I grope about, trying to find my earplugs without waking David. It is always a mystery to me how he can sleep through the most intrusive of human voices or late-night musicians, but the moment I even attempt to get out of bed he wakes with a start. Unable to find my earplugs I lie there, hearing her plaint and thinking about the nature of happiness and how affluence carries no guarantees. Sleep does finally arrive, however, just ahead of the truck coming to empty the skip on the quay.
Early next morning a tall, spare man in his 50s, dressed in khaki shorts and shirt, taps on our hull to say he has berthed in front of us and will it inconvenience us. We peer round the side flaps of our awning and see that single-handedly he has shoehorned a large catamaran into the small space in front of us; a manoeuvre we had not seen, heard nor, more importantly, felt. David says, no problem, we aren’t going anywhere, and the man disappears.
Sometime later, a young man recognising the boat in front of us asks if the owner is about, saying that the last time he saw him was in Venezuela. Told no, he says, ‘He’ll be in a bar, then,’ and looks behind him along the quay. David points out the nearest bar. ‘No, too posh,’ says the young man and goes in search of a more down-market one. By the time we rise, at seven next morning, he and his catamaran have gone, as quietly and unobtrusively as they had arrived. A shy, courteous man. An Australian.
The weather is unstable. El Niño is blamed, a warming in the tropical Pacific which occurs every few years and affects weather patterns worldwide. Its name, The Child, refers to Christ, because of its original occurrence at Christmas time. In between the warm, pleasant, early summer days there are unseasonably hot windy ones, torrential rain, and one day there is a hailstorm, unheard of at this time of year. One morning we get up to find a fine reddish-brown coating over Voyager. All the boats are covered in it. So are all the parked cars, including the upholstery and interiors of quite a few whose windows and sun roofs have been left open overnight.
‘What is it?’ we ask Joss when he comes up the quay to check on one of the boats.
‘Saharan dust,’ he says.
Confronted with winds strong enough to lift and carry so much so far, you suddenly get a new perspective on biblical stories about plagues of frogs falling from the sky.
Like the weather, communications are also a little haphazard. So much European Union election material has been mailed – postage-free for all the relevant political parties – that it sends the Spanish postal system into crisis. Even several weeks after voting has finished people are still complaining that it is taking a letter four weeks to get the few miles from Palma to Mahon. Our own priority, however, is to get some necessary work done on Voyager.
8
Mañana
Getting people to start work in Mahon has shades of A Year in Provence about it. Their arrival on the quay is usually to tell you that they have an urgent job on another boat leaving that afternoon so they won’t be able to keep their appointment to work on Voyager. Their eyes, meanwhile, never quite meet yours.
‘When, then?’ you say.
‘Mañana,’ they say. ‘For sure. Probably.’
It is only when they are safely trapped in one of your lockers, bottom upwards, with an open tool box on the deck above them that you can feel relatively optimistic.
To be fair, the sailing season has started and everyone wants their boat prepared now. Although at the end of last season, in November, we did try to get a quote from a stainless-steel welder so that the work could be done during the winter. Despite reminders, by mid-May he still has not obliged, but we decide not to pursue it further on the principle that if it takes this long to get a quote, we shall be too old to sail by the time he gets around to the actual welding. Nobody grumbles more than the Spanish themselves about the difficulty of getting anything done on time, or even at all. Then they shrug, spread their hands wide and say philosophically, ‘This is Spain.’
Nevertheless, the electrician ultimately does the business with our automatic steering and work begins on resealing the windows. This involves removing each window, replacing the sealant between the glass and its aluminium frame, and then resealing the frame back into place. The window man is a Scandinavian called Sven who is not given to optimism. ‘Maybe,’ is as enthusiastic as he gets when asked if it will cure the leaking windows. The biggest problem is getting him to turn up. The second biggest is getting him to start work when he does.
‘It’s going to rain,’ he’ll say, squinting into a blistering blue cloudless sky. ‘Can’t risk taking one out today.’
Or, having done one window during the morning, he will return from lunch to say, ‘Too late to start another one now. Tomorrow.’
Never do today what you can put off until mañana. This is Spain. It is part of its charm. You don’t feel pressured because nobody puts any on you. ‘Sure, you can leave it there … No hurry … No problem … Settle up tomorrow … This is Spain.’
None of this is to say that people do not work hard. They do. And none harder than the half a dozen young women who clean boats for Joss. They arrive at the pontoon early morning, in bikinis and Marigold gloves, and without coffee or ciggie breaks or skiving off to the café on the quay they clean boats all day. And I mean clean, from power washers on the decks right down to old toothbrushes applied to the crevasses of teak stairs and the flossing of stainless steel bottle screws until they gleam.
We only see them pause once, to consider the name on an English boat they are working on. They look at us quizzically as we pass in the hope of a translation. David and I glance at each other. Its equivalent in Spanish is unknown to us, and there is no mime we can think of that would not be a breach of public decency, so we shrug apologetically and walk on. Why anyone would want to call a boat Rumpy Pumpy is beyond me.
The evenings are glorious. We sit out in swimsuits, insect-free, with the town and quay lit up and reflected in the still water. And Venus rising.
9
Lift-Out
At the beginning of June Voyager is lifted out for overdue bottom-scraping and anti-fouling at the boatyard down the end of the harbour. Naturally, with any kind of manoeuvre imminent, the wind will rise anyway, but today’s forecast is for Force 6 or more. Given the inevitable delay to be expected – ‘This is Spain’ – we have a plan in place for milling around indefinitely in what is a particularly cluttered part of the harbour in winds of 26 knots and rising but, unnervingly, the lifting team arrives at the ramp at the same moment we do and the hoist is already in place.
In her time Voyager has been lifted out by hoist and by crane. Hoist is better. Not for her especially, but for me. Imagine your home swinging over your head on the end of a chain and you will know what I mean. And, just as the furniture removers always walk into your house and say the estimator hasn’t ordered a big enough van, so the crane driver always starts muttering at the last minute that they haven’t sent a big enough crane and you start to panic about it toppling over with your boat on it. Even with a hoist, however, they do not disappoint. On the dock the man in charge eyes Voyager and purses his lips.
‘You five metres wide?’ he asks.
‘Yes,’ says David.
‘Might just make it then.’
He is tall, fair, speaks clipped but excellent English and everything runs like a precision watch; including the Force 6 which does not arrive until after we are safely settled on the hard, when it roars through the boatyard sweeping before it wood shavings, paint trays and rollers, several small children and a stray dog. It leaves behind it a coating of dust and grit, to the especial chagrin of the matronly lady next door who had spent the entire morning varnishing the extensive woodwork on her immaculate motor yacht, and who will now have to rub it all down again. Meanwhile, further down the yard a voice pleads for someone to come and prop his ladder back up so that he can get down off his boat.
Our hired power-washer arrives exactly on cue and, for the first and only time ever, anywhere, we are handed a scraper as well. This
is Spain? Over the next three hours we power-wash and scrape Voyager, removing enough marine life from her hulls to keep the Discovery Channel busy for a whole series. The window man arrives, says, ‘Tomorrow. If it doesn’t rain,’ and drives away again.
It is very hot and humid. Even the Spanish are complaining about it. We start at six each morning, before it is light, to get as much done in the exposed places as possible before the sun rises. Because the minute it does, it is like an oven. The rest of the day we work in the boat’s own shade. Early evening it is still in the 90s. The sunsets are buttercup gold.
Over the next week we undercoat and anti-foul Voyager, polish her topsides, service both engines and gearboxes, clean and paint the propellers, and David is finally able to complete the gelcoat repair on the port bow begun in Bayona last year. While waiting for the replacement sacrificial anodes that somebody in town forgot to order and which the supplier in Madrid air-freights only once a week – ‘on Wednesdays’ – we also fit new hinges to the hatches so they stay open on their own like they used to, instead of having to be propped up with bits of stick. Gradually, by stealth, we even get some more of the windows done.
There is also David’s heroic struggle with the two cables which connect the engines in the hulls to the stop mechanisms on the cockpit control panel. Each cable is around twenty feet long, wends a complicated route through the bowels of each hull, and both have seized almost solid. When the cockpit is filled with dismantled control panel, the entire contents of the big toolbox, lots of oily rag and David in elbow-wielding overdrive, it is usually prudent to find something to do below. At one stage he can be glimpsed through the companionway doors with twenty feet of cable coiling round him, and at another is to be heard muttering, ‘Well, I’ve either fixed it, or cocked it up entirely.’
I had reached quite an advanced age before discovering that the planet had on it such a thing as a sacrificial anode. When I found out what replacing one entailed, I should have been quite happy never to have encountered one at all. Voyager’s are 10-inch-long heavy blocks of zinc and they are there to stop the electrolyc action in seawater from eroding any metal components exposed to it. The zinc, being a soft metal, is eaten away – or sacrificed – leaving undamaged the harder metals of the propellers and rudders.
Naturally, these anodes must be replaced before the zinc is completely eroded or the electrolyc action will begin attacking the props and rudders. Ours are bolted through the hulls and require David outside on a ladder with a spanner tightening a nut, and me inside the engine bay with a spanner stopping the bolt head from turning. Failure to tighten the nut sufficiently could result in us sinking at sea.
To secure the bolt head on the inside I have to crouch in the engine bay where there is room for only one foot to stand flat. The other, braced against the curved inside of the hull, slides remorselessly down to meet its partner where, made silkily mobile by the merest trace of engine oil, they proceed to fold over each other until my shuffling resembles a Cossack dancer who has lost the plot. To overcome this, and get some purchase on my spanner, I really need to brace myself against something solid; but I can’t, since any attempt to do so brings tender bits of flesh into contact with sharp bits of engine.
When the nut is properly tightened David comes in and hauls me out of the engine bay, fits polybags onto my tainted feet for the hobble over the bridge deck to the other engine bay, and there we repeat the process all over again. This is the problem with catamarans – as owners of single-hulled boats are forever eager to remind you during haul-outs – you have to do everything twice.
When you live on a boat you discover what floats about in the water which, once treated, you will ultimately drink. When your boat is made of white plastic you also discover what is floating about in the air you breathe. Local yachtsmen call the deposits from the power station at the end of the harbour yellow rain. It results in tiny yellow spots which will neither wash nor scrub off your gelcoat, but have to be polished off with cutting compound.
I am standing on our side deck removing yellow rain from the coach house roof when the hoist travels alongside, very precisely, barely a couple of feet away, with a 55-footer in its slings ready to go back into the water. The driver is standing, as always very tall and fair and straight, at his controls on the side of his hoist. As he passes me, eyeball to eyeball, he says, ‘Gut morning,’ very formally in his clipped, precise English, and such is the impression of two passing U-boat captains on their conning towers that I barely stop myself from saluting.
10
Life Ashore
We have the yard pretty much to ourselves. Like all boatyards, part of it is a graveyard of dreams: restoration projects which people have started but then become overwhelmed by the amount of work required; long-term ventures like our own which have run aground; or the perfect idea for carefree family weekends and holidays afloat, only the wife and kids hated it.
Where we are, in the working part of the yard, the people from the boats around us mostly come for a few hours in the evenings and at the weekend. Since we spend a lot of time up-ended in lockers, inside the hulls or in between them, we get to recognise our neighbours as much by sound as sight. Mozart’s Requiem means the man with the wooden ketch has come to spend a few hours on it after work. Heavy metal means he has paid his son to do a few hours of paint-stripping for him. Prolonged rasping means La Señora on the motor yacht is sandpapering her woodwork again prior to yet another coat of varnish. Metallic clangs interspersed with the occasional dull thud mean the power boat owner has brought his two bored adolescent sons with him and they are using a paint tin lid as a Frisbee, to the detriment of everybody’s gelcoat but their own.
Gradually these other boat owners stop by. La Señora’s husband offers the use of his car to fetch bread and milk. The Mozart-lover tells us where he lives and says if we visit that bay anytime to call in for a cup of tea with him and his family. The power boat owner takes the opportunity to hone his English as he enquires about our progress.
They’re keen, the Spanish, on polishing their English. I cannoned into a young man in town one day, and when you’re startled you forget all your carefully-rehearsed foreign phrases and revert to your own language. ‘Oh!’ I said, taking his elbow briefly to steady him, ‘I’m so sorry.’ When I joined David, a few yards away, he was looking past me and smiling. I turned and looked back. The young Spaniard was still where I had left him but mouthing something to himself slowly with great concentration while rhythmically stretching out his hand.
‘What’s he doing?’ I whispered.
‘Practising an English apology,’ said David.
In the early evenings the boatyard’s security men do a tour of inspection and lock the gates. Arc lights worthy of a football stadium provide virtual daylight in the cockpit to dine by, and we are kings of the castle, high up on a high boat with an uninterrupted view across the harbour to the twinkling lights of the town. There is also a demented bird. Deceived by the arc lights, it thinks it is still day. It is tired out but it keeps on tweeting.
One evening, after the gates are locked, three shouting men on a cart race a thin brown horse with all its ribs showing down the hard, shiny, sloping road. The horse’s head is thrown back and its eyes are wild. Its back legs collapse under it and the men shout louder than ever. It struggles up, desperate to pacify them, and they race it on down the road. A dog barks, locked inside a container yard below the boatyard.
We are miles from any shops here and David cycles up an enormous hill, in the horrendous heat, for the things we need. It would kill me, but he does it cheerfully, and along with undercoat and pop rivets will return with bags of plump red cherries and the delectable crème caramel pastries they sell in the little square above the fish market.
Meanwhile I sit under the boat in the shade, and contemplate the nature of happiness. I am sanding the hull below the waterline and scraping barnacles away from nooks and crannies that are hard to reach. One neighbour’s radio is
blaring tuneless pop music; another’s anti-fouling paint stinks to high heaven; the wind is blowing dust all over me; I am crouched on a lump of wood with an old cushion on it to keep its splinters from piercing my shorts and I ease the cramp in my right hand by alternating between a rusty craft knife and a scrap of frayed sandpaper wrapped around a wood off-cut found in the boatyard’s skip, and I am ridiculously happy.
It is startling, though, how quickly one’s living conditions descend into squalor when a facility taken for granted, such as the instantaneous and hygienic disposal of waste water, disappears. Each application of undercoat and antifouling paint on the hulls needs to be thoroughly dry before we let water out of the sinks, which would simply wash streaks of the new paint off again. This means pouring every drop of water that you normally put down a plughole – for personal washing, teeth brushing, greasy washing up, water strained from boiled vegetables and all those other liquid dribs and dregs – into a slop bucket to be carried from the galley into the cockpit, over the stern, down a ladder and across the yard for disposal.
On the way back you carry half the boatyard’s grit back up onto your deck on the bottom of your shoes, where it mixes with windborne dirt, sawdust, fibreglass grindings and heavy dew, which you cannot wash off because it will run down the hulls bearing their still-moist undercoat or hugely expensive anti-fouling paint.
Nor is the dirt confined to the decks and cockpit. With windows being taken out, the dust feels free to move indoors. And despite removing our shoes at the stern the minute we step off the ladder, the crustaceans we scraped from our hulls are now mysteriously embedded in the carpets.
Turtles in Our Wake Page 4