Atlantic Britain: The Story of the Sea a Man and a Ship. Adam Nicolson
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It was like a sneeze - a clean, straight, if enormous, expulsion; everything from breakfast onwards, leaving me surprised to have been that sick that quickly. George came up from below with a cup of tea. I drank that and sicked it up. Then a couple of chocolate biscuits that went the same yo-yo route. I saw a look of resigned horror on George’s face. At that time of year, the night lasts about fourteen hours, from five in the afternoon to about seven in the morning. He had an invalid along with him. How was he going to manage it?
The rest of the voyage remains what can only be called impressionistic. Sick every now and then, cheerful enough to start with but gradually shrinking into a little ball of cold and paralysis. George saying, ‘You have got to keep moving.’ Me, ignorant of everything around me - boat, sea, systems, methods, means of keeping well - shrivelling with what felt like straightforward shutdown but was perhaps fear. ‘Why don’t we just go into Weymouth?’ I said to George, longing for some relief. ‘Better to go on,’ he said. ‘We’ll have eighty miles under our belt tomorrow.’ Shrunken child of a passenger, I said yes, was sick, crept down to my sleeping bag in the saloon, sick on the way down, sick as I took off my oilies, sick getting into the sleeping bag, sick every now and then into a bucket George had put beside me. It was 5.15 in the afternoon and it felt like midnight.
From time to time in the night George came down, a huge figure in his wet oilies, reeking of a hellish world outside, to check our course on the instruments below. It was now blowing a full gale, Force 8, and the sea was against us. All I could hear was the grinding and banging of the rig and the heavy bass thumping as the bows fell into each new sea. At one of his visitations I was being sick. ‘Everything all right?’ he said.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Fine, thanks.’
At about one o’clock in the morning, I woke again and felt too ashamed of what was happening, pulled on my clothes and waterproofs, gloves and hat, and went on deck. It was bitterly, bitingly, grippingly cold and the bow was throwing one freezing shower of spray after another the full length of the boat. The deck gleamed green and red with the nav lights. I managed to persuade George that I was feeling all right and he went below for a sleep after more than eight hours at the wheel, half of it in a blizzard in which the rain was ice.
The privacy of the winter sea closes in at night. Far to the south I could see the big pale looms of the lights in the Channel Islands lifting up above the horizon like wraiths. The cold of the night prickled on the skin. England - the yellow lights of its coast roads necklaced in the dark to the north - was a foreign country. Here just the grinding and the thumping of the boat as she pulled her way westwards into the night. Seas came at you blind. There was no reading them. All I could do was drive on into them and take the thump, the shudder, and the cascade as we hit each wall. Fishing boats, lights swinging wildly, crossed our bows and occasionally a tall merchant ship, lit like a Christmas hotel, steamed past at three or four times our speed in the dark.
The hours went by. The sky cleared and the stars emerged. Orion had his legs and feet deep in the western Channel, the horizon sliding up to his waist and down again. Cassiopeia hung and slewed like a windblown billboard in the rigging to my right. I have never been colder in my life. My gloves were wet inside and my fingers didn’t feel. George had said, ‘You need to be a little more fastidious about your gloves’, but I hadn’t been and wet, cold fingers were the result. I was still sick from time to time but was fixed on giving George at least four hours of rest. I looked at the lit places ashore and felt no envy. Even in this cold and discomfort I was glad to be here, not inert in my bed, but out in the air, a small unroofed presence in the world, sticking up like a single hair on the world’s skin, feeling the atmosphere as a reality around me, and, because of that, somehow deriving reality and substance of my own.
We began to slide and ride the waves, as the longer Atlantic swell started to take up from the shorter Channel chop, a longer, oceanic movement, the under-rhythm of the west. The stars were no longer jerking and jumping around the masts, but swinging their easy dance between them. The big strong boat, so made for this, the ocean horse in her element. For a moment, with no more than a shred of understanding of how to do it, I felt extraordinarily confident, happily riding this thing, at home at sea.
Endless night, the endless looking to the east for a sign of day. None there when, at four o’clock, George came up again, all oilied up, and sent me below. Instant sleep. Nothing till I heard him shouting: ‘Adam! Adam!’ I went up. The sunrise was like a barred grey flag in the east. The daylit sea looked old and tired. The wind had dropped, but the water was still broken, like a rough-sawn surface. ‘Look, look,’ George said as I came up the companionway steps. All around us were porpoises, forty or fifty of them, surging freedom after the prison of the night, the gleam on their backs stained orange by the sun.
George made me asparagus soup, warm and beautiful. I sicked it up. Oatcakes. The same. We slid on, a little dazed, through the morning, the Cornish headlands now in view. ‘Would you like to be in Weymouth now?’ George asked. No, no. But I felt shaken and exhausted. His face was puffy too, as. if beaten. We turned at last into Carrick Roads, the long sleeve of an anchorage on whose shore Falmouth sits. The sea went flat in the shelter and the world quiet. The green sweetness of the woods and fields. We passed two of the Falmouth oystermen, sailing their traditional oyster dredgers in the Roads, boats as fine as curlews, their long bowsprits curved down in front of them, the men at the helm just touching the tiller an inch to catch a gust, tweaking a sheet as if it were needlepoint they were at. I felt as if I had been living inside the head of a sledgehammer.
Kathy Bevan, George’s girlfriend, met us on the quay at Mylor and we drank whisky, straight, at eleven in the morning, sitting on board at the saloon table. She looked at us as if we had been in an accident.
‘Have you learned anything, Adam?’ she said, smiling at me a sweet, warm, womanly harbour-smile. Had I? Perhaps that a storm at night teaches you the beauty of harbours. All the grommets on the mainsail had burst. The planking in the bow, where we had slammed into those big ones, had visibly shifted. I was dazed with the motion and my head still swam. Neither I nor the Auk had ever lived like this. It is often said that a man’s boat is an extension of himself, but that is not quite true. A man’s boat is more an instrument by which his self is exposed.
George remade the Auk. She went into the operating theatre and her agony lasted six weeks, drying out in a yard at Tregatreath on Mylor Creek, one of the arms of the sea that reach inland from Carrick Roads. There she leant up against the ragged concrete quay, where only one tide a month comes high enough to float her. Her keel stood on the mud-coated concrete, ladders propped against her, all dignity gone. Rough patches appeared on the hull where the chain-plates securing the shrouds were moved. Down below was chaos, all deck-linings off, all bunks and lockers out, tools everywhere, the cabin sole up and the guts of the boat exposed. Poor Auk\
Of course, it was for the good. She was to have a new sprayhood, to protect us from seas coming back over the length of the boat, and a teak stopwater to stop those seas running down into the cockpit. The cockpit itself needed new drains; the heads’l winches were to be moved to the side-decks on little purpose-made tables and a new mainsheet winch installed; the mainmast needed more tension and the backstay system had to be improved; there was to be a complete new set of sails, taller and wider than the old set, to power her up; the spars and running rigging had to be adjusted in proportion; a hard dinghy was commissioned for the deck; the interior cushions were re-upholstered; the batteries were re-housed in waterproof casings; more hand-holds were fitted; the deck was treated; and we bought what felt like a large inflatable.
Finally, in mid-March, she was done, or as good as we would get her. We had sluiced and hoovered every conceivable nook and hollow. She had been honed and tuned. The tide that would float the new Auk would reach its peak at three o’clock on the Sunday morning. An easterly had been blowing up the creek all day, pulling at the blue tarpaulin over the cockpit, an endless, morale-sapping snatch-and-release. We were tired and it was a testy time. George, Kathy, and I all slept on the boat that evening and woke at quarter to three.
I lay for a minute listening in my bunk. The Auk was rocking, afloat. The tide had crept in with the night,