Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [17]
Of course, next morning the Nikoses failed to show up. I was in a state of excitement verging upon hysteria and Tim got so fed up with me moaning on about the Nikoses—Where were the buggers?—that he marched off and sorted out the harbor crane himself. It took an hour; these things are best done at a steady pace … one small slip with a harbor crane and that’s the end of your boat. But finally there was the Crabber—a boat really ought to have a name, but the Crabber was always known as “the Crabber”—in her proper element, floating in the water.
Tim excelled himself further by fixing the paperwork with the harbor authorities that would allow the Crabber to leave the dock. We loaded the water, figs, dates, olives, and bread, our iron rations (in case things cut up really rough), filled the tank with diesel … and cast off.
Bub … bub … bub, bub, bubbububbubbub went the engine, a big inboard diesel with a deep pleasing throb. I let Tim take the tiller while I flaked down the warps—this seemed no time to give a lesson in what a warp was and how to flake it—and we throbbed slowly along between the pontoons, nosing through the slicks of oil and rafts of floating rubbish. Tim pushed the tiller across and we edged between the breakwaters and at long last out into the mighty rolling blue sea.
As I looked back, I could just make out a trikiklo bouncing along the harbor mole. It pulled up at the end and disgorged the Nikoses, who jumped up and down, and waved encouragingly for a bit. We waved back in a more restrained, Anglo-Saxon manner before returning to the business of setting sail. “Head into the wind and we’ll get the sails up and we can turn that horrible engine off,” I shouted.
Now with most people, if you were to tell them to head into wind, they wouldn’t have a clue what you were talking about, but Tim was a natural. I busied myself with the mess of tangled ropes and pulleys on the foredeck, and within twenty minutes or so had the sails all hoisted. I turned the engine off, and we abandoned ourselves to the sounds of the sea and the gentle breeze coming out of the north.
ON A CLEAR DAY—and this was the clearest of days—you can see the island of Aegina from the harbor mouth at Kalamaki. It appears as a slightly darker gray blue than the gray blue of the mountains on the mainland behind, and the nearer you approach, the more it detaches itself, until finally it appears as a living island with its forest of pines and its cliffs and coves and villages. I figured that because it was our first time out, it might be better to hop from island to island on the way down, following the ferry route, rather than launch ourselves out into the open sea.
The little wind we had was just about right to get us to Aegina, so I pulled the tiller over, let out the mainsail until it blossomed with wind, then cleated the sheet home. Tim adjusted the jib and the staysail until they were smooth like a well-ironed sheet and full of the breeze, and the little boat bounded away across the blue sparkling water, shattering the wavelets into trails of pale foam. Oh lord, were there words to convey the simple joy of feeling the pull of the tiller on a sailing boat scudding across the bright blue sea in the sunshine? I laughed and I laughed and my eyes filled with tears, partly from the breeze and the salt-laden spray, but partly, if the truth be told, from sheer ecstasy.
Little by little the port suburbs of Athens dropped away astern, the sea became deeper and bluer … and then the wind dropped. The cat’s-paw wavelets on the surface disappeared and the sea turned glassy. The Crabber stopped her headlong motion.
You always think of the Ancient Mariner at times like these, dragging around the carcass of the albatross, decrying the terrible stillness and silence of the sea. But in reality it’s not silent at all. With the