Atlantic Britain: The Story of the Sea a Man and a Ship. Adam Nicolson
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beneath us, the boat nudged into life. I stood on the bowsprit, giving warnings back to George. ‘Unlit boat ahead, dead ahead!’, ‘Buoy on the port bow!’
‘Got it,’ George murmured back again and again from the wheel. We were quiet apart from those few spoken signals. Kathy sat with George in the cockpit and as we passed the ghost-forms of the moored oyster boats in the night, I felt a kind of release. Out at the Mylor yacht harbour we tied up and the Auk, the new Auk, joggled there slightly in the small easterly chop, was ready to go. We were due to leave for Ireland.
We weren’t ready. All next day, and the next, and the next, the preparations continued. We bent on the new sails. They didn’t seem to fit, and then they did. The mizzen sheet blocks and cleat were all wrong. The sail covers had been made to the wrong size. The sprayhood, to protect us from seas coming back over the boat, was not going to be done in time. We could live without it. A couple of defunct instruments had to be renewed. Food and drink had to be stowed in one place and then another. The dinghy had to be lashed to the deck, the life raft stowed, the ‘grab bags’, which we would snatch from the boat if she sank, filled with baked beans and Mars bars, lemonade and bottled water, chocolate, torches, a radio, our passports, spare warm clothes, hats, gloves, all or any of which might be of comfort in a life raft: all this took hour after hour. I scrubbed the decks and hosed out the cockpit. Men in the chandlery said, ‘I thought you were going yesterday?’
‘So did I,’ I said, more than once.
I thought at the time that this getting ready was too much and too long, but I see it differently now. The nature of the voyage is set before you cast off. A sea passage is shaped by the boat’s time attached to the land. Every moment at sea is dependent on, and even twinned to, a moment in harbour. What a boat sails on and in is not only the ocean and the wind but the days, weeks, and months tied up alongside.
Finally, late in the afternoon, grey, windy, and cold, with a gale forecast from the south, we were ready, but we weren’t. We needed fuel. We took the Auk round to the diesel pontoon. George and I were already dressed for sea, in full oilskins, with life jackets and lifelines around our necks, hats and gloves on for the cold. The long tense days of getting ready were visible on George’s face, as they must have been on mine. The forecast was bad. A man with his hands in his pockets on the pontoon told me he had gone to Scilly for the last twelve summers, but he wasn’t going today. No one in their right mind would go with a forecast like this. ‘Really?’ I said. ‘I think we’re going.’ I couldn’t dream of not going now.
The boy at the diesel pumps - he must have been about nineteen, in his shore anorak, a shock of hair -suddenly said, ‘I wish I was coming.’ He looked surprised as the words came out of his mouth, too much honesty in a rush. I looked at him and saw myself in him, a man who all his life has stood on the quayside and watched other men going to sea, seeing in them the air of - what is it? Engagement? A task to which they are fully and wholly committed absorbing every part of them? People who are simply deciding to cast off, to go, to leave the here to find the there?
‘Come on then,’ I said, ‘why don’t you come? Come now. We’ve got waterproofs for you, and plenty of food. We’re going to Ireland. We should do it in about forty hours with a wind like this. You could be back by the weekend.’
He hesitated. ‘Come on,’ I said, and stretched my hand out over the gap between the boat and the pontoon. He hung there for a moment, like a diver on the lip, or a fledgling on the verge of leaving the nest, a millimetre difference between staying and going, but then, a flicker of the needle, he held back. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I’ve got too much on here. I can’t. I can’t. I will, one day. I’m going sailing this summer. Good luck, though! Good luck!’
I hauled the warps inboard, and as George took the boat under motor out from the quay, I coiled them and stowed them in the starboard cockpit locker. Fenders in and stowed in the lazarette. Stays’l out of its bag, hanked on to the forestay, its tack fitted with a locking shackle to a strop fixed to the stemhead, the head of the sail itself on to the halyard snap-shackle, the tail of the halyard made up on the pin-rail, and the body of the sail marlin-hitched for the time being to the boat’s safety rail. The two stays’l sheets then tied with bowlines through the cringle at the clew, led back through the sheet-leads on the side-decks, figure-of-eight stop-knots put into their bitter ends, and the full length of the sheets wound around the secondary winches beside the cockpit.
The mains’l next. Ease the leeward running backstay and make it off on the leeward shrouds under the light box. Bring the windward backstay up around the primary winch on that side and winch it iron-tight. Release the sail ties holding the mains’l to the gaff and stow them. Unloop the peak and throat halyards from the pin-rail, loosen the leeward topping lift, bring the head of the boat almost up to the wind, ease the main-sheet and haul on both the halyards. Up the sail goes, filling as she does so, that full belly swollen with wind. Make sure the battens in the leach don’t get caught on the topping lifts and when they are clear tighten up the throat first and then the peak, making up the main halyards on the rail and then, with the jiggers on the port side, put extra tension into both of them, the luff board-hard, the peak just tight enough to put a crease into the sail running diagonally all the way across it down to the tack. The mizzen up in the same way, then the big heads’l, the high-cut yankee, unravelled from its roller-furling gear on the bowsprit forestay, its leeward sheet hauled in tight on the primary winch next to the cockpit. Finally, the stays’l, released from its marlin-hitched tie, sheets eased, hoisted on its own halyard, made up at the pin-rail, jigged with its own jigger and its leeward sheet winched in on the leeward secondary. Ten minutes out of Mylor, the engine off, a full suit of sails driving her, tell-tales aligned on the swell of the yankee, the Auk was now making for Ireland.
In the end, however perfect your boat, you go to sea exhausted, when the weather is least suitable. You just bite off what you can’t do. The Auk was now going to look after us in a way that before we had only been looking after her. It’s the deal you make with your boat. Pour it into her and she will, in time, pour it out for you.
There was a problem. The wind was strong but at least in our favour, just veering that evening from easterly to southerly as we made our way down to the Lizard. If we were lucky it would stay on the beam all the way to Ireland. The boat felt sleek and tight. George and I were tired but keyed up. It then slowly became clear to us that no instruments were working. We turned every switch but nothing came on. The electrician who had arrived to replace two of them two days before did not have a depth gauge in stock. He was going to send it to us in Ireland. But the system on which the instruments worked was an integrated one and no depth gauge in the system meant no readings from anything: no depth of course, no wind speed, no wind direction, no boat speed, no speed over the ground, no course made good, no electronic compass. There was also no light in the magnetic compass and no autohelm. We would have to stand at the wheel, watch and watch about, three or four hours on, three or four hours off, no breaks while you were up there, for the forty hours or so it was going to take us to cross the wide open reach of the Atlantic known as the Celtic Sea.
Driving down south, the sea began to lift under us. We passed the famous Manacles Buoy, marking the killer rocks off the Cornish coast, on which the bell clangs lugubriously day and night, day and night, like a graveyard sexton of the deep. As we passed near enough to read the word ‘MANACLE’ painted on its vast metal body, George said, ‘That bell will still be ringing when we are up in Donegal, or in Orkney, when we are out at sea in the worst storm you have ever known. And it’s been ringing these last ten years, for as long and anywhere you have ever been.’
It felt as if we were pushing our fingers deep into the dark. No instruments, no autohelm, no compass light, both of us tired, the boat on her first day out from a refit. We would have to use a hand-held torch to read the bearing on the compass, to align the boat on her distant destination, one of those blessed harbours in the southwest of Ireland, Baltimore or Schull or Crookhaven, a good 250 miles from here. It was a four-way meeting: ocean, boat, me and George,