Three Ways to Capsize a Boat - Chris Stewart [8]
At the end of the week, proudly clutching my certificates, I felt I had just tasted a tiny smattering of something that would haunt me to the end of my days. I was almost feeling a sense of destiny and recalled that my grandfather on my father’s side, who had died before I was born, had been a captain. He had ferried captured German battleships back to Britain after the First World War. So maybe this was in my blood. I felt more than ready for the isles of Greece.
PART II
The Isles of Greece
Where Is Weare?
WHEN I GOT HOME there was a package for me from Jane Joyce. It contained a letter explaining what would be required of me, a letter of introduction to a certain Captain Bob Weare, and a brochure with details and pictures of the boat, as well as a receipt for a sum of money she had paid the said captain.
“I am about to go under the knife,” she wrote. “Meanwhile, here is what you must do. The boat is not at the island, Spetses, yet. It has been looked after this winter by Captain Bob, who I fear is a dreadful old reprobate. He has the papers and the keys and has undertaken some repairs that had become necessary. He can be contacted at Bar Thalassa, Euripides 5, Kalamaki. Good-bye, my dear, the best of luck and I look forward to seeing you and the refurbished Crabber in Spetses on my return.” There was also a check for a couple hundred dollars to cover expenses.
I looked at the pictures of my first command, a pretty little boat with a long wooden bowsprit and a picturesque suit of red canvas sails … a long way from my grandfather’s captured battleships, but it would do for a start.
“ABSENCE MAKES THE HEART grow fonder” I said to Ana as she took me to the airport … and I meant it. I flew to Athens and took a bus down to Kalamaki, where, humping my bag and my guitar with me, I trudged around the hot streets looking for Euripides. Thalassa means “sea” in Greek, so I figured the bar must be on the waterfront. But it wasn’t, and after a number of confusions and misdirections, I eventually tracked it down. It was a dreary sort of a dive, with plastic tables perched on the curb of a backstreet, beneath some stunted plane trees; but the barman was pleasant, spoke some English, and knew my man.
Captain Bob, it seemed, was in the habit of coming to the bar at about six or seven, though he hadn’t been seen for some days. I stowed my baggage in a corner of the bar and, ordering a salad and a jug of retsina, sat in the shade with my Greek grammar. Customers came and went, flies buzzed, cars and vans crawled along the potholed road. Six o’clock came and went, so did seven and eight o’clock. The sun set, and with it came the blessed cool of evening and the orange glow of streetlights; my Greek book was becoming increasingly tedious. With no sign of Captain Bob, I checked into a hotel recommended by the barman, conveniently located just beneath the take-off path of the airport, a cheap dump of a place that turned out, with the inevitability of these things, to be a whorehouse.
Next day I returned to Thalassa for breakfast and afterward headed down to the marina to see if I could find the boat. There were hundreds and hundreds of gleaming plastic boats all bobbing at their moorings on the foul, oily slop that constituted the sea in Kalamaki Marina. In the hot morning sun I marched along pontoon after pontoon, watching the glistening brown men and women beavering about on their boats. But there was nothing even remotely resembling a Cornish Crabber.
It wasn’t hard to tell, as a Crabber is a most singular design of boat. From the brochure that Jane Joyce had sent me, I knew that the hull was black; that her mast and spars were wooden as opposed to the more modern aluminum; that her sails were red; and her stem was plumb … and sure as hell she would be the only boat in all of Kalamaki Marina with a plumb stem. (A plumb stem is where the front of the boat or bow enters the waterline at the vertical, as opposed