A skipper’s lot... crewed behaviour... competing for Miss Iceland... musical beds... PeePee jumps ship... the Nob and the Oik... table dancing redefined... the many ways of beating one’s chest... needs must... Iraklis expires... post-coastal depression... gale-force altruism... more of Blatchley’s nautical philosophy... an extant sextant... the captain and his mate.
Thus the flotilla proceeded for four or five days. We visited Spetses and Ermioni, had a barbeque on the lovely, uninhabited island of Dokos and spent a night anchored off a beach taverna somewhere east of Thermissia. Shergar was managing very well, all things considered, but every night Billy-Bob and the American lady on the faculty crew took time to assure me that he was still acting as if he didn’t know one end of a boat from another, and to tell me the latest ‘Shergarism’.
Apart from the lazy, late morning starts, the pace of life continued to be somewhat hectic… the general pattern which developed involved a short, quiet sail in the late morning, with hangovers being slept off on deck; some sort of activity (swimming, water sports, water-fights, etcetera) in the afternoon; an evening meal and then a party into the early hours. For the skippers, it could get a bit wearing... late at night there were all sorts of problems to be sorted out; documents and hand-bags gone astray; misunderstandings about bills; people to be pulled out of harbours, mule-bites to be salved; unwanted suitors to dislodge. Also, of course, the skippers had to constantly replenish the water and make the boats ready, so they couldn’t sleep late the next morning as the clients did. Any regrets were expressed cheerfully and ruefully, however. No-one dreamed of complaining.
The general atmosphere was very genial and good-humoured. The girls were not, of course, the anthropophagic wantons which chauvinistic alpha male fantasy, fevered by a long, womanless winter with nothing to do but tell lad’s tales and consume caffeine, had contrived to imagine; but they were nevertheless very charming and it was fun to help them. As for the boys… well, I’m not sure anyone noticed them much unless they got into trouble, so they were perhaps a little less esteemed...
I quickly learned to enjoy my solitude in the early hours before the crew awoke. I would take a very leisurely coffee and a stroll; watch the world a while, and then set about my chores very, very quietly in order to be left with my thoughts a while longer. This was something which became very much easier after the second night, in Spetses, where we had a boozy cockpit-party late at night. The corollary of this was that a dishevelled and transparently euphoric PeePee emerged the next morning from Karrotos’ boat, hand-in-hand with a blonde Canadian lad. I was delighted to assure Spiros that Clemmie and I could manage Iraklis, and PeePee was seen no more on board ‘the big boat.’
This was by no means the only liaison which was made on the Grave-Robber. There was a fair amount of late-night smooching… referred to by one of the American girls as ‘mashing’, which I thought a splendidly colourful and accurate description… and quite a few people changed boats during the course of the trip. At night there was great variation too... the boat one sailed on was not necessarily the boat one slept on. People migrated like nomads with defective compasses, and laid themselves down to sleep wherever affection, fatigue, alcohol or sheer convenience deposited them. On two occasions we left people behind, skippers thinking they were on other boats, and they had to catch up by ferry, and there was one Welsh lad who, I think, slept on a different boat every night. I found him snoring contentedly on the beach the morning after the barbeque.
There was enormous competition amongst the other skippers for the attention of my Icelandic goddess... which she returned with graceful acknowledgement of the compliment, and not the slightest hint of interest. This, of course, merely made the Mediterranean blood boil all the more effervescently for her.1 Yeorgaki, Karrotos and Xanthos were locked in a good-humoured contest for her favour, and by my reckoning the cheery, rotund Yeorgaki was a narrow head in front of the other two and still getting absolutely nowhere. I highly approved of this jealous devotion, as it made it unnecessary for me to have to worry about her being bothered by men in the towns we visited. Her suitors guarded her from each other and from outsiders with equal devotion, and she proceeded through the streets like an American president surrounded by the Secret Service.
I trust I do not give the impression that our archaeologists were a depraved lot: we all wished that had been so, but it was not. They were just healthy young people with a truck-load of vigour, in mixed company and a vibrant, stimulating foreign country, feeding off each other’s energy. There was an end-of-term sort of atmosphere, and it was party-time. Some might think the studious, committed nature of archaeological study and frenzied revelry unlikely bedfellows, and perhaps they become so with time… the lecturers who accompanied the tours were sensible, abstemious sorts by and large… but there appeared to be no sense of incompatibility amongst the student body. Even the more mature scholars were likely to end up jumping into harbours in the early hours; and, on consideration, perhaps there was an element of catharsis in their carousing... an archaeologist, after all, is someone who will spend a week in silent, single-minded concentration gently brushing dirt out of a gladiator’s coccyx in an attempt to separate his pilum from his prostate; there must surely be a reaction to such a degree of absorption.
* * *
On board Iraklis things were becoming quite well organised by the morning of the third day. Clemmie had assumed the role of chief mate as smoothly as she did everything else, and I had no qualms about letting her berth and unberth the boat... she was completely competent. Then, to my great surprise, our Nordic beauty abruptly began to pay attention and progressed quickly to Fender-Tender First Class.
The Italian boy… time, time, the thief of all things, what was his name? Giovanni seems to strike a chord… turned out to simply adore helming. The only occasion when he willingly left the wheel was when Jana, his Czech consort, disappeared into their cabin... then he was gone like a missile leaving its silo, regardless of whether anyone else was there to take the wheel or not. On more than one occasion I heard a door slam, then felt the boat coming up into the wind, and hopped up on deck to find a Marie Celeste situation in the cockpit… and presumably another Czech getting bounced.
A Scots lass called May, who was a climber, knew a few knots and took a bit of an interest... mostly in shinning up the mast. She could go up it like a monkey fetching coconuts, and spent a good while happily sitting on the crosstrees until Spiros took her to one side and quietly explained how long it takes to get to hospital from a boat. She also became one of my ‘trusties,’ capable on the wheel at sea and on deck in harbour.
Other than that, my crew were occasionally inspired to get involved but generally just made the boat untidy. At sea they took little interest, and it would have been fine by me if they had been the same in port as well, but they did feel it incumbent upon them to do something when we were berthing, which was really when I most wanted them to sit down and keep their extremities inside the boat. Then, on the third day, I had a stroke of genius.
One of the party had a yellow portable stereo with a bulging circular speaker at each end, an implement I regarded as the death-knell of civilisation because I am a musical caveman who tends to the opinion that music ceased to be written the day Teddy Elgar turned up his toes. The term ‘boom-box’ was in current usage for such an ‘asset’ at the time, but because of its suggestive shape we called it the ‘boob-box.’
Since they had so much energy when we came in to port I suggested that our status as Largest Vessel should be emphasised, and revealed that I had a cassette recording of the works of Offenbach about my person... and you know what he wrote. Thereafter, every time we came in to port, all the spare girls donned whatever they had in the way of a short skirt, lined up along the boom and, with Offenbach’s most recognisable work crashing out of the boob-box, they performed the Can-Can with enormous gusto. This amused everyone, entertained hordes of cheering Greeks, and kept the girls well out of harm’s way. It also had the fringe benefit that they paid for significantly less of what they drank when ashore.
Being the principle sailors on Iraklis, Clemmie and I were more often with each other than with other people. She always stayed to help me with the watering, engine checks and general care of the boat whilst the rest were in town or at the beach, and we often wandered off and had a drink together, or ended up enjoying the cockpit in peace and quiet whilst the mob were marauding in the discos.
Clemmie’s far-back upper-class accent and dated slang grew on me, and we teased each other unmercifully about our breeding, or lack of it. Offenbach had outed me as a classical music hound and, although she was primarily a folk- and ethnic-music aficionado, Clemmie had been brought up playing the classics. During the evening on the island of Dokos we wandered away from the barbeque and she played me a stunning improvisation on Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy as we watched the sun set over Ermioni.
We weren’t an item. She was still rather too much of a hearty to appeal to me romantically, and I had no delusions of being irresistible to her; so there was no romantic tension. We worked and conversed easily together, I admired her as a sailor and a musician, enjoyed her company and very much appreciated her help. We laughed a lot.
* * *
The penultimate night was quite amazing. We anchored off a beach some way east of Thermissia, with a single taverna on an otherwise deserted beach. Spiros had pre-arranged the meal, which was followed by a spectacular display of unbridled Greek waiter machismo.
The show started with some Greek dancing. Notwithstanding the rural setting, the restaurant boasted five waiters all impeccably attired in black-and-whites. They now supplemented their costume with scarlet sashes, and heel-slapped, high-stepped and genuflected their way through a couple of dances to much applause.
Then they started to get competitive. First they danced individually, with bottles on their heads, turned somersaults, and generally tried to outdo each other. Whilst awaiting their go, they also began to drink quite freely with their customers. Next, one of them made a standing jump onto a table,2 alarming the occupants so much that two girls overbalanced backwards off their chairs. This led to a competition as to who could make the most consecutive such jumps, and I think one chap managed six or seven.
After this, the rest of the waiters demanded an opportunity to showcase their own particular talents, and it rapidly got silly. One of them squatted, gathered up a girl in the crook of each arm, and lifted them both off the ground.
The next tried to repeat the feat with an additional girl sitting on his shoulders... and succumbed to gravity spectacularly, ending up compressed under a wriggling assortment of female anatomical components (which may, of course, have been his intention all along). The surface was loose stone chippings, so no-one was really hurt.
Then other waiters started to load themselves up with girls from the table-tops and stagger under the greatest possible load to another table about five or six metres away, some with quite successful results, others with hilariously abortive ones. Some of the male archaeologists tried their hands… or, rather, their entire skeleto-muscular systems… at it too. And finally, of course, one of the waiters had to try it on the rickety pier extending over the water, and that ended inevitably in a rapid succession of three loud splashes. Laughter, squeals and bouzouki music flowed into the calm night air.
It would of course be an intolerable breach of storytelling convention had such an evening not had a finale, and the reader is easily forgiven if he suspects that, to give my story the classical form, I gild the lily to create the predictable denouement; but to doubt the existence of a definitive climax is to misunderstand the flamboyant nature of Greece and Greeks. There is always going to be a finale... that is the quintessentially theatrical nature of the place. It really happened.
The most thick-set of the waiters, a moustachioed enthusiast of about fifty years, who looked like the villain in an Arabian Nights tale, bellowed for attention and then tore off his shirt… quite literally, cloth sundered and buttons pinged into the audience… to reveal a body somewhere between stalwart and stout. His chest and shoulder blades were thickly forested with greying hair. He stalked around the circle of onlookers as though looking for someone to eat, and selected a slim American girl as his partner for the next event. She went willingly enough, giggling and rolling her eyes at the waiter’s hairy body, and he took her waist in two hands and swung her up easily to stand on a table. She looked a little nervous, but bowed left and right, gamely playing her part. And then she looked a bit puzzled as the waiter produced a blue plastic bottle and commenced squirting fluid up and down three of the legs of the table.
By the time the waiter had finished, she was beginning to show a little more agitation, but if she was going to bail-out she delayed too long. The waiter squatted down at one corner of the table, placing his chest against the leg and holding the side of the top in both hands. Then he took the corner of the table-top in his teeth. And stood up.
The whole restaurant gasped. The powerful little chap made it in one smooth, clean lift, holding the weight of the girl and table with his bared fangs and keeping them level by the pressure of the leg against his chest. The girl staggered and squeaked, but he had the table-top quite horizontal and unbelievably steady, so she hung in there, teetering a little with her arms spread to balance her. Then the waiter spread his arms out wide, and an acolyte started Zorba’s Dance on the stereo. He began to move slowly, smoothly. The girl pleaded, half seriously, to be let down; but she didn’t jump. And then the assistant performed the second part of his supporting role... he flicked his lighter quickly one-two-three against the table legs, and they burst into flame.
From the blue-ish hue of the conflagration it was obviously only methylated spirit, but you can imagine the reaction of the girl. After an instant of incredulity, she felt the warmth on her ankles and, emitting a shriek that would have put a band-saw to shame, she launched herself sideways into the audience, collapsing half of the front row. The table spun the opposite way, one blazing leg coming into contact with the waiter. He righted the table serenely and danced on, eyes wide, and now a trickle of flame was extending over the table-top towards him. By the time he dropped the table there was a definite smell of singed hair, a suspicion of smoke around his Adam’s apple, and any mere mortal would have beaten his chest like a gorilla after happy-hour; but our Hercules paraded around his applauding audience like a victorious prize-fighter, arms high, until he came to his erstwhile partner as she adjusted her clothing and eyed him with wild-eyed consternation. Then he gathering her into his powerful, hairy arms and, drawing her into his chest, gave her an enormous hug. C’mon, baby, put out my fire.
The girl took it extraordinarily well. She even laughed about it. Eventually.
* * *
The waiters weren’t the only macho ones. The skippers weren’t exactly deficient in testosterone either, and were always in competition. We raced whenever there was enough wind, naturally, but that was very indecisive, as the boats were not evenly matched, so the competition took other forms... fanciest dive off a high rock, deepest dive, biggest fish caught, biggest octopus, longest time underwater. The Greeks were in their element, of course… they all had spear-guns, which they used at every opportunity, and knowing the water temperature they also had wet-suits. They spent hours fishing, and when not in the water they prowled the rocks and harbour-quays with their kamakis, the long, wooden-handled octopus spears. They took the girls out in the dinghies in the evening and bounced their octopus-hooks across the seabed. Daily they brought in their harvest to feed the barbeques... Karottos in particular was a fine spear-fisherman who could stay under water about three minutes, and generally won the deep-diving contests.
All this was stuff I couldn’t possibly compete at, so I threw down the gauntlet in my own field, and just tried to down-right out-sailor them all. I made sure that I tied the fastest, flashiest knots, and I sailed every possible inch of the way. With Clemmie’s help I got my sails up and down as quickly and smoothly as could be… it was counted a deep disgrace if Iraklis didn’t have her mainsail up before she left the harbour… and I sailed in and out of anchorages without the engine. I pontificated on navigation and seamanship and, despite the fact that we were never more than a couple of miles from land, I desperately regretted the fact that my sextant was lying idle in Kyria Fotini’s best bedroom. I shamelessly expounded maritime lore… history, mythology, nautical etymology of common words and phrases… and analysed great naval battles and shipwrecks.
Even I soon realised that I had overdone it... the kids would go away happy and I would never see them again; but if I wanted to stay here I had to co-exist with Karottos, and Yeorgaki, with Xanthos and Megali and O Geros. It belatedly occurred to me that if I ever had to face a major test of my prowess, I was going to find it somewhat difficult to live up to the image of a maritime oracle which I had made for myself.
And so we came to the last day. Leaving Spiros on the beach near Thermissia, arguing about compensation for damaged tables, we set out to round Tselevinia and return to Poros. A race had been planned, but there wasn’t enough wind to bother a butterfly, so we motored. The plan was to get most of the mileage done whilst the worst hangovers were still being slept off, and then stop at Aliki beach outside Poros for lunch and a swim before going in.
Iraklis led the fleet out of the bay, and should have led all the way with her speed, but Shergar, full of confidence after several trouble-free days and in thrall to his innate belief that unused horse-power was an affront to nature, gunned his mighty engine and steadily forged past me. I gave him an indulgent wave as he passed, happy to see my fledgling taking flight, and got on with talking about astro-navigation with an earnestly interested Clemmie.
Clemmie was keen to learn astro-nav, and her questions were insightful and serious. To stay a step ahead of my student I had to concentrate quite hard at recalling my college days, and although I had a mental register on where Shergar was, it was quite a while before I realised where he was going.
Poros is separated from Hydra by a long, thin, high spur of the Peloponnese which extends eastward and ends in two islets called the Tselevinia Islands. One has to make a dog-leg of more than ninety degrees around the end of this peninsula, changing course between north-west and south-west, or vice-versa, depending which way one is going. There is a channel between the Outer and Inner Islands which looks deep and easily navigable, and this is in fact the case; it is an easy passage which almost everyone uses, even hydrofoils and ferries, as it saves at least a mile going out around Akra Skyli on the outside. But between the inner island and the shore there is also a channel which looks as if it may be navigable... and nothing much bigger than a duck should try it! It is rocky, shallow and, although a few small fishing boats with years of local knowledge go through in calm weather, it should never be attempted by anything with a keel.
The thing with these two passages is that they are not aligned. Whichever direction you approach from, one is masked so that you see only one channel; and if you come from the south-west, then it’s the bad one. Shergar, knowing nothing about charts but remembering that on the way south he had gone through a channel, had added up two and two, arrived at the answer of eight-point-nine recurring, and was blithely heading Molto Allegro and her crew of erudite archaeological savants straight towards a passage full of rocks at full speed.
I shot down to the chart room and picked up the VHF radio mike.
“Molto Allegro, Molto Allegro, this is Iraklis, over.”
Nothing. I tried again. I fiddled with the squelch knob, using the static to test the speaker volume. Maybe he was not on the working channel. I switched to channel sixteen, the calling and distress channel.
“Molto Allegro, Molto Allegro, this is Iraklis on channel sixteen, over.”
Getting desperate now.
“Shergar! Shergar! This is Julian, over.”
‘You’re wasting your time here, big fella,’ whispered a treacly smug voice somewhere inside my head, ‘Time to get out there and show some of that nautical omniscience you have been spouting about!’
I estimated that I was about half a mile behind Shergar, and had perhaps twenty minutes to get his attention. It is pretty hard to make up half a mile in a stern chase in twenty minutes under any circumstances, and Shergar was a petrol-head with an engine that would have been adequate for the Lusitania. As I rammed the throttle forward, and Iraklis spouted filthy smoke from under her counter, I knew that I wasn’t going to make it.
I was cooking up some scheme for encouraging all the crew to shout at once when I abstractly realised that the exhaust from the engine was irritating my throat, and we were probably motoring at close to seven and a half knots. Some long moments later it dawned on me that we had wind from astern, and glancing back I saw a dappling on the water with occasional white flecks... there was something of a gust coming up from behind us. Hope flared. I called Clemmie.
“Can you fly a kite?”
“Oh, rathER! Have we got one?”
I nodded. “Get forward!” I said, and then, “Giovanni, take the wheel... yes... you... Si! Prendo il... the... bloody wheel! Conductore! Timoneer, you, savvy? Steer! Take the wheel!”
I galumphed forward and dragged the spinnaker out of its cave. There were perhaps four other girls on deck, May and Miss Iceland fortunately amongst them, and I soon had them all working, passing the sheet-lines and letting the main sail out to catch the new wind.
Clemmie and I feverishly dumped the sail out on the deck and swiftly ran our hands along the luff and leach to check that it wasn’t twisted. No time to re-pack it and launch it from the bag… we’d just have to send it up from the deck as it was. It lay there, an enormous, prolapsed heap of thin red, white and blue nylon which spasmed occasionally in the rising breeze; not a hint yet of the great, powerful, arrogant belly of barely-controllable power which it represented.
“I say, Skip, what’s all the ruddy bally-hoo?” asked Clemmie privately, and I needed her on top form so I told her. Her eyes lit up.
“Roger-dodge. Mum’s the word, what! Bit of a lark!” she grinned, and I thought, I like this girl. A lot. Despite the P. G. Wodehouse vocab.
I had an enormous struggle to release the spinnaker-pole; it had lain unused so long that the outer piston was almost seized with salt, but I levered and battered it with my knife, and got it free. The pole downhauls looked as if they had seen better days... a spinnaker puts enormous lifting strain on a pole, and the downhauls control this. Anyone who has seen a down-haul break under a well-loaded spinnaker will also have seen an enormous balloon of enraged nylon shoot vertically up above the top of the mast and either become hopelessly entangled, or heave the boat right over on her side. Or both. So I quickly improvised some reinforcement out of a sturdy mooring-line, and hoped for the best.
I headed back for the wheel, and Clemmie took the halyard. I set the pole-guy and had May and Giovanni stand by the sheet. And up she went.
For a moment all was quiet; I steered down a bit to allow Clemmie to get the spinnaker up in the lee, or dead-wind area, behind the main sail, which was straining gently out to port now. The luff of the spinnaker snapped petulantly once or twice, and Clemmie came aft again with the crouching gallop of an experienced foredeck hand, which is a very good trick if you can do it. Then, with Clemmie on the sheet, I had May bring the pole square using the guy and brought the wheel around to fill the sail.
It flickered twice, and then blossomed in an instant, filling with an angry ‘boom’ that rattled the rigging and heeled the boat ten degrees in an instant. The luff began a slow, sullen flogging as Clemmie and Giovanni winched in frantically on the sheet to tame it and then, as the flogging stopped, the sail began to develop its potential. The bow dipped and Iraklis settled. You could feel her accelerate. I pulled back the engine-throttle and put her in neutral... she was already sailing faster than she could ever motor, and the wind was rising still.
Clemmie knew her stuff with a kite. She never even looked at me, but did the sheets-man’s job to perfection, trimming the sheet and issuing instructions to May on the guy. The spinnaker swelled out, a great, proud distended belly of straining red, white and blue, its enormous power transmitted to the boat through the straining mast head, the thrumming sheets and the creaking pole. Iraklis was flying now, nine knots coming up on the log and her wide, creamy wake hissed like tearing linen as it curved past her flanks.
I could feel some weight coming onto the wheel as the great sail tried to bring the boat up to windward. Heads started to appear in the companionway, complaints at the disturbance and angle-of-heel giving way to a delighted chatter as they saw the great, noble bulging kaleidoscope above their heads.
I probably still wasn’t going to make it in time to stop Shergar, but at least now I was sure someone would point out the spinnaker and make him look round. I hoped so, because otherwise I was going to have to sail into the bay after him... and wind does funny things in Greek bays. Being in a Greek bay with a spinnaker up is like walking through a tiger-park with a pork chop tied around your neck and bleating like a lamb.
At last I saw it, the flash of flesh-colour above Shergar’s T-shirt-du-jour as he turned to look back, and I raised my hand high and stabbed emphatically off to the right. He got it second go, and I saw him turn back to his crew, point for a while at the passage he was almost into,3 and then lazily swing the wheel. Molto Allegro curved smoothly out of the bay, and just as smoothly my blood pressure fell away. An unimaginable lightness of heart and a great feeling of peace fell upon me. All I had to do now was get this rampaging great boat out of the bay it was entering without alarming any of my crew... who, with the exception of Clemmie, were still under the blissful impression that I was in control.
“Everyone sit down!” I called, my guts twisting as they took their time finding comfortable places. They finally managed it, after about a year or so. And then I slacked the pole forward, and brought Iraklis around slowly.
A spinnaker becomes more difficult to control as the angle of the wind comes more on the side of the boat, and it also becomes more powerful, because the relative wind-speed increases as it comes forward. Clemmie was still doing very well on the sheet, there was no flogging, but the heel of the boat increased by another ten degrees and the speed rose over ten knots. I had a good bit of weight on the helm now, she was trying to bring her head up into the wind where the spinnaker would flog and damage something. If you get this completely wrong you may even broach, losing all control as the boat goes over on her side and then, if the spinnaker sheet is not released pronto, you could be in dismasting country. Clemmie was doing exactly the right thing; looking straight into my eyes, calmly ready in case I told her to dump the sheet. Iraklis was almost on the edge, but not quite. I still had about a turn on the wheel before I lost steering control. We screeched out of that bay like Herbert von Karajan leaving a rap concert, almost eleven knots showing on the log and the crew shrieking with nervous exhilaration.
We got the wind behind us again and Clemmie and I got things more under control. I sent Iraklis screaming past Molto Allegro a mere twenty feet to her windward side, exchanging insults with Shergar whilst the pupils abused their lecturers. Vegetables were, of course, thrown, and fire returned… Billy-Bob scored a direct hit on Miss Iceland with a tomato, and May put a yoghurt right into a Swedish lady’s cleavage... but so great was our speed that we were soon out of range.
I didn’t try to go through the ‘right’ channel, not with the kite up... we carried on outside the island, and there found the wind decreased a little and went a bit more southerly, so we very gingerly gybed the spinnaker and main, and set off for Poros at a spanking eight knots with the wind over our port quarter. Of the rest of the fleet, O Geros followed. Never to be outdone he quickly set his own spinnaker, but couldn’t close the gap. The rest dwindled far behind, apart from the motoring Shergar, who, I noticed, followed us around the outside... he had apparently had his fill of channels for one day.
* * *
The wind started to come ahead of us again about three miles out of Poros, and we dropped the spinnaker. Plodding lazily on with the main only, Clemmie and I tidied it up and put it away... I wondered how long it was since it had seen the sun; how long it would be again. And then I went back to start the engine. It ground, and it whirred, coughed and stayed resolutely inactive. We set the genoa and Clemmie sailed slowly north-west on the dying breeze as I tried to look confident and descended into the engine compartment. And let me tell you, what I don’t know about engines... well, it would fill a very large, useful book about engines.
I poked around, uttering mendaciously confident platitudes to my concerned passengers whilst looking hopefully for something very simple and obvious which was within my capabilities... such as a large switch set at ‘OFF’; and then I suddenly remembered that, in the exhilaration of setting the spinnaker, I had put the engine in neutral but I hadn’t stopped it. It must have stopped itself. Fuel starvation? The tank was still at least a quarter full. Finally I realised that, with the engine running whilst the boat was heeled hard over, we might have got an air-bubble in the fuel system. At least that was something I could deal with.
After five minutes of pumping and grinding the starter, then slacking and tightening the injector-feeds, the engine suddenly roared into life. I walked on deck feeling a million dollars, wiping oil from my hands, trying not to look smug in front of my admiring crew, and casually put the engine in gear.
An appalling grinding noise, like a noisy ogre being sick into a cement-mixer full of rocks, clattered out of the companion way, and with a massive shudder the engine stopped dead again. Oh, deary me. Well, that is the essence of what I said. My actual vocabulary was probably just a fraction more authentically nautical.
My mechanical guru, the elusive Shergar, had already passed me and was thundering into Aliki bay, a useless half mile ahead again and with his VHF radio still tuned to Planet Zog. Without him I didn’t have a clue where to start with this problem, so figuring that whatever happened now couldn’t do any more damage than had already been done, I optimistically put the engine in neutral and restarted it.
It started with no problem, and ran perfectly. I thought for a minute. Gearbox problem, then. Well, there’s two in there... if one won’t work try the other.
As Mr Spock would have said, “It’s logic Jim; but not as we know it.” But it worked. Iraklis went smoothly into gear astern, and began to gather sternway. We quickly dropped the main, and with Clemmie and I each side of the wheel to hold it straight Iraklis completed the Grave-Robber in unique style, blithely reversing half a mile into the Bourtzi channel and so to anchor off Aliki beach. Here Shergar attended, certified the gearbox as dead on arrival, and so we enjoyed a lazy lunch by way of a wake for it before towing Iraklis effortlessly back to Poros. Molto Allegro’s great, purring beast of an engine barely raised a sweat.
* * *
There was a very merry last night. I took all my crew to Petros’s cafe for sundowners and then we met up with the rest of the gang for another meal of cheap but tasty traditional Greek dishes, some of which mysteriously became airborne. Spiros played master-of-indignities with raucous abandon, dishing out silly little prizes for the dumbest deeds of the trip. I got one for being pillock enough to sail into a bay under spinnaker. (Spiros had originally been a bit cross about that, until I explained why I had done it; but then he beamed and said, “Bravo, Palikari-mou!” ‘Palikari’ translates as ‘good lad’, and is something of an accolade. It is the sort of thing one calls a trusted friend, and is used in folklore to describe the younger revolutionaries who fought well against the Turks, so I enjoyed that).
The party went late into the night. Some of the kids went to the Kavos and Korali discos up on the rocks at the end of the dock, others stayed in the cafes or retired to the boats. I made a random last minute effort to chat-up the Swedish lecturer with the yoghurt-flavoured bosom, and after I had been very charmingly told to go and boil my head the American lady lecturer drew me to one side. For a moment I thought my luck was in, but she only wanted to talk about Shergar.
“Y’know,” she said (in a crisp American accent which was at the other end of the evolutionary scale entirely from Billy-Bob’s sub-Mason-Dixon porridge), “He never let up, right to the end. Last dang thing he said was ‘I don’t think I’ll ever be any good at this sailing business.’ He was an absolute hoot!”
The wine was in, the wit was out, and I couldn’t resist it.
“Well, he’s a very truthful chap!” I said. Her brow creased.
“Whad’ya mean?”
“He’s a racing car driver, not a sailor,” I said. “He’s our mechanic. He really doesn’t know anything about boats at all. We were short-handed.”
She looked at me uncertainly for a minute, and then let out a whoop of laughter.
“Ah, you Brits and your sense of humour! You’re worse than he is!” And off she went, apparently perfectly convinced that she had been in safe hands all week.
We saw about sixty hangovers off at the ferry quay the next morning. The rattling old pantouffle farted and puffed its way back off the dock and plodded doggedly out of the bay. The skippers all sagged slightly. We bad each other weary farewells, and went our separate ways.
Shergar and I traipsed sluggishly back to the South Quay, where we collapsed on Petro’s terrace and consumed a pyramid of bacon sandwiches. He brought us both a beer on the house as well. We sat quietly, both quite drained by five frantic days. My body was pleading for sleep, and my get-up-and-go had not just got-up-and-gone, it had changed its name and emigrated without leaving a forwarding address. But a quiet day would soon sort that out, I knew, and then I would want to be out on charter once more... I had loved the experience, and it depressed me that there was no immediate prospect of doing it all over again. I didn’t think Spiros would have many other charters, even for a ‘palikari’, until after Easter at least. In all probability it would be the height of summer before he needed me. I could expect some deliveries, but it could be months before I skippered a charter-boat again, and the thought deflated me.
I glumly cleaned up Iraklis and walked away from her, leaving the poor thing broken and forlorn at the quayside, waiting for someone to come and fix her gearbox. I settled down at Petro’s with a kanata of retsina, and as Mine Host did not have much business he sat with me for a while. He gave me his world-standard sardonic smile.
“How was your big boat? You got towed in, huh?”
I nodded, and said, a little defensively, “Gearbox. No idea what went wrong... I could only go astern.” He nodded.
“S’always problems, that boat. Gets towed more than a caravan.”
I thought about this a moment.
“It’s had engine problems before?”
“That boat? Always! Engine, gearbox, electrics... s’a pieca shit. Las’ year the oil leaked inna the bilge an’ got pumped in the harbour... the cap’n spent two days in jail. The owner don’ spend no money. They gotta name for it... stead of Iraklis, they calls it ‘Horror-klis’. Nobody in Poros gonna drive that thing.”
So now I knew why no-one else was qualified to drive ‘The Big Boat’. They weren’t stupid enough!
* * *
Three days later there was a powerful blow and strong rain overnight, to which I was awakened in the early hours by unsecured shutters crashing against the windows. Blasts of enraged wind buffeted my house high on the hill, sending chilling jets of air squirting into the room at every ill-fitting window-frame. Salvoes of heavy rain flayed the roof-tiles, and the flash and grumble of thunder stalked the mountains around the bay. The noise in my un-insulated apartment resembled that in a speeding underground train.
Sensible people would have burrowed deeper into the duvet and luxuriated in being dry and snug on such a night, but I love dramatic weather and take a macabre interest in its effects. Hastily donning my waterproofs, I hurried down to the quay to see what was going on and help out if anyone needed a hand. After years of dealing with my own maritime mishaps, I find it utterly delightful to assist other people by way of a change, and a higher altruistic plane is always achieved when I perform in full waterproofs; thus I was in a state of beatific smugness (a good trick if one can manage it) for the next hour or two as I assisted fishermen and yachtsmen to sort out various predicaments in the driving rain and gusty wind.
On the North Quay there was a real shemozzle for a while, a motor boat having dragged her anchor and fallen across two charter yachts. It took until after daybreak to get that sorted. Then several grateful boats offered me coffee in their cockpits… coffee which the wild weather dictated had to be laced with something to keep out the cold… and we chatted away the early hours contentedly. It was some time after the first ferry from Piraeus had chugged in before I got ashore again, reflecting as I did so on the astounding number of wonderful and varied folk I would never have met if someone hadn’t made a cock-up in a boat. I’ve seen common endeavour for the preservation of fibreglass unite people across any social barrier you care to name… national, cultural, social, class, economic, even soccer… and I cogitated upon this phenomenon as I pushed my way along the North Quay through the still-boisterous air.
Sailing is a definitively international pursuit; and it is socially varied too. The racing scene, with its jet-set image, luxury sponsors and hallmark events like the America’s Cup, has a strong whiff of elitism about it, but there are far more do-it-yourself types out on the water than plutocrats, and even the rich chaps with their carbon-fibre speed-machines need lots of proletarian grunt to wind their winches. The result is that the sailing world throws together people from all backgrounds. In a yacht-club, or even some marinas, you may find stratified society; but on the harbour-wall you meet the world.
Yet, as much variety as there is in the waterfront world, you do need a catalyst to make the final bond. Like does tend to cling to like. Racing men don’t have much in common with passage-makers, family cruisers or live-aboards; people sailing their own boats keep a very leery eye on charterers; all the rag-flappers combined are united against motor-boaters, and the divide between any type of leisure-boater and professional fishermen or ferrymen is generally of Berlin Wall quality. But the one place all these disparate users of the waters cannot avoid interaction is in harbour cock-ups, and the upshot of this is that you can meet an amazingly catholic selection of people in the sailing game, but mostly only in times of crisis!
One is attracted to people who acquit themselves well in adversity, whether in terms of skill, imperturbability or simple good nature. Having passed through the fire in company, and seen one another in misfortune, one recognises qualities in people one would otherwise probably never have even looked at. It is the ‘Band of Brothers’ syndrome: ‘For he that shreds his boat with me today shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition!’
As I pondered this it struck me abruptly how many of my friends I had first met when the wind was piping and the fibreglass flying, friendships often begun at odds but fashioned into bonds by mutual suffering. It occurred to me that, in such circumstances, I had even exchanged civilities with jet-skiers; and upon that very shocking thought, I believe, I formulated my Second Law of Nautical Recreation… ‘One meets a better class of person in collisions’.
* * *
The sense of virtuous accomplishment which I accumulated from both the morning’s events and the formulation of a new nautical axiom left me feeling as perky as Pinky’s brother, and I also found myself exceedingly keen on the idea of breakfast. I set off for George’s Cafe beneath a scudding sky of low, grizzled cloud, the tail-end of the gale ripping through my hair and beard.
As I reached the ferry quay I met Shergar coming the opposite way on his little gorilla-bike with, behind him on what there was of the pillion, Miss Iceland! She gave me a great, cheesy grin and a wave as I stared open-mouthed.
“Oi, Captain!” bellowed Shergar, with an unmistakable smirk, “You’d better get up home. There’s something going on up at your house!”
I waved acknowledgement and trotted up the steps. It is quite a way up, for a seafaring gentleman like me who enjoys his table; and the direct route from the Heroes Square is pretty steep. By the time I arrived at the house, marginally concerned about what I might find there, I was drawing breath like a blacksmith’s bellows and feeling distinctly over-heated under my waterproofs. I was, thus, not quite the calm, collected chap I might have wished to be as I entered the avli and found Clemmie sitting on my steps, doing Cheshire Cat impressions.
“Wha... how... Clemmie, dear girl! How the devil are you?” I panted.
“Top hole, Skip. In the pink. How about you?”
I gestured to my sweating face.
“Even more... in the pink... as you... see...” I puffed. “What are you doing here? Err... delighted of course... pleased to... see you...”
“How very flatteringly you put that! Well recovered... we’ll make a pretentious bourgeois upstart out of you yet! Wellllllllllllllll...” She looked at me appraisingly, “I have about ten days before I have to go to Turkey, for the Ephesus visit, don’cher know, sooooo... I came back to see if you were telling the truth.”
“I doubt it!” I said. “I’m sure I would have remembered. About anything in particular? Or are you after The Truth... is there a God? Why are we here, what’s it all about, all that stuff? I charge extra for that.”
She stood up, pursed her lips as if mulling something over, and rather suggestively scratched the door of my room.
“Have you ryally got a sextant in he-yar?”
I nodded.
“We’re not talking about one of those plastic things, are we? You have a real, live sextant? Brass, glass, enamel? Sort of thing Ahab and Horatio Wotsit would recognise?”
“Made by Cooke of Kingston-upon-Hull, serial number 5904. With an eight-by-thirty monocular sight for stars. I can even work Venus in daylight on a clear day.”
“Ah. Tempting. Very tempting. Because, you see, I ryally would like to learn astro-nav.”
“Ah ha! Well, I’ve got everything you need, including Nories tables, a star-finder and this year’s nautical almanac. And a short-wave radio, for the time signals.”
Clemmie sighed theatrically.
“Oh, you silver-tounged devil, you. What’s a girl to do? One tries to be virtuous, one tries to be good, but it’s a wicked world, full of things we want...”
“I’ll have to get a chart and some parallel rules... they’ve got them in the chandlery...”
“Oh! There you go again, talking dirty!” She grinned. “Is it a deal then? You’ll teach me?”
I tugged my forelock and bowed my head.
“Most ’appy to be of ’umble service to yer Ladyship!” I servile-ed in my best Faaarmer Joiles accent.
“Jolly Dee. But there’s just one thing...” She grinned impishly and looked me straight in the eye. “Regretfully, one has to stoop to grubby commercialism when dealing with the lower classes... and you really are a fearful oik, you know. Pater always insisted on paying the menials… God knows why, but there you are; but he also said a lady shouldn’t carry cash. Can I pay with Sexual Excess?”
I opened the door to the room and waved her in with a flourish.
“That,” I said, “will do nicely!”