On Monday 02 July 2018 morning, I got up early and asked Damjan to take me ashore in the dinghy. He stayed on the boat because he was supposed to meet Stuart and Barney later to sort out something with the SSB radios, while I set off on my own.
My plan was very simple: I wanted to walk as much of Niuatoputapu as possible, maybe even make a full circuit of the island, no matter how long it took.
As usual, I had my backpack, a bottle of water, a camera, a knife and, of course, a handheld radio. I had been carrying a radio on almost every longer walk since Pitcairn, where I was first seriously advised not to rely too much on mobile phones on remote islands. On Niuatoputapu, a phone was not exactly something you could depend on anyway.
I started along the coast toward the eastern side of the island.
At first, it was not particularly difficult, although the shoreline itself was rough to walk on. There were pieces of coral and sharp rock everywhere, and there was no way anyone could comfortably walk barefoot there. I moved slightly inland, where the ground was easier, and continued between the coast and the vegetation.
The tide was low, and the sea had pulled back far enough to expose wide strips of shoreline. I stayed close to the water for as long as I could, until I noticed an opening through the trees and decided to cut through.
On the other side, I found myself in mangroves.
The eastern side of the island was much more sheltered. The water was calmer, there were no serious waves, and the mangrove roots formed a tangled network over sand and shallow water. I worked my way through them until eventually I came out on the southern coast.
There, everything changed.
The south side was fully exposed to the Pacific. Over the years, the ocean had deposited all kinds of things on the shore. The amount of rubbish was unbelievable: bottles, flip-flops, old boat fenders, pieces of plastic, even the remains of televisions and refrigerators.
I kept walking along this strange beach, still thinking I might manage the full circuit.
Then, near the end of the southern side, the weather changed very quickly.
The clouds turned dark and heavy, the wind came up, and the sea started to change with it. I did not like the look of it. It occurred to me that a proper squall or storm might be coming, and that continuing simply because I had decided that morning to walk around the island was probably not the smartest idea.
So I turned back.
On the way, I picked up two or three small boat fenders that had washed ashore.
If they were already lying there as rubbish, I thought, they might as well end up tied to our dinghy and become useful again.
I headed back toward the mangroves.
The terrain did not look particularly dangerous. The mangroves were not very tall, but roots spread in every direction, with fine white sand underneath and occasional pieces of sharp rock or coral sticking through.
Then my foot slipped.
I lost my balance and started to fall.
My shin barely touched one of the rocks.
Nothing dramatic.
At least that was what I thought.
I stood up and looked at my leg.
That was the moment I realized I had a serious problem.
The skin on my shin had been ripped completely open. The wound was several centimeters wide and deep enough that I could see the white of the bone underneath.
For a few seconds, I just stared at it.
Then panic kicked in.
My first completely irrational reaction was to look around for the piece of flesh that, in my mind, must have been left somewhere on the rock.
I never found it.
I took off my shirt, tied it tightly around my leg, pulled the radio out of my backpack—
—and then everything went black.
The next thing I remember looked like a scene from a strange movie.
I was lying on the ground.
The whole world was turned ninety degrees.
And in front of me, on the sand, was the radio.
I have no idea how long I stayed like that.
When I came around again, I got up and kept moving through the mangroves, limping, with my shirt wrapped around my leg.
I grabbed the radio and started calling.
“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.”
I switched between the standard marine Channel 16 and the private channel Damjan and I used between the boat and our handheld radios.
“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.”
I said I was badly injured and needed to get to a doctor urgently.
The only thing I did not say was the most important thing.
Where I was.
At the time, it never even occurred to me.
Later, of course, it seemed obvious that if you call Mayday, it helps enormously if you tell people where to come and find you.
But I was not exactly thinking clearly.
At one point, I heard Barney’s voice over the radio. He was telling someone that they needed to get ashore immediately because somebody needed help.
That gave me hope that at least they could hear me.
I could barely hear them, but I kept walking and repeating:
“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.”
Little by little, I made it out of the mangroves and back into the strip between the shore and the trees, heading toward the dock.
At one point, I passed a group of locals.
They looked at me rather strangely.
My first thought was that they were staring because I was walking through the village without a shirt, which in Tonga was not exactly considered proper.
I looked at the shirt wrapped around my bloody leg and thought:
“Come on. Surely they can see I’m not shirtless because I’ve lost my mind.”
I considered asking them for help, but decided against it. I had no idea how much English they spoke, and at that moment I was convinced I would reach the dock faster if I just kept moving.
Step by step, I eventually made it.
Natalie was waiting there with two of the children.
“What happened?”
“Nothing. I just cut my leg.”
She looked at the shirt around my shin.
“Okay. Take that off. Let me see.”
I removed the improvised bandage.
There was not as much blood on the shirt as you might expect, so at first the whole thing still somehow looked almost manageable.
Then she saw the wound.
“Hm. You really did cut yourself.”
The kids immediately moved closer.
“Ooooooo!”
Their excitement was endless.
For them, the best part of the day had just begun.
Natalie opened a large first-aid bag. As a nurse, she immediately took over. She pulled out disinfectant and warned me:
“I have to clean this now. This is going to hurt.”
I sat down on one of the large mooring bollards on the dock and stretched out my leg.
She poured the disinfectant straight into the wound.
Then she looked at me.
“Do you feel anything?”
“No.”
That is the last thing I remember.
The next scene was me lying beside the bollard, with the children trying to help me sit up.
Apparently, I had passed out again.
Only later did I find out what had been happening elsewhere on the island while I was making my way back.
When my first Mayday came over the radio, Barney happened to be showing Stuart how to use the SSB set.
As soon as he heard the call, he said:
“We need to go. Someone’s in trouble.”
Damjan, apparently, replied:
“No, no. That’s Bojan. He’s probably just looking for an excuse to have someone pick him up from the dock. He’s fine.”
To be fair, that was not an unreasonable theory.
But then I kept repeating:
“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday…”
Barney changed his mind.
“No. We should go. This doesn’t sound like a joke.”
From that point on, everything turned into a proper search operation.
They called Bingo over the radio. He got the pickup and headed out immediately. Some of the locals joined the search too.
The problem was that nobody knew where to look.
I had been transmitting Mayday over and over again, but I had never given them my location or even told them which direction I was moving.
So they spread out across the island while, at exactly the same time, I was limping back toward them along a completely different route.
Eventually, fortunately, we all ended up back at the dock.
Bingo and the others arrived in the pickup soon after.
Nobody could quite believe that I had managed to make such a large hole in my leg from what was basically just one bad step.
They put me in the back of the pickup and we headed to the local clinic.
Barney, meanwhile, went back to his boat to get needles and sutures.
We, of course, did not have those in our first-aid kit.
We had not planned on cutting ourselves open to the bone.
The clinic was a small, single-storey building, basically divided into two rooms.
Doctor on one side.
Dentist on the other.
The doctor, naturally, was not there.
He was at home.
So they went to wake him up.
Before long, I was lying on a table with a small medical team gathered around me. The doctor, nurses and Natalie started cleaning the wound.
It took a long time.
There was sand, dirt and debris from the mangroves and rocks inside it, and everything had to be carefully removed before they could close it.
Then came the question of anesthetic.
They had some local anesthetic, but they were not entirely sure how well it would work.
At that point, I really did not care.
After almost three hours of cleaning and stitching, they were finally done.
I left with several sutures, a bandage and antibiotics to reduce the risk of infection.
And then something happened that probably says more about our little world on Niuatoputapu than anything else.
We agreed that everyone would come over to our boat for drinks in about an hour.
You might imagine that after passing out twice, triggering a search operation, spending three hours having a wound cleaned and stitched, I would spend the evening quietly resting.
That is not what happened.
The kids arrived first.
We had a PlayStation on board, and they had barely ever played anything like it. These were children who had grown up on boats, outside, in the sea, without much television or gaming, and even the basic idea of controlling a character in a three-dimensional game with a controller was completely new to them.
While they tried to figure out what was happening on the screen, everyone else gradually arrived.
That was when they told me the full story of my Mayday and the search across the island.
Naturally, the more they told it, the funnier it became.
And the more alcohol disappeared, the funnier it became still.
We had a fairly serious wine collection on board, maybe thirty or forty bottles.
By late evening, almost all of it was gone.
At one point, Dennis looked around.
“Guys, are you telling me we drank everything? There has to be another bottle somewhere.”
We searched.
Nothing.
Then I remembered.
Somewhere behind the bed in the cabin was one last bottle of wine we had been given earlier. It had kept rolling around whenever the boat moved, so I had wedged it behind the bed to stop it flying across the cabin.
With one stiff leg, I somehow made my way down below, pulled it out and brought it back on deck.
Dennis looked at that bottle as if I had just discovered water in the Sahara.
He immediately pulled out a hundred dollars and put it on the table.
“Here.”
“Put that away. The wine is probably worth five dollars.”
He looked at me.
“Maybe. But there isn’t another bottle within a thousand miles.”
Fair point.
They opened it.
I, of course, was not supposed to drink because I was on antibiotics.
Which is probably the only reason I still remember at least part of what happened that night.
The party went on until very late.
I honestly do not remember when everyone left.
At some point I simply fell asleep.
What I understand even less is how some of them managed to make it back to their own boats in the condition they were in.
The next few days on Niuatoputapu looked very different for me.
There were no more long walks.
I stayed on the boat with my leg bandaged, listening over the radio to what everyone else was doing.
Damjan went diving with Stuart and Dennis, Barney kept explaining radio equipment, and I followed most of it from my bunk.
Then the antibiotics started causing problems with my stomach.
When Dr. Sean came to check on me, he first looked at the leg and said the wound was healing very well.
Then he casually mentioned that the king would be arriving on the island in about ten days, and if we stayed long enough, I might get to meet him.
Apparently, the king might enjoy meeting the man who had managed to injure himself so spectacularly on his island.
We all laughed.
I asked Sean:
“Do you get many cases like this? People cutting themselves on coral and rocks?”
He looked at me.
“No, no, no.”
He paused.
“We know how to walk.”
That finished us.
Then I told him about the stomach problems.
That suddenly interested him more than the leg.
He insisted on checking what was going on, but I was having trouble going to the toilet at all.
Sean very calmly explained that I had two options.
Either I somehow managed to go normally.
Or he would bring me something that he would insert in a place where I absolutely did not want him inserting anything.
I suddenly found myself highly motivated to make the first option work.
When he later saw blood, he concluded that the antibiotics were probably severely irritating my stomach and gave me medication to reduce the acidity.
The leg, fortunately, was doing well.
But our time on Niuatoputapu was coming to an end.
Stuart, Dennis and Barney planned to continue through other islands in the Kingdom of Tonga. Tonga is famous for humpback whales, which migrate through these waters every year, but up to that point we had not seen a single one.
We decided that our next destination would be Fiji.
Before leaving, however, one serious logistical crisis remained.
Coca-Cola.
We had run out.
Damjan loaded the bicycle into the dinghy, went ashore and rode off toward the next village to search for supplies.
He came back in a very bad mood.
Along the way, he had managed to puncture both tires on the bicycle.
And when he finally returned carrying an entire case of Coca-Cola, he realized he had bought the regular kind.
With sugar.
He only drank the sugar-free version.
After two flat tires and the whole expedition, he now had an entire case of Coca-Cola he did not even want.
He was especially pleased.
Eventually, it was time to leave.
We said goodbye to everyone and raised anchor early in the morning.
By then I was partly functional again, although my leg was still bandaged and I could not bend it too much because I was afraid of tearing the stitches. The doctor told me to leave the sutures in for around three weeks, keep the wound clean and watch how it healed. On the boat, I often left it uncovered so it could dry, and Damjan had some silver-based wound dressings that we used to reduce the risk of infection.
When I look at the photographs of that wound now, it looks much worse than I remember it feeling at the time.
But when everything is taken into account, I was incredibly lucky.
No serious infection.
No damage to the bone.
The wound healed.
I kept the leg.
And as Damjan said when we finally left Niuatoputapu:
“Could have been worse. At least they didn’t have to build you a wooden leg like a proper sailor.”
With that very comforting thought, we set course for Fiji.