Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat (6 page)

“The reason a donkey makes that heartrending noise,” I reflected, thinking of country lore, “is because the donkey has seen the devil.”

To Spiti Joyce
—The Joyce House—Jane had told me, could be located by means of a tall eucalyptus with a donkey tethered to it. I crossed a shadeless stretch of waste ground and pulled the bell set in a high white wall. I waited in the shade of an overhanging oleander; the hot air thick with the sweet scent of jasmine and the pleasant cat-piss smell of fig.

A fumbling on the far side of the door, and there was Bob. “Well, if it isn’t our new skipper. Delighted to see
you, Chris. Come and join us; we have a few friends over for luncheon.”

I dumped my bag on the cobbles of the patio, mussed up my hair a little with my hands and dusted myself down, then followed Bob through into the cool of the house and out onto the terrace. Here, beneath the dappled shade of a spreading fig, was set the table, a simple calico cloth and some fresh flowers, some glimmering glasses with cool white wine. By this time I was steeped in euphoria; the contrast between the grimness of Kalamaki and this lovely Mediterranean island was almost too much to take in.

“Chris, what perfect timing,” called Jane from her seat at the head of the table. She seemed not a jot altered by her hospital ordeal. “I shall not rise to greet you, dear boy,” she continued, beckoning me forward, “as my wretched new titanium bones dictate that I remain seated, but help yourself to a glass of wine and come and give an account of yourself. These are our good friends.”

There were not many friends: the Nomíkoses, an elderly Greek couple, expensively dressed and coiffed and just a shade reserved; I shook their hands. Next to them sat a much younger woman, slim with thick dark hair twisted into a knot at the nape of her neck. She looked up at me, her brown eyes alight with amused intelligence.

“And this,” enunciated Jane, “is Florica.”

Well, I liked the look of Florica. She had a casual grace that immediately put you at your ease and a dazzling smile. I kissed her on each cheek and sat down rather presumptuously beside her. A hint of lemon blossom wafted
across as she turned to ask me how the fiasco with the boat was going. Her voice was low, her accent cosmopolitan.

Jane surveyed us with the satisfied expression of a benign aunt. “Let’s wait for Tim, my dears; then we can eat lunch and Chris can tell us about the unfortunate Crabber,” she said. Then added, “I think you’ll hit it off with Tim. He’s English, you know, and a writer and can turn his hand to absolutely anything. He’s so wonderfully clever.”

As if on cue the bell jangled.

A tall, tanned man stepped into the courtyard and greeted Jane and Bob with unaffected warmth; the Greeks he greeted politely in Greek. Then, pulling up a chair next to Florica, he extended a hand, almost as calloused as my own. “I was doing a little carpentry on the house,” he explained to the guests, “and I completely lost track of time; do forgive me if I’ve kept you waiting.”

You could easily forgive Tim. He had a keen sympathy and a look of such absorbed interest in whatever you happened to be saying that stories just spilled out. Soon I was recounting the desperate goings-on at Kalamaki Marina, the perfidy of Captain Bob, and the surprising erudition of the Nikoses. All of which Tim translated fluently for the Greeks while I watched, smiling at his gently incredulous tone and the habitual way that he blinked whenever he was about to voice a new thought. It was obvious from their looks and their body language that he and Florica were lovers, and I decided to myself that a friendship with this delightful couple would put the finishing touches to my idyllic summer.

The lunch of course helped. There were bright salads of divinely sweet tomatoes, with Kalamata olives and chunks of fresh feta cheese; a bowl of taramasalata—creamed roes and garlic and lemon and heaven knows what else was in it; and tzatziki, too, with rich yogurt, salt, and the crispest cucumber. There were tin jugs of cold retsina with condensation dribbling down the outside, for those who fancied that pungent resinous taste. For the more delicate palates a big bottle of cool Cambas white wine. Later came a dish of delicately poached
barbounia
—red mullet—with some courgettes and aubergines done with parsley to perfection.

It seemed to me at that moment as if everything was in harmony: the food, the colors, the people, the hot sun, the view of the little harbor and the blue sea below … as if I’d passed through a portal into a different, more congenial dimension.

Tim was a walker and a climber and lover of the mountains, and was writing a book about the mountains of Greece. I dearly wanted to go to the mountains, too. One thing that we both emphatically agreed upon was that we always—and neither of us ever made an exception to this rule—traveled alone. So when Tim told me that he was planning to go for a ten-day journey into the Pindos Mountains, up near the Macedonian border, I thought about it for a bit, and then said, “Can I come along too?”

He looked at me in surprise, and hesitated just a moment before saying, “Yes, why not? That would be very nice.”

“And come to think of it,” I continued pensively, “I’m going to need somebody to help me bring the boat down from Kalamaki to Spetses. Are you a sailor?”

Now, to a seasoned nautical man, the business of sailing a Cornish Crabber single-handed down the Saronic Gulf in the summer would offer little difficulty … but you never know, and besides it would be nice to have some company.

“Never been on a sailing boat in my life,” he replied, blinking hard, “but I’d be very happy to give it a go.”

A
WEEK OR
so after our lunch with the Joyces we got under way.

Tim had a good idea to start off with, suggesting that we take the ferry, rather than the hydrofoil, back to Athens, in order to stand on deck and get a good look at the route that we would be taking with the Crabber, when and if it were ever ready. We duly took note of every islet and peninsula along the way—and noted, too, that one island looks much like another from the sea. But it was a fairly straightforward route: sail close to the shore and keep the land on your left—or your right, that would be, coming from Athens.

Once at Piraeus we took the bus along to Kalamaki Marina. It was a Monday and by the time we got to the yard it was long into the searing heat of siesta time, a time when the Nikoses would never deign to work. But
there was the
trikiklo
, and as we approached the Crabber we heard the sound of banging—the universal concomitant of men and work—coming from deep in the bowels of the boat. And then red-beard-Nikos, caked in engine grease and soaked in sweat, a truly disgusting sight, clambered out of the hole where the engine lived, and announced: “That’s it, man. Noo engine in. All we need now is get the boat rigged. I reckon we get it done tonight, you fill up some gas, and tomorrow morning you sail away to Spetses.”

I figured that the way to get an undertaking like this on the move was to throw some cold beer at it, so I took the
trikiklo
to town and bought a couple of crates of Marathon.

When I got back, the frenetic pace of the work had subsided a little, as the Nikoses and Tim were squatting in the dust in the shade of the boat, deep in discussion of the antifascist poetry of Seferis and Gatsos. At least, that’s what Tim said. They were all talking Greek, Tim with an easy fluency that made the Nikoses seem even better company in their native language. I felt the smallest bit left out.

“Right,” I shouted. “Enough with the literary seminars, let’s get this boat rigged.”

Little by little, by judicious application of warming beer and the sharp side of my tongue, I managed to get them moving. By the cool of the evening we were ready to raise the mast. We hauled it up, gleaming with a dozen coats of oil, tightened all the ropes that held it in place, and then fitted the boom. At last the Crabber started to look like a sailing boat. I climbed off her time
after time just to go and stand at a distance and admire the sight. Night fell, and at last she was all set to go. The plan was that the Nikoses would make the arrangements with the harbor crane to put her in the water first thing in the morning; Tim and I would gather the necessary provisions, and we would set off as early as possible. I reckoned that, all being well, the journey to Spetses, fifty-seven nautical miles away, ought to take us about twelve hours.

Of course, next morning the Nikoses failed to show up. I was in a state of excitement verging upon hysteria and Tim got so fed up with me moaning on about the Nikoses—Where were the buggers?—that he marched off and sorted out the harbor crane himself. It took an hour; these things are best done at a steady pace … one small slip with a harbor crane and that’s the end of your boat. But finally there was the Crabber—a boat really ought to have a name, but the Crabber was always known as “the Crabber”—in her proper element, floating in the water.

Tim excelled himself further by fixing the paperwork with the harbor authorities that would allow the Crabber to leave the dock. We loaded the water, figs, dates, olives, and bread, our iron rations (in case things cut up really rough), filled the tank with diesel … and cast off.

Bub … bub … bub, bub, bubbububbubbub
went the engine, a big inboard diesel with a deep pleasing throb. I let Tim take the tiller while I flaked down the warps—this seemed no time to give a lesson in what a warp was and how to flake it—and we throbbed slowly along between the pontoons, nosing through the slicks of oil and rafts of floating rubbish. Tim pushed the tiller across and we
edged between the breakwaters and at long last out into the mighty rolling blue sea.

As I looked back, I could just make out a
trikiklo
bouncing along the harbor mole. It pulled up at the end and disgorged the Nikoses, who jumped up and down, and waved encouragingly for a bit. We waved back in a more restrained, Anglo-Saxon manner before returning to the business of setting sail. “Head into the wind and we’ll get the sails up and we can turn that horrible engine off,” I shouted.

Now with most people, if you were to tell them to head into wind, they wouldn’t have a clue what you were talking about, but Tim was a natural. I busied myself with the mess of tangled ropes and pulleys on the foredeck, and within twenty minutes or so had the sails all hoisted. I turned the engine off, and we abandoned ourselves to the sounds of the sea and the gentle breeze coming out of the north.

ON A CLEAR DAY
—and this was the clearest of days—you can see the island of Aegina from the harbor mouth at Kalamaki. It appears as a slightly darker gray blue than the gray blue of the mountains on the mainland behind, and the nearer you approach, the more it detaches itself, until finally it appears as a living island with its forest of pines and its cliffs and coves and villages. I figured that because it was our first time out, it might be better to hop from island to island on the way down, following the ferry route, rather than launch ourselves out into the open sea.

The little wind we had was just about right to get us to Aegina, so I pulled the tiller over, let out the mainsail until it blossomed with wind, then cleated the sheet home. Tim adjusted the jib and the staysail until they were smooth like a well-ironed sheet and full of the breeze, and the little boat bounded away across the blue sparkling water, shattering the wavelets into trails of pale foam. Oh lord, were there words to convey the simple joy of feeling the pull of the tiller on a sailing boat scudding across the bright blue sea in the sunshine? I laughed and I laughed and my eyes filled with tears, partly from the breeze and the salt-laden spray, but partly, if the truth be told, from sheer ecstasy.

Little by little the port suburbs of Athens dropped away astern, the sea became deeper and bluer … and then the wind dropped. The cat’s-paw wavelets on the surface disappeared and the sea turned glassy. The Crabber stopped her headlong motion.

You always think of the Ancient Mariner at times like these, dragging around the carcass of the albatross, decrying the terrible stillness and silence of the sea. But in reality it’s not silent at all. With the gentle rocking of the boat and not a breath to keep the tension, the heavy boom swung inboard and then out with a crash that made the whole boat shudder. It did this about every twenty seconds and within ten minutes our nerves were utterly frazzled.

“Isn’t there anything we can do to stop that horrible crashing?” asked Tim.

“Well, as a matter of fact there is, but it would impede our progress.”

“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.