Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [21]
“Drop anchor,” I cried in a nautical fashion, and Tim dropped the anchor, letting the line run out through the fairlead.
“Make fast to the bitts!” and Tim, without a moment’s hesitation, made fast to the bitts, as I had briefed him to do. I switched off the engine and leaped onto the shore, at the same moment as the Crabber pulled up just half a yard short of the dock. I took a turn round a bollard with the mooring warps and jumped back onboard to cleat them off.
I looked at Tim and Tim looked back at me. Nothing had gone wrong; the whole daunting maneuver had gone off without mishap. It was almost too much to take onboard. Later we sat in a taverna by the dock drinking retsina, rather a lot of it, and discussing our next move. If we had had half a brain between us we would have gone to a boatyard on Aegina and got the boat fixed there and then. But I felt that we had already started our journey. Spetses was not so very far away now, and I was keen to get the boat down to its home. Also a certain mood of unfounded optimism had taken hold as a result of the success of the docking and the pleasant hour of sailing we had enjoyed on the wings of the evening breeze. In short, we had completely forgotten how awful the previous day had been. We decided to leave for Spetses the next morning, engine or no engine. But we did take the precaution of buying a big red plastic bucket.
BRIMMING WITH CONFIDENCE IN our newfound powers of seamanship, we left the dock without the engine, under sail. This was a matter of casting off the mooring lines, pushing off and heaving on the anchor line to get a bit of speed up, then raising the staysail, sheeting it hard in so the breeze carried the bow round … then finally up with all the sails and off and away to the south. The whole maneuver unfolded flawlessly, seemingly without effort.
As we sailed slowly along the west coast of the island the breeze began to freshen and veered a little until it was blowing strongly from the northeast. Tim was on the tiller and I was on the foredeck fooling around with the sails. We shot out from the end of the island and turned a little to the east in order to go round the outside of Poros instead of navigating the narrow channel between the island and the mainland.
There were about twelve miles from the southern tip of Aegina to Hydra, where we would be bearing west for the final run home to Spetses. It took us not much more than a couple of hours, about as swiftly as a little boat like this could go. Tim, who was learning fast how to feel the wind with a delicate touch of the tiller, how to keep the sails filled and working to drive us forward, was a natural. And I could tell that he was ecstatic about this new experience. As was I; our whole beings were suffused with the sheer joy of wind and water and sunshine, and the beauty of our little craft. For this, too, is a big part of the pleasure, the way a boat moves in the water, whether she be gliding across the still waters of a sheltered bay or—in that school anthology poem of John Masefield’s—“Butting through the Channel in the mad March days.”
No wonder people get emotional about their boats, I thought to myself … and still think. Because boats—or, at any rate, old wooden boats—have their personalities, their foibles, their weaknesses, and their beauty. The wind sings in the rigging; the hull creaks and groans as the stays take the strain of the wind in the sails; then there’s the clanking and rattle of the winches, of the blocks and tackles, of the hoists and lifts and purchases, the jolly rollicking of the parrel balls as they roll up and down the mast. There’s the smells, too, the wood and the oil, the unforgettable smell of tarred twine and Stockholm tar; there’ll always be an undertone of fish, too, and the huge smell of the sea.
And the beauty, the incomparable beauty, of sailing boats is a thing that has settled deep in my heart and it’s hard to get rid of it. Of all the beautiful things