Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [49]
Mike is watching you from the cockpit with steadily increasing interest—he’s that bored.
Now for the moleskins. Mine, interestingly enough, belonged to the explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes and have the name “Ran” written in Biro on the waistband. He wore these trousers on his Arctic and Antarctic adventure and sold them off at Camden Lock along with a whole rake of other stuff from the expedition. That’s where I got the fancy sleeping bag, too. But the moleskin trousers are by far my favorite possession—a reminder that we are all, in our own small way, fellow explorers.
They also have a very fine weatherproof zip, which, with frozen fingers, requires a lot of fumbling to get undone … but somehow eventually you do. That’s two layers; two more to go. Long johns, or the particular type that I was wearing, have a small aperture covered by a sort of pocket. You manage to insert a couple of questing fingers as you peer downward to see if you can see anything, which of course you can’t, because your glasses are soaked in salt spray and it’s almost dark and, besides, there’s not that much to see anyway; these things are best done by feel.
This, of course, is where your problems begin. You search in the gap between this opening and the top of your inside underpants with increasing but unavailing desperation. Can you locate the organ in question? Like hell you can! You’re being buffeted back and forth like a shuttlecock, it’s freezing cold, and you’re scared half to death. A glance back at the cockpit confirms your suspicion that you’re still being watched by Mike. If anything he’s staring more intently.
Now here I should remind our readers that the male of the species is prone to a certain … shall we say reticence, and indeed shrinkage, in circumstances of extreme stress. An involuntary survival mechanism kicks in to protect that which we hold dear until a less inopportune moment should present itself. You look around, startled by a shout from the cockpit. It’s the unspeakable Mike.
“What’s the matter, then?” he shouts. “Can’t find your dick?” He then convulses with fatuous laughter at his own crass joke.
Your desperation increases, if that’s possible. There’s just got to be a penis in there somewhere, surely … it was there the last time you came on deck.
After long, long minutes of ineffectual fumbling, your search may be rewarded, but even then it’s no simple matter to coax the poor thing out through the long threatening sphincter of elastic and wool and buttons and zips. But then finally you get there, and you hang in the shrouds directing the long steaming arc into the frozen gray wastes of the North Atlantic … oh, the sweet and blessed relief. And now back to bed.
FOR THREE DAYS AND three long nights we lay buffeted by the elements at some point between Iceland and Greenland. We kept up our routine of an hour on watch, then back to the cabin, though to be honest it probably made no difference if anyone were at the wheel or not. Indeed, when any of us were woken for our watch—perhaps by John, his beard dripping icy water into the cup of tea that he’d brought—there would always be a few minutes, struggling with the pantomine of putting on foul weather clothes, while Hirta bucked and plunged, alone and unwatched, with us seven vulnerable souls shut below.
Still, we took our watches seriously. First I would go forward and, shackling myself to the forestay, scan what I could see of the horizon. Nothing, just gray heaving sea in all directions, populated sparsely by the odd baffled-looking fulmar. Next I would check that all the lashings and stays were tight, that everything was in place. And finally I would