I had never intended to buy a boat really. It was Bob’s idea.
My father had owned a sequence of wooden boats. I had been brought up to disdain ‘plastic boats’ as ‘floating caravans’, to pity their owners and their unseaworthy, condensation-trapping ‘bath tubs’. There were many different divisions of weekend sailor. My father was of the tarry, romantic regiment. He would discard his Marks and Spencer’s suit, drag on a filthy pullover and a tattered oil skin, top it off with a jaunty navy blue yachting cap and look every inch the fat doctor playing at sailors.
It was routine when sailing with him to discriminate against lesser yachtsmen and important to admire real boats. Almost any rotting hulk elicited favourable approval, as long as it was wooden and hung with smelly ropes. When he bought Windsong, built in 1929 for duck shooting – ‘It had racks for the guns down the main saloon, you know’ – we got used to strangers standing at the quayside and offering compliments. It was a terrible boat. My brother despised it (‘It sails like a cow’). But it looked beautiful.
What was this man doing with this boat? It frightened him almost as much as Undina was beginning to frighten me. Part of my adult recklessness was the result of standing watching my father fretting and panicking over his impossible yacht. Now Bob was taking my place as the juvenile delinquent – ‘Oh, it’s fine. Don’t worry. We’ll get in there. Put your foot down’ – and I, for my part, was becoming over-cautious. But my father had bought his boat as his substitute garden shed. A wooden boat is hard work. He revelled in it.
He had done woodwork at school (something I managed to avoid), and all his adult life he carpentered. He made lockers, shelves, racks for mugs, ingenious holders for pots, all of which got put into the boat. He bought elaborate pieces of equipment. (One year he bought my mother a paraffin stove for her birthday.) And he loved fitting them. Drilling the holes, gently blowing the sawdust, sanding down and running his thumb along the grain.
Gradually, Windsong sank lower and lower in the water, as he bolted, screwed and glued an ever-increasing number of fitments to her insides and added more shackles, pins and screws to his collection of spares.
He would disappear into a chandlery and stand, for what felt like hours to us, transfixed by a peg board hung with galvanized eyes, in a trance before a selection of brass hooks, or seemingly hypnotized by a box of rope offcuts. And we had to wait. Sometimes, on a damp Saturday in May, he would row himself aboard his boat, with me, aged ten, in tow and just sit there. Or so it seemed. Sometimes he would open the engine and kneel in front of it, unscrewing massive nuts, or disassembling pistons, and he would require his children to kneel there with him, like the Arnolfini family, only instead of our hands conjoined in prayer we would be holding spanners or wire, or strange cigarette things, which needed to be lit and inserted into the belly of the engine to get it going on cold days.
Like a surgeon, like, I suppose, the hospital consultant that he was, he needed to have his tools to hand, somebody else’s hand preferably, ready to be passed to him at a moment’s notice at the critical stage of the operation. Of course, it was always critical. Nothing if not a self-dramatist, he pursued every aspect of his sailing adventures in an atmosphere of tension and recrimination.
And the waste of time! The boat had to come out of the water at the end of the season. This was when his contempt for the namby-pamby, fibre-glass sailor was flourished with real vigour. After all, they had merely to wipe down their bilges with a sponge and forget about her. Forget about Windsong? (Or Dunlin or Xara before her?) Impossible. The real work was just beginning.
Was it every weekend we went down to that freezing West Mersea boat park? Was the entire winter spent in that grim, gravelled patch by the saltings, where boats were propped up on legs and trussed in tarpaulins for the winter? It certainly felt like it then, when time was so precious, and we wanted so desperately to waste it. Instead, the barnacles had to come off the bottom. We had to lie on our backs on a bit of tarpaulin. I can still feel the cold seeping through from the stones beneath my back. With a flat-bladed scraper, we pushed at a crust of tiny conical shells, which crumbled away and spattered down on to our faces. We felt the slight stinging, and feared to breathe in the flakes of the ghastly anti-fouling concoction that had been slapped over the hull and would have to be slapped over the hull again, before we were finished and she could go back in the water. At least all that scraping was vaguely satisfying. Like picking at a scab. On a good day, the skin of dead molluscs would fall away in satisfying strips; on a bad day, we were sand-papering. Black sheets of ‘wet and dry’ were soaked in buckets of freezing water and rubbed ceaselessly against the acres of pale grey hull until it ‘keyed’, by going a slightly frothy white, and then back in the bucket to soak off the gunk and more rubbing, rubbing, rubbing.
A wooden boat needs constant maintenance. The manuals recommend that varnish is done twice in a season. That is, rubbed down and several coats applied, not only over winter, but also in the middle of July. I can’t recall that we ever did that, but we certainly painted, polished and scrubbed all year long, and for what? For some daft romantic pride.
After the Baltic journey was over, I hosted a party for the members of the Classic Yacht Club.
There were two key men from the exciting world of modern boats present. One was an expert in epoxy resin, the other had made his fortune in carbon fibre. His latest project was trying to produce a carbon fibre that showed its stresses, just like wood. Both men, however, owned and sailed classic wooden boats. ‘It was love,’ said one. ‘I just fell in love with her,’ the other echoed. ‘Oh, she is so beautiful and the curve of her…’ Everywhere, these men and women were fervently whispering their intimacies, sharing their affairs, their sweethearts. ‘I’ve chartered. You need the convenience, but ownership, well, that’s a different matter…’
After supper, Rosemary from the Little Classic Boat Museum on the Isle of Wight showed them old black-and-white footage of J class boats being launched in the 1930s. Like a Lone Ranger film on a stuttering super-8 projector at a boyhood birthday, the party was stilled, apart from appreciative oohs and aahs.
I suppose I loved my father’s boat, and feebly tried to stop him from selling her fifteen years ago.
‘Are you going to come with me and sail her?’
‘No.’
‘Are you going to maintain her?’
‘No.’
‘Well it’s pointless keeping her.’ And she was sold. He was ill. He died and his ashes were scattered in the mud in the upper reaches of the Deben. My mother had made no complaint about the sale. Both of them were old. She no longer wanted to be wet and dirty, perhaps she never did. But, oddly, she keeps tabs on Windsong.
‘She’s in Lowestoft now. And they’ve spent a lot of money on her, restored her original rig. I don’t like the colour they’ve painted her, though.’
So someone else was in the grip of a hopeless infatuation, wasting money on keeping the old tub afloat.
I still wanted to sail as I grew older. Despite the pain, it was bred into me. No other form of occupation really constituted a holiday. When I had money, I chartered. I became an advocate of the rented boat.
‘It’s the only way to do it,’ I told anybody who would listen, and many who weren’t listening at all. ‘For the money that my father spent just mooring his boat I can have two weeks in the Caribbean on a bigger, faster, more comfortable fibre-glass yacht! I can take friends, sail in warm water, catch fierce fish and then walk away.’
On one holiday the engine failed in the Tobago Keys. We sat for an afternoon, while the skipper (‘You rent them for the week. Costs almost nothing and they have to do all the work’) contacted the base on the radio and a spare part was ferried out. We didn’t sit, in fact. We snorkeled in a natural aquarium on the reef. When the engine had been fixed and we were ready to go, the skipper took me aside. ‘Thank you,’ he said earnestly.
‘Thank you for staying. So many would have left.’
‘No!’ I was shocked. It had never occurred to me that we could.
‘Americans would have just insisted on another boat and a sea plane to get them to it.’
‘Really?’ I made a mental note that next time…
Bob had become a fixture on these sprees. What a perfect companion he was. He was one of life’s layabouts and always available. I would sometimes ring other, more employed, busy men of the world. ‘It’s a last-minute thing,’ I would tell them. It nearly always was. ‘I’ve got this boat in Turkey for a couple of weeks and we’re just going to drift down to Marmaris.’
‘What a lovely idea,’ they would say. ‘Can I come back to you?’ But I knew they were really thinking: ‘God! He means next week.’
But Bob was a constant. He was the only true committed hedonist I knew. And when we first went, he was like a cockney child taken to the country to see cows for the first time. Bob was a wide-eyed, baptism-seeking convert to the sailing life.
We must have been in the Aegean. Crossing an azure sea one late afternoon from some smudgy violet rock to another, I remember glancing at Bob, who was sitting holding on to the wheel. He had an odd look in his eye. He was gazing around him appreciatively. He had a fag on. He was wearing something comfortable and colourful. The sun was shining. He was eating a Greek sweetie. He smiled and nodded to himself. And then he cackled. Some people get it. Others never do.
Paul, by contrast, was a busy man. When he came with us, he sat in mute admiration as we busied ourselves for leaving the port. ‘Look at you. Gosh. I never knew you had all these skills. It’s like watching a different person. Ha, ha.’ He was full of intelligent and searching questions as we negotiated the harbour exit and raised our sails. And then, when the course was set and we settled back to sail our distance, he sat with a fixed smile of anticipation. ‘What now?’ he asked.
‘Well, we just sail,’ I explained.
‘Mmm.’ He smiled brightly. After a while, he started drumming his fingers. ‘What time do we get in, then?’
‘Oh, I don’t know… about four hours.’
‘Right.’ He shifted on the hard bench. The smile hardened. ‘Can I do anything?’
‘No, no. You’re fine.’
‘Right.’ And he nodded.
Paul is the sort of person who sits aboard a sailing boat and watches a motor launch roar past with a quiver of barely suppressed envy.
‘Oh, that looks like fun.’
‘That isn’t a lovely boat. That’s a ghastly, vulgar piece of shit, Paul.’ Vainly, I told Paul that sitting on that boat is like sitting on a washing machine after it’s been thrown down a hill, that the noise and the bumping are moronic, that inside it has all the taste and dignity of a footballer’s bathroom. His eyes remained fixed on it until it thrashed over the horizon. And he imagined it tied up outside some bar while we were still wallowing along at walking pace.
‘Would it be a good idea to put the engine on, perhaps?’ he offered, finally.
Of course, he never came again. He was probably sea-sick at some point. He probably injured himself and had difficulty sleeping, but that wasn’t the real reason. He just didn’t see the point.
Bob, however, embraced the delusion of sailing straight away. He found little difficulty in adapting to a life of doing nothing at all while appearing to progress to something or somewhere.
I was shocked when I discovered he was secretly going on sailing courses. He signed on to become a ‘competent crew’ with a company in the Solent and went for a long weekend on a 30-foot sailing boat.
‘The instructor was a bit of a Nigel,’ Bob thought. ‘No sense of humour. Heh, heh.’ He’d put a stuffed cat on Nigel’s bed, and for a satisfying moment Nigel had thought it was real and lost his rag, but Bob wasn’t sure that Nigel really appreciated his easy-going approach. ‘At one point he said that he wasn’t going to be able to give me the certificate. I don’t know what all that was about.’
Nonetheless, officially, Bob became a competent crew. Then he went to evening classes in Fulham. This was in preparation for his ‘day skipper’ certificate. ‘To be quite honest,’ Bob told me, ‘the instructor was a bit of a granny.’
‘In what way?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I don’t know. I made some joke and he wasn’t up for it, but we got along quite well in the end.’ Bob’s renowned ability to smooch anybody meant that he sailed through the course on good terms with his teacher, who ‘took it all a bit seriously’.
Bob came out the other end of the winter with a dedication to sextants and the science of positioning from the sun, a sketchy but committed knowledge of the movement of tropical storms, an urge to do his own weather forecasting and an irritating emphasis on safety procedures and compass swinging. He still couldn’t untie a rope from a cleat in less than three minutes, had no firm grasp of the principles of sailing and couldn’t tell the difference between a sheet and a halyard, but give him half an hour and the right book and he could tell you what the lights on an approaching vessel might mean.
He didn’t actually have his certificate as yet. That was only awarded when the theoretical knowledge, which Bob was swiftly forgetting, was matched by his actual experience. So the journey we were to undertake was now an important part of the whole scheme. Quite where the whole scheme was heading remained a mystery. But he needed to get several thousand miles under his belt.
Of course, I was merely envious. I was irritated as well, but more because my incompetent crew had become an incompetent crew who now, apparently, knew a lot more about sailing than I did.
‘Now, Griff, just before we actually leave the dock,’ he suddenly announced, as I was trying to manoeuvre the boat out of Ipswich wet dock to take her on the Orwell for the first time, ‘I must just ask you: what is your man-overboard procedure?’
‘My what?’
‘Your rescue procedures in the event of a member of your crew falling overboard.’
‘Falling or being pushed?’
‘Whatever.’
‘Well, Bob,’ I replied, ‘at sea, my preferred method is to mark the GPS, set a man on deck to point out the missing person, throw a dan-buoy overboard, followed by other detritus to mark our way back to them, turn around, take down any sails and approach them from the windward side. But in this river I would probably shout at them to stand up and walk to the bank.’
Bob considered this. ‘Hmmm,’ he said. ‘Well, I suppose that’s one way of doing it.’
I was lazy too. I knew at some point I would have to overcome my indomitable pomposity and try to swallow my annoyance at the whole system’s emphasis on arcane knowledge over practical skills. I would have to get a certificate myself.
Secretly, I thought it was quite handy that Bob had various bits of paper. It was always my intention, should we get stopped by any authority whatsoever on the way to St Petersburg, simply to indicate Bob and tell them that he was the skipper. Bob would produce his documents and we would go on our way. It was especially useful that he had got his radio operator’s licence.
In the event, we never got stopped by anyone. The boat looked too serious.