A gentleman’s lodging... Poros in winter... how to snare a sailor… Société très Anonyme... Spiros impartially considered... anatomy of a flotilla... Dramatis Personae... Dramatis Naviae... the Armada assembles... scratch appointments... taking it advisedly.
On leaving the ship I decided to base… and debase… myself in Poros, a brilliantly white, terracotta-roofed town. It lay on the lovely, pine-wooded island of the same name, positioned hard against the Peloponnesian shore of the Saronic Gulf, and possessed almost everything a young, single adventurer with a nautical bent and a tendency to worship his belly could desire… a beautiful natural harbour, beaches, excellent restaurants and bars, nightlife, and a plentiful supply of lady visitors.
Poros was really two islands; the large, forested island of Kalavria, which had resort developments around the beaches on its south side, and the much smaller, boot-shaped Sphaeria, where the town of Poros was situated. They sat so close to the coast of the Peloponnese that they formed a large, almost totally enclosed bay which provided excellent shelter. The town lay at the closest point to the mainland… indeed, the word ‘Poros’ actually means a ford or crossing-point… and was bordered on three sides by an enormously long quay with good depths of water alongside. The various crenulations of the two islands offered a number of other delightful anchorages besides, and all this was situated an easy day’s sail from Athens in a strategic position at the junction of the Saronic and Argolic gulfs. The happy combination of location, characteristics and charm made it an ideal hub for cruising the islands.
Poros was not only a yachtsman’s haunt but also a thriving tourist destination. The charming warren of lanes between the close-packed traditional houses were richly endowed with splendid eateries offering tasty grills, the best fish the Mediterranean could offer, and every variety of traditional Greek cookery. There were beaches, night-spots and water sports centres. Over the narrow channel on the Peloponnesian shore lay the more agrarian and rather less picturesque mainland town of Galatas, and between there and Navplion were many sunny slopes covered with vineyards, which maintained a copious supply of fresh, young wine. In addition to these perfections, at the time I arrived, Greece as a whole was ridiculously cheap for a Northern European and also attracted a startlingly high proportion of female tourists.
Nothing could have been better suited for my purposes. Poros was a hive of maritime activity and a place from which I could easily keep a keen ear to the ground for opportunities to do some sailing. It was a vibrant and beautiful place to live, and well connected... a very easy commute to Piraeus, from where I could catch ferries, visit Athens or get to the airport if required, and, lying just a five-minute boat-ride across the narrow strait from the Peloponnese mainland, the island also boasted easy access by road or sea to Navplion and Corinth, Epidavros and Ermioni.
* * *
I took lodgings in a guest-house high up in the main town of Poros, very close to the clock tower and sitting on the spine of the hill where it afforded a view of both the Bay of Poros and the Stenon Porou, the narrow but navigable passage between the town and the mainland.
My landlady, Kyria5 Fotini, utterly enchanted to have a long-term, cash paying and apparently solvent guest in her house so early in the year, was an enormous floral bundle of motherly solicitude with a taste for scents so powerful as to eclipse the loo-cleaner and so indiscriminate as to embrace, on occasion, her husband’s after-shave. She installed me in her best room, a cavernous, elegant, high-ceilinged affair on the second floor with classical plaster cornices, a split-level, stripped wooden floor, shuttered windows on three sides and small balconies facing the bay and the channel.
The room boasted what would now be called a ‘futon,’ but was then known as ‘a mattress on the floor.’ There was a curtain to close-off the raised section where this elegant sleeping arrangement lay, one rush-seated wooden chair and one extruded plastic one, a tin table, a rickety set of three drawers with a cracked mirror, a clothes-rail with a plastic cover, and a tiny fireplace. This latter did very little to heat the room but contributed enormously to the ambience of an evening. It also seemed to give warmth and cheer to the seagulls, which flocked to the chimney and iced the roof terrace around it like a wedding-cake.
Downstairs via an exterior staircase was a small communal kitchen shared with two other rented rooms, which tended to be occupied only at weekends. It contained a marble sink with cold water, a fridge which sounded as if it was powered by a diesel engine, a single-plate electric hob, a small camping gas burner, a briquette, a knife, a few mismatched plates, two forks and some drinking-vessels which had started life as mustard-jars. The gas burner was an essential asset; when it rained even slightly seriously, the electricity was more often off than on. I soon learned to kept candles and a gas-lamp in the room.
Adjoining the kitchen was the toilet and shower, so close together that one could- and in fact had to- use them simultaneously. The strident acoustics in this oubliette transmitted every horrible intimacy through the whole house. The water pipes rattled like the terminal breath of a lung-shot rhinoceros, the toilet flush crowed like a cockerel and the shower-drain slurped like the child of a Titan draining his milk-shake... there really was no need for a lock on the door. Which was probably why there wasn’t one.
As far as I was concerned, all of the above were features, not shortcomings; I was a young bachelor of no detectable sophistication, conditioned to sailing boats and elderly tramp-ships, and I would probably have been happy in a Gulag, so long as it was co-ed and had a bar. My lodging was amazingly cheap, Kyria Fotini and her rambunctious family made me palpably welcome, and the views from the room and the terrace compensated a thousand-fold for any discomfort. I had a panorama of mountains, sea and islands extending about three hundred degrees, from the naval base right around the whole bay of Poros, with its stunning backdrop of a mountain-range resembling a sleeping woman, to the narrow straits between the island and the mainland. I was as happy as a pig in shit... and thanks to the seagulls, I had plenty of shit!
* * *
Thus comfortably installed, I let Spiros and a couple of other contacts know that I was available for boat deliveries, and contentedly fell into a lazy routine as I waited indolently for some work to stray in my direction. My great confederate was Petros, the sardonic, cynical and golden-hearted owner of the Square Cafe, and there I would go each morning for my coffee and to catch up on developments.
The Square Cafe is so named because it is set in a square, but it works both ways as the building is one of those charmless concrete cubes which, although sadly common in Greece, are refreshingly rare in Poros. Despite its lack of aesthetic qualities, however, the cafe was delightfully set amidst orange trees a little back from the road and right next to the museum, so its architectural shortcomings were mitigated by the greenery and the more elegant adjacent buildings. All along one side of the little square lay an amazing number of artefacts too big or too numerous to fit into the museum; ancient capitals, bits of columns, mill-stones, grinding-tables and even a great stone anchor.2 The buildings sheltered the square from the wind and made a wonderful sun-trap in the cooler seasons; the noise of the road was kept at a respectable distance, and the scent of the oranges pervaded. I loved to sit there, to chew the fat with Petros and his clients, to cogitate on the aeons of history represented by the museum pieces, and to marvel at the historical wealth of a place which has so much of this stuff that it leaves it out in the rain.
After my morning coffee, I would betake myself to something vaguely resembling activity. I rarely had a plan before I sat down for coffee, but Petros’ terrace was so strangely conducive to creative thought that I generally arose slavering with anticipation for some enterprise. Often I went over to the boatyard on the mainland and chatted with people readying their boats for the season. Sometimes I strode out, full of purpose and vigour, bent on a hike. I rented bikes or scooters and explored, and occasionally I hopped on a ferry and spent the day on another island. Whenever I heard of boats for sale I went off to look at them, but mostly I just patrolled the waterfront, mingling with yachties and watching young ladies getting off the ferry until it was time for a long, lazy lunch.
I was fortunate with regard to the weather in Greece at the beginning of March. It can be an unkind month of temperatures in single figures and overcast skies which leak badly, but that year the firmament remained very largely clear, bathing the land in light and clarity. The north wind, dry and still cool, swept the air of all impurities, and, when I ventured forth, I enjoyed breath-taking views. I would go often to the Paradise Taverna, close to the Temple of Poseidon up on the northern slopes of Kalavria, to marvel at the view of the Saronic.
In weather like this, one can see a hundred miles if one gets high enough, and looking northwards to Aegina and north-west past the jagged crater of Methana towards Corinth every minute detail seemed crisp in the transparent air. The clarity foreshortened the scenery, so that I felt that I could lean forward and touch the islands across the brilliant blue of the sea. Fruit-blossom and wild flowers rioted on every hand, and rebirth was in my eye and in my soul. I was delighted to be back in Greece, and as far as I was concerned, it was unquestionably spring. The foreigners readying their boats for the season thought so too; Poros, however, was under no such illusion.
Orthodox Easter was still some weeks off when I returned to the island, and the European Easter3 (which would bring the first real ingress of tourists) was even later. A few visitors were already in evidence, but the combination of Lent and a paucity of punters meant that most of the restaurants were still closed. Despite the sunshine, and a riot of spring blooms, the Porioties, as the indigenes were known, were mostly visible only as shadows in darkened cafes. A few, hunched in their boufan jackets and steering single-handed with one hand in their pocket, buzzed along the front on the ubiquitous step-through motorbikes. Poros was still deep in winter mentality.
This somnolence was broken occasionally by the arrival of ferries and hydrofoils, which brought a few people onto the streets and briefly rippled the placid atmosphere, but even this disruption was a fleeting thing. Most of the ferries were the old open types called by the locals a pantouffle. This means ‘slipper’, and refers to the shape of the ship, with a ramp forward, a low, open car-deck, and a passenger section cantilevered high up over the back end, but the word also has connotations of grandfatherly inactivity which is appropriate too. They rumbled across the bay, through the strait and over to Galatas in a suitably leisurely manner. At this time of year their clients were all locals, highly familiar with boarding and disembarking, so there was none of the frantic shouting and blowing of port policeman’s whistles which the herding of a summer payload involved, and the venerable argosies were quickly and smoothly on their way again. The only real animation on the winter paralia4 came with the daily visit of the Hermes, the Aegean Glory or the City of Poros, ships which did a three-island day-cruise from Athens to Hydra, Poros and Aegina.
As the arriving ship’s whistle boomed across the bay, mopeds erupted from alleyways and converged on the main quay. The gift shops threw open their doors and vomited their wares onto the pavement just as the first mooring-lines landed on the dock, and then a couple of hundred Japanese and Americans would perform a re-enactment of D-Day. Some remained aboard, spraying the waterfront with video-cameras. Others, telephoto lenses at the high port, rampaged down the gangways and advanced in short dashes interspersed with momentary pauses when they unleashed rapid bursts of shutter-noise from their 35mms. Then, having duly recorded every cat, flower-pot and child, it was summer for sixty minutes as they porpoised through the gift shops, burned up a few miles of ASA 400 and milled outside the ouzeries whilst waiting to have their photographs taken with an air-drying octopus.
At another imperious hoot the tourists re-embarked and, as their ship churned away from the quayside, the gift shops did not so much close as implode; clothing-racks and postcard stands were sucked back into shop interiors like a pair of skimpy knickers going up a vacuum-cleaner, lights blinked out, doors slammed, keys rattled and the proprietors sprang onto motorbikes as smoothly as gymnasts mounting a vaulting-horse. It all happened with the speed and silky ease of an umbrella folding, so that before the ship had turned the corner out of the bay, the town was contentedly back in its midwinter torpor, somnolence so tangible on the air that one breathed it in and exhaled it in a yawn.
The simple fact was that, regardless of flowers or weather, all Poros was still curled up in its hibernatory cave. All Poros, that is, apart from the sailing community.
* * *
One charmingly sunny morning in mid-March, with a genuine harbinger of summer present in the air temperature, Spiros erupted out of a Flying Dolphin like a hen in front of a fox and didn’t touch the ground until he was almost the other side of the road. Then he appeared to go in seven directions at once. With the energy and deportment of a ninja on ecstasy, he began rousing sailors from hibernation. Shergar, Xanthos and The Pretty Panzer were ripped untimely out of their winter lethargy, and within moments an electric activity bordering on panic raced headlessly up and down the waterfront.
Within a remarkably short time for so restful a place, all was bustle. People scurried to-and-fro with arms-full of boat gear; hoses snaked across yachts; laundry piled up on cabin-tops; mops, brooms and vacuum-cleaners were plied with gusto. Engines ran, and the fuel truck lumbered from boat to boat. Even O Geros and Megali, the Grand Old Men of the Poros yachting scene, were pottering on their boats with a methodical edge to their stately indolence that bordered on activity. The Grave-Robbers Flotilla was imminent, and the whole winter, which had once been available to prepare for it, had inexplicably disappeared.
As I smiled at the antics of the scurrying dock-rats I had not the least premonition that I was about to become one of them, but when Spiros exploded out of the hydrofoil on that fine morning he had a Grave-Robber to organise and a scant twenty-four hours to do it in... and the solution to one of his problems had my name written all over it.
“My dear boy!” he cried, his customary conversational bellow gently agitating the window-panes behind me with as he rounded the corner of the square twenty yards away, “How are you? How are you?”
I started to tell him that I was in the pink and then stopped, because he hadn’t.
“And what are you doing this week? Nothing, I suppose... too early in the season... but we might have a little job, just five days... it doesn’t pay much, I’m afraid. ” At this point his face registered anguish equal to that of Juliet holding Romeo’s corpse, “Just students, they don’t have much money, but I like to try to help them out.”
I grinned inwardly as I remembered first meeting Spiros, when we started our charter the previous autumn; on that occasion too he had given us to believe that he was virtually a charitable organisation.
“Still, it will pay your keep for a few days, and it will be a lot of fun. Lots of girls, you know. About fifty of them.” He winked massively. It looked like a car-crusher closing on one of those little Fiats.
This proposition surprised and delighted me. It had not so far occurred that Spiros would want me for any charters; I assumed he had plenty of skippers whose local knowledge was much greater than mine, guys who wanted to sail at a holiday pace, schmooze with passengers and earn tips. That sounded pretty idyllic to me, but I had no expectation of getting that sort of work yet; I expected to serve my apprenticeship doing boat deliveries, which were less popular. Deliveries had deadlines, and being predominantly against the wind they often required hard sailing; there were no perks either... no tips, no half-full bottles of Talisker left in the galley, no bikinied crew to delight the manly senses.
“I thought all the local lads were queuing up for this job, Spiro?” I asked, and indeed that was what I had heard... everyone wanted in on the Grave-Robber. But Spiros’s smile took on a shark-like width, and with one avuncular hand on my shoulder and another one, more opportunistic, on my last ham-and-cheese toastie, he dropped his voice to a confidential roar.
“Well, they are, they are... but Julian, to be quite honest, I have a small problem. I have a large boat on this charter... she’s forty-eight feet. I need her because she has a lot of beds, but none of the skippers here want to take her... she’s too big for them. And also, she uses a lot of fuel, so I want her to sail as much as possible... I need a real skipper.”
That was the genius of Spiros in a nutshell; in a few words he had employed me, fed my ego, tempted me with carnal delights, manoeuvred me into a position from which I could not retreat without losing face, told me he wasn’t going to pay me the going rate whilst still casting himself in the light of a benefactor, and had a free breakfast.
Well, I wouldn’t have taken much persuading anyway… I was happy doing any sailing at any time, quite apart from being avidly heterosexual… so I took his explanation at face value, and accordingly hoisted my self-esteem a notch higher up the flag-pole. Oh, boy, I still had a lot to learn! If my own invitation to participate in a Grave-Robber came as a complete surprise... well, that was only because I was new in Greece and had not yet learned see things through the eyes of the locals.
* * *
So I was roped in for my first charter, and quite a charter it was too. The Grave-Robber’s Flotilla was, in the mid-eighties, already a tradition in the local yachting industry. A certain international archaeological school (hence the ‘Grave-Robber’ title) naturally spent a lot of time in Italy, Greece and Turkey, and their students were young people whom the necessity of travel made even more impoverished than your average undergraduate. They toured the Mediterranean in the off-season, partly to have better access to the archaeological sites and museums when they were less crowded, and partly to save money. They also came from pretty much everywhere in the world, so by the time they got to the Mediterranean many had travelled a very long way. It therefore made sense to get the most out of their long-distance travelling and combine their field-trips with a bit of a holiday; since Italy was expensive and Turkey lacked economical airline connections, Greece was where they dallied.
Sometime in the early eighties a lecturer involved in organising these tours- an American at one of the numerous archaeological institutes to be found in Athens- had taken a sailing holiday in the Saronic and hit upon the idea that penurious young folk, who did not mind roughing it a little to save some money, could have a memorable vacation at quite moderate expense by hiring a few sailing boats and some skippers to drive them.
Fortune, fate or ferocious business acumen (my money would be on the latter) had then led this lecturer, his scheme still embryonic in his mind, to stray into the path of Spiros, the charismatic, fabulously plausible proprietor of Saronic Sea Charters, and a man whose mind was so fertile that his body never had a chance of keeping pace with his cerebral output. From the moment of that meeting, the Grave-Robbers Flotilla was not only conceived, it was also hand-cuffed to the midwife, frog-marched through pre-natal classes and booked in for a Caesarean section.
To describe the Grave-Robbers Flotilla, it is probably best to start with a brief sketch of Saronic Sea Charters and its enigmatic proprietor, and so I digress.
* * *
Saronic Sea Charters was an entity of no substance whatsoever, due principally to the fact that Spiros couldn’t afford a boat. It also employed no permanent staff, possessed no capital that anyone had ever located, and its office was essentially a tatty leather satchel generally to be found in the back of a sand-coloured Lada Jeep; anyone wanting to sue the company would need to serve a writ at forty kilometres an hour (although certainly no more) to a car which blended into the concrete around it, travelled in its own personal smoke-screen and boasted a single, deeply ambiguous registration plate. The only real assets the business possessed consisted of a ream of headed stationery, a portable typewriter and what might have been termed a ‘compound intellectual property’- the confidence, imagination, language skills and sheer brass neck of the proprietor. To these you might, if you had a very generous interpretation of the term ‘asset,’ have added the Jeep.
The company chose to do business largely in the field of renting out sailing yachts, with or without skippers, but could, in fact, have done almost anything at all... and when opportunity arose, it did. It certainly did not operate a ‘walk-in’ style of business- it was the sort of firm that you would have expected to have a double lock and a spy-hole in its door, if only it had possessed a door- and preferred to come to its clients rather than the other way about. For a few weeks of the year it could be reliably located at the London, Paris and Dusseldorf Boat Shows, but apart from that it existed with nomadic elusiveness, visible only in the form of adverts in the classified section of various yachting magazines.
Spiros was the company’s only regular employee. During my first voyage in Greece, I had been surprised by his receptionist’s unfamiliarity with nautical matters... I now knew the reason. In those days before mobile phones arrived in Greece, all the company’s calls and faxes were received by a barmaid at a hotel near Alimos Marina. The ‘after-hours emergency number’ on the stationery was Lefteris’s souvlaki joint in Amfitheas Street. If Spiros himself wasn’t available, there was generally someone there prepared to do him a favour by sorting out a cock-up.
In those days most of the charter yachts in Greece were owned by private owners, and Spiros made it his business to know everything possible about every boat and proprietor on the Attic shore. His basic operating methodology was to contract for absolutely any requirement whatsoever, and then, but not until the deposit was received, go looking for the boats, skippers or hostesses to fulfil the particular needs of the client. In the high season, when late bookings came in and boats were scarce, or when they were broken down, late back due to bad weather or otherwise unavailable at the last minute, this led to some splendidly farcical eleventh-hour situations which would have destroyed the nerves of anyone with a conventional approach to business in a week; but Spiros was a man with a true genius for improvisation and the energy of a gibbon on adrenaline supplements. He thrived like a vampire in a blood-bank.
Spiros himself was as extrovert and flamboyant as his company was reclusive. Somewhat over average height, of coffee-olive complexion and evidently jolly fond of his food, he was not so much hirsute as shag-pile carpeted. Ringlets of coal-black hair sprang out half a foot in all directions from his head, as if at loggerheads with his scalp. His jowl was eternally blue with growth, a Zapata moustache drooped limply over his upper lip and his eyebrows resembled sea-urchins clinging to a rock. At his throat was a straight line where his razor daily demarcated between the cultivated and feral parts of his body, and from every gap in the buttons of his straining shirt-front erupted anarchic, wiry curls. What little could be seen of his face through the undergrowth was tanned to cinnamon, and when he pointed at something his fore-arm looked like a dachshund with no legs. Yet, if I have given the impression that Spiros’s predominating characteristic was hair, I must instantly correct myself: all his yak-like shagginess was merely the backdrop for his smile. For when Spiros smiled normally (which was pretty much at any time when he was awake with his wallet closed) the world about him grew brighter; when he made a special effort, which he did readily, the very sun of Greece acknowledged the competition, let out a grunt and upped its game.
A Spiros smile gave his whole head a workout. His hair-line shot up about two inches, his eyes retreated into fleshy fissures, his back-teeth popped round the corner for a word with his earlobes and his pupils blazed like the birth of a star. There was no doubting the sincerity of a Spiros smile; not because it wasn’t a calculated act-it very, very often was- but rather because you simply knew that he couldn’t be feigning it. He was merely revealing his true nature, albeit when it suited him to do so. Ambrose Bierce would have conceded the sincerity of a Spiros smile.
Spiros’s other dominant trait was his ability to talk both hind legs and the bum off a whole cavalry regiment. As equally at home in English as in Greek, he also possessed a deep confidence in his abilities in French, Italian and German (an opinion which his French, Italian and German clients would have been happy to contradict, had they ever been able to get a word in edgeways). When merely being sociable, he could comfortably occupy ninety per cent of any conversation... and not unpleasantly either. His entertaining fund of stories and jokes, delivered with natural timing and a sumptuous vocabulary, made a willing audience of most people. But when faced with the need to divert attention from something, or to talk down a complaint, he went into filibuster mode. Then, an ocean-liner’s foghorn couldn’t have got the better of him.
Spiros was a mighty believer in Hamlet’s maxim: ‘There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.’ It was a measure of the psychology of the man, for instance, that he never saw his position as owner of a charter firm without a boat as either absurd or disadvantageous, but rather took the view that it allowed him freedom in the market.
Spiros oiled his way past anything negative and could find a positive aspect to anything short of disembowelling… had he ever taken it into his head to defend Hitler, you’d have ended up giving the brute a Nobel prize for infrastructure. It wasn’t Tony Blair who invented ‘spin’, believe me... all he did was give it a bad name. The genius of Spiros’s spin was that after you’d been spun you queued up to pay for another ride.
* * *
When the Chief Executive (and only) Officer of Saronic Sea Charters fortuitously met with the archaeology lecturer he had immediately recognised several key points. First and foremost, the students didn’t have a lot of money, but there were a lot of them. Spiros instantly comprehended that this was a ‘stack ’em high and sell ’em cheap’ opportunity (which appealed to him not only commercially but also at an emotional level) and he identified that his product was perfect for the market… cut-price yachts for undiscerning clients was a niche he was ideally positioned to exploit.
Operating out of the high season was another feature which suited Spiros’s business model. In the low season he could have his pick of boats; he could match them exactly to his requirements, take or amend bookings at the last minute with confidence that whatever he needed would be available, and he could drive a devilish bargain with owners keen for some off-season income. Then he could cram each boat full of bodies paying on a ‘per head’ (but not necessarily ‘per bed’) basis, and his returns would be excellent. The condition of the boat was not critical… if a boat looked a bit ropey this was simply a tool for driving the price down a bit further, and if it broke down, well, it was a flotilla... another boat could tow the damn thing. But perhaps the most charming aspect of working in the off-season, particularly in spring when most of the Grave-Robbers took place, was the very decent chunk of loot it brought in early in the year... a most desirable state of affairs after a long winter.
It is often said that the three most important things about a business are the location, the location, and the location. As we have seen, Spiros’s business was based (in so far as it was based anywhere) at Alimos Marina in the Athenian suburb of Kalamaki; but Alimos houses half the charter boats in Greece and that Sherwood Forest of aluminium masts is stalked by many Sheriffs of Nottingham... wits are keen, secrets are badly-kept, and ethics is a county east of London. Spiros originally moved the Grave-Robber to Poros, thirty miles south-west of Kalamaki on the opposite side of the Saronic Gulf, purely to keep the enterprise away from the competition of the Alimos vultures; however, it quickly turned out to be a brilliant tactical move in many other respects.
Poros was and is a simply beautiful place to start and end your voyage. The island is not only an ideal terminus, it is also a fully-fledged destination, and the holiday starts the moment one arrives. Whatever your needs, tucked away somewhere between the Sleeping Lady in the west and the castellated island of Bourtzi in the east, you can find pretty much everything required for an island holiday… character, azure water, rural peace, stunning vistas, beaches, secluded bays, discos, restaurants, bars, cafes, excursions, antiquities, water sports… and for a sailor, there are so many bays and anchorages that one could, in fact, have a perfectly good sailing holiday without leaving the island at all.
For the Grave-Robber, Poros was perfect. It had reasonable connections to Athens by road or ferry. The kids could visit the archaeological sites at Corinth, Mycenae or Epidavros by road en route. Ancient Troezen lay only a couple of miles away, and the remains of the Temple of Poseidon were on the island itself. As far as sailing was concerned, Poros provided a safe harbour centrally placed between the Saronic and Argolic gulfs, giving a range of short cruising options depending on weather and time. The sailing was almost always decent, and the journeys a good duration to fit in with other aspects of the holiday.
So Spiros had a product, but he was also possessed of a vision which not all his countrymen can boast… he was willing to play a long game. In favourable circumstances he was prepared to give patience, and even modest investment, a try. He realised that if he played his cards right, this was not a windfall but rather an annual crop, one which could be nurtured, cultivated and harvested so long as archaeologists retained an interest in... arches, presumably, or whatever it was they liked so much. He skimped and saved on the boats, but only to a point… his outrageous brinkmanship had a line beyond which he knew that his charisma would not prevail, and that point he only ever crossed accidentally.
Not content with the sailing action, Spiros managed to involve himself in the entire tour, making hotel and restaurant bookings, organising bus rentals and airport transfers, and helping himself to a slice of the airline reservations action. He organised discounted visits to water sports schools, dinners with Greek dancing entertainments, disco-evenings, sailing races and barbeques; he even had the gall to get involved in the educational itinerary as well, booking site-visits, museum tours, lectures and presentations. In fact, in a very short time, he had made himself so much a part of the local archaeological community that he became a habitué of the archaeological social scene in Athens... without anyone thinking to question where he came from, and despite the fact that he thought an Ionic column was a list of things he had borrowed from someone called Nicholas.
Thus Spiros advanced in the world by wit, adaptation and brazen opportunism. With the charm of Terry Wogan, the cunning of Richelieu and the tenacity of boarding-school porridge on flock wallpaper he refined his creation and wooed his client. By the time I arrived on the scene, he was bringing home the bacon by the sty-full.
The charter was a four or five day event with a loose itinerary to allow the best to be made of the prevailing winds, and it had a well-set format; short voyages with swimming-stops, arrivals early enough to enjoy the town or beach, and two or three group meals or entertainments. Spiros always skippered one boat himself, to be ever-present with his Hollywood smile and blast-furnace personality to put the best and most creative interpretation on any difficulty or deficiency.
A few lecturers would attend, and these Spiros took care to accommodate separately from the students, in a small, new boat, with a sober skipper and strict allocation of one bed per person. Everyone else was lodged rather less formally; people slept in the bunk or boat most conveniently to hand when their stamina failed them, with the more determined socialisers generally ending up on the floor.
It swiftly became apparent that girls predominated over boys by a ratio of about three or even four to one. Apart from a tendency to use more water than the boys, this caused no problems… the girls, possibly because they were accustomed to fairly basic conditions on archaeological sites, were not disconcerted by the basic accommodation, and they were a worldly-wise species well capable of surviving in the robust arena of Greek courtship. Spiros soon found that, on balance, the girls were a positive asset, as a preponderance of female clients made it easier for him to find skippers at reasonable rates. In fact, rural society in Greece in the eighties still took such proprietary care of its unattached womenfolk that, at the end of a long winter barren of tourist girls, there were rumours that several of the Grave-Robber skippers actually paid Spiros for the privilege of working for him.
* * *
So this was the Grave-Robbers Flotilla, and I was a very happy chappie to be involved, especially as I was to be the captain of the flag-ship, as it were.
My boat was Iraklis, which means ‘Hercules’ and is pronounced ‘Irra-kleeyse’, with the stress on the last syllable. She was a Jeanneau Trinidad forty-eight footer, a boat with a good sailing reputation and a distinctive look deriving from having a curved deck-house over the saloon. Ketch-rigged5 with a capacious but shapely hull, she had a large, comfortable cockpit, two good-sized double cabins, two cabins with bunk-beds and a large saloon. In the French style, she had spare bunks absolutely everywhere†… the backs of settees swung up and hung from straps, whilst coffin-like affairs could be created out of short seats by the use of ‘trotter-boxes’, recesses which extended leg room into wardrobes and adjoining cabins. There were so many permutations, with seats which slid-out to make double beds, hanging contraptions and extra pipe-cots in the bunk cabins that I never did manage to come to a final conclusion about how many bunks she possessed. The designers of slave-ships, however, could have taken useful notes.
Iraklis was definitely a well-used vessel. The whiteness of her hull had lost its lustre; her sails were as soft as linen with use and goose-grey with age; her interior, faintly musty and distressed with prickly, slightly threadbare upholstery, had that shabbiness one finds in the carriages of preserved steam-trains; and years of replacing losses and breakages had left her with barely one fork or glass which matched another.
Despite Iraklis’ world-weary appearance, I rather liked her. The skipper’s bunk was a pilot-berth, a cosy little glorified shelf in a niche by the chart table, which also boasted a splendidly comfortable curved wooden seat, and I took great delight in my personal ‘space.’ My approval radiated outwards from there. Despite wear and age the boat had pleasing lines, and the class had an excellent reputation. I tried not to be smug about having the largest sailing boat in the harbour and failed complacently; I felt rather grand surveying the world from the unusually imperious height of her helmsman’s seat.
Finally overcoming my smugness, I began to prepare Iraklis for sea. I loaded her up with bedding from the laundry, filled the fuel tank, ran-up the engine and did an oil-change, washed her down and got contentedly to work finding out about her water-tanks, fuel system, and rig. All appeared very orthodox, except that, buried deep in the depths of the forward locker, I found a rather wonderful thing. She had a spinnaker! Oh, how I longed to try that spinnaker... but forget it for this trip. One only flies a spinnaker with experienced crews, especially a kite this size. It looked gargantuan. With grieving heart, I re-interred it in the locker.
* * *
At lunchtime, we all went to George’s Cafe where Spiros performed any necessary introductions and made his dispositions for the charter. The flotilla, we were informed, was to be comprised of eight boats.
Spiros would skipper a Gin-Fizz, an attractive, beamy, thirty-six foot centre-cockpit boat with a reputation for decent sailing qualities but rather ‘wet’ going to windward. Spiros himself, and anyone who wished to study extreme trichology at close hand, could share the aft cabin. The forward end included the galley, heads, and another capacious, ingenious French accommodation.
A blonde-haired Athenian of Apollon good looks called Xanthos had brought a very odd looking box-shaped thing made of flat steel plates with two masts of equal height, lots of wires, and a centre-cockpit. It looked rather more like an amateur radio enthusiast’s shed than a yacht, but obviously had a capacious interior.
Yeorgaki was new to me, a stout, black haired chap with wonderfully soft eyes, an infectious grin and a little Gib-Sea 106, a pretty boat with a sweet sheer and (you guessed it) lots of beds!
A curly-haired bean-pole called Karrottos was the proud seneschal of a bright blue ‘double-ender’ which was obviously built of ferro-concrete, a boat with a stern as sharp as its bow. This was also roomy, and a most attractive boat in a very solid, deep-in-the-water way. It looked like he’d need half a hurricane to move it and the platoon of people it could accommodate.
O Geros and Megali were local men and both were older gents of great experience with very attractive vessels. O Geros had a traditional keel-boat, and Megali, who had a famous name as a racing man, had a sleek, lean, hungry-looking one-design of about forty feet. Both had racing interiors, which means very little trim, thin upholstery, toilet curtains rather than doors and lots of beds arranged like supermarket shelving.
That left me, with Iraklis, and the final boat was Molto Allegro. I had no idea who was going to skipper her, but I didn’t envy him! On her insurance papers she was called a sailing yacht, but not since Titanic was dubbed ‘unsinkable’6 has a boat been so inaccurately described.
Molto Allegro was generally acknowledged to be one of the strongest hulls afloat, and one of the least aqua-dynamic. Almost as wide as she was long, she was very strongly constructed, fitted out inside like the seraglio of Suleiman the Promiscuous and equipped with an enormous six-cylinder engine. As a result of this lavish outfitting, she was far too heavy. To move her stocky, hefty, overloaded hull she had been given a small ketch rig, with tiny sails which could not move her in anything much short of a typhoon. She had no such reticence under motor, however. Her enormous engine could drive her along at a very respectable eight knots through almost any weather; but, being as deep in the water as a post-prandial crocodile, she was also a tsunami-generator... the wake she left behind her was out of all proportion to her size. In harbours she had to be handled very slowly to prevent damaging other boats with her wash, and at sea, since moving water takes a lot of energy, she could empty her fuel tank in half the time of most boats.
Despite her unattractive qualities, however, Spiros had a use for Molto on the Grave-Robber. He could hire her in very cheap, and her sumptuous interior made her attractive for accommodating the group of lecturers who were accompanying the flotilla. But who could skipper her? I could immediately see that no-one wanted the job... she was such a difficult boat. Spiros evidently didn’t have a solution to this problem, because even his confidence wavered as he named Shergar for the job. I couldn’t believe it, and by the look on his face, neither did Spiros. Shergar certainly didn’t.
* * *
Since Shergar is to become a regular visitor to these pages, I will beg the reader to forgive another digression at this point as I sketch his character.
Shergar came originally from Wiltshire, almost as far from the sea as you can get in England, and his curriculum vitae prior to his debut in the Mediterranean yachting industry had included motorbike racing, go-karting, scrap-metal recovery and herding helicopters. He also did periodical work in the film industry, making cars do unusual things, and in the winter he sometimes betook himself to the French Alps, where he repaired skis and provided sympathy and support for ladies who had fallen off them. Tall, chunky, bespectacled and never seen in anything other than a T-shirt, he entirely failed to comprehend the purpose of barbers or combs. He had the freest, most infectious laughter I think I have ever heard, a bubbling, chuckling anthem of joy which rose in his throat like the cry of a hungry chick in a nest, and he could find humour in almost any situation. He wallowed luxuriously in irony and was a master raconteur with a rich fund of wonderful stories which regularly creased his audience up with laughter... in fact, shortly after I first met him, I described him in a letter as a man who could come to break the news to you that your own mother had been fatally mauled by a leopard, and have you in fits of mirth at how funny she had looked trying to hit it with her handbag.
Exiled from Britain by a misjudgement and a misfortune (the misjudgement was that a paint-job would disguise the fact that the car had been created by welding together the opposite ends of two wrecks; the misfortune was selling it to the wife of the Assistant Chief Constable) he had more or less settled in Greece, and Spiros periodically employed him as a mechanic. To call Shergar a mechanic, however, is a bit like calling Ghengis Khan a traveller... it doesn’t quite give the whole picture. He was actually a barmy genius, a mad professor, an improviser, an optimist, and a lateral thinker of startling originality.
Whenever Shergar succeeded in something, he was disarmingly modest; when he failed, (and his penchant for innovation ensured that he often did, spectacularly) he roared with laughter and took the mickey out of himself at full volume before hatching a new scheme and diving headlong back into the fray.
Both in looks and nature he resembled a youthful Einstein, and he was equally at home with a ship’s diesel engine or a go-kart buzz box. Despite having left school (to the mutual satisfaction of all concerned) at the age of fourteen, his powers of self-education and a practical, analytical mind meant that what he didn’t know he could reason out with instinctive and crystal-clear logic.
He loved films, eagerly watching anything from shoot-’em-ups to Shakespeare, he listened religiously to the most avant-garde music available, and his idea of formal dress was a T-shirt with no swear-words on it. Frequently covered in oil, perennially late and capable of assimilating beer like a blue whale ingesting krill, he was nevertheless one of the completest ladies-men I ever knew. I loved being around his girlfriends who were, without exception, vibrant, bonny and as mad as him. Wonderful people to know.
So why, you are asking, is Shergar not racing Mother Theresa to sainthood? Well, in a nut shell, reliability. He was about as dependable as a politician’s promise. Once he was on a job, he was generally OK as long as no-one opened a cold beer within earshot. Once you lost sight of him, however, then re-locating him was like finding your virginity again... he was in demand for cars, motorbikes, go-karts, women and parties; each and every one of which appealed to him a hell of a lot more than anything that floated. He had a tiny ‘gorilla-bike’ with a souped-up engine on which he commuted enormous distances to race meetings, parties, car-auctions and assignations at insane speeds, a tool-box on the back, his buttocks nine inches off the ground and his knees next to his ears. You could barely see the miniscule motorbike at all, and horrified Greek drivers flinched from the spectacle of a man passing them at high velocity looking like a squatting frog travelling on the bones of its arse. One never knew where he would be or when… he rarely did himself. As hard to find, in fact as... Shergar!
From the flotilla’s point of view, there was one other slight flaw in Shergar’s character too… he couldn’t drive a boat to save his life. Thus the general bemusedness which accompanied Spiros’s nomination of him as the master before God of Molto Allegro. I suppose there was some sense in it: true, he couldn’t sail... but then, neither could the boat!
* * *
In the general mirth and incredulity which greeted this appointment, I happily noted some very positive Greek characteristics... they really can be lovely people. The first instinct of everyone was to shout ‘Bravo!’ and clap Shergar on the shoulder… and even though Greeks have an instinctive fondness for improvisation, this was a very generous reaction, when you consider the circumstances.
These were people whose livelihood was yachting, and there was an enormous amount of know-how around that table. O Geros and Megali alone must have had close to a hundred years’ experience between them, Xanthos had been skippering since before he left school; Karrottos had started with his father at the age of ten, and although I didn’t yet know anything about Yeorgaki he showed every indication of being a veteran.
Shergar, by comparison, hardly knew a main sail from a closing-down sale; he could not be anything but an embuggerance on the flotilla and, if he learned, he would only become a potential competitor. To boot, he was a foreigner. There aren’t many places in the world that would have given him anything more than a luke-warm nod in the circumstances, but within seconds a jovial crew was beating him on the back and making jokes about Molto Allegro, about lady archaeologists, and, of course, starting to give him advice. And there is nothing, simply nothing, anywhere under the sun or moon, which Greeks enjoy more than giving advice.
Greeks give advice as copiously as the Amazon gives to the Atlantic, and as eagerly as gravity getting to work on an unsupported anvil. There is a confidence and generosity about the entire nation that manifests itself in rhetorical counsel on absolutely any subject, in any forum, and under any circumstance. Put a Greek in front of a firing-squad, and he’ll die reminding you to take the safety-catch off. I had come to think of the host nation, in this respect, as terror-didactyls, and now Shergar rolled his eyes and grinned as the concentrated and conflicting essence of decades of Aegean sailing experience broke and eddied around him like Napoleon’s cavalry around Wellington’s squares.
* * *
I suppose that everyone considered Shergar’s appointment as the non-sequiteur of the evening, but Spiros had one last little surprise for us... specifically for me, and The Pretty Panzer.
The Pretty Panzer was a very charmingly rounded young east German lady, of opulent form and a cherubic, mischievously lovely face whom I might perhaps best describe as ‘abundantly beautiful.’ Chubby and dimpled, she glowed with apple-cheeked colour. As tall as the average man and as demure as Foghorn Leghorn, she was a blue-eyed, flaxen Saxon, square in the shoulder, generous in the hips, voluptuous in the belly, buxom, plump, a synergy of curves and flawless flesh that simply exploded with robust health and vigour. She shone with youth and enthusiasm, and the enthusiasm which glowed most radiantly was the one for a western European passport and a father for her children. These were still Iron Curtain days, and The Pretty Panzer, predominantly interested in putting all that socialist workers paradise nonsense firmly behind her, was unashamedly using her every advantage and wile in search of a husband of impeccable national and financial stock.
She was utterly guileless about her intentions and set out her stall with no inhibitions whatsoever… she wore clothes which had probably fitted her when she was twelve and sunbathed naked at the least excuse, she danced like a dervish, dined like a combine harvester, and wooed like a tsunami. She kept herself surprisingly fit for such a Rubinesque form, running daily in a skin-tight stretch outfit.
The Greeks were besotted with her, and she trailed a string of Honda Fifties as she destruction-tested her Lycra every morning, but she held fast to her goal of a mate of impeccable financial integrity; not many of whom were to be found lying around unmarried on the island. Shergar swore it as gospel-truth that she kept an engagement ring in her bag in case she should meet Mr Right while out of doors.
This latter information Shergar had offered to me with an enormous grin, as the arrival of a British ship’s officer on the island represented a veritable sturgeon in the very small pond of the Poros males whom The Pretty Panzer considered to be eligible bachelors. She had thus been exceedingly obliging to me, from the moment that Shergar had introduced her in a blatant effort to get her off his own front porch.
“He’s the sort of chap you want, PeePee. Really rich... he’s even got a credit card!7”
‘PeePee’, as she was content to be known, took my initial rebuff as a mere negotiating ploy and stayed as close as she could. She got very chummy with Kyria Fotini, so that she was often around the house, and constantly asked me for English lessons “becauze I vood zoooooo much like to lif in Inglant, alvays it vos my tream to see ze Bockingkham House.”
Next, she found out that I like to cook.
“Oh, pliss to teach me zis cooking... I vant to make sooch vonderful sings for my hosbant. A voman should be able to please her hosbant in every vay, nichtwar?”
The draft caused by her eyelids made the candles gutter on the other side of the road.
When sober, PeePee was an unrelenting suitor; when drunk… an activity in which she engaged with the noisy, salivating abandon of a pig in an apple-store… she was a matrimonial carnivore, a maternal time-bomb, and at absolutely any time she could have eaten and drunk John Paul Getty out of house and home. She really was a very nice person… good hearted and full of joy, but she had an agenda, and her aura was so forceful that you could enjoy it just as well in the next street.
Even in the condition of celibacy enforced by the Poros winter season I made very sure that I was never alone with PeePee, and was careful not to get inebriated in her company. And these were now resolutions which were going to be a sight harder to keep, for Spiros announced that she would be accompanying the flotilla as hostess, and would be sailing with me in Iraklis. My knees turned to jelly at the prospect.
These, then, were the Dramatis Personae and Dramatis Naviae which made up the Grave-Robber Flotilla that set sail from Poros in March 1985.