One bay at a time

THE problem with being a sea gipsy is that you never know what lies over the horizon. One day you're fighting a fire on a crippled 53ft ketch off wild, remote islands in the central Pacific, and the next you're serving cocktails to Placido Domingo on the sundeck of a Swiss millionaire's super-yacht in Antibes harbour. In between, you are likely to be scuba-diving on the wreck of a seaplane off Tahiti.

Colin Stenhouse has done the lot since quitting his job as a gamekeeper in the Campsie Hills more than four years ago and sailing into the wild blue yonder in search of adventure. ``It's different,'' he says of his itinerant maritime life. ``You just take each day as it comes.''

The essence of his lifestyle is fairly simple: wherever he happens to be, he finds a boat looking for crew and signs on for a voyage to somewhere else, where the process is repeated. In this whimsical manner he has meandered over the greatest oceans on Earth, in accordance with the maxim of Robert Louis Stevenson that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.

Stenhouse's previous life on land was as haphazard as his current course on water. After studying hotel management he flew hot-air balloons from Gleneagles for a whisky advertising campaign, and sold fire extinguishers in Northern Ireland. It was while he was working as a gamekeeper in Milton of Campsie that he saw a television programme that suggested several ways of travelling around the world free. One of them was crewing on boats.

Having done a bit of sailing with friends in the Firth of Clyde and around the Western Isles, Stenhouse sent his name to a crew registry company in Southampton that had been mentioned in the programme. ``I was hoping for a trip to France, or maybe even a Dutch port,'' he recalls. A few days later he received a call from a man who asked if he could be in Antigua by Saturday. ``What, this Saturday?'' he asked.

It so happened it was the end of the pheasant season, and Stenhouse had just organised the last shoot, so he packed his bags. His new assignment was to help sail a 42ft ketch from the Caribbean to Australia, where its new owner was waiting to take delivery.

On arrival at Antigua airport he was met by the captain and first mate, who were both drunk. A young woman who had travelled on the same flight from London to join the crew said something along the lines of ``No way, Jose'', and turned on her heels. Stenhouse figured it would be a long time before he got another chance to sail halfway round the world, said to himself what the hell, and signed up anyway. His new shipmates promised they would remain sober at sea, and after recruiting another English girl they sailed two days later.

For a while, all went well. En route to the Panama Canal the captain and his mate kept their word, although every time they went ashore in Grenada, Venezuela, and the Dutch Antilles they were rolling drunk by lunchtime. It was while they were waiting to pass through the canal that Stenhouse met the South African owner of a larger ketch, who was looking for crew to help him sail it home across the Pacific and Indian oceans. This seemed a better bet than the jolly tars he was with, and so he switched boats. It was a move that took him from an unsteady frying pan into a serious fire.

On leaving Panama they were becalmed for 10 days. At this point the engine broke down, depriving them of power for everything other than emergency radios and navigation systems. The next thing to go was the self-steering gear. It then transpired that the owner did not wish to put into the Galapagos Islands because he had unlicensed guns on board, so the crew was faced with steering the yacht manually for almost 4000 miles to the lonely Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia.

During this voyage it became apparent the vessel had been badly maintained, when bits of it began falling off. First the forestay went, then the jib, and then the mainsail. When a spinnaker was hoisted, its halyard promptly snapped. Stenhouse's laconic comment on this catalogue of calamities is: ``The boat was old and tired, and we were beginning to feel the same way.''

They were about 60 miles from the Marquesas when the owner decided to transfer fuel from the outboard engine of a dinghy into a generator, which was charging the batteries to start the main engine. He proposed to do this while the generator was still running. Stenhouse pointed out the obvious danger of fire, and when his warning was ignored he withdrew to a safe distance. ``It was quite a big fire,'' he recalls. ``The explosion sent the owner flying.'' It was at this point that they discovered only one of the six fire extinguishers on board was working.

Desperation produces marvellous feats of self-preservation, and so the crew put out the blaze and called for help from local fishing boats around the island of Hiva-Oa. Being towed in a crippled boat into one of the wildest, gloomiest natural harbours on Earth was not how he had imagined arriving in Polynesia. And their problems were not over.

Warnings of a severe tropical storm sent every vessel in the harbour scurrying for the open sea - except the South African ketch which was incapable of going anywhere. Thanks to four anchors and a bit of luck it survived the maelstrom, trapped by logs and other debris washed down by torrential rivers.

To cut a long, sad story short, we switch to the nearby isle of Tahuata, where Stenhouse has gone swimming to look for manta rays. Instead he sees a handsome 65ft ketch, swims to its stern, and inquires of its occupants whether by any chance they are looking for crew. Is he prepared to babysit, they wish to know. He is, he says. Get your gear then, they say.

And so he sails into the sunset, and happier times, with an American couple and their two young children wandering around the world for the fun of it. ``It was a beautiful boat,'' he recalls. ``It had the best of everything.'' Its equipment included a windsurfer, water skis, and an air compressor for diving. The yacht was well-maintained, the owner was sober and knew how to sail, and Stenhouse made breakfast for the children and took them snorkelling.

He remembers with particular pleasure three weeks spent at Raroia, a coral atoll north-east of Tahiti, which had a population of 42. ``During the day the islanders would take us fishing in their canoes. We had a guitar on board, and in the evenings they would come with their ukeleles and banjos, and we'd have a sing-song in the lagoon beneath the stars. Times like these are very special.''

This particular idyll ended in Tahiti, where the Americans were joined by relatives for a trip to New Zealand. After a conversation in a waterfront bar, Stenhouse found himself in the smart dress uniform of a deckhand on the kind of luxurious yacht that dreams are made of. The gleaming 127ft cruiser was built and operated by a Swiss company for charter. All mod cons were laid on for the occupants of the six guest cabins, for a price - $55,000 a week, to be precise, not counting drinks and satellite telephone calls.

Having made an effortless transition from oily rags to riches, Stenhouse was now earning good tax-free wages swabbing the decks of this floating palace and catering to the likes of Billy Crystal, star of City Slickers and When Harry Met Sally. His main duty during this particular charter in the Caribbean was towing Crystal's teenage daughter on water-skis.

From then on it was just one magnificent superyacht after another, in the service of the rich and famous in the world's smartest resorts. In between he decided to visit a girlfriend in Alaska. He was in Florida at the time, so he bought a Harley Davidson motorcycle and headed north, Easy Rider style. In the event, he never made it to Alaska, ending up by a circuitous route (via Canada) at a Harley rally in South Dakota that attracted 160,000 bikers. Stenhouse's present berth is as a steward on Lady Marina, a 164ft testimony to wealth and privilege owned by a Swiss businessman. It is essentially a stately home within a sleek white hull and superstructure, decorated with Italianate murals, translucent shoji screens, and Gauguin portraits. There are speedboats and Jacuzzis all over the place. ``It takes about a week to polish all the marble,'' he says. He has the temerity to call this work.

A recent guest was Placido Domingo, who joined the yacht in Antibes for a jaunt to St Tropez. It was during the finals of the Euro96 football championship, and the Spanish tenor endeared himself by singing the praises of Scotland. ``He said he had always admired Scotland, and he hoped we would beat England.'' The pangs of defeat were assuaged in an agreeable manner in a waterfront bar, while watching the sun sink slowly over the Mediterranean.

It seems a fairly idyllic lifestyle, but Stenhouse hopes to chart a steadier course one day on land, as the proprietor of a bar or restaurant somewhere in the tropics. In the meantime he would like to explore the Brazilian coast, and perhaps the islands of the Indian Ocean. But like his fellow Scot and sea rover Robert Louis Stevenson, he is drawn back to the South Seas. ``The Med is full of yachties and celebrities,'' he says. ``but out in the Pacific there is solitude and silence. You watch incredible sunsets, and when you go to bed you hear nothing but the sea and the wind in your sails. At times like these you want to go on forever.''

Then the gipsy spirit prevails, and it doesn't really matter what lies over the horizon.