Three Ways to Capsize a Boat Read online

  I wondered what quality it was that had landed me a place among such a seasoned crew. “Oh,” said Tom, before hanging up, “bring your guitar. Hannah likes your songs,” and then he added, as if in answer to my question, “she thinks you’re funny.”

  WHEN I BROKE THE NEWS of my voyage, Ana turned out to be a little less sanguine than I had expected. She had always accommodated my wanderlust, placing a high value on her own independence as much as mine, but was I really sure about the safety of it all? Tom had, after all, talked about storms at sea and this played on her mind. It reassured her to some extent that Ros and Hannah were going along; nothing awful would be allowed to happen to the boat while they were onboard. But what if I fell off it? What if far from land we hit the sort of freak weather that was beyond even the skill of the legendary Tom Cunliffe?

  I worked on through that winter with the sheep, and by the end of March, and lambing, I had enough money saved to defray my share of the costs of the voyage. I put the wheels in motion to see that the flock was well cared for while I was away and, in order to present my case to Ana in a better light, set to work with more enthusiasm than skill on some long-promised home improvements. All this had the effect of keeping me well occupied, and distracting me from my seething excitement about the journey. At long last April came, and with it the eagerly awaited call from Tom to say that everything was ready for our departure.

  On a grim sort of a day with a lowering gray sky and squalls of rain scudding across the Downs, Ana drove me down to Brighton Marina, where Hirta now lay. The weather itself seemed full of menace and foreboding, and, as we drove, it got worse and worse. We didn’t say much and, at the marina, as we walked arm in arm up the quay, Ana leaned into me as much for warmth and a windbreak as for affection.

  Hirta was moored at the end of the quay. I felt a frisson of pride as I saw her; her hull was deep black now with new paint, the spars—mast, bowsprit, and boom—glistened with coat upon coat of oil. The brasswork gleamed, the deck was scrubbed, and everywhere were well-coiled ropes, hanging from the pinrails or neatly flaked down on the deck. The sails were shackled or tied into place and ready to be raised; all in all she looked a most businesslike boat, and reassuringly well prepared for sea.

  “Now, there,” I said to Ana, “is a well-found ship.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” she answered, just a little absently.

  Hannah waved at us. She had posted herself as lookout, her little red Wellingtons and plastic mackintosh setting off her pale blond hair. As we climbed aboard, she ran giggling in a fit of shyness to hide behind her father’s legs. Ros, who had been making tea in the galley, poked her head out at the top of the companionway steps to greet us. It struck me anew what a contrast they made: Ros, slender, quiet, and assured; Tom, towering above her, and with the presence of a bear in a barroom.

  “Welcome aboard,” he boomed. “Get your kit stowed. I see you’ve brought the guitar. Wonderful. We’re having a quick cup of tea and some sticky buns to fortify us and then we’ll slip the lines and get under way. The weather’s not what it might be, but then it never is, is it?”

  A handsome man of about thirty-five, and a gangly, mop-haired youngster with round spectacles were busy on deck lashing gas bottles into the big red dinghy. They paused for a moment to shout greetings, the former turning on a dazzling smile, which Ana returned.

  “That’s Patrick,” said Tom, gallantly handing Ana down into the cockpit, and then through the companionway doors to climb down the steps into the bowels of the boat.

  It was good to get below and out of the cutting wind. The saloon, where a little potbellied stove supplied a welcome warmth, felt like a congenial place to be spending the next half year. While Ana chatted easily to Ros, Tom’s attention was held by a slight, mild-mannered man, who, while thoughtfully fingering his beard, was speculating about the probable outcome of the weather pattern that was establishing itself. “I’m John,” he said, extending his hand, before resuming their conversation.

  Soon the tea and the buns were gone, and it looked like it was time for leaving. I moved to Ana’s side. We could all hear the wind screaming in the rigging, the frenzied clattering of wire stays on tin masts. It sounded nasty out there. John, with reluctance, was suggesting we might want to delay our departure, wait for better weather.

  “I’d given that some thought, too,” said Tom. “But I think we’re all set, and the waiting will do more harm than the wind.”

  “It’s true,” said John. “We’ve got to bite the bullet sometime.”

  “Right, let’s do it.” And Tom rose to his feet and went to start the engine.

  I saw Ana off the boat, and there on the gale-lashed mole she kissed me good-bye. Feeling just a little lovelorn, I hung on to the shrouds (the tensioned ropes that support the mast on either side of the boat … and the handiest bit to cling to when leaning over the side) and waved to the dwindling figure of my girlfriend as we motored toward the harbor mouth.

  “I’LL SEE YOU NEXT AUTUMN,” I shouted. But my words were whipped away by the wind, as Hirta shouldered her way into what looked an ominously swelling gray sea.

  “THE ROUTE WE’RE TAKING,” Tom announced to his crew, “is the logical and best way to get from Brighton to Newfoundland. Our next landfall, in a week or maybe ten days at the worst, will be Norway. With the right sort of wind up our chuff we should make it to the Hardanger Fjord for apple blossom time, which is one of the lesser-known wonders of the world. We have a good supply of whisky to trade with the natives, which ought to see us right for a warm welcome.

  “Then, when we’ve exhausted our credit with the Norwegians, we’ll head west past the Faroe Islands, and on to Iceland, and, if ice conditions are right, we can put in at Julianehåb in Greenland. And then on among the bergs and growlers of the mighty North Atlantic until we hit the north coast of Vinland.”

  I looked around me. Everyone else seemed to know where Vinland was except me, and perhaps Mike, who was intently studying his shoes. Vinland, it transpired, was a historic destination in the Icelandic sagas, more commonly known as Newfoundland. I was going to hear a lot about the sagas on this journey; they were a literary passion and inspiration of Tom’s.

  But the main point was that it was a long way to go … and for now the task was to get safely away from Brighton. For, not ten minutes into our voyage, the wind was already building fiercely. Hannah had disappeared below deck with Ros, leaving Tom to shout instructions from the cockpit, both hands clamped on the wheel. You couldn’t help but notice that ours was the only boat on the water.

  “Safety lines on!” Tom shouted through the foul weather. “I’ll keep her head to wind; get the storm jib up, quick as you can.” The storm jib is a small but heavy-duty sail that is flown from the bow when the wind is really strong, in order to keep the boat stable without driving her too hard.

  We hauled at the ropes like men demented, slithering and sliding on the bucking foredeck. The red triangle of canvas rose like a spirit from the deck and leaped into the air. Then with a thunderous crack the sail snapped into the wind and instantly tore into shreds. The remaining tatters of sail and rope thrashed and flogged in a frenzy. It felt as if poor Hirta were being beaten to bits.

  “Kill that sail!” yelled Tom from the wheel.

  I leaped to grab a snaking rope. It upped and smacked me in the head like a kick from a mule. I fell and grabbed at a stay to stop myself slipping overboard. Swiftly, Patrick, a bigger-built man than me, and far more alert to the real danger of a flogging sail, managed to quell its fury. But not before the long free end of the sail’s rope had fallen overboard and snarled up in the propeller, thus putting the engine out of action.

  Tom cursed, Patrick was ashen faced. It was humiliating for seasoned sailors like them to be caught in such a balls-up so close to the land, even if none of them were culpable. For myself, I was mortified. What sort of asset was I going to be if I couldn’t even grab hold of a rope? But there was no time for such r
eflections; Tom was shouting to us to reef the sail. This is where you loosen and then tie up the lower segments of the sail—making it all a lot smaller and therefore offering less resistance to the wind. It’s one of the crucial maneuvers, that every sailor learns to lessen the impact of a storm.

  With an alternative sail taking the place of the storm jib, and with the mainsail substantially bundled and tied (or double-reefed), we headed east, and four hours later decided to put in at Newhaven to clear the propeller. God, I thought. I hope this is not the way it’s going to be all the way to Newfoundland. Summer in Greece didn’t prepare me for this. There was also a worry playing on my mind. How the hell, I wondered to myself, do you go about clearing a rope from a propeller without actually diving beneath the bottom of the boat? It didn’t bear thinking about.

  IT TURNED OUT THAT I did not have much time to ponder the issue, as I was soon to find out firsthand.

  “Right, Chris, are you ready? I’ll hand you the knife once you’ve got that safety rope sorted out; we don’t want you slicing bits off yourself by accident.”

  It was Tom, leaning like the others over the side while I slid, tied to a safety line and fully clothed (for we hadn’t a wetsuit and, even when immersed in water, wool still imparts a certain warmth), into the cold, cold sea. The odd thing was that I felt almost glad that I was the one to have pulled the short straw. It made me feel important and useful and redeemed that sense of guilt that maybe I could have prevented the rope slipping overboard. At least that’s how I felt before the first gush of freezing water welled into my trousers, agonizingly consumed my nether parts, and then made a grab for my neck. God, it was cold!

  Cold sea is always better once you’re fully immersed, so I dived down, groping my way along the keel until I came to the propeller. I kept my eyes shut because the water in Newhaven Harbour, as well as being cold and fast moving with the tide, was about as clear as mushroom soup. The knot, thankfully, was easy to find—a mass of thick rope wedged tight into every turn of the propeller blades, like a grotesque sinewy growth.

  Clutching the keel with one hand so as not to be whooshed out to the open sea by the tide, I started cutting. To my dismay the rope had been twisted so tight by the force of the propeller that it had taken on the consistency of steel cable. I sawed feebly through a few fibers and then burst to the surface, panting and spluttering.

  My shipmates looked down at me expectantly. “Are you OK? Have you done it?” they asked.

  “Very nearly,” I lied as I wheezed and honked for air, and then ducked under again.

  A few more fibers, a lunge to the surface for breath. Yet more still, and another lunge for breath. I continued in this manner until my fingers and face were half frozen and my body began to quake with cold.

  “I think you should come up,” Ros insisted after nearly half an hour had passed. The others had stopped asking about my progress; they too thought I should stop for a break. But it would be unthinkable to stop without finishing the job. There was my pride to consider, as well as the fact that we wouldn’t be going anywhere at all if the propeller was snarled up. There were just a few more fibers to go now. I sawed and hacked like a man possessed and at last the tangled skeins of rope came away in my hands. Propelled by an enormous sense of achievement I burst back to the surface, where five pairs of arms helped haul me back onboard and guide me down to the cabin.

  I had just about managed to tug off my sodden layers of clothes and get into my arctic sleeping bag before the shivering started in earnest. I’d heard once of a man who shivered so much that he cracked a couple of ribs. Well, that’s how I was shivering now. My teeth were chattering, my very bones were chattering.

  “You’ve got a touch of hypothermia,” said Ros, cracking open a small bag of heat-producing iron filings from the ship’s survival kit and passing it to me. I was unable to acknowledge the truth of what she was saying as my jaw was convulsed in violent spasms along with all the rest of my muscles. I cuddled the miracle bag that seemed somehow to be offering my body something of its lost heat.

  Nor could I gesture, as I was stuffed tightly into my sleeping bag—silk filled with goose down, liner of cashmere wool, good for forty degrees below zero. Yet even so I felt that I might never get warm again, as I lay there, my body racked with convulsions. Gradually, though, a little of the warmth of life began to creep back into my body, and I was able to take a couple of sips of soup and fall into a sound sleep.

  I slept so deeply and so fast that not even the clattering of boots on the deck, nor the roaring of the engine, nor the rumbling of the ropes in the blocks … none of these sounds was able to rouse me to the fact that long before dawn we had put to sea. It was hours later when I slipped back into consciousness, and lay gloriously warm, listening to the sound of the water rushing along the wooden hull just inches away from my ear. When finally I emerged from my bag, the new day was well into the morning. I crept out onto the sloping deck and gazed across a blue and sunlit sea toward the white cliffs of Dover.

  The wind was right and the tide was sweeping us fast along to where we would round the South Foreland and head north up through the Straits of Dover and into the English Channel. It was early in May and we were heading, by what seemed to me a somewhat circuitous route, for Vinland.

  NIGHT BEGAN TO FALL and the pale cliffs of the Kent coast were replaced by distant lines of light. With the deepening of the darkness the sea, too, vanished, and we seemed to move through a fathomless blackness, with just the glimmer of foam in our wake to place us in the firmament. High in the shrouds the red light of the port lantern shone dimly on the mainsail. A few scattered stars peeped from behind the scudding clouds. A faint silver glow on the northeast horizon intensified until a bright shard of moon rose from the dark, shook herself, and began her climb into the night sky. The gale had abated and become a light wind blowing from the west, just what we wanted to drive Hirta, now under full press of sail, northward toward the North Sea and Scandinavia.

  We all sat in the cockpit—a large sunken area on the open deck, like a big wooden bath with benches, that surrounded the wheel and compass. There was the friendly glow of a couple of cigarettes and the comforting scent of thin curls of smoke, as we talked quietly, almost with a certain reverence, so as not to dispel the enchantment of our first night at sea. Each of us cradled a mug of hot tea, for it can be murderous cold on the deck of a boat in the North Sea on an April night. Hannah was below, wrapped in peaceful sleep, rocked by the waves and cuddling her rag doll, Rowena.

  Now the great pleasure of ocean voyaging, as opposed to day sailing, is that as the land drops away astern, all the woes and worries that afflicted you on dry land—all the things you ought to have done but have left undone, all the drab detritus and clutter of your daily existence—slough away like the old dry skin of a snake. You feel renewed and newly alive. There’s nothing you can do about any of that old stuff, so you forget it and just attend to the business of navigation and survival … because getting things right on an ocean voyage in a small boat is simply a matter of life and death.

  This phenomenon, which strips people down to their essence, happens every time you leave the land. But just as surely, when finally the lookout perched high up the mast shouts, “Land ahoy!,” you are overwhelmed with longing for the land, and mysteriously ready and eager again to immerse yourself in that cloying bog of cares.

  Sensing all of this, we mused and chatted, sounding one another out, testing the parameters where you could and couldn’t go when it came to needling one another’s sensibilities. There was a tentative pleasure in getting to know one another, in the knowledge that we were soon to be hurled together and shaken up in conditions of the weirdest intimacy. Tom had warned me that to be confined together in the cabin of a small wooden boat, tossed among the terrors of the open sea, has the effect of a pressure cooker. Feelings that are best left simmering beneath the surface burst forth in extremis and have to be dealt with to make life even halfway tolerable. To
night, though, we took a mild and friendly interest in one another, bandied compliments, trying to show ourselves in our most appealing light, without overstepping the mark. We each sipped whisky from a mug, the traditional treat at the start of the night—and the whisky in its wonderful way warmed our hearts and our spirits.

  And then it was past midnight and a reverential silence fell for the Shipping Forecast. Like anybody else I had heard the shipping forecast before on the radio; a meaningless almost mystical incantation, the clear, clipped tones of the BBC enunciating, “Dover, Thames, Humber, Dogger, German Bight … Fisher, Fair Isle, Cromarty, Viking, Faroes, Southeast Iceland …” and so on; comfortingly obscure names that had suddenly become both personal and pressing for us. Even its theme tune, “Sailing By,” which I had always thought rather vacuous, took on a different form, its rippling arpeggios charged with meaning and emotion.

  From now on we would hear “Sailing By” each night as we plied our way north, until we’d sailed so far that not even the BBC could reach us.

  “IT’S TIME TO START the watch system,” announced Tom. “We’ll do four-hour turns, two to a watch: John, you can have Mike, and Patrick can be with Chris. As skipper I don’t have a specific watch but you can call me any time, day or night.”

  And so I found myself doing ten until two in the morning, just Patrick and me alone in the cockpit while a steady wind drove us northward through the night. Patrick spoke with the softest of Scottish accents. He was an experienced sailor and beneath his gentle well-mannered exterior he was really hard, tough as a nut, the result of years in the army. I was happy to take orders from Patrick as he knew what was going on, and I knew nothing.