Ted Botha

Will the massive, unsightly container ship ever be able to replace the colourful freighter in the heart of sea travellers?

I bumped into the first mate somewhere off the Skeleton Coast. Behind us lay the Cape of Storms, its rollers infamous, their effect potentially sickening. But our ship, the Winterberg, handled the punches of the Atlantic around the southern tip of Africa so smoothly that I had decided to go for a jog.

Jogging at sea wasn't easy; you first had to learn how to balance, side-step bollards, leap bulky struts, and turn sharp corners around windlasses and spare bow anchors without lacerating yourself. Also, one of the officers had advised me that if I didn't want to wreck my ankles on the slant of the deck, I should run in a figure-of-eight pattern.

"Change direction and ease the strain," he said.

Chris, the first mate, was the only other jogger on board and had been running at sea for so long he could take the bollards like a gazelle. An officer with the Cape Town harbour service, he was clocking up his last bit of sea-time before qualifying for his pilot's ticket.

"Figure of eight, figure of eight," I kept reminding myself. Above me loomed a mountain of containers heading for Zeebrugge, Le Havre, Rotterdam and Tilbury. Below deck lay another seven storeys of boxes under refrigeration: fruit and avocados mostly. The setting was strange. There were so many containers around me - the ship could take over 2,000 - that I couldn't help feeling I was jogging through the vacuous middle of a very big container sandwich. From between the bulk of these boxes stepped Chris, dressed in overalls.

"Morning," he said, studying the green deck for corrosion. "Watch out you don't slip on the moisture." We met on deck every morning, he on his inspection rounds, me dodging bollards. We talked for a while about the weather ahead; the chance of a container slipping from its moorings; the serious damage a half-submerged box would cause to a ship that ran into it; and whether the Cape of Storms or the Bay of Biscay was a more daunting proposition. Then we went our separate ways, him fore, me aft, figure-of-eighting.

It was early in the voyage still. Ahead of us lay 4,000 miles to be covered at an average speed of 19 knots. We would travel from the 32 nd parallel south to the 32 nd parallel north, the depth of the sea beneath us would stay a fairly constant two miles, and the captain would steer a course far enough off the continent to miss any stray fishing boats. We would stop at not a single port until Europe, and we would not see even a dot of land for the next fortnight.

Initially, I had had my doubts about travelling on a container ship like the Winterberg. Container ships, as far as I was concerned, were New World ships, too big, overly efficient and characterless. They never docked at quaint, out-of-the-way places, but rather at ports which were large, central and (usually) ugly enough to house a terminal that could handle their boxes. No longer were you met on the quay by souvenir sellers and crazy taxi drivers, but by an army of cranes that looked like space-age spiders, picking up and then laying rectangular metal eggs.

But for anyone who wanted to travel by sea from South Africa to Britain, berths of any kind were scarce. Of the few freighters that still took passengers, hardly any sailed this route; and of the cruisers, even fewer still. The last regular passenger ship had ended its service 15 years ago. Demand for a regular service on the once-popular Atlantic route went unanswered until two years ago, when Safmarine started taking passengers on each of its four container ship sailing from Cape Town to Tilbury and back.

Happily, my prejudice against container ships was short-lived. Once I'd settled into my cabin (TV to the left, regularly replenished bowl of fruit to the right), had met Raymond, the friendly steward, tested the pool and heard the sea through my porthole at night, I realised that the type of ship wasn't as important as being at sea again. I had only one request: that I be left to my own devices. I had a dread of hat parties and tombola tournaments - of which, thank goodness, the Winterberg had none. "This isn't a passenger ship," I was reminded. "It's a working ship that takes passengers. Your time is your own."

Most of the passengers kept to themselves, something you could do quite easily, since the ship was big enough to get lost on. When we did meet - apart from at the dinner table - it was usually on the container deck, in the middle of the Container Sandwich.

I came to know my fellow passengers by their gait. The first of these was Blinks, who was what you might call a sea junkie. She'd sailed this passage 17 times already and, after a week in London, was to return south with the Winterberg's sister ship, the Helderberg. Blinks was 77 and even though she used crutches, she walked for an hour a day, and you heard her before you saw her, the steady knock-knock of the crutches preceding her.

Next came two British grandmothers now living in Zimbabwe, one very thin, the other buxom. They walked slowly and stopped often to look for any birds or fish that might have joined the ship. Once they saw a school of porpoises, but mostly it was flying fish that rode the wake. At some point south of Dakar, two boobies spent their day dive-bombing the airborne fish.

The swiftest walkers, doing up to six miles a day, were a retired headmaster and his wife who were getting into shape for a four-month hike through France. At the start of the voyage, they were sometimes joined by Arthur, whose long, languorous strides didn't match their own brisk pace. Before long he gave up.

Arthur usually had other things on his mind anyway, namely avocados. Arthur was an employee of a body called the Perishable Control Board and, there being at least half a million avos in the refrigerated hold, it was his job to monitor their condition. Every day, several times a day, he would don his overall and descend into the front hold, climb down the seven storeys of containers and inch along a maze of narrow catwalks in order to check the temperatures and see that the fruit was holding steady at 5 degrees centigrade.

Avocados are sensitive fruit, Arthur explained. One slip of a milligrade in temperature, and they could turn into a landslide of brown guck. At several dinners, compliments of the farmers back home, the fruit was given to us as a treat. Their were usually six courses at dinner, and the avos made a seventh, a very rich seventh at that. But we all tucked in, remembering that we could do an extra circuit of the deck in the morning, Or, as the case might be, an extra figure-of-eight.