Three Ways to Capsize a Boat Read online

  “We’re not exactly making a lot of progress anyway, are we? What can we do?”

  “Well, we could tie a bucket to the end of the boom and throw it in the water. The drag would restrain the boom from banging … but it’s a hideously unseamanlike solution. And we haven’t actually brought a bucket with us.”

  “But we have to do something. We can’t just sit here like this; we’ll go bonkers.”

  “Heavens, man—we’ve only been becalmed for fifteen minutes.”

  “Perhaps,” agreed Tim. “But the problem with the Mediterranean is that in summer the calms are almost constant. The Ancients didn’t do very much sailing at all, you know; they rowed everywhere. But they didn’t have the internal combustion engine then, of course,” he added as an afterthought. Then blinked.

  “Of course,” I echoed thoughtfully, wondering what he was driving at.

  “We have, though.”

  “We have what?” I asked, absently.

  “Internal combustion engines. We have an internal combustion engine right here on this boat.”

  “Aah …”

  “So why don’t we start it up?”

  I had suspected all along that this was what Tim wanted: he wanted to forget sailing and use the engine.

  “Well, it’s smelly and noisy, and it makes the whole thing rather disagreeable, don’t you think?”

  “But surely it can’t be more disagreeable than sitting here becalmed with that boom banging the hell out of the poor boat. And besides, we’re supposed to get to Spetses today. At this rate we’re not even going to make it to Aegina.”

  There was something in what Tim had to say. I held my ground a little longer … then I started up the engine.

  WE PULLED THE SAILS in tight and set course for the northern tip of Aegina. With our forward speed an apparent wind sprang up and cooled us down; the warm sunshine had become a searing furnace while we were becalmed. The Crabber churned on across the glassy waters toward Aegina, and the progress cheered us up. The engine didn’t sound too bad, a pleasant chugging coming from somewhere deep down inside the boat. We ate some figs and had a sip of water. It wouldn’t do to get dehydrated.

  “What’s that smell?” asked Tim.

  “What smell?”

  “There’s a sort of a hot smell.”

  “That’ll be the engine, I suppose.”

  “But it didn’t smell like that before.”

  “No, that’s because we had it turned off.”

  “No, but I mean since we’ve had it running.”

  “Engines always smell like that when they’re running—it’s because they get hot. And this one is new, so probably all the paint is burning off it. It’s what always happens.” I rabbited on, not altogether convinced by my own sophistry.

  Then a plume of smoke appeared from under the lid of the engine cover.

  “Jesus, the goddamn boat’s on fire!” Tim cried.

  “Nonsense, man. It’s just a bit of hot paint. I’ll take the cover off it.”

  I shipped the tiller out of the way and bent down to lift the heavy wooden cover off the engine box. It was hard to budge—and a little hot—and when I finally shifted it, it came away with a great jerk. A thick cloud of black smoke burst upon us and, with the sudden hit of oxygen from the violently lifted lid, the whole damn thing burst into flames.

  “Fuck! You’re right. We’re on fire. Get some water, quick!”

  “How?”

  “From the sea, of course! Get some water out of the sea with a bucket!”

  “But we haven’t got a fucking bucket! We haven’t got anything for chrissakes!”

  The essence of being a good seaman is to keep your head when things go wrong, as in their inimitable way they inevitably will, and to be able to improvise. How to put out a fire at sea without a bucket … hmm.

  “I know,” said Tim, “we can take our shirts off and dip them in the sea and wring them out over the engine.”

  No sooner said than done. We dipped and scooped and wrung for all we were worth. And by this method we soon doused the flames, mainly because they had already consumed the piece of wood they were interested in—a small section of bulkhead that was too close to the really hot bit of the engine.

  We sat back and wiped the sweat from our eyes. There was a horrible sizzling, a smell of oily smoke and steam.

  “There must be something not quite right,” I observed. “It’s not supposed to do that.”

  Tim refrained from making any comment, for which I was grateful. He blinked down at his sodden shirt.

  “I think it’s a mistake to put to sea without a bucket,” he suggested. “I suppose we’ll have to return to Kalamaki and see about getting it fixed.”

  “Not bloody likely,” I cried. “I’d sooner die than go back to that hellhole. We’re heading to Aegina.”

  This ill-considered utterance produced a silence between us. Neither of us quite knew how to put what we were thinking. Eventually Tim spoke. “And how,” he said, “would we get to Aegina if, say, we were to want to go there?”

  “Well, we’d have to sail, wouldn’t we?”

  I was very conscious of being the skipper here, and it was my clear duty not to spread panic among the rather volatile crew. I would play the nastiness of our situation down. Things were, after all, about as bad as things could get. Here we were, out in the middle of the ocean, midway between Kalamaki and Aegina, in a boat that would at the least provocation, so it seemed, burst into flames. There was not a breath of wind to take us anywhere and, perhaps worst of all, we had no bucket. On the positive side we had some figs and dates and olives and a couple of bottles of drinking water.

  “But there isn’t any wind,” said Tim with irritating predictability. “Here we are out in the middle of the sodding ocean …”

  “It’s not an ocean,” I interrupted testily. “It’s a sea. We are, if I’m not mistaken, in the Aegean.”

  “Now, let’s face it, Chris, it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference to our plight whether it’s an ocean or a sea, does it?”

  WHICHEVER WAY WE LOOKED at it, our situation was grim. If we’d had a radio or some such thing, we could have radioed for help, but, as I’ve already been at pains to point out, we didn’t even have a sodding bucket. I could see that Tim was wondering about the wisdom of having invited a person such as me to share his journey to the mountains.

  The Crabber lifted and fell almost imperceptibly on the gentle swell. The boom swung regularly to and fro, each time with a sickening crash. The sun poured down upon our unprotected heads. It was far from pleasant. A resolution had to be made, in order to move us out of the disagreeable state of affairs in which we found ourselves and into the next one, whatever that might prove to be.

  We resolved to keep the sails trimmed in order to take advantage of even the slightest passing zephyr. We had already observed, by dint of spitting into the sea and watching the boat’s movement in relation to the bubbles thus produced, that although we appeared to be standing stock-still, we were in fact heading in an unspectacular fashion toward Aegina. There was some considerable distance left to cover, about six nautical miles I reckoned, but the likelihood was that as the long day drew toward evening a breeze might spring up and, all being well, we could be in the harbor by nightfall.

  We amused ourselves for a time by studying the engine and its mountings, to see if we could discover the cause of the fire. Neither Tim nor I, though, are of a mechanical turn of mind, and so the exercise consisted in not much more than staring into the engine hold in bovine fashion and shaking our heads in disbelief.

  “We could,” suggested Tim, “try running the engine again, for a short time, and see what happens.”

  “It’s a bit of a risk,” I said. “If the boat catches fire properly, we’re doomed.”

  Oddly enough, fire at sea is one of the worst of the mariner’s fears; it’s the canvas and the wood and the usually strong wind to fan the flames, the presence of the three elements—air,
fire, and water—and the absence of the fourth, the blessed unyielding earth, that make it such a nightmare.

  But it was worth a try so, nervously, we started the engine again. It seemed to run fine, so, leaving the cover off, we slipped it into gear. Again the blessed cooling breeze, the churning of the wake astern. I spat in the sea. The filmy bubbles vanished behind us in seconds.

  “There’s that smell again,” said Tim.

  I peered into the hold. Sure enough the curl of blue smoke, the woodwork glowing like hot coals. I pulled the stop knob and the silence reasserted itself. It had been no more than five minutes, but five minutes at five knots, and the little bit of freewheeling at the end, take you the best part of half a mile. Aegina was definitely a lot nearer than Kalamaki now. We felt heartened a little by this.

  So now we figured that we could use the engine in brief bursts in an emergency, but any more than five minutes would have the Crabber engulfed in flames. It was going to be a long, long afternoon.

  I decided to teach Tim some knots to while away the time. We may not have had a bucket, but the Crabber was well supplied with bits of old rope. Rather pleased with my own recently gleaned knowledge and love of knots, I showed him the amazing bowline and its interesting qualities and uses; then we did the clove hitch, the reef knot, and the granny, all of which he knew already. Then on to the more complicated rolling hitch, the fisherman’s hitch, the sheepshank, the sheet bend, the sailors’ knot, and the beautiful Turk’s head. This activity occupied us for more than an hour, and it was an hour in which, apart from the study of the knots and its attendant self-improvement, we made not the slightest bit of progress. We had given up spitting into the sea, partly in order to conserve bodily liquids, but partly, too, because neither of us felt it was quite the right thing to do. In our precarious situation the last thing we wanted to do was give offense to, say, Neptune, or Doris and her sisters. It was pretty obvious we were not getting anywhere, anyway.

  Next we told stories, mostly of a salacious and mildly humorous type, but of this we soon tired. Finally Tim started to tell me about Greek history. He did this so well that I was absolutely captivated, and time seemed to pass in a completely different way. Almost before I knew it, the sun had dipped behind the mountains and we were in blessed shade.

  Tim was sitting with his back against the mast, while I lay slumped in the cockpit idly waggling the tiller. We had moved a long way back through history, and Tim was on to the War of Independence: “… and then there was Athanasios Diakos—the Turks broke every bone in his body with hammers, before impaling him …” when all of a sudden, the boat heeled hard over.

  “The wind, the wind,” we cried, as we let out the sails and sheeted them home, and the Crabber leaped and scudded eagerly toward the west. In less than an hour we were rounding the point at the northern tip of the island. Night was falling, and the lights of the little town were just coming on.

  We switched direction without mishap and with the wind now coming over our port quarter we eased down the west side of the island.

  THIS WAS WHERE OUR next problem appeared. In Greece the convention is to moor your boat stern to—that is, with the back of the boat against the quay and the bow facing outward, kept in check by the anchor. In order to achieve this, there is a complex maneuver that involves sailing past the slot where you have decided to moor your boat, then backing in, dropping the anchor on the way. You let the anchor line run as you move carefully backward, your fenders down to cushion the inevitable crunching of the neighboring boats. At the last moment, just as you are about to crash into the dock, you kill the engine, snag the anchor line, and leap off onto the shore with your mooring warps to make them fast. This is all done in one swift movement. Unfortunately, I had never performed the maneuver before and my engine was, to say the least, unreliable.

  I was understandably a little nervous as we rounded up outside the dock and dropped the sails. I started the engine, and we moved slowly backward toward the berth we had chosen.

  “Drop anchor,” I cried in a nautical fashion, and Tim dropped the anchor, letting the line run out through the fairlead.

  “Make fast to the bitts!” and Tim, without a moment’s hesitation, made fast to the bitts, as I had briefed him to do. I switched off the engine and leaped onto the shore, at the same moment as the Crabber pulled up just half a yard short of the dock. I took a turn round a bollard with the mooring warps and jumped back onboard to cleat them off.

  I looked at Tim and Tim looked back at me. Nothing had gone wrong; the whole daunting maneuver had gone off without mishap. It was almost too much to take onboard. Later we sat in a taverna by the dock drinking retsina, rather a lot of it, and discussing our next move. If we had had half a brain between us we would have gone to a boatyard on Aegina and got the boat fixed there and then. But I felt that we had already started our journey. Spetses was not so very far away now, and I was keen to get the boat down to its home. Also a certain mood of unfounded optimism had taken hold as a result of the success of the docking and the pleasant hour of sailing we had enjoyed on the wings of the evening breeze. In short, we had completely forgotten how awful the previous day had been. We decided to leave for Spetses the next morning, engine or no engine. But we did take the precaution of buying a big red plastic bucket.

  BRIMMING WITH CONFIDENCE IN our newfound powers of seamanship, we left the dock without the engine, under sail. This was a matter of casting off the mooring lines, pushing off and heaving on the anchor line to get a bit of speed up, then raising the staysail, sheeting it hard in so the breeze carried the bow round … then finally up with all the sails and off and away to the south. The whole maneuver unfolded flawlessly, seemingly without effort.

  As we sailed slowly along the west coast of the island the breeze began to freshen and veered a little until it was blowing strongly from the northeast. Tim was on the tiller and I was on the foredeck fooling around with the sails. We shot out from the end of the island and turned a little to the east in order to go round the outside of Poros instead of navigating the narrow channel between the island and the mainland.

  There were about twelve miles from the southern tip of Aegina to Hydra, where we would be bearing west for the final run home to Spetses. It took us not much more than a couple of hours, about as swiftly as a little boat like this could go. Tim, who was learning fast how to feel the wind with a delicate touch of the tiller, how to keep the sails filled and working to drive us forward, was a natural. And I could tell that he was ecstatic about this new experience. As was I; our whole beings were suffused with the sheer joy of wind and water and sunshine, and the beauty of our little craft. For this, too, is a big part of the pleasure, the way a boat moves in the water, whether she be gliding across the still waters of a sheltered bay or—in that school anthology poem of John Masefield’s—“Butting through the Channel in the mad March days.”

  No wonder people get emotional about their boats, I thought to myself … and still think. Because boats—or, at any rate, old wooden boats—have their personalities, their foibles, their weaknesses, and their beauty. The wind sings in the rigging; the hull creaks and groans as the stays take the strain of the wind in the sails; then there’s the clanking and rattle of the winches, of the blocks and tackles, of the hoists and lifts and purchases, the jolly rollicking of the parrel balls as they roll up and down the mast. There’s the smells, too, the wood and the oil, the unforgettable smell of tarred twine and Stockholm tar; there’ll always be an undertone of fish, too, and the huge smell of the sea.

  And the beauty, the incomparable beauty, of sailing boats is a thing that has settled deep in my heart and it’s hard to get rid of it. Of all the beautiful things that mankind by his creative genius and his ability to cooperate has created, it’s the tea clipper, racing home from China under full press of sail, that is the absolute zenith for me. There are those who would cite aircraft and rocket ships or buildings … and I concede the beauty of, say, the Concorde, even the space shu
ttle, and the Parthenon … but still, number one on my list is the Cutty Sark.

  And the fact that there is so much lore and literature about boats is because sailing goes back to the dawn of history; it goes deep into the genes of our island races, and if one is not a lover of poetry and literature, then there are few better ways to become one than to spend time sailing in small boats.

  We raced on, hour after hour across the wine-dark sea … not really like wine at all, but a deep, deep blue that gave the impression of unimaginable depth. The lovely treeless island of Hydra appeared on our bow, pale and stark and rising sheer in gray and red cliffs from the waters. We stuffed ourselves with bread and olives and figs and watched the ferries and fishing boats busying themselves around the mouth of the tiny harbor.

  Finally we cut between the end of Hydra and the bare uninhabited rock of Trikiri, and there, barely five miles off, lay Spetses. The wind dropped a little and there was only the lightest of swells on the sea as we pulled away again into the open water.

  TIM AND I WERE getting cocky; we had been sailing fast and easy all day long and now our bourne was in sight. We wanted a little more of a challenge.

  “Right,” I said. “Let’s do a man-overboard drill. Test ourselves a little.”

  “What would that involve?” asked Tim.

  “Well, it’s a thing you do when you learn to sail, one of the most important of all, really. You throw a buoy overboard and then do the appropriate maneuver to pick it up, as if it were a real person.”

  “Sounds like fun. What shall we throw overboard? I know: the bucket.”

  “Over my dead body; the bucket is the most important thing on the boat. I know, you jump overboard and I’ll do the stuff and pick you up.”

  “OK,” said Tim. “I could do with a swim.” And before I could utter another word, he was gone, a neat dive deep down beneath the surface. A few seconds later he was up and spluttering. “Jesus, man, it’s just beautiful. Come on in.”