Emerging confidently from the labyrinth at the side of Petros’ cafe I took an ouzo and a small mezé of cheese and olives, simply because it was so definitely the thing to do in this seafaring town; as I sipped the ouzo, and took a profound private pleasure in stripping the olive-pits as efficiently as any man to the Mediterranean born, I exchanged grave nods with Petros’ other seagoing clientele, which in one respect or another was pretty much all of them. The grip at my feet formed a bond previously absent; for now I too was a Mediterranean sailor, on his way down to the sea. Smugly savouring this new sense of comradeship, I exchanged a few knowing words about the weather with my peers, and casually let it be known that I was taking out ‘the big boat.’
“Ah, neh?3 The BIG boat!” they all acknowledged, and nodded significantly to their neighbours. One or two of them raised their glasses to me.
Having indulged myself with my Band of Brothers, I ambled down the dock, pausing to confer my gracious benediction on the fishermen’s catches as they sold them direct from their boats, and to exchange greetings with other waterfront characters. Finally my regal progress ended outside a restaurant where Iraklis was moored alongside, her high hull presenting a large step up from the quay. I slung my bag over her railing, purloined a restaurant chair to stand on- another source of contentment, as one needed to be an intimate of the waterfront to know that this was quite acceptable behaviour provided that you patronised the restaurant from time to time… and swung myself up into my kingdom.
As I sat at the wheel and gazed complacently around, the first hydrofoil from Porto Heli grumbled into the channel. The boat bucked gently and plucked at her moorings… she seemed as eager as me to cast off the idleness of winter and feel the first of the summer miles washing past her keel. I had a sense of purpose, of nobility, of place, of independence, of aspirations high above the grimy imperatives of the life of the common man. In fact, I think pride and narcissism had inflated my chest to almost the size of my stomach when Spiros passed by with a cheery, “Good morning! Oh... I forgot... the forward toilet is blocked... but it’s OK, you’ve got an hour or so to clear it before they arrive...”
The skipper who cheerfully greeted his boisterous charges at the ferry pier about ninety minutes later was one with slightly fewer misconceptions of the romance of commercial yachting, a little less self-esteem, and a strong whiff of antiseptic soap about him.
* * *
They were a bouncy lot, my archaeolonauts. We herded them all into George’s Cafe where Spiros made a charmingly charismatic welcome speech… during which I noticed that he suddenly developed a rather engaging Greek accent whilst he set out his stall as the genial and genuine Hellenic host… and introduced the boats and the skippers. There then followed a cheerfully anarchic mêlée as the kids sorted themselves out according to the crew-mates, yacht and captain they liked the look of.
I shortly found myself patiently shepherding a platoon of dancing, chattering magpies past the souvenir shops towards the boat, where I simply said “This is my bed. The rest are first come, first served...” and was then rather pleasantly trampled by a good-natured phalanx of predominantly female body-parts. When I had enjoyed this to a point barely on the respectable side of perversion I left them to sort themselves out, and returned to the cockpit... a cockpit now inhabited by a very hyper Pretty Panzer, who was suddenly rather more conspicuous than she had been during my travails with the toilet. I figured that I now at least knew how far she wasn’t prepared to go to get her man.
Eventually I mustered them all into Petros’ cafe, and tried to make sense of the names and nationalities. I found I had two couples and eight young ladies, originating from places as mutually remote as Iceland and Okinawa. English was more or less the lingua franca, although an Italian boy and his Czech girlfriend didn’t seem to have any language in common with anyone, including each other. The boys both looked a little soft, with a strong hint of mum’s cooking still about them, but the girls were pretty much how I had imagined young archaeologists would be...a healthy, practical looking lot for the most part; somewhat earnest, inclined to be analytical, and highly inquisitive.
I was a (fairly) young, single and single-minded man, and so the equality-conscious reader will perhaps forgive the fact that, through the diminishing effects of the years, I have retained rather more detail about the girls than the boys. To the latter I was perfectly indifferent, but as regards the former I was highly delighted with my haul. Before me appeared a very pleasing selection of international womanhood; fit, intelligent and homely looking lasses with outdoor complexions not always found in students. There was one outstanding beauty amongst them; the Icelandic girl, who had some of the most delicate facial features I had ever seen; high cheeks, a sharp little nose and elfin lips, set off with silver-blond shoulder-length hair and the ice-grey eyes of a wolf. Her figure was equally mesmeric, and her character was delightfully open and warm. It was fortunate indeed that she had one flaw which brought her down to a level at which a mere mortal could interact with her…her name sounded like a wolverine eating porridge. My instant and no doubt lamentably sexist first thought when I met her was that she must be truly committed to archaeology,4 because there ought to have been any number of modelling agencies willing to shovel dollars through her window with a fork-lift.
As we got introduced, and I concentrated desperately on trying to create aides-memoires to help me remember everyone’s name, I heard Shergar addressing his team at a nearby table.
“No, honest!” He grinned, “I haven’t a clue. I’m just going to follow Julian.”
I winced, but his four earnest passengers chuckled contentedly; and then, as Shergar disappeared out of earshot to get more beer, I heard the confident rumble of a trans-Atlantic accent say “British understatement!” and her confederates tapped their noses and nodded knowingly.
* * *
We left the dock at about one o’clock. I had some notion of giving everyone something to do and making it a bit of a lesson, but no-one seemed very much interested in my ideas. The boys had both withdrawn into private cabins with their partners, and the rest of the girls were preoccupied with staking their claim to lockers, with unpacking and, to my amazement and delight, with changing into bikinis. It was a sunny day, to be sure, but the air was not really warm and if you stood in a shadow you soon felt it. I was wearing an open body-warmer over my shorts and cotton shirt, and most Greeks still had their overcoats and felt trousers on; but the northern element of my crew, which was most of them, were nothing daunted and the Icelandress, or whatever the correct term for them is, declared that she felt positively summery.
I trotted a few yards down the dock to help Shergar off the quay. This was no great challenge for him, as Molto was berthed with her stern to the dock. I let the ropes go, and he just headed straight out into the channel... and turned the wrong way, towards Methana. The rest of the flotilla was going to Hydra, and so when Shergar glanced back at me I gave my thumb a covert jerk the other way. He nodded imperceptibly, and a moment later I heard his voice booming over the water;
“We’ll just go up this way a bit first, so that you can get a good look at the clock tower. Then I’ll come back and follow Julian, because I haven’t a clue where we’re going!”
A ripple of contented laughter bubbled out of his crew. I shook my head at the insanity of it, giggled helplessly and hurried back to Iraklis.
We would have got away clean, had it not been for PeePee who, in her lunatic enthusiasm, cast off the lines of the boat ahead as well as ours. This resulted in me doing some rather rapid commuting up and down the deck to make sure she got them secured properly again. By this time, though, almost all of my crew were stretched out on deck in the sun. My migrations took on the nature of a hurdles race through a busy mortuary.
Having re-secured the other boat, PeePee made a wholehearted but elephantine leap for Iraklis and missed by about a metre. I ended up with my arms around her shoulder blades, hanging on for grim death as
she thrashed about in a galvanic attempt to get a leg as high as the toe-rail... bikinied, fleshy and coated in sun-tan oil, it was like trying to hang onto a Teflon-coated hippo in an earthquake. My passengers lived scrupulously up to their name, observing with keen interest and doing nothing whatever to help as the now unsecured Iraklis drifted slowly astern towards Captain Yeorgios’ fishing boat.
Fortunately, assistance was at hand. Blatchley’s first law of nautical recreation is, ‘the competence of the manoeuvre is in inverse proportion to the number of people watching it.’ Half the waterfront folk of Poros, in particular the ones I had accidentally managed to tell that I was sailing ‘the big boat’ today, were in the vicinity to watch me leave, and the sudden abundance of bikinis had done nothing to diminish the audience either; a substantial throng was therefore available and very willingly grabbed hold of railings and shrouds to hold the boat and reduce her impact on Captain Yeorgios’ newly-painted stem. Then a couple of grinning fishermen gave PeePee’s ample posterior portion a shrewd hoick and she flew over the rail with a squeak of protest... propelled, I suspect, as much by indignation as force.
Regaining the wheel, I manoeuvred Iraklis out of the confined berth… it was a nice little bit of driving, if I do say so myself, but of course when you do something right, no-one notices. My reputation had already been established by preceding events, and a non-event was not going to change it.... especially since most of the crowd which had observed my inelegant departure were already on their way to the cafe to have a good chuckle about it, and the remainder were still bellowing advice. Ruefully, I turned into the channel, and just as my stern gland began to unclench the world suddenly became full of Shergar, roaring back out of nowhere with a huge grin on his face and an enormous bow wave under Molto’s stem. I slammed my engine astern so hard that I almost broke the throttle-lever; black smoke erupted from under the counter as Iraklis’ mighty eighty horse-power engine souflléed the harbour, and she stopped almost dead. Shergar crossed my bow with a cheery wave and a comfortable half-inch to spare. Had the bewitchingly vulpine eyes of Bjørk Someonesdottir not appeared in front of mine at that moment, he might have learned a thing or two about his IQ and parentage.
Sweating at the scalp and whistling to create an impression of imperturbability, I headed east down the strait, and consoled myself that, although I had performed ignominiously in front of about half of the people of Poros whom I most wished to impress, I could at least be grateful that O Geros and Megali were already out of the channel and had not witnessed our departure. As the senior local sailors, theirs was the censure I feared the most.
* * *
Hydra, pronounced ‘ee-thra’, is a mere twelve nautical miles from Poros; a distance which a yacht can generally cover in just over two hours with a fair wind, or under engine if the day is calm. The wind that greeted us as we passed Bourtzi, a charming little fortified islet in the eastern approach to Poros, was a light north-easterly... enough to move us at three, or possibly four, knots at best. I decided to sail, however, because of Spiros’ strictures about fuel consumption and also because I had this odd perception in the unexplored space between my ears that folks who had hired a sailing boat might actually want to sail.5 So I swallowed a cup of hot tar and got nautical.
It was fairly evident from the inertia during our departure from Poros that most of the crew were at best ambivalent about boats, and they had so far shown no inclination for physical activity. I decided to make sailing an optional activity.
“Anyone who is interested in sailing, come and join me in the cockpit.”
I wasn’t trampled in the rush. The inevitable Pretty Panzer, fully recovered from her indignities and keen as ever, galumphed aft from the mast, and I had one other taker; a square-featured, stocky, curly-haired brunette with a cheeky grin who rose vertically out of the main hatch like a Polaris missile leaving it’s silo.
“Oh, rathER!” She enthused in public-school English, and vaulted over the coaming into the cockpit with all the decorum and daintiness of an SAS trooper dropping in at the Iranian embassy.
“Ready, willing and able, what, Skip!”
She stood beaming and keen, blue eyes sparkling, button-nosed, apple-cheeked and shapely, attractive in the curvy, substantial sort of way that does not get into the fashion magazines, playing an imaginary piano with her fingers in anticipation of something to do. I groaned inwardly. A hearty Hooray-Henry type... the sort of girl farmed out to the Pony Club from the age of six, who can bare knuckle-box an inflamed stallion at puberty and crush a carthorse into submission with her thighs before she can vote. I had an immediate mental picture of a highly impractical creature of immense strength and enthusiasm but little sagacity tearing the clews out of Iraklis’ weary old sails.
“OK, great. Er... it’s Chloe, isn’t it?”
“Clemmie, ectually. Short for ‘Clytemnestra’... never forgive my ruddy Pater for that, what?” she bubbled.
Clytemnestra. It would be! Absolutely NO jokes, Julian!
“Right Clemmie... er... ever done any sailing before?”
‘Please, Gods, let her say no!’ I prayed... the last thing I needed was a Solent yellow-wellie who was going to say, “That’s not the way we did it on the Hamble!” to everything... because I am a self-taught sailor, and I have not the foggiest idea how anything is done on the Hamble. Well, outside the Rising Sun, that is.
“Well, just a little bit, don’cher know?”
Grieving inwardly that, out of all the demure and elegant specimens of young womanhood on board, it was only these two gung-ho Amazons who apparently had the slightest interest in anything I might be able to teach them, I fixed a cheery smile on my phiz and led them through the steps of hoisting the main sail.
Tip-toeing as discretely as possible through the tangle of body-parts which strewed the deck, I gave a clear, step-by-step commentary… halyard up… not too tight, no vertical wrinkles at the luff. Reef-lines and topping-lift eased. Outhaul tension checked. Kicker lightly tensioned. All this was attentively followed by PeePee and Clemmie, and might as well have been a speech by the President of the European Commission6 as far as anyone else was concerned.
Returning to the cockpit, I trimmed the track and main sheet with similar sagacious observations, and then turned slightly off the wind so that Iraklis heeled gently to starboard as the light south-easterly breeze filled the mainsail. It seemed I could just about lay a course to Tselevinia, perhaps having to make one tack, but that would do me just fine. I stopped the engine and, instructing Clemmie to let go the furling line and PeePee to heave in the sheet, started to roll out the genoa.
PeePee, in her eagerness, made a complete pig’s ear of it. First she wound the sheet round the winch-barrel the wrong way three separate times... a situation exacerbated by a combination of her tendency to forget her English under stress, and my unaccountable failure to remember, in the heat of the moment, that the German for ‘clockwise’ is Im Uhrzeigersinn.
When she did finally get it right, PeePee tried to make up for lost time and face by unleashing her full upper-body strength combined with an almighty pump of her formidable thighs in a titanic heave… the experience of her previous effort with the rope wound backwards obviously left her expecting a similar resistance on the sheet, but the now correctly loaded winch spun easily and the genoa was rippling gently in the breeze without wind in it. There was no weight on the rope at all. PeePee took off across the cockpit like a long-jumper in reverse, just as Iraklis rolled to port on a wave. Under the twin influences of her fearsome quadriceps and the yacht’s momentum she crossed the cockpit quicker than I can tell, shredding the air with flailing appendages. Her enormous impetus carried her clean over the bench, and she landed doubled-up, in an undignified half-reclined posture on the deck beside the cockpit, with her elbows over the middle lifeline, her knees next to her ears, and her sweet but highly puzzled face peering uncertainly out of a chasm of cleavage.
Before I could get around the wheel t
o correct things, the purposeful figure of Clemmie stepped into the breach. With barely a glance to either side, she stripped the line off the winch again. I started to tell her that it was perfectly OK as it was, and then shut up as I saw that it had developed a riding-turn, which Clemmie cleared as deftly as she had identified it. Then, with three cobra-strikes of her right wrist, she flicked the sheet thrice around the winch and, giving it an expert pull, set it screaming as it recovered the slack. At the instant that the load came on, Clemmie leaned easily back on the rope and tensioned it with perfect timing; then, in a move so fluid that it disgraced waterfalls, she scooped a winch-handle out of its pocket and slapped it into the winch. With a series of powerful but elegantly choreographed strokes of her arm, she then brought the genoa smoothly in until it formed a lovely curve a perfect four inches from the spreader.
Clemmie subjected the weary old sail to a critical look and, muttering to no-one in particular, “Track back a bit,” she nimbly adjusted the tension of the foot of the sail. Then she stepped back, whipped the winch-handle back into its pocket with the panache of a Hollywood gunslinger holstering his smoking Colt, coiled the free end of the sheet onto the side-deck, loaded the windward winch ready for tacking, and gazed around with a look of complacent competence.
Iraklis was heeling easily and bubbling away on the port tack towards Tselevinia, PeePee was still in her recumbent posture looking as if she was only waiting for someone to say ‘push’ before giving birth, and I had finally managed to close my mouth.
“And the ‘little bit of sailing’ was where, exactly, Clemmie?” I enquired
She grinned wolfishly.
“Oh, between Sydney and Hobart. At Cowes. And a few times around Fastnet and back.”
The Trojan Walrus Page 6