, she would duck into a shop door until my camera was safely put away.

Lamu town itself is very similar to Zanzibar, both of them being old Arab towns. It features the same warren of two and three storey buildings, seemingly leaning towards each other so as to almost meet over the narrow alleyways. There are no cars in Lamu, so people go by dhow, on foot, or by donkey. We loved the donkeys, with their silly floppy ears and their attempts, mostly ineffectual, to go more slowly than their drivers wanted. It was up to you to keep an eye out for some racing donkey appearing unexpectedly over your shoulder as it made its way through the labyrinthine tangle of narrow streets.

From time to time the air was punctuated by the braying of a donkey, a bizarre sound that gathers itself up slowly like a sneeze and ends in a fantastic burst of loud hee-hawing that is answered by other donkeys farther away, the same way distant dogs howl to each other on a moonlight night.

We were captivated by Lamu, but somehow we didn't enjoy it as much as we should have. It was because something was hanging over us, something we dreaded but couldn't escape. With each passing day, the prospect of our next passage loomed larger and larger until it seemed our emotions became entirely tied up worrying about it.

We had several reasons to dread this passage. The first was the sheer size of it: 1600 nautical miles, or about 3000 kilometres, the second longest voyage of our entire circumnavigation. Our recent experience with that rough and rocky Indian Ocean had not led us to look forward to that ordeal.

The second reason was weather: the winds where we were heading are notoriously strong, especially around the Horn of Africa. There was even a slight chance of encountering a cyclone.

But what really had us scared were the pirates. We'd gone through pirate country before, in Indonesia and the Malacca Straits, but those poor Indonesian fishermen armed with knives seemed like kindergarten pupils compared to desperate Somalis armed with AK-47s. There had been at least seven attacks on private yachts in the past 12 months, two of which involved machine gun fire. Some years back, a yacht had actually faced a barrage of mortar fire, and only escaped unscathed thanks to being rescued at the last minute by the Canadian naval ship Fredericton. More than once we wondered whether we had made the right decision in going to East Africa, far off the beaten path, because if we had followed the more traditional route we would have gone up the Red Sea in company with other sailboats, and thus would not have had to face these dangers alone.

Our route to Aden, Yemen, would take us along a thousand miles of lawless Somali coast. Then we would have to round the stormy Horn of Africa and sneak past the notorious pirate base of Socotra Island, then sail through heavy shipping traffic in the Gulf of Aden, bordered by Yemen on one side and Somalia on the other. It was here that most of the recent attacks have taken place. I'd been keeping track of them, and no matter how we looked at it, we had no choice but to go right through the ominous collection of "x"s I had been marking on a map, one "x" for each attack on a yacht or a commercial ship. We just had to run the gauntlet and hope for the best.

So our minds were preoccupied with preparing for the voyage, one that scared us more than any other had before. We made the decision to remove our radar reflector, not use our VHF radio or use navigation lights at night, in order to make ourselves as invisible as possible. We arranged to keep in daily shortwave radio contact with our friend Tony Britchford in Kilifi and developed with him a kind of code to indicate approximately where we were each day. If any pirates were listening with stolen HF radios, we didn't want to give our position away.

We devised plans to protect the most important equipment on the boat. We found a little cubbyhole the pirates would be unlikely to find, and stashed in it our handheld GPS, our handheld VHF, our camera, and made room for our laptop computer and satellite e-mail system. We even had a dry run to see how long it would take to stow these things away if danger threatened.

We removed our wedding rings, gathered most of our cash, and hid them in a place no one would ever find. We hid a smaller stash of cash and traveller's cheques in another spot, to sacrifice if need be.

It's been a long time since the cold grip of fear has clenched me in my gut, and I was not the only one on board to shiver beneath the touch of its icy fingers. Finally we all wanted to leave, just to get it over with.

So when every contingency had been thought of, prepared for and fretted over, when we were as ready as we ever would be, we set off. All we could do now was pray.