Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [20]
But it was worth a try so, nervously, we started the engine again. It seemed to run fine, so, leaving the cover off, we slipped it into gear. Again the blessed cooling breeze, the churning of the wake astern. I spat in the sea. The filmy bubbles vanished behind us in seconds.
“There’s that smell again,” said Tim.
I peered into the hold. Sure enough the curl of blue smoke, the woodwork glowing like hot coals. I pulled the stop knob and the silence reasserted itself. It had been no more than five minutes, but five minutes at five knots, and the little bit of freewheeling at the end, take you the best part of half a mile. Aegina was definitely a lot nearer than Kalamaki now. We felt heartened a little by this.
So now we figured that we could use the engine in brief bursts in an emergency, but any more than five minutes would have the Crabber engulfed in flames. It was going to be a long, long afternoon.
I decided to teach Tim some knots to while away the time. We may not have had a bucket, but the Crabber was well supplied with bits of old rope. Rather pleased with my own recently gleaned knowledge and love of knots, I showed him the amazing bowline and its interesting qualities and uses; then we did the clove hitch, the reef knot, and the granny, all of which he knew already. Then on to the more complicated rolling hitch, the fisherman’s hitch, the sheepshank, the sheet bend, the sailors’ knot, and the beautiful Turk’s head. This activity occupied us for more than an hour, and it was an hour in which, apart from the study of the knots and its attendant self-improvement, we made not the slightest bit of progress. We had given up spitting into the sea, partly in order to conserve bodily liquids, but partly, too, because neither of us felt it was quite the right thing to do. In our precarious situation the last thing we wanted to do was give offense to, say, Neptune, or Doris and her sisters. It was pretty obvious we were not getting anywhere, anyway.
Next we told stories, mostly of a salacious and mildly humorous type, but of this we soon tired. Finally Tim started to tell me about Greek history. He did this so well that I was absolutely captivated, and time seemed to pass in a completely different way. Almost before I knew it, the sun had dipped behind the mountains and we were in blessed shade.
Tim was sitting with his back against the mast, while I lay slumped in the cockpit idly waggling the tiller. We had moved a long way back through history, and Tim was on to the War of Independence: “… and then there was Athanasios Diakos—the Turks broke every bone in his body with hammers, before impaling him …” when all of a sudden, the boat heeled hard over.
“The wind, the wind,” we cried, as we let out the sails and sheeted them home, and the Crabber leaped and scudded eagerly toward the west. In less than an hour we were rounding the point at the northern tip of the island. Night was falling, and the lights of the little town were just coming on.
We switched direction without mishap and with the wind now coming over our port quarter we eased down the west side of the island.
THIS WAS WHERE OUR next problem appeared. In Greece the convention is to moor your boat stern to—that is, with the back of the boat against the quay and the bow facing outward, kept in check by the anchor. In order to achieve this, there is a complex maneuver that involves sailing past the slot where you have decided to moor your boat, then backing in, dropping the anchor on the way. You let the anchor line run as you move carefully backward, your fenders down to cushion the inevitable crunching of the neighboring boats. At the last moment, just as you are about to crash into the dock, you kill the engine, snag the anchor line, and leap off onto the shore with your mooring warps to make them fast. This is all done in one swift movement. Unfortunately, I had never performed the maneuver before and my engine was, to say the least, unreliable.
I was understandably a little nervous as we rounded up outside the dock