Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [7]
Sark by Starlight
I HAD DECIDED BY this time, as any sane person might, that I hated sailing and didn’t want anything further to do with it. However, I had given my word to Julie’s great-aunt that I would skipper her boat, and I didn’t like the idea of admitting my deceit, or letting her down. Besides, I didn’t have any other job prospects on the immediate horizon. So, scraping together a little money from some sheep-shearing work, I enrolled at the Isle of Wight Sailing School. I was signed up for a fortnight’s course that would give me a certificate as a “Competent Crew” and then “Day Skipper.”
I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of any kind of school and had pretty much made up my mind that sailing was either dangerous or boring, or more often both. Still, I’d paid my money, so I had no option but to make the best of a bad job. I took the train down to Portsmouth and then caught the ferry across to Cowes.
We—the hopeful competent crew—were divided four to a boat and assigned a skipper-teacher who would arrive the following morning. My crew were an odd mix: Roger, an Indian property developer from north London; Suzie, a plump, pretty primary school teacher; and Simon, a police inspector from Bognor who was learning to sail, he said, to fill his Sundays since his wife left him.
In the morning our skipper arrived, an enormous man, seemingly made from a different mold than the rest of us. His physical immensity—he was six feet six and built like a heap of bricks—barely hinted at the enormousness of his presence. Tom Cunliffe was his name, and I gathered that he was something of a big cheese (or whatever is the correct nautical term) in the sailing world. He was a serious long-distance sailor and had navigated most of the seas and oceans of the world on merchant ships or yachts. He was a most imaginative user of English, with language gleaned in equal measure from Shakespeare and the mess-rooms of tramp steamers. He could be filthy when he felt like it, but you couldn’t take offense because of his natural exuberance and bighearted good humor. He had the gift, too, of being able to squeeze the funny side out of things and would have you rolling about and clutching your sides. Tom quite took the wind from my sails … so to speak.
Competent Crew was a simple, undemanding course; we learned the vocabulary of sailing and what everything was for and why. We learned a dozen different knots and why it’s important to get them right. To flake and coil ropes we learned, too, and when Tom demonstrated, the rope seemed to come alive in his huge hands.
“And that,” he would boom, “is the way to do a first-class Flemish flake.”
We did a little basic navigation and some sailing theory. Then we took on a box of provisions for the week and slipped away down the river into the Solent.
It was a seascape unrecognizable from my adventures with Keith. The sea was blue and the sun shone, and with a gentle breeze the boat went bounding across the water like a happy dog. We moored one night in the beautiful Beaulieu River. We took the dinghy across the quiet water to the pub at Buckler’s Hard, where Tom sang sea shanties with the band. And in the morning we woke with thick heads, to the silence of the still river among the woods, and the haunting cries of seabirds. And then we battled against the wind and the waves, bashing our way through the flying spray to tie up at Bosham in Chichester Harbour … not a million miles from the scene of my last adventure.
The next week we sailed overnight to the island of Sark and I learned the pleasure of sailing by the stars in the open sea. As we approached the island, because we’d been a day and a night at sea and our sense of smell was hankering for the land, the flowering gorse all over the island scented