Dawn at sea can be a profoundly uninspiring event. It may come up like thunder on the road to Mandalay, but off Margate it arrived like a slow Polaroid.
‘I can see the front of the boat,’ I told Bob.
‘I can’t. I can’t see anything without my glasses.’
‘But it’s definitely getting light.’
And five, ten minutes later, it was still definitely getting light, without a point where you could say that it actually was light. Turning from looking ahead, I realized that I could clearly see the North Downs to one side. The lights from buoys, ships and zealous town councils were overwhelmed. But by what? By the most generalized, grey, wishy-washy half-illumination possible. Clearly, no one had switched them off, but just as clearly, they were gone. It became a typical, cloudy, wet June morning. But some miles ahead, a dull red sliver hovered on the horizon and then seemed to heave itself bodily upwards: a perfect orange ball.
‘It’s the sun,’ I said to Bob. And for a few moments, we both stared at it. Through the mist and the cold it seemed a powerless pallid blob, quite unrelated to the same sun that regularly drops out of sight with a loud red shout. Above it, though, there was a wash of pink in the sky, and behind that, the first tinge of blue. Within half an hour, our first morning at sea had turned into a gorgeous, sunny, cloudless, advert-skied day. Undina ploughed eastwards through a balmy sea, and a fresh south-easterly breeze.
It was all a pleasant surprise, with no reason why it should have been any sort of surprise at all. The good weather had been forecast. It had been forecast from about six different sources. The television had emphatically told us this, but shortly after we had set off, refusing to trust to sun lounger concerns, we had gathered around Rick’s impressive short-wave radio to listen to the late-night shipping forecast.
We were in ‘Thames’, just above ‘Dover’, below ‘Humber’ and some way to the west of ‘German Bight’. At this time of year, the differences in temperature between the Arctic regions, the big continental land masses and the hot, hot seas (warmed up all the time by the sun sliding upwards on the gradually tipping globe) meant that big areas of low pressure, dollops of swirling cold air and clouds, are dislodged from the far north and sent wobbling south. Most weather forecasting is based on predicting their movements. Most horrible summer weather in England is based on their arrival over the furthest outlying bits of the land: us.
We knew that there were several of these monsters swirling up the Atlantic from the Azores, but we appeared to have wandered into a gap in the dance floor. Weather systems were pirouetting away and round to the south, but currently dodging us. Of course, they had a habit of blundering out of the formation, so we sat, heads bowed, with the solemn attention of the Maquis listening to SOE radio messages telling them that the ‘hat is green with gold feathers’, while Rick cradled his radio in his arms and wrote down every single area forecast, hoping to extract some pattern of his own.
I sympathized with Rick and Bob’s urge to second-guess the weather forecast. After all, the professionals were fallible. In Honolulu recently it was calculated that they were only correct 83 per cent of the time. This sounds good, but Honolulu is invariably sunny. If they had just said, ‘It will be sunny tomorrow,’ they would have been correct 85 per cent of the time. But since we were still within 50 miles of the meteorologists’ head office, where ranks of paid experts were sweating over their isobars, I thought we could accept their generally favourable assessments for the time being.
Bob went below and started to balance frying pans on the stove. It is one of his character traits that he likes to surround himself with his own shit. I sat at the helm, my face gradually turning into a Japanese Kabuki mask of horror, as he settled himself into a corner of the boat and began to colonize it. First, he emptied his pockets. Lighters, cigarettes, a plastic toy or two, one sailing glove, several unpaid parking tickets, three or four stolen pats of butter from a hotel, two or three napkins, scraps of torn-up cardboard with phone numbers and a large quantity of sweets.
Humming now, and lighting a cigarette, he warmed to the task of getting his ingredients sorted. There were sausages as well as bacon and, despite the kitchen equipment to hand, Bob preferred to use the boat’s cutting-down-the-rigging-and-severing-knots knife. It was in a sort of square wooden bucket built into the side of the cabin and to reach it Bob needed first to remove the torch and the binoculars and several clothes pegs. Needing potatoes, he opened the impressive chest fridge and took out most of the contents which he laid on the floor. Putting the sandwiches to one side, on top of the engine casing, and helping himself to a can of Coke, which he placed at his elbow, on a pillow, he focused for a while on the possibilities now presented. He had bacon and eggs and tomatoes already. Now he had potatoes. Noticing sausages, he added them to the morning fry-up menu. He also added cucumbers, bits of ham, some old cheese and the contents of a small jar of capers. The wet plastic from the bacon was pushed to one side, scrunched up a bit and used as an ashtray while Bob pricked sausages and reached across to light a second cigarette with his other hand, commandeering a spare cup to use as a secondary ashtray. He moved across to the stove and the sink area, took the torches, binoculars and more clothes pegs he had deposited there, and corralled them into little piles. Nothing was stowed, stored or lockered. Nothing was ever thrown away. Everything that Bob touched had to remain visible and handy. Old cigarette butts, pulled corks, packaging, pencils, unused food, used food. Something inside him preferred his immediate environment to bear his mark. His territory was defined, like some wild bear, by the limits and extent of his detritus. His urban sprawl disfigured my mahogany uplands and pristine virgin bedding. It demanded use of my green belt and spilled over into my rural areas. And it was all done with a steady, remorseless and deliberate energy. Within minutes the interior of the cabin looked like his own extraordinary home.
I have since had time to reflect on my intensely anal reaction to this behaviour. I was vain about my boat. I was a control freak. I needed order to make up for my own mental deficiency. I wanted to control the space myself. I was over-potty-trained as a child. But who cares? I didn’t want to set off to sea in some fourteen-year-old’s bedroom.
The ‘main saloon’ is a grotesque term to describe our shared accommodation. Those of you who think, ‘Oh yes, yachting! You rich, boaty bastards!’ have no idea of the privations we endured. When we went down the ladder in Undina we stepped over the engine casing to find ourselves wedged into a small upper area about 3 feet square. We could turn to our left, and, with difficulty (because the sides curved up to disastrously tilt the floor), fold and double back our legs, push them under a sloping desk and face the navigation instruments bolted on to a bulkhead. But beyond this bulkhead, all space immediately in front of us was occupied by the (admittedly magnificent) stove and sink arrangement. Another step brought us to the galley floor area, which was equally restricted. Turn and we banged into the table. This had two flaps, easily raised to eat, but there wasn’t enough space to continue forward in the boat unless these flaps were lowered. Even when lowered, we could only get over to sit on the narrow bench on the left-hand side of the boat by crouching into a sitting position and progressing flat-footed, and shaped like a question mark until our arses made contact with the upholstery. There were two berths, on either side of the boat, above these benches, at shoulder height. The deck came down to within a foot of their mattresses, and getting into them at all required a limbo-dancer’s dexterity.
The whole saloon most resembled a third-class sleeping compartment in a pre-war railway carriage, with about a third of the space. Two people could not pass each other in any part of the interior. The shape of the boat dictated that the floor, or cabin sole, was defined by the curvature of the bottom. Under the water it quickly descended into a sharp edge, leaving a few planks’ width to walk on. And this surface was broken by large and frankly reassuring baulks of wood which, standing proud, indicated where the keel began and the walkway ended. They were topped by bronze nuts of a size and disposition so precise that you were guaranteed to stub your toe on them.
A wooden boat is constructed like a cage, on to which an outer skin of planks is attached. The cage is made of frames and stringers, jointed, tied and bolted together to control movement, but the cage, naturally enough, takes up a good deal of the available space. To create the object of great outward beauty that Undina was, the ingenuity of the designer had been brought to bear, giving her extensive overhangs at the front and back. She looked like a Raoul Dufy boat, sweeping, bowed, womanly: a sleek bracket, lying low in the water for extra elegance, and, like Jane Russell’s brassiere, a miracle of cantilevered shapeliness. Visitors were often surprised to find that the first 12 feet of the boat were nothing but curve. We could lift up a large bronze manhole and look down into a superbly constructed piece of furniture with a propeller shaft running across it.
So, you see my point. We had set to sea in a poky hut. I had been brought up on small boats. My father ordered me to put things away. He told me how I was expected to live. He instructed me on the dangers of leaving rubbish all around and losing vital pieces of equipment. He taught me to be ‘tiddly’. But he was Daddy and I was six.
‘Bob…’
‘Mmm?’
Bob looked up from his intense labours with a glazed look in his eye. I was leaning in from the wheel, sailing the boat and shouting in a stage whisper so as not to wake the others.
‘I just wondered… we’re going to have to be a bit more tidy, I think.’
‘What?’ Bob looked around him, avoiding my gaze. ‘I’m just making breakfast!’
‘Good, good. It’s just, you know, we seem to have an awful lot of stuff out everywhere.’
Bob looked around again. ‘Yes. Well I’ll just sort that out a bit. Hold on.’
He pushed some of the potatoes away from him, moved the cans of beans on to the side of the sink, reached out, wrapped his gloves and the bacon wrapper up in a jumper and tried to stuff it into a bag. The bag was full, however, so he took out the clothes, the alarm clock and the wash-bag that were in it and stood, for a moment, cradling the whole lot in his arms. He pushed some of it behind the stove, on top of the sauce bottles and sugar containers, and put the rest on the bunk opposite. Then he turned and carefully arranged half the torn-up cardboard, his bills and his sweets into a pile on one side of the table and the other into a pile on the other side. He surveyed what he had done, took the empty bag and crammed it on top of the wooden bucket. He seemed satisfied and returned to his work.
At first I assumed he would learn. We would all learn. It was a learning experience. Less than an hour later, with the sails up, the breeze was to freshen, the boat would heel into it and there would come a sequence of sliding, clattering and crashing sounds from below.
‘Fucking hell!… oh fuck… shit!’
‘Yeah, sorry. Sorry,’ I shouted. ‘The wind’s come up.’ As the water under Undina gurgled and splashed, there followed a sound like an upended tea tray.
‘Bloody fucking hell.’
I stood up and peered below. Bob was holding on to the stove and glaring up at me. I felt an urge to explain, to teach and to instruct.
‘You see, Bob, we’re bound to hit weather if we’re sailing. You’ve got to keep things tidied away.’
It was clear enough to me: obvious to me. But it became one of the trip’s abiding and profound mysteries, something so deep that it began, even in these early hours, to gnaw like a canker at my soul.
No matter how far we travelled, and our log showed a distance covered, in the end, of over 3,000 miles; no matter how long we journeyed together, and four months were to pass before we left Undina in her winter berth; no matter how many winds were to blow, and we experienced storms, squalls and even gales, every time the gentle forces of nature drove us onwards through the cold northern seas and the boat gently heeled to the breeze, I would hear from below the sound of smashing, breaking, toppling and shattering and the plaintive cry, ‘Shit, fuck… bloody hell… damn! Oh no! Fuck!’
Did it matter? Really, no. Surely I could take the consolation of knowing that it was Bob’s own stuff that went flying and disappeared through cracks into the swill of the bilges. It was only a plastic wine glass that he had left balanced on the central table from the night before. It was merely that framed sepia-tinted photograph of an old Estonian farm worker’s granny that he had perched on the top of the life jacket locker that had now gone whistling across the cabin and clattered into the engine. But for me, alas, it was something deeper, and a symptom of the terrible truth that was to gradually dawn on me, as we crept further up the Scandinavian latitudes. If Bob was the fourteen-year-old, then I was the Daddy. Over the next thousand miles, as inexorably as the ageing process, as silently as creeping frost, as remorselessly as my new beard sprouting in forks on my chin, I was metamorphosing into my father, the irascible, anti-social Welsh doctor who was always right and permanently in a bad mood because of it.
For the present it was sunny. It was even warm. The morning was blissful and full of hope. Bob pottered in the galley like a stage magician and leaned across to wake Baines in the under-deck berth by singing to him: ‘Oh, a cunty piece of bacon in a cunty bacon roll. Mmm.’
There was a breeze now, nothing too strong, and the sea was gently patterned with wavelets. In a spirit of consensus, I offered up a plan, as Bob served breakfast.
‘Let’s forget crossing to Belgium,’ I started. ‘This weather looks like it will stay with us for a while. The storm system is passing south beneath us. We could head much further up, cross right across the sea towards Den Helder, and if things change, slip in above Amsterdam into northern Holland.’
Bob looked a little worried. ‘Oh.’ He glanced at Baines. Baines seemed unsure of the consequences of this anyway and only raised his eyebrows. ‘We’d go in the Nordzee Canal,’ said Bob.
‘I was thinking we’d go a bit further north.’
‘But we’ll get to Amsterdam?’ Rick asked.
The other three were all now looking at me. They had the earnest, expressions of fourteen-year-olds threatened with by-passing Alton Towers.
‘Oh, yes, yes,’ said Bob, casually. He was very quick to reassure the others. I sensed some earlier pact.
‘Well, not necessarily,’ I said. ‘We are under quite a lot of pressure to get on.’ In fact with the delays and the hold-ups, it seemed to me that, even travelling the whole way at top speed, we could barely guarantee getting to the regatta on time.
Bob stopped serving up his black pudding.
‘Yes. But we would just go there for a day. We can arrive tonight. Leave tomorrow afternoon.’
‘Well that would be…’ I trailed off. I could guess what was going on. Bob had offered up the lure of Amsterdam to the impressed men. And Bob, as usual, had no clear idea of the nature of time. He never really seemed to grasp that time passed and if you had to meet someone at, say, six o’clock then half past eleven was a different sort of time altogether.
‘Look. Nothing is set in stone,’ I lied as straightforwardly as possible. ‘I’m sure we’ll be able to fit it in. Visit some brown cafés, a couple of live sex shows and a quick bit of window shopping on the Reepersbahn, as long as we’re quick. But how about if we press on for the time being and then take stock, eh?’
Baines and Rick nodded quickly. Bob thought for a moment. And then nodded himself. This outright fabrication seemed to meet with approval. We would head north.
Rick, for his part, was worried about the shipping lanes. So we examined the chart.
The North Sea is one of the busiest shipping routes in the world. Millions of tonnes of extremely large and powerful ships converge and pass both ways through the Channel. Crossing it in a small boat, you are the hedgehog and they are the juggernauts. Stories are told of freighters arriving in port where, to their crew’s astonishment, bits of small boat rigging are found hanging off their anchors at the bow, dread evidence of an unnoticed collision. Like a motorway, though, the sea has been marked off into lanes. Ships head south on the English side and north on the continental side. Ferries, of course, make their own way, crashing straight across.
Small boats are required, by law, to cross these lanes at a right angle and not to wander about in the road like old ladies on scooters. If we sailed directly to our new destination we would make a long and obtuse angle across several different lanes and a couple of gyratory systems. Obviously, we should sensibly keep well clear of that.
We decided on a route that would take us up the east coast of England, almost as far as Yarmouth, way out of sight of land, but edging the downward shipping lane. We had to get north of what appeared to be a ships’ roundabout, where the shipping from Scotland met the shipping from the Baltic and joined a major trunk shipping lane heading south. Once there, just by the Wash buoy, we would turn right, cross one lane, then a few hours later cross another and then head straight into the Dutch oilfields. Robert and I felt perfectly confident. When we drew up our courses on the chart, a matter of taking a perspex ruler and marking two straight pencil lines, the second part corresponded exactly to the route we had taken the year before.
At five o’clock in the morning we motored up to the Knock buoy, a hollow metal can some 12 feet high, plonked in a waste of open water, lonely and alien and hardly human in its geometric certainty. Buoys are just markers. On the chart they figure hugely, their shape outlined in detail, their name emblazoned across the depth contours, but in reality they arrive with minuscule impact, a black pin prick on the horizon, an insignificant, wavering black shape, until you come closer and realize that they are as big as you are, just about as big as you must seem to others in this empty place.
We set a new course of 30 degrees, and I stepped up with Baines and Rick on to the cabin roof to fight the stiff cloth of our new mainsail, the big triangular sail, up to the top of the mast.
‘Bring her round now,’ I shouted to Bob.
‘What do you mean?’ he shouted back.
‘Bring her on to the course!’
‘Oh. OK.’ He stared down at the compass.
‘Let out the mainsheet. The big rope to the side of you. Never mind the course for a moment. The one attached to the end of the boom. That’s it. That one. You see, it’s attached to a cleat, by the side of you. It’s tied up. Yes. Untie it. Yes, completely. Let the wind fill the sail. I’ll come and do it.’
We let the mainsail out and the wind ballooned out the sail.
‘Are we doing thirty degrees, Bob?’
‘More or less.’
I pulled back on the rope until the cloth stopped flapping and the pressure of the wind started to translate through the system and down to the boat herself.
‘We need to let off the topping lift,’ I shouted up at Baines. ‘It’s the grey rope, running down the mast, attached to that little tackle with the cleat there. Just slacken it off. Let it go. Let it be slack and then reattach it to the cleat. It’s just the rope that holds the boom off the cockpit when there’s no sail up.’
And the back end of the boom dropped a few inches, tightening the creases out of the sail, making a smooth wing of cloth.
The jib, or foresail, a massive triangle of synthetic white canvas, was furled by a winding mechanism around its own wire support right at the front of the boat.
‘Rick, just let that go…’
As the wind got into it with a crack, the cloth billowed out and it pulled the rest of its own mass free, flogging, like a flag, in the wind. We tightened the back end to make ‘a wing’ of this sail too. And as the wind hit the flattened planes, the boat, quite naturally, leaned over. There was a crashing and tinkling sound from below.
‘Fuck, shit! Damn!’ said Bob.
I reached beyond Bob and, pulling back the lever of the engine, put the motor into neutral.
‘Rick, you can stop the engine.’
He turned the key. The engine died. There was a rumbling beneath our feet. I put the engine briefly into reverse. Somewhere beneath our rudder, at the back of our hull, the propeller cunningly folded itself up, and what appeared to be utter silence suddenly descended on the morning.
It wasn’t completely quiet, of course. After a while the surge of the sea along the sides of the boat became audible. The rigging and wooden bits of the boat creaked, as they really do. There was a slight drubbing, a powerful vibration from the sails above our heads which translated itself through the whole structure like the pulsing of a living thing, but to begin with, most of all, it’s the quiet that you notice. The brain is suddenly released from a noise it has grown so used to that it no longer registers it, but when it stops, the freedom is like stepping out of a printing house, or switching off the mower or smashing the television. It is like stopping holding your breath. It is a religious moment.
‘Ahh,’ said Baines.
‘Now we’re sailing,’ I added inanely, just as my father might have done.