Ellen McCallie's Zanzibar diary: Lost at sea

Production team

Day 1

Kate overboard? At night? In the ocean? And we’re supposed to save her? This is not our standard challenge. It’s kind of out there, pushing the limits of what we do. The stakes are higher, too. Sure, we have safety teams, but in the end, we are responsible for each other. Scientifically, it’s a fabulous set of challenges.

Mike makes a flare for Kate to set off, so we know her general direction when she hits the water. Kathy and I make Kate a life-jacket, so she stays afloat until we find her. Jonathan adorns the life-jacket with lights, so when we get near we’ll see her in the dark - like we won’t hear her screams first!

First thing is obvious - this is going to be messy and fun. Our strategy is to make a life-jacket out of the fabric from the pillows we were provided with in the trunk. We’ll stuff it with kapok fibre, which is traditional pillow, mattress, and life-jacket filling. The good thing about kapok is that it is light, fluffy (air is trapped between its fibres), and water resistant (the fibres are coated with a waxy substance). This means that if we can create a waterproof skin to stuff it in, the entire life-jacket should be very buoyant and support lots of weight - Kate’s to be exact.

Our challenge, then, is the waterproof skin - we need to rubberize the pillow fabric. Our plan is to tap rubber trees (Hevea) for their latex, spread it on the fabric, and vulcanize the whole thing so the latex “cures,” turning from a milky liquid to a stable, impermeable rubber. We’re too late to tap rubber today, as it flows best in the early morning, so that’s the plan for tomorrow. Today we’ll sew the life-jackets.

That afternoon: I have to say it was a beautiful, sunny day by the ocean. Kathy and I had a relaxing day in a sewing circle. Making the life-jacket is part of the technology of getting to the final product. We don’t think of clothing and sewing as very scientific now, but historically, that’s another matter. I have to say that we were thankful we didn’t have to make the fabric from scratch…, I’ve sewn all my life: pillow, drapes, clothing, fancy dresses.. It was something my grandmother and I did together. My mother and I sewed together, too. I loved it.

Back to the challenge: To find someone just based on a sighting from a flare isn’t very realistic. We wanted to make and use a compass. Yes, there are currents in the ocean, but if we could get a bearing on the flare and follow it out, it is much more likely that we’ll find Kate. Without a bearing and given we can’t sight on anything as it will be dark, we might end up wandering around in the ocean - no good to Kate. The key was convincing the production team that a compass was logical and necessary. We wanted to build it today, but they were worried we wouldn’t have anything to do later, on Day 3. Based on previous experience, we’ll have plenty, plenty to do. Things rarely go as expected…

Day 2

Up at the crack of dawn and on our way to a local rubber plantation—Kathy, me, Rosey, the director, Tony, the cameraman, and Simon, in charge of sound. Rubber trees are native to the Amazon, so we wouldn’t find them growing naturally in a Zanzibar forest.

I’d tapped rubber trees before when I was working in Brazil, so Kathy and I practiced a bit before we split up and went to work. It is absolutely amazing to see. With a v-tipped knife, we pierced the outer bark of the tree. We cut diagonally down and across the trunk, about a third of the way around the circumference. The latex runs in vessels just below the outer bark, so when we strike the right layer, it’s obvious. It’s like cutting a vein with a sharp blade; the white, milky latex starts pouring out. (It doesn’t pulse like cutting an artery—there isn’t a heartbeat in trees.)

So Kathy and I went from tree to tree in the early morning light. We wedged a little v-shaped spout at the end of the diagonal cut in the tree and place a plastic cup to catch the flowing latex. At 9 am, we were done tapping and were pouring the latex from the cups into buckets. It was a bit nerve racking carrying the sloshing bucket of latex—a morning’s work and all necessary for our success later. It was so, so easy to trip over a stump or a log on the ground—hence, one of my boots is extra-waterproofed now. Kathy and I took turns leading, checking the way for the one carrying the bucket of “white gold”.

The best latex in the world is still tapped this way, by hand, in the mornings. It doesn’t damage the tree if you do it well. Tap every other morning, cutting just through the outer bark. The wounds heal themselves as the latex coagulates slowly in contact with the air.

This also meant we needed to get cracking so the latex wouldn’t coagulate before we coated the material for the life-jacket.

"we heard shouts, screams, and a ruckus"

And then…we heard shouts, screams, and a ruckus. Among the creatures living in the rubber plantation are biting red ants. The director had stepped right into a plant they were protecting. Immediately the lower half of her body, inside her clothes and out, was covered in ants. As she moved, they bit. As they bit, she jumped. We turned around to see Rosey jumping frantically, slapping her body wildly. Just as we were rubbing down her legs to kill the ants on the inside and out, Tony, the cameraman started the same routine. We were all bit some, though Rosey and Tony got the worst of it. Each bite stands your hair on end. It’s hard to tell when you’re bitten; it’s more like a tiny electric shock. Thankfully we were almost done, because the production team was out of there - walking carefully to avoid walking through plants that the ants frequent. Kathy and I didn’t have enough time to figure out if the ants were living on or in the species of plants they were on or if they were foraging for food on them. In any case, once you set your search image for that plant, we avoided it. This was impossible for Tony the cameraman as he walks while looking through the lens. Simon, the soundman, guided him the best he could without making noise - the soundman’s not eager to mess up the sound!

This was only the start of the day. The rest of the day, Kathy and I spent figuring out how to vulcanize the rubber. The material we’d sewn so carefully into life-jackets for stuffing yesterday just shrunk up to nothing when we dipped them in latex and then placed them over the fire. An absolute disaster. This meant we started experimenting with dipping more fabric, smoking it - it was a fine line between vulcanized and a burned mess. The key was to add sulphur so cross-linking between the rubber molecules occurred. Mid-process from milky to stable rubber was a mess - very, very sticky. It got all over our clothes, on our skin, in our hair. I felt like a big ball of rubber cement. Cooking oil worked to get it off, but then we were greasy, too. A funny nightmare as we smelled of smoke as well. It was a long, long, hard, hot day by the fire. In the end? Well, I couldn’t have been more pleased. Kathy and I had vulcanized latex! We had rubberized material. But we were nowhere close to having completed life-jackets.

Day 3

Yesterday, everything stuck. Today nothing does!

Today was a race against time. A process of trial and error. As the only way it worked was to waterproof the material before stitching it, we now had the challenge of figuring out how to put the life-jacket together without having hundreds of little needle holes through which the sea water could come in. Kapok is water-resistant, but given we didn’t know how long Kate would be in the ocean, we couldn’t take chances.

Kathy and I tried glue, adhesive, epoxy, gaffer tape, cable ties, everything in the workshop. Everyone was consulted. Stuff just doesn’t stick to rubber. We finally used a mix of sewing, various adhesives, and hot glue. The glue gun was broken, so we used a soldering iron to apply it. By the end of the day, I’d burned myself several times, but fortunately, I hadn’t burned Kathy.

It was a challenge in stamina and patience. We worked shoulder to shoulder for hours, having to be careful and alert the whole time. We had to laugh that folks thought we’d have nothing to do this day!

The countdown to our departure had started, the sun was fading, and we were still racing to seal the life-jacket. Jonathan and Kate joined in the process - holding, gluing, and waiting for everything to cool and seal.

Later in the blackness, the flare went off. We followed the compass bearing Kathy took to find Kate’s voice and these tiny, red, flashing lights flying away from us. Kate was really moving in the current. Immediately, it felt real, like Kate was really in danger. My body and mind flashed into overdrive - we’ve got to get her, fast… In the end? Amazing success! Mike’s flare, Jonathan’s lights, and the life-jacket -Kate’s hair didn’t even get wet!