Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [23]
Where was the Crabber? I looked all around. Christ, it was halfway to Spetses! I could see Tim buggering about ineffectually with the tiller and the sheets.
“WHAT THE HELL WAS I SUPPOSED TO DO NEXT?” he shouted.
“HARDEN YOUR SHEETS AND TURN INTO WIND.”
He flapped about a bit and then headed off upwind.
Perhaps at this point I should say that we were lunatics enough to do this without wearing life jackets.
“OK. NOW WHAT?”
“NOW TACK, TURN RIGHT, SLACKEN OFF YOUR SHEETS AND HEAD OFF OVER THERE UNTIL I SAY SO.”
The Crabber came through the wind and rocketed off downwind of me. I was treading water and trying hard not to think of all the horrible denizens of the deep with intentions inimical to my well-being.
“RIGHT, NOW TURN LEFT, SHEET IN YOUR SAILS AND HEAD FOR TRIKIRI. ON THE WAY YOU OUGHT TO PASS ME.”
He did, indeed, pass me, and then rounded up elegantly to fish me out of the water … and thus I live to tell the tale. After all, Tim was, as I have already said, a natural sailor.
BY THE TIME WE had finished fooling around in the water, the wind had dropped to the merest breath, but the island was barely a couple of miles off now. We could see the little lighthouse on the rocks at the mouth of the harbor.
“You know there’ll be a party on the dock to welcome our arrival, don’t you?” said Tim.
“I doubt it. Nobody knows exactly when we’re going to arrive … least of all us,” I added glumly as I looked up at the sagging sails.
“Oh, they’ll know all right; someone will have spotted us as soon as we sailed out from behind Hydra.”
“It seems a little unlikely,” I protested.
“Not a bit,” countered Tim. “We’re the only boat around here with red sails—you can see us coming a mile off—and Jane and her friends spend half their day sitting on their terraces, drinking gin and watching the sea. Not to mention the fact that it’s the Bouboulina festival.”
“And just what exactly is Bouboulina?”
“Bouboulina,” explained Tim, “was a Spetsiot admiral during the War of Independence—a female admiral, to be exact. And, among her many exploits, she put to rout the Ottoman navy in Spetses Harbor—which is what the whole shindig commemorates.”
“How did she set about that?” I asked, getting interested now.
“Fireships,” said Tim. “She set fire to a number of her ships and sailed them into the midst of the tightly packed Ottoman fleet. Burned the lot to a frazzle.” He looked at me meaningfully to see if the full impact of Bouboulina’s deeds was getting through. “So you can take it from me, most of the island will be down at the port, with the priests and dignitaries doing their stuff … so we’d better not cock up our arrival, had we?”
“Oh, I think we’ve got pretty competent now,” I said, giving a little more slack to the staysail. “But we could be hours yet if this wind doesn’t pick up. I wonder if we ought to give the engine another try.”
“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