Atlantic Britain

by Adam Nicolson

  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, the wind had dropped, and the moon was now laying its own silvery path up the creek. With her engine purring slowly 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 could
n’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!’

  2

  The Passage

  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, a test set by the first for the other three.

  The Lizard light loomed through the thickening dark. We stayed a mile off the headland but still the sea was roughened by the tide, full of huge barn-door breakers. They were coming at us, the whole of the bow plunging into them, burying the bowsprit up to its socket, and the bulk of water driving back along the deck. The spray was lit in the nav lights on either side in huge green arcs of red and green water. There was no sprayhood and every second or two the water burst and rattled on to our waterproofs as the boat plunged on. ‘Brave’ George called her then. The night was clear and phosphorescence was sprinkled down to leeward like a reflection of the stars. The Auk was passing her exam.

  ‘Go down,’ George said to me and I slunk down into the safety of the bunk, away from this, sleep instant and deep. No thought for the man on deck and the rattling of the seas as they came over him. Just the warmth and welcome of my own private, down-filled harbour. George was simply going to be there for four hours, as I was to be for another four hours in four hours’ time. In a way, the sea sets too much of a test to reveal the intricacies of character. I, of course, know George ashore, the subtle and layered interactions of his strengths and weaknesses, the certainties and uncertainties, the withdrawals and generosities that make up any man. But at sea, particularly a demanding sea as it was that night, that internal play of the self does not appear. It is a simplified world and the sea only asks the simple question: are you on or are you off? Can you do this or can you not? It doesn’t care why, or even how. It only expects a yes or a no.

  At one in the morning, George woke me. I came up, he gave me the bearing, handed me the torch, and I took his place at the wheel. The stars were coming and going through the clouds. Our course was to leave Scilly to port and then bear away for the Irish coast. The Lizard light had sunk below the horizon but the light on the Longships reef at Land’s End was still clear behind me to the east. The lightship on the Seven Stones, the rocks that sank the Torrey Canyon, was winking to the north of me. In the south, the arm of the Wolf ranged across the night. Ahead, Round Island light, to the north of St Martin’s in Scilly, led me onwards. Beyond it, the loom of the Bishop swept out across the open expanses of the Atlantic. These names were like the constellations of the sea.

  I was well that
night, happy to be out here in the cold. Seasickness, as George had said to me, is a kind of fear, and like any fear can be held at bay and suppressed, can be told to get down like a dog. You can feel seasickness coming on and, as George had taught me, you can deny it. I tried it that night and although from time to time I was still being sick over the side, watching the supper I had eaten spewing out among the phosphorescence below the lee rail, it was not the sort of seasickness I had before. It didn’t make me think I was about to die or my character a waste of shame. I was simply being sick every hour or so, in the way that exhaust comes out of the back of a car. Nelson was seasick until the year he died. The fear it represents doesn’t need to send you to hell. And I wasn’t in hell; I was in a sort of cold windy heaven.

  The course for Scilly was 280 magnetic, the wind just behind the beam. One by one the quartering seas kicked under us, picking up the Auk first at the stern, travelling the length of her, and then dropping the bow in the trough behind. As each one came under, I held the helm against it, a door pressed shut, as George had told me, against the beast pressing in from the other side; and then, as the beast relaxed, I relaxed, taking the pressure off the wheel and waiting for the beast to try his luck again. It was a long, twice-a-minute rhythm, on and off, on and off, the wide, strong Auk surging into the dark.

  At times like this, alone in a wide dark sea, with your companion asleep below, you can feel the wonder of a boat. Of course a boat is not a natural thing. She is the most cultural of things, the way she works dependent on a line of thought that goes back to the Bronze Age: the form of the hull and the weighted keel; the lift and drive given by a sail; the way four sails like ours can be trimmed to lead each other on; the ingenuity of blocks and tackles, strops, sheets, halyards and warps, the sheer cleverness of knots. The knowledge that is gathered in a boat is a great human inheritance, especially valuable because it is not material but intangible, a legacy made only of understanding.