Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat (9 page)

“Go on, then—we’re almost home anyway. Maybe the thing that was making it get so hot has loosened up. We can always turn it off if things start to cut up rough.”

So I turned the key and a little nervously pushed the starter. The engine burst into life and once again we surged on toward Spetses and the waiting welcome committee.

It held out well this time; I was running it slowly, just above the idle, to keep it as cool as possible, because I knew we would need it for the final docking maneuver and, as my crew had so succinctly pointed out, we didn’t want to make a cock-up of it.

We puttered slowly around the point and turned in toward the harbor. Tim was right: there on the dock was Jane, transported in what looked like a homemade litter, a Heath Robinson contrivance banged up for the occasion out of an old bedstead and some palm fronds. She sat in this flower bedecked contraption and held court among the score or so of friends who surrounded her, in their summer glad rags, and she like some queen of ancient times about to bless the waves. But that wasn’t the half of it. As Tim had suggested, the whole damn island was down there too, whooping it up on the dock. There were rockets and a band and buckets of booze and Bouboulina herself was there, magnificent in effigy, a great papier-mâché lady admiral, glowering censoriously out across the water.

“We’d better make this look good,” I said. “Or we’re going to look prize arse’oles. There’s enough of a breeze now to sail in. Let’s do it.”

I cut the engine and brought the Crabber around. Tim trimmed the sails and she heeled gently and started her final run into the harbor. The wind direction wasn’t quite right, but it would just about do. We were going to end up just a little farther away from the dock than I would have liked, but no matter.

As soon as we came into view we heard loud cheers from Jane’s contingent—we must have cut a fine dash
with all the red sails up and pulling—followed by a frenzied toasting and waving of scarves and kerchiefs. We smiled and waved to the happy crowd.

At the last moment I rounded up and started the engine, just letting it tick over for when we needed it. We dropped the sails and bundled them up neatly in a tight harbor stow.

“Better make this a bit snappy,” observed Tim. “She’s starting to smoke.”

“Jee-zus, you’re right.” She wasn’t just starting to smoke; we’d been too busy with the sails to notice, but there were clouds of smoke belching from the engine hold now. There was the faintest sense of consternation coming off the land, murmurs of concern, questions asked…. Was this perhaps some part of the Bouboulina festivities?

We drifted farther away from the mooring, not waving and smiling now, but panicking just a bit as we tried to retrieve something of the dignity of the occasion. Tim was on the foredeck, ready to do his stuff with the anchor. I jammed the engine into reverse and hit the throttle by mistake. The engine howled and promptly burst into flames. The boat rocketed backward toward the dock, belching smoke and flame. A Greek fire ship in reverse. The Bouboulina revelers on the dock scattered like ninepins—all except newly hipped Jane, enthroned among the greenery and flowers of the makeshift litter.

“Anchor aweigh.”

“What?”

“DROPANCHORFORCHRISSAKES!! NOW!”

Tim dropped the anchor as we hurtled back. I hit the
gear lever. Damn thing jammed. Engulfed now in the fire and smoke, I jabbed and tugged for all I was worth at the lever.

“SNAGOFFTHEANCHORLINENOW!” I yelled above the foul din … just as a moment later with a satisfying crunch the Crabber crashed at speed into the stone dock.

Jane rose a little unsteadily from her litter, leaning on her stick, and cried,
“Sto kaló
, all to the good, dear Chris. Welcome. I am overjoyed to see you and the Crabber safe and sound.”

IF JANE WAS A
little disappointed by the spectacular mode of our arrival, she was kind enough not to show it. Loyalty was one of her finer qualities, and I think she had decided that after all my tribulations in Kalamaki, I deserved a break.

Florica, who was also there on the dock, gave us a touching account of Jane’s spirited defense of her new skipper, to the less-than-impressed party of guests. Florica herself, though, had some searching questions of her own to ask us, such as why, when we knew the engine was faulty, hadn’t we stayed on at Aegina and arranged for it to be repaired? It was a suggestion that left us both, and especially the more responsible Tim, feeling somewhat sheepish. He redeemed himself by introducing me to the island’s best mechanic, who had the engine fixed by the end of the week.

Sadly, neither Tim and Florica could stay much longer than that. They had work to return to in Athens and London
and were soon boarding the hydrofoil themselves. The trip to the mountains we would have to leave for another time. We parted with plans to meet up in London and, unusually for a holiday friendship, we each of us knew that we would. And so my summer job finally began.

As summer jobs go—indeed, jobs of any kind—this was a pretty good one. My duties were simply to keep the boat and myself in readiness to take Jane and her friends out on the water at any time of night or day.

Occasionally we would take the boat across the straits to a waterfront taverna on the mainland, setting out from the simple wooden jetty close to Jane and Bob’s house. We would leave in the cool of the evening, just as the sun, drained of its noonday ferocity, sank toward the blue hills of the Peloponnese. This was a lovely hour to go sailing, on the gentlest of evening breezes and the sea almost shimmering. For a couple of hours we would sail lazily northward, trailing fingers and toes in the calm water till we dropped the sails and drifted deftly alongside the wooden tables at the quayside where we were to meet some of Jane and Bob’s friends for dinner.

Dinner would go on for hours and I would sit with the boat tied, like an obedient dog, to my chair leg. The little harbor teemed with fish and there were candles in jam jars on the tables; the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle complemented by dishes of fried squid with the lightest coating of batter glistening with droplets of freshly squeezed lemon. Later, as the pale moon rose over the dark bulk of Trikiri, we would motor back to the island, shattering into bright shards the moonlight that lay on the still water. Jane would take the tiller and dream perhaps
of her girlhood down in the Deep South, of the days when she could run fast and easy and dance all night. Bob would smoke and quietly tell stories that Jane must have heard a hundred times before, yet managed to greet with a look of amused attention. And me, I sat leaning against the mast in the dark, captivated by it all, and pleasingly troubled by wistful thoughts of my girlfriend.

At other times we might load the boat with food and wine and sail round the island to some quiet bay for a picnic beneath the pines on the beach, and there we would loll till late in the afternoon, in the glorious scented shade of warm Mediterranean pine. Or we might sail on to the house of one of their friends who had a waterside home with its own jetty and there take a lingering lunch through the long hot hours of the afternoon. Usually I would be invited, too, but on the odd occasion when the hosts were especially superior people, I would stay on the boat, munch sandwiches, and read some poetry books that Tim had left me—the very Seferis and Gatsos recommended by the Nikoses. And I’d swim, of course. Whenever the heat or tiredness overtook me, I’d simply plunge into the water and circle the boat for a while.

There were times, too, on those fiercely hot late summer days when there was just nowhere to get cool on the land. On those days we would take the Crabber out and sail to and fro, luxuriating in the blessed coolness of the wind on the water. I figured from the paths of conversation that this would probably be Jane’s last year with the Crabber, and it was up to me to do what I could to help make it a good one.

If the seas were too rough, we’d stay at home, lounge
about, read, or take long siestas. The original deal had been that I would live on the boat, which was fine for the odd night, but a bit of an ordeal for much longer. Fortunately, though, my employers insisted that I take a spare room in their villa. The very essence of minimalism it was, with a red tiled floor, a bed, and a chair with a mosquito coil smoking through the night. I would breakfast alone with a book, in the shade of a fig tree, on toast and butter and honey and yogurt, washed down with “mountain tea;” lunch and dinner we would take together on the terrace.

As late summer moved into autumn the high winds and stormy seas confined us more and more to the land. The pinewoods that crowned the hill above the town burst forth with a carpet of beautiful little Mediterranean cyclamen. At night there was the smell of wood smoke, and the occasional squall of rain would come tearing across the Saronic Gulf and lash the island for an hour or so. All the summer visitors had gone, and we began to make preparations to close the house up for the winter. Finally came the morning on which I helped carry Bob and Jane’s baggage down to the town.

I laid their bags on the dock, among the usual milling crowd of Spetsiots who waited, with their trolleys and heaps of mysterious boxes and parcels tied with string, for the midmorning hydrofoil.

“My dear,” said Jane, as the craft came into view, “I can’t pretend to know what next year will bring. At our age we’re happy just to enjoy the present. But as long as we keep my lovely Crabber you must come and sail her. There’ll always be a place for you here.”

I hugged her warmly.

“Good-bye, skipper,” said Bob, extending his hand. “It has been a great pleasure. Please come and visit with us in London.”

I saw them climb aboard, and stood on the dock and waved until I could see them no more. Then I turned and walked along the jetty to the town, where I had a coffee and a honey bun, before strolling along to the boatyard to make arrangements for taking the Crabber out of the water.

I
N THE WINTER, AFTER
I had come back from Greece, Tom Cunliffe rang. The nights were drawing in by now, the trees were bare, and there was ice on the puddles in the yard. Ana and I spent the long evenings as close as we could get to the pathetic excuse for a stove that was all our wretched farm hovel offered in the way of heating. I was working again with the sheep, this time as a contract shepherd on a nearby Sussex farm. In contrast to my elysian summer, I spent my days out on the hills, up to my knees in mud and driving rain, sorting lambs, foot-rotting sheep, moving electric fences. I enjoyed the work and was decently paid for it, but was troubled by a restlessness, a feeling that the chapter I had opened on the sea had come to a close before I’d had a chance to prove myself. I daydreamed that instead of grappling day after day with sodden sheep, I might have been better employed at the helm
of some graceful craft, plowing across the oceans of the world.

Tom, as you may recall, had been my teacher on the Competent Crew course, and the man who had first instilled in me a love of the sea and its boats, as well as its language and literature.

“We’ve just about finished work on
Hirta
, Chris,” Tom announced, “and she’s looking magnificent. Tight as a nut, and she goes like a rocket.”

I could well believe it.
Hirta
was his boat, a vintage Bristol Channel Pilot Cutter that he and his wife, Ros, had been restoring. I had seen her when I’d gone to visit Tom for the weekend, at the end of our Isle of Wight sailing course, and had been bewitched by her classic beauty. She looked not unlike a Crabber, only much bigger and more solid and with a long graceful sheer.

“I’m getting a crew together,” Tom continued. “We’re going to sail her up to Norway and across the North Atlantic to Iceland, and eventually to Newfoundland—you know, in the footsteps of Leif Eriksson.”

“Hell, Tom … that sounds fantastic.”

“I wouldn’t put it quite like that,” he went on. “It’s going to be a beast of a journey: five months, at least. And even in summer it’ll be bloody cold. There’ll be icebergs up there, and bound to be a storm or two. I can’t promise you plain sailing, but you’re right—it’ll be fun, and you’ll learn a hell of a lot more than you did puddling around in the Med on that little tub of yours.”

“You mean … you mean … ?” I spluttered. I wasn’t sure I had heard right.

To say I was excited would be an understatement. I
was staggered. This was an adventure like I’d grown up imagining an adventure to be. Tom went on to say that our voyage north would be the most unpleasant and dangerous experience I would ever be likely to have, that I would be by turns sopping wet, freezing cold, unutterably bored, and frightened half to death.

“Are you on, then?” he concluded.

“Well, of course I’m on,” I almost shouted.

How could I possibly resist such a tempting prospect? Perhaps I ought to mention it to Ana, but there was plenty of time for that. I listened on. The rest of the crew had already been chosen: Ros would be going, of course, which meant they’d be bringing along Hannah, their four-year-old daughter, who had effortlessly won my heart when I’d first met her. Then there was John, a merchant-seaman shipmate of Tom’s, to whom, he assured me, he’d happily trust his boat and his life; Patrick, an ex-army man who knew about sailing in the Arctic; and Mike, a teenager who had done exceptionally well on Tom’s skipper course and was taking a gap year before starting an engineering degree.