Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat (3 page)

This is one of the things that I was learning about sailing: it wasn’t just a matter of going when the mood took you, you had to take into account the tides. This more often
than not involved leaving in the middle of the night or, worse still, just before the onset of night, so that just as you got out into the sea you would be enveloped by an intimidating and unhelpful blackness. I comforted myself with the thought that in the Mediterranean everything would be simpler, as the tides are negligible, so we would be able to go wherever and whenever we wanted.

Here, though, we were confronted by dark and empty distances, filled only by the stars, the little light on our compass, and a constellation of far-off winking lights that, according to Keith, were telling us where to go. Once again I had little idea of the dangers of sailing, especially on a boat with Keith, a person who was only marginally less incompetent than I. As far as I was concerned, he had concluded from the events of our previous adventure that I was a menace. However, perhaps as a consequence of his halitosis and his parsimony, he was not exactly inundated with eager applicants to be his crew.

The dangers became all too apparent the next day when we attempted to return from Chichester. We were about a mile off the beach at Climping when the weather turned truly nasty. The wind began to howl and soon whipped the sea into a convoluted mass of raging waves, and every way we looked there were immense walls of gray-green water, capped by dirty white foam with skeins of spray coming off the top. The roar of rolling and breaking water and the shrieking of the wind made it impossible to think straight. We both wore oilskins but even so we were sopping with salty water, and only the business of staying alive kept us from feeling the hellish cold. The
little boat was tossed from trough to peak, and Keith and I were hurled about like ninepins in a skittle alley.

I was on the tiller with a handful of sheets (the ropes that control the sails), and Keith was up on the front frantically tying up great folds of sail. I was all for scandalizing the main … that is to say, dropping the whole shebang and letting the sails flap about harmlessly on the deck … and, as it happened, given the way things turned out, it wouldn’t have been a bad thing to do. For suddenly all hell broke loose as we were hit by a gust of wind like a battering ram. There wasn’t much of us in the water anyway, as a result of being hurled into the air at that same moment by a colossal wave, and the next thing I knew Keith and I were thrashing about in the furious sea, and the boat was upside down, with its keel (the fin that ought to be at the bottom) on top.

There was a brief moment of shock, then the icy cold water flooded into my oilskins, making me catch my breath and start to sink. The water was cold enough to seize up all my muscles, but the sudden imperative of keeping afloat in order to gulp the next breath kept me moving. Curiously, I also recall hooting with watery laughter—which with hindsight must have been the beginnings of some sort of hysteria.

I still had little idea of what was at stake, though. When we bobbed to the top of a wave I could see the white foaming breakers on the beach about a mile away. I thought we could always swim if the worst came to the worst. I’ve never actually swum a mile, and certainly not wearing oilskins or in a cold, rough sea. Keith told me later that we wouldn’t have stood a chance, indeed that it
was little short of a miracle that we had survived. And in no uncertain terms he made it clear that it was my fault that we had capsized. I had unaccountably hung on to the sheet, instead of letting it fly.

However, then and there, Keith appeared in his best colors as he showed me how to stand on the keel of the boat and pull it back upright again. This was a a lot harder than it sounds, because by this time
Ana
was completely full of water. However, as a result of titanic effort and a big helping of luck, the dear little boat righted herself, and after a protracted struggle to get ourselves back onboard, we set course with sodden charts, bailing all the way, for Littlehampton. For a time we maintained a sort of shocked and bovine silence, but little by little our close encounter with disaster brought on a tendency to hysterical laughter, and by this curious means, we even bonded a bit. It took us all through the long afternoon, about six hours of teeth-chattering, waterlogged misery, but when we got to the dock we felt pretty good—as if we had been somewhere where not many others had been … and I don’t mean Chichester Harbour.

Dear Keith, I quite liked him in the end, and I wish him all the best, and I hope that he finally found an Ana of his own, and that the watery grave that looked to me like it might be his lot hasn’t yet claimed him. I never saw him afterward, though perhaps with good reason he never asked me to sail with him again, and either he or we found ourselves frequenting some other watering hole.

I
HAD DECIDED BY
this time, as any sane person might, that I hated sailing and didn’t want anything further to do with it. However, I had given my word to Julie’s great-aunt that I would skipper her boat, and I didn’t like the idea of admitting my deceit, or letting her down. Besides, I didn’t have any other job prospects on the immediate horizon. So, scraping together a little money from some sheep-shearing work, I enrolled at the Isle of Wight Sailing School. I was signed up for a fortnight’s course that would give me a certificate as a “Competent Crew” and then “Day Skipper.”

I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of any kind of school and had pretty much made up my mind that sailing was either dangerous or boring, or more often both. Still, I’d paid my money, so I had no option but to make the best
of a bad job. I took the train down to Portsmouth and then caught the ferry across to Cowes.

We—the hopeful competent crew—were divided four to a boat and assigned a skipper-teacher who would arrive the following morning. My crew were an odd mix: Roger, an Indian property developer from north London; Suzie, a plump, pretty primary school teacher; and Simon, a police inspector from Bognor who was learning to sail, he said, to fill his Sundays since his wife left him.

In the morning our skipper arrived, an enormous man, seemingly made from a different mold than the rest of us. His physical immensity—he was six feet six and built like a heap of bricks—barely hinted at the enormousness of his presence. Tom Cunliffe was his name, and I gathered that he was something of a big cheese (or whatever is the correct nautical term) in the sailing world. He was a serious long-distance sailor and had navigated most of the seas and oceans of the world on merchant ships or yachts. He was a most imaginative user of English, with language gleaned in equal measure from Shakespeare and the mess-rooms of tramp steamers. He could be filthy when he felt like it, but you couldn’t take offense because of his natural exuberance and bighearted good humor. He had the gift, too, of being able to squeeze the funny side out of things and would have you rolling about and clutching your sides. Tom quite took the wind from my sails … so to speak.

Competent Crew was a simple, undemanding course; we learned the vocabulary of sailing and what everything was for and why. We learned a dozen different knots and why it’s important to get them right. To flake and coil
ropes we learned, too, and when Tom demonstrated, the rope seemed to come alive in his huge hands.

“And that,” he would boom, “is the way to do a first-class Flemish flake.”

We did a little basic navigation and some sailing theory. Then we took on a box of provisions for the week and slipped away down the river into the Solent.

It was a seascape unrecognizable from my adventures with Keith. The sea was blue and the sun shone, and with a gentle breeze the boat went bounding across the water like a happy dog. We moored one night in the beautiful Beaulieu River. We took the dinghy across the quiet water to the pub at Buckler’s Hard, where Tom sang sea shanties with the band. And in the morning we woke with thick heads, to the silence of the still river among the woods, and the haunting cries of seabirds. And then we battled against the wind and the waves, bashing our way through the flying spray to tie up at Bosham in Chichester Harbour … not a million miles from the scene of my last adventure.

The next week we sailed overnight to the island of Sark and I learned the pleasure of sailing by the stars in the open sea. As we approached the island, because we’d been a day and a night at sea and our sense of smell was hankering for the land, the flowering gorse all over the island scented the sea for miles around. Tom was an inspiration; he loved the sea and knew how to inspire others with that love.

At the end of the week, proudly clutching my certificates, I felt I had just tasted a tiny smattering of something that would haunt me to the end of my days. I was
almost feeling a sense of destiny and recalled that my grandfather on my father’s side, who had died before I was born, had been a captain. He had ferried captured German battleships back to Britain after the First World War. So maybe this was in my blood. I felt more than ready for the isles of Greece.

W
HEN I GOT HOME
there was a package for me from Jane Joyce. It contained a letter explaining what would be required of me, a letter of introduction to a certain Captain Bob Weare, and a brochure with details and pictures of the boat, as well as a receipt for a sum of money she had paid the said captain.

“I am about to go under the knife,” she wrote. “Meanwhile, here is what you must do. The boat is not at the island, Spetses, yet. It has been looked after this winter by Captain Bob, who I fear is a dreadful old reprobate. He has the papers and the keys and has undertaken some repairs that had become necessary. He can be contacted at Bar Thalassa, Euripides 5, Kalamaki. Good-bye, my dear, the best of luck and I look forward to seeing you and the refurbished Crabber in Spetses on my return.”
There was also a check for a couple hundred dollars to cover expenses.

I looked at the pictures of my first command, a pretty little boat with a long wooden bowsprit and a picturesque suit of red canvas sails … a long way from my grandfather’s captured battleships, but it would do for a start.

“
ABSENCE MAKES THE HEART
grow fonder” I said to Ana as she took me to the airport … and I meant it. I flew to Athens and took a bus down to Kalamaki, where, humping my bag and my guitar with me, I trudged around the hot streets looking for Euripides.
Thalassa
means “sea” in Greek, so I figured the bar must be on the waterfront. But it wasn’t, and after a number of confusions and misdirections, I eventually tracked it down. It was a dreary sort of a dive, with plastic tables perched on the curb of a backstreet, beneath some stunted plane trees; but the barman was pleasant, spoke some English, and knew my man.

Captain Bob, it seemed, was in the habit of coming to the bar at about six or seven, though he hadn’t been seen for some days. I stowed my baggage in a corner of the bar and, ordering a salad and a jug of retsina, sat in the shade with my Greek grammar. Customers came and went, flies buzzed, cars and vans crawled along the potholed road. Six o’clock came and went, so did seven and eight o’clock. The sun set, and with it came the blessed cool of evening and the orange glow of streetlights; my Greek book was becoming increasingly tedious. With no sign of Captain Bob, I checked into a hotel recommended by the barman,
conveniently located just beneath the take-off path of the airport, a cheap dump of a place that turned out, with the inevitability of these things, to be a whorehouse.

Next day I returned to Thalassa for breakfast and afterward headed down to the marina to see if I could find the boat. There were hundreds and hundreds of gleaming plastic boats all bobbing at their moorings on the foul, oily slop that constituted the sea in Kalamaki Marina. In the hot morning sun I marched along pontoon after pontoon, watching the glistening brown men and women beavering about on their boats. But there was nothing even remotely resembling a Cornish Crabber.

It wasn’t hard to tell, as a Crabber is a most singular design of boat. From the brochure that Jane Joyce had sent me, I knew that the hull was black; that her mast and spars were wooden as opposed to the more modern aluminum; that her sails were red; and her stem was plumb … and sure as hell she would be the only boat in all of Kalamaki Marina with a plumb stem. (A plumb stem is where the front of the boat or bow enters the waterline at the vertical, as opposed to the elegant streamlined curve of, say, a clipper stem. It’s the way fishing smacks are, and all the boats that feature in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Dutch seascape paintings have plumb stems.)

All in all the Crabber was the choice of an aesthetically sophisticated owner who knew nothing about sailing but was determined that it should be beautiful. There was no sign, though, of such a boat among the slinky white craft moored stern to (parked backward) at the pontoons.

Next I checked the area where the boats were lined up
in winter storage—again nothing resembling a Crabber. Finally, a little confused and worried, I went across to a sort of dump where the wrecks lay, poor old crippled boats who had given of their best and were now left to rot in this dusty corner of the boatyard. There were scores of boats here; I walked up and down the lines and in and out between them and suddenly, emerging from behind a rusting steel hulk, I saw the Crabber. There was no mistaking it. She was listing to one side, half propped by some flimsy timbers and with a tattered tarpaulin half on and half off.