Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [31]
This phenomenon, which strips people down to their essence, happens every time you leave the land. But just as surely, when finally the lookout perched high up the mast shouts, “Land ahoy!,” you are overwhelmed with longing for the land, and mysteriously ready and eager again to immerse yourself in that cloying bog of cares.
Sensing all of this, we mused and chatted, sounding one another out, testing the parameters where you could and couldn’t go when it came to needling one another’s sensibilities. There was a tentative pleasure in getting to know one another, in the knowledge that we were soon to be hurled together and shaken up in conditions of the weirdest intimacy. Tom had warned me that to be confined together in the cabin of a small wooden boat, tossed among the terrors of the open sea, has the effect of a pressure cooker. Feelings that are best left simmering beneath the surface burst forth in extremis and have to be dealt with to make life even halfway tolerable. Tonight, though, we took a mild and friendly interest in one another, bandied compliments, trying to show ourselves in our most appealing light, without overstepping the mark. We each sipped whisky from a mug, the traditional treat at the start of the night—and the whisky in its wonderful way warmed our hearts and our spirits.
And then it was past midnight and a reverential silence fell for the Shipping Forecast. Like anybody else I had heard the shipping forecast before on the radio; a meaningless almost mystical incantation, the clear, clipped tones of the BBC enunciating, “Dover, Thames, Humber, Dogger, German Bight … Fisher, Fair Isle, Cromarty, Viking, Faroes, Southeast Iceland …” and so on; comfortingly obscure names that had suddenly become both personal and pressing for us. Even its theme tune, “Sailing By,” which I had always thought rather vacuous, took on a different form, its rippling arpeggios charged with meaning and emotion.
From now on we would hear “Sailing By” each night as we plied our way north, until we’d sailed so far that not even the BBC could reach us.
“IT’S TIME TO START the watch system,” announced Tom. “We’ll do four-hour turns, two to a watch: John, you can have Mike, and Patrick can be with Chris. As skipper I don’t have a specific watch but you can call me any time, day or night.”
And so I found myself doing ten until two in the morning, just Patrick and me alone in the cockpit while a steady wind drove us northward through the night. Patrick spoke with the softest of Scottish accents. He was an experienced sailor and beneath his gentle well-mannered exterior he was really hard, tough as a nut, the result of years in the army. I was happy to take orders from Patrick as he knew what was going on, and I knew nothing.
“Take the wheel, Chris, and keep her on that heading, zero one five, while I go forward and give the sails a tweak.”
I took the wheel and peered myopically at the dimly illuminated compass in its binnacle just inside the cabin hatchway. At that distance of about two and a half yards I couldn’t quite make out the figures. This was a problem for me all the way to Vinland. What I would have to do was abandon the wheel for a moment and move forward to get a clear sight on the compass, then leap back for the wheel before the boat had moved too far off her course. Naturally by the time I got back to the wheel Hirta would have changed course by a few points, so I would have to dart forward again to the compass, nip back and give a tweak to the wheel, then forward again to see if I had got the adjustment right. It was far from satisfactory, but resulted in a certain sort of a zigzag progress in roughly the desired direction.
On a starry night the whole thing became easier because you could get your course more or less right, then find a star close to some fixed point