Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat (8 page)

“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 shuttle, 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.”

“I don’t think that would be a very good idea. Just hang on in there and I’LL SEE IF I CAN REMEMBER HOW TO DO THIS.” I had to shout the last few words because we were already quite a way apart.

Now, what you are supposed to do is the following: you harden your sheets and work upwind of your man, tack, then go downwind of your man, then harden up, and just as you come up to windward of your man you let fly your sheets and come, all being well, to a stop with your man just beneath your lee bow.

I muttered the formula uneasily to myself as I pushed the tiller over, and, keeping an eye on the head bobbing about among the distant waves, cleated in the sheets as we came close to the wind. I ducked as the boom flew across, and, sheeting in the headsails on the other side, I lost sight momentarily of my man.

“Now where’s that man? … TI-I-I-M,” I cried.

“OVER HERE,” he yelled. I saw him splashing.

“OK, here we come.”

The last bit was to head a little downwind of him, then come back up on the wind … at least I was heading toward him now. Things were looking up. Finally there he was, dead on the bow—metaphorically speaking. I turned
upwind some more so that he slipped along the lee side, and then I let the sheets fly.

“There,” I said. “How about that, then? Piece of cake.”

There wasn’t very much wind now, so the operation was not too difficult, but even so it was amazing how quickly we had moved apart. Tim hauled himself with impressive agility back into the boat.

“Right,” I said. “Your go now. Let’s see how you make out.”

“Oh, I’m not so sure,” he demurred. “I don’t think I’m ready for this yet …”

“Nonsense, man. You’ll have no trouble at all.”

And I explained to him clearly and succinctly the moves of the drill.

“So now imagine you’re sailing along just like this,” I said, handing Tim the tiller, “and all of a sudden your man falls overboard … thus …” Saying which I dived off the back as deep as I could go. I swam down and down, then twisted to come up again. I saw the tiny distant light of the sun, eclipsed by the bluest blueness that the mind could imagine. So much beauty…. Then I shot out into a burst of sunlit spray. I spluttered and caught my breath.

Where was the Crabber? I looked all around. Christ, it was halfway to Spetses! I could see Tim buggering about ineffectually with the tiller and the sheets.

“WHAT THE HELL WAS I SUPPOSED TO DO NEXT?” he shouted.

“HARDEN YOUR SHEETS AND TURN INTO WIND.”

He flapped about a bit and then headed off upwind.

Perhaps at this point I should say that we were lunatics enough to do this without wearing life jackets.

“OK. NOW WHAT?”

“NOW TACK, TURN RIGHT, SLACKEN OFF YOUR SHEETS AND HEAD OFF OVER THERE UNTIL I SAY SO.”

The Crabber came through the wind and rocketed off downwind of me. I was treading water and trying hard not to think of all the horrible denizens of the deep with intentions inimical to my well-being.

“RIGHT, NOW TURN LEFT, SHEET IN YOUR SAILS AND HEAD FOR TRIKIRI. ON THE WAY YOU OUGHT TO PASS ME.”

He did, indeed, pass me, and then rounded up elegantly to fish me out of the water … and thus I live to tell the tale. After all, Tim was, as I have already said, a natural sailor.

BY THE TIME WE
had finished fooling around in the water, the wind had dropped to the merest breath, but the island was barely a couple of miles off now. We could see the little lighthouse on the rocks at the mouth of the harbor.

“You know there’ll be a party on the dock to welcome our arrival, don’t you?” said Tim.

“I doubt it. Nobody knows exactly when we’re going to arrive … least of all us,” I added glumly as I looked up at the sagging sails.

“Oh, they’ll know all right; someone will have spotted us as soon as we sailed out from behind Hydra.”

“It seems a little unlikely,” I protested.

“Not a bit,” countered Tim. “We’re the only boat around
here with red sails—you can see us coming a mile off—and Jane and her friends spend half their day sitting on their terraces, drinking gin and watching the sea. Not to mention the fact that it’s the Bouboulina festival.”

“And just what exactly is Bouboulina?”

“Bouboulina,” explained Tim, “was a Spetsiot admiral during the War of Independence—a female admiral, to be exact. And, among her many exploits, she put to rout the Ottoman navy in Spetses Harbor—which is what the whole shindig commemorates.”

“How did she set about that?” I asked, getting interested now.

“Fireships,” said Tim. “She set fire to a number of her ships and sailed them into the midst of the tightly packed Ottoman fleet. Burned the lot to a frazzle.” He looked at me meaningfully to see if the full impact of Bouboulina’s deeds was getting through. “So you can take it from me, most of the island will be down at the port, with the priests and dignitaries doing their stuff … so we’d better not cock up our arrival, had we?”

“Oh, I think we’ve got pretty competent now,” I said, giving a little more slack to the staysail. “But we could be hours yet if this wind doesn’t pick up. I wonder if we ought to give the engine another try.”