Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [19]
We sat back and wiped the sweat from our eyes. There was a horrible sizzling, a smell of oily smoke and steam.
“There must be something not quite right,” I observed. “It’s not supposed to do that.”
Tim refrained from making any comment, for which I was grateful. He blinked down at his sodden shirt.
“I think it’s a mistake to put to sea without a bucket,” he suggested. “I suppose we’ll have to return to Kalamaki and see about getting it fixed.”
“Not bloody likely,” I cried. “I’d sooner die than go back to that hellhole. We’re heading to Aegina.”
This ill-considered utterance produced a silence between us. Neither of us quite knew how to put what we were thinking. Eventually Tim spoke. “And how,” he said, “would we get to Aegina if, say, we were to want to go there?”
“Well, we’d have to sail, wouldn’t we?”
I was very conscious of being the skipper here, and it was my clear duty not to spread panic among the rather volatile crew. I would play the nastiness of our situation down. Things were, after all, about as bad as things could get. Here we were, out in the middle of the ocean, midway between Kalamaki and Aegina, in a boat that would at the least provocation, so it seemed, burst into flames. There was not a breath of wind to take us anywhere and, perhaps worst of all, we had no bucket. On the positive side we had some figs and dates and olives and a couple of bottles of drinking water.
“But there isn’t any wind,” said Tim with irritating predictability. “Here we are out in the middle of the sodding ocean …”
“It’s not an ocean,” I interrupted testily. “It’s a sea. We are, if I’m not mistaken, in the Aegean.”
“Now, let’s face it, Chris, it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference to our plight whether it’s an ocean or a sea, does it?”
WHICHEVER WAY WE LOOKED at it, our situation was grim. If we’d had a radio or some such thing, we could have radioed for help, but, as I’ve already been at pains to point out, we didn’t even have a sodding bucket. I could see that Tim was wondering about the wisdom of having invited a person such as me to share his journey to the mountains.
The Crabber lifted and fell almost imperceptibly on the gentle swell. The boom swung regularly to and fro, each time with a sickening crash. The sun poured down upon our unprotected heads. It was far from pleasant. A resolution had to be made, in order to move us out of the disagreeable state of affairs in which we found ourselves and into the next one, whatever that might prove to be.
We resolved to keep the sails trimmed in order to take advantage of even the slightest passing zephyr. We had already observed, by dint of spitting into the sea and watching the boat’s movement in relation to the bubbles thus produced, that although we appeared to be standing stock-still, we were in fact heading in an unspectacular fashion toward Aegina. There was some considerable distance left to cover, about six nautical miles I reckoned, but the likelihood was that as the long day drew toward evening a breeze might spring up and, all being well, we could be in the harbor by nightfall.
We amused ourselves for a time by studying the engine and its mountings, to see if we could discover the cause of the fire. Neither Tim nor I, though, are of a mechanical turn of mind, and so the exercise consisted in not much more than staring into the engine hold in bovine fashion and shaking our heads in disbelief.
“We could,” suggested Tim, “try running the engine again, for a short time, and see what happens.”
“It’s a bit of a risk,” I said. “If the boat catches fire properly, we’re doomed.”
Oddly enough, fire at sea is one of the worst of the mariner’s fears; it’s the canvas and the wood and the usually strong wind to fan the flames, the presence of the three elements—air, fire, and water—and the absence of the fourth, the blessed unyielding