Mistress and Commander

by Amelia Dalton

  ‘Aye, well.’ He looked at me, grinning. ‘I needed to find a toilet —she’s a big boaty.’ I knew he’d skippered smart luxury yachts as well as fishing boats and had worked at sea all his life, but I hadn’t realised until then that Monaco was the biggest boat he had ever handled. Weaving through the convoluted harbour and its interlocking basins, narrow channels and swing bridges, was challenging even when you knew your boat well, and he’d had no idea how Monaco would turn and ‘drive’: in some places there had only been inches to spare.

  ‘I thought the mast was going to knock the ice chute off! Were you asleep?’ I went on, teasing him.

  ‘No, I’d forgotten to put her into gear,’ he admitted with a broad grin.

  Grey Peterhead with its tightly packed streets began to slip astern as Monaco headed north, nosing into a lazy rolling swell: not bad for the North Sea in the depths of winter. Our final destination was round on the west coast, south of the Clyde, the little fishing port of Troon, where the shipyard chosen to transform Monaco was based. To get there would take four days, and first we had to round exposed Rattray Head, then steam almost due west to pass Buckie and Macduff, on into the Cromarty Firth eight hours away, where the entrance to the Caledonian Canal waited. Slicing through the Highlands, the canal would save us at least two days, with its inland lochs of Ness and Oich and flight of eight locks known as Neptune’s Staircase tucked under the watchful gaze of Ben Nevis, before we reached the open sea again by Fort William. Once out of the canal, we would go due south down Loch Linnhe, have the shelter of the islands of Mull, Kerrera, Scarba and Jura, before we took on the exposed complicated tides round the Mull of Kintyre, finally crossing the entrance to the Clyde, to arrive in Troon. Even in summer it was a demanding route and now in the depths of winter we needed good weather, but it was also potentially a beautiful as well as an exciting voyage.

  Monaco steamed on; we had rounded Rattray Head and, as the dark drew in, Cubby turned the wheel to head her west. There was no one about, no specks of nearby boats showing green on the radar, just an occasional distant light from the fishing communities and little harbours of Buckie and Macduff away to port, all too shallow to offer shelter to Monaco. Cubby, closing one eye to keep his night vision, lit another cigarette. Kate and I were squeezed onto the narrow seat next to the useless echo sounder. The atmosphere was crisp with tension. We knew nothing of this boat. We couldn’t even read the instrument labels; everything was in Danish. From the battered fishing gear, tightly lashed to the deck, to the engine pulsing away beneath our feet, we had no experience of any of Monaco’s machinery. We were dirty, weary, hungry and cold, but sitting in the red-and-green glow from the navigation lights there was no question of a watch rota, it was far too exciting. Monaco steadily and surely was making her way towards Troon and we grinned at each other in the shadowy instrument glow.

  Suddenly, the steady rhythmic beat of the engine was shattered by an ear-piercing wail. A bright red light flashed urgently on a small black box close to the instrument panel. ON! OFF! ON! OFF! A siren screamed out from above our heads.

  ‘What the fuck?’ shouted Cubby above the din. Grabbing the torch he’d carefully placed within reach, he shone it at the box and flipped up the main control switch next to the red light.

  Silence.

  It was possible to think now, but the red light flashed insistently. He shone the torch on the dials. Oil pressure, engine revs, and propeller pitch – the needles were all steady. Nothing had changed. I too peered at the black box. Each light had a neat clear label, in Danish. ‘Keep her head into the swell, Katie, and I’ll go and have a look.’ Kate took over, glancing at the radar to see if anything was near.

  ‘All the paperwork I found I’ve pushed into those little drawers, I’ll see if I can find anything,’ I volunteered, anxious to be doing something. Cubby had disappeared to the engine room and Kate stood at the wheel, turning it occasionally to keep Monaco’s head into the swell as she kept a wary eye on the radar. The red light went on flashing. On–off. On–off.

  Dragging my own torch from my jeans pocket, I stuck it in my mouth to free my hands and tugged at the damp little drawers in the skipper’s cabin immediately behind the wheelhouse. There had been no time to decipher any of the muddled mass of papers and John had promised to send a Danish dictionary to Troon. The masses of yellowing sheets were indecipherable; Danish had not seemed a language I would need at school. There were faded diagrams too including one sheet headed ‘Electriks’. I studied the wiring diagram’s spidery lines. Number five was the flashing one: ‘Tåghorn’. Horn must be horn in any language.

  ‘Kate, I think it might be the horn,’ I said doubtfully.

  ‘Aye, well, maybe just find the fucking fuse for number five,’ was her terse reply. I knelt on plastic floor matting, torch in mouth and fumbled at the back of the box amongst the bundles of wires. Cubby appeared from the engine room.

  ‘There’s no problem down there. It’s all OK.’

  ‘I think it’s the horn, Cubby.’

  ‘OK, pull the damn thing out and we’ll soon know,’ was the response. Hoping I’d got the right one, I twiddled the knurled nut and pulled out the fuse. Cubby returned the switch to its rightful place. No lights came on, nothing flashed. All was silent. No blaring siren. All that fright for a short circuit in the horn.

  Early next morning, with no further incidents, we made it to the canal. In the watery early morning light Cubby carefully nudged Monaco into the sea lock; she might be a mess, with chewed-up steel and smashed fishing gear, but she was his command and he was already proud of her. Safe in the canal, we were greeted as Monaco progressed through locks by Kate and Cubby’s friends; they had friends everywhere. One of the loch keepers shouted out.

  ‘Och, it’s yourselves! And how’re you doing in yon big boaty?’ Our curious pale blue, battered fishing boat, so unlike the regular Scottish ones they knew so well, was already starting to make her mark.

  Going through the locks was of course another art I had to learn as the wind pushed on Monaco’s superstructure, pinning her against the wall while the water flowed in, lifting her up. At the last gate before Loch Ness, the keeper’s wife stretched across the gap passing fluffy white baps stuffed with bacon into our hands. Monaco chugged steadily across the dark waters of Loch Ness, making light of the strong south-westerly winter wind and heavy rain.

  A very slight change of note unsettled us all. The engine missed a beat. Another. A little cough. Then silence.

  Silently Monaco drifted over the ink-black surface of Loch Ness. Gusts of wind and blasts of wintry rain swooped down from the surrounding hills, pummelling her.

  ‘You, get out on deck and keep a look out,’ I was told. ‘Kate, keep her head into the wind.’ Not so easy, as the surrounding Highlands increased the strength of the irregular gusts pushing the Monaco remorselessly towards the shore. It was getting dark, we had no lifejackets or life rafts and even though it was a loch, it was deep. Monaco would be wrecked.

  On deck the wind and rain were fierce, but I thought I could just hear the faint chug of an engine as I peered through the rain squall. A red navigation light glowed. Cubby appeared from the engine room, as ever in heavy yellow oilskins. He swiftly jumped up onto the bulwark and then to the top of the huge red whaleback. Like a sort of steel umbrella, it usually sheltered the men while they sorted the catch on deck, but now it gave him height. It was slippery in the rain and there were evil spikes of aluminium sticking up where the tow cable had ripped it. I wanted to shout to him to be careful, he might slip, fall off, or cut his leg. But of course he’d spent most of his life on slippery decks.

  Cubby had absolutely refused to go to sea without one good rope. He and I had spent hours searching through scrap yards in Peterhead and Aberdeen, as the type he wanted was extremely expensive. He had firm ideas on what he wanted, its length and composition, and eventually we’d found one, lying rejected behind a shed, coiled up like a lifeless anaconda. He’d swapped it for
some of the Monaco’s fishing gear and had stowed it under the whaleback: ready, in case.

  By now, the gap between Monaco and the approaching boat was about thirty feet; the rope was plaited, multi-stranded and as thick as my arm. I’d seen him throw a rope before and always admired the skill, but now it was vital: Monaco was nearing the shore. He made a few small swings judging the weight of it, then the rope was snaking out, uncurling across the gap. A figure standing on the other boat’s whaleback caught it and made fast. Cubby knew it had to be our rope, otherwise the Silver Darling could have claimed salvage, a practice rarely pursued amongst fishing boats but Monaco was an oddity, so you never knew.

  Tightly lashed together, Monaco was towed for the second time in her short life with us. Embarrassingly, she had simply run out of diesel. Her fuel system turned out to have yet another cunning piece of Danish design. There was no need for costly manholes in the fuel tanks: if the fuel flowed continuously through them, you didn’t need to open them up and check for sludge. Sludge had no chance to collect, but she did need to have enough fuel. We had everything to learn about her.

  From the calm of the Lock Inn at Fort Augustus, I rang John to report in. He was not amused. ‘How could you have run out of fuel? Why on earth didn’t you fill her up?’

  Smugly, I quoted Cubby. ‘Well, full tanks are really heavy and that would be a big weight on the hull when she goes into dry dock in Troon, and that’s not good for her frame. Cubby’s trying to be careful with costs too, you know.’

  John recognised when he’d lost. ‘Well, we’ve a board meeting on Thursday at the Grahams’ in Wiltshire and you need to be here: everyone wants to know what’s going on. Ian’s complaining, and of course Jeremy’s already had his money back. We’ve got to calm the others down, so no more dramas. Today’s Tuesday; if you leave tomorrow you can get here in the evening ready for the meeting the next morning.’

  Loch Ness to Wiltshire in a day! He had no idea. Public transport was a joke at the height of summer, never mind in the depths of winter. Rather to my annoyance, Cubby seemed unperturbed. ‘Aye, aye, well, then, we’ll just have to stop the Mallaig train.’

  At three o’clock next morning in the pitch dark he stood in the middle of the track. I could hear the train approaching: quickly it rounded the corner. Cubby just stood there, in his yellow oilskins, calmly swinging the none-too bright torch back and forth. The train slowed and then stopped. No drama, no screeching brakes, quietly it just rolled to a stop. A head stuck out of the driver’s window. ‘Och. It’s yourself! How’s your boaty? I hear she’s not so good. Do you think you’ll be keeping her?’

  Reaching up, I opened a door and clambered in whilst Cubby chatted to the engine driver about the strength and charms of the Monaco. I was completely exhausted, worn out by cold and frights, by negotiating with surveyors and shipyards and dealing with engineers and sparkies for our already beloved Monaco.

  After three changes of train and a taxi to the village, I arrived at the carved sixteenth-century oak door of the Grahams’ house. I could hear a phone ringing as Fanny opened the door. Behind her, James answered it.

  ‘Yes. Hello, this is James. Oh, Cubby! Good. Good. We’ve been waiting to hear from you. Oh, you’re short of money. No more change. OK, I can call you back. What’s the number? No? Are you sure? All right then. Yes, she’s just arrived. I will pass on the message. Good night then.’

  ‘Hello, Fanny. It’s lovely to be here. Hello, James. How are you? Did Cubby have anything important to say?’ I asked nervously. John appeared and gave me a hug. Other people, who I assumed were shareholders or directors, stood about in the hall looking expectant.

  Finally James said casually, ‘Yes, that was Cubby. They’ve arrived in Troon and Monaco’s safely tied up. She goes up the slip in the morning ready to start the work.’

  That was it. No dramas. I almost felt angry. None of them would understand how frightening it had all been: being blown towards the shore; the cold, the dark and the exhaustion. But what did it matter? Monaco’s transformation was about to begin.

  Seven

  I moved like a chameleon: a hand, then a foot, gingerly edging my way along the level horizontal ladder. Below me yawned a thirty-foot hole, lined with unforgiving concrete: the bottom of the dry dock. A heavy plastic supermarket bag swung from under my wrist, making me increasingly unstable. I’d nearly made it, just a few more rungs to negotiate, when there was a shout from below and I froze, looking down. ‘You’ll no be getting far with only a wee poly bag for your weekend.’ I opened my mouth to retort that it held six thousand pounds which would keep me going quite happily for a couple of days but thought better of it. ‘Yes, you’re probably right, but I think I’ll be here for the weekend anyway, not much chance of the bright lights yet! See you later.’ I could sense the shipwright working under Monaco’s hull, watching my bum as I jumped down from the ladder before making my way through the deserted streets to the Clydesdale Bank.

  At last the conversion was progressing well and although it was just two months since she’d arrived there, things finally seemed to be going smoothly. John and the directors were enjoying my reports, progress was steady and the goal of 6th May for the first National Trust charter seemed possible. As I sauntered into Troon’s only bank, I realised this was fun: I was busy, and there was no time to dwell on Digby’s death. I knew Hugo was happy. After submitting his portfolio, he’d succeeded in bagging a prestigious art scholarship.

  Inside the solid Victorian red-brick building, a lone cashier was tucked behind the counter. I dumped the bag in front of her and began to count out the six thousand pounds, in dirty individual pound notes, one by one. She didn’t bat an eyelid. No questions, no sign of surprise. Big wodges of cash were clearly the norm in fishing communities.

  Monaco would not need the cumbersome fishing gear in her new role and Cubby had insisted that we sell it all. It was worth good money, he said, which should be in our pockets, not the shipyard’s. The advert in the Fishing News had precisely described all the various pieces Monaco had once used. First was the huge main winch which stretched across the whole deck; you could just squeeze between each end and the gunwale. Fifteen-foot wide, and in five sections, its drums turned independently to wind up the steel hawsers attached to the bag net of the trawl, a massive dead weight when full of fish. At the stern, bolted to the gunwales, were the gallows, one on each side – seven-foot high and shaped like a giant letter ‘A’. As the bag net was winched in, the hawsers attached to the trawl were pulled up over the gallows which guided them onto the drums of the winch. The solid weight of the catch was thus kept evenly distributed across the Monaco to ensure she remained stable in big seas. Finally, there was the mangled whaleback, the giant aluminium umbrella that gave the crew a degree of shelter from the icy spray as they stood sorting the catch on the heaving deck. The fish had to be divided into different types, depending on size and value; they were then posted into Monaco’s hold through holes cut in the deck. Each opening was about eighteen inches in diameter and had a removable metal plate that could be locked shut to keep out the sea. Underneath each hole, the fish hold was divided into sections by boards, known as pound boards: each board slotted into metal frames to create compartments to hold the slippery fish. Without dividing up the catch, the whole slithering mass would have been able to slip from side to side, again making Monaco unstable.

  Specifically designed for trawling the cold rich waters of the far north, she would have left Søndeborg full of ice to come home crammed with fish with the deck at her ‘waist’ actually underwater. Sometimes it took just a few days to fill her cavernous, forty-five-foot hold, sometimes over two weeks. She was an efficient, solid oak fishing machine, designed from years of experience to deal with mountainous Arctic seas and massive weights of fish. Her conversion into a charming little passenger ship was progressing as completely as my own conversion and I could feel my country-house life slipping away as I turned into shipyard foreman and decision make
r. From bilge pump impellors to radar scanners, echo sounders, life rafts and anodes: I was learning they were all vital but I still needed to know why.

  ‘Hello. Yes, of course you’re welcome to come and make an inspection,’ I had replied to our potential fishing gear purchaser. ‘Yes, in Troon in the dry dock.’ While Monaco had travelled from Peterhead, through the Caledonian Canal, word had spread all around the west coast, so undoubtedly whoever he was would be inquisitive. Monaco looked exposed and sort of naked, propped up in the dry dock with no sea to clothe her, and no doubt the Oban fishing mafia would like to know more. However, when Angus MacDonald arrived it turned out he and Cubby had known each other for years, had blethered about the weather and tatties over the VHF and not just sunk drams in the Oban Arms. He liked the winch and gallows and, after some formulaic haggling over the price, Cubby made had him take the whaleback too. Curiously he had brought exactly the right money with him, six thousand pounds in fish-whiffy, crumpled one pound notes. Cubby had insisted Kate and I should count the ‘spondulix’ while he and Angus caught up with a dram or two.

  Although Monaco was making progress, time was short and I had learnt that shipyards seemed to be governed by breaks – coffee, lunch, tea. Every couple of hours, it seemed, the workforce stopped: I longed for them just to get on with it. Yet Monaco was steadily changing. The unglamorous industrial trawler was being transformed into a sturdy expedition ship through what Cubby referred to as ‘London ways’: John’s financial nous and air of calm stability, plus a smart suit, had achieved a marine mortgage from the Clydesdale Bank, as well as grants and loans from the Highlands & Islands Development Board. All wanted regular reports, so progress needed to be tangible, and I was learning to weave a path between the lackadaisical shipyard and the bureaucratic Department of Transport who would eventually issue the licence to allow Monaco to work.