Seafaring adventure

Aquatic Antics: Viggo practising his deep diving in the British Virgin Islands.

Seven-year-old Viggo Mikkelsen Steele shares his final adventure tale from the trip, filled with Caribbean wonders and heartfelt farewells.

Hello, it’s Viggo again. Since I last wrote a lot has happened. My dad crossed the Atlantic Ocean in our boat. It took 22 days. I was in Denmark with my mum and my sister for Christmas and then we flew to Barbados in the Caribbean Islands to meet my dad.

In this story I will tell you all about all the adventures in the Caribbean.

I made a new friend named Hendrik. We played a lot together. Once we went to a place where hot water flowed from a river into the ocean. You could swim by the river mouth and it was like a hot pool. The river came from a factory that made electricity from magma. Every time I went there, I felt hot and happy. But every time I went in the river for too long I had to escape to the cold water.

We have had lots of bonfires on the beach. We put marshmallows on sticks and cooked them on the fire to make melted marshmallow froth. We also wrapped dough around a stick and cooked that on the fire. We called it stick bread. I like fires and that’s why I want to be a Scout when I go to New Zealand. Every time we had bonfires, I felt happy as I was with my family and my friends.

Once, my dad, my sister and I took our dinghy to an island far out to the sea. It had a humungous pile of conch shells and a cave with gigantic hermit crabs. They were so big that they could have killed a frog. On that island we also saw an iguana that was as big as me. It was orange and black and when I saw it I was shocked.

At a different place I saw a snake. It looked poisonous. My sister got very scared but we chased it away with sticks and then my sister was happy.

Sometimes sailing can take a long time to get anywhere. While we were sailing I started reading Harry Potter. It was so exciting. I read every morning and night. It’s about a boy called Harry Potter who goes on a lot of adventures. I liked it because he had to face dark wizards but he won.

Besides reading, I like writing poems. I have written one about the sea, one about the land and one about the snow. But they are all in Danish because my mum is from Denmark and I can speak the language. I have translated one on the computer for this story.

(English version of the poem: “The Sea Where the Whales Live / I sailed day and night in storm weather and rain / I see fish and adventure, it is a sign / I have sailed the world’s seas lots of times / And the only thing I hear is the song of the whales”).

A couple of months ago my dad bought a new fishing rod. Once I caught a grouper and my sister caught four fish on one line. We used lionfish meat as bait. Lionfish are poisonous and usually live in caves. They have dangerous spikes that hurt 10 times as much as a bee sting. They are not meant to be in the Caribbean, kind of like possums are not meant to be in New Zealand. We haven’t caught many other fish but my friend Hendrik’s boat has a green light that can go underwater. It attracts barracuda and tarpon which are fish as big as my five-year-old sister but you can’t eat them because they have small bones and because they could have a sickness called ciguatera. Once I saw a stingray while I was diving and it had a little fish on the top of it. I also saw a turtle swimming underwater and from where I was it looked like it was made out of silver.

My grandparents visited us in the British Virgin Islands. I played a lot of Scrabble with my grandpa and even won some games though I think he was taking it easy on me. We visited lots of bays. One bay had boulders as big as a little house. It was next to Scrub Island, which had a big swimming pool with two layers — one was deep, the other was even deeper and a waterslide and a waterfall connected them.

Let me tell you about life on the boat. We get electricity from solar panels and from our motor when it is on because it goes around and around like a windmill. That means we can’t leave our TV on all the time because it uses electricity. When we started this journey we got drinking water from bottles because the water in the tanks was not fresh. Now we have a filter tap but I accidentally broke it. It worked with a fork until my grandparents bought a new one that was even better. We also catch rain in buckets and put it into our tanks.

Soon our boat adventures are going to end because we are selling our boat. This story will be the last. I feel sad to be leaving the boat.

Yesterday we also said goodbye to Hendrik because we are going southeast and Hendrik’s boat is going west. It felt like a little fire inside me had almost gone out. But I am happy to go and live in a house in New Zealand. Maybe we will live close to the sea so I won’t miss the boat too much. I will definitely visit Grandma and Nanny in Gisborne. If you see me walking down the street come and say hello.

Thank you for reading all of my stories.

Viggo’s Gisborne connection is through his grandmother Jill Chrisp, great-grandfather the late Michael Chrisp and his wife Catherine, and Jill’s partner Karen Johansen.