Even I soon realised that I had overdone it... the kids would go away happy and I would never see them again; but if I wanted to stay here I had to co-exist with Karottos, and Yeorgaki, with Xanthos and Megali and O Geros. It belatedly occurred to me that if I ever had to face a major test of my prowess, I was going to find it somewhat difficult to live up to the image of a maritime oracle which I had made for myself.
And so we came to the last day. Leaving Spiros on the beach near Thermissia, arguing about compensation for damaged tables, we set out to round Tselevinia and return to Poros. A race had been planned, but there wasn’t enough wind to bother a butterfly, so we motored. The plan was to get most of the mileage done whilst the worst hangovers were still being slept off, and then stop at Aliki beach outside Poros for lunch and a swim before going in.
Iraklis led the fleet out of the bay, and should have led all the way with her speed, but Shergar, full of confidence after several trouble-free days and in thrall to his innate belief that unused horse-power was an affront to nature, gunned his mighty engine and steadily forged past me. I gave him an indulgent wave as he passed, happy to see my fledgling taking flight, and got on with talking about astro-navigation with an earnestly interested Clemmie.
Clemmie was keen to learn astro-nav, and her questions were insightful and serious. To stay a step ahead of my student I had to concentrate quite hard at recalling my college days, and although I had a mental register on where Shergar was, it was quite a while before I realised where he was going.
Poros is separated from Hydra by a long, thin, high spur of the Peloponnese which extends eastward and ends in two islets called the Tselevinia Islands. One has to make a dog-leg of more than ninety degrees around the end of this peninsula, changing course between north-west and south-west, or vice-versa, depending which way one is going. There is a channel between the Outer and Inner Islands which looks deep and easily navigable, and this is in fact the case; it is an easy passage which almost everyone uses, even hydrofoils and ferries, as it saves at least a mile going out around Akra Skyli on the outside. But between the inner island and the shore there is also a channel which looks as if it may be navigable... and nothing much bigger than a duck should try it! It is rocky, shallow and, although a few small fishing boats with years of local knowledge go through in calm weather, it should never be attempted by anything with a keel.
The thing with these two passages is that they are not aligned. Whichever direction you approach from, one is masked so that you see only one channel; and if you come from the south-west, then it’s the bad one. Shergar, knowing nothing about charts but remembering that on the way south he had gone through a channel, had added up two and two, arrived at the answer of eight-point-nine recurring, and was blithely heading Molto Allegro and her crew of erudite archaeological savants straight towards a passage full of rocks at full speed.
I shot down to the chart room and picked up the VHF radio mike.
“Molto Allegro, Molto Allegro, this is Iraklis, over.”
Nothing. I tried again. I fiddled with the squelch knob, using the static to test the speaker volume. Maybe he was not on the working channel. I switched to channel sixteen, the calling and distress channel.
“Molto Allegro, Molto Allegro, this is Iraklis on channel sixteen, over.”
Getting desperate now.
“Shergar! Shergar! This is Julian, over.”
‘You’re wasting your time here, big fella,’ whispered a treacly smug voice somewhere inside my head, ‘Time to get out there and show some of that nautical omniscience you have been spouting about!’
I estimated that I was about half a mile behind Shergar, and had perhaps twenty minutes to get his attention. It is pretty hard to make up half a mile in a stern chase in twenty minutes under any circumstances, and Shergar was a petrol-head with an engine that would have been adequate for the Lusitania. As I rammed the throttle forward, and Iraklis spouted filthy smoke from under her counter, I knew that I wasn’t going to make it.
I was cooking up some scheme for encouraging all the crew to shout at once when I abstractly realised that the exhaust from the engine was irritating my throat, and we were probably motoring at close to seven and a half knots. Some long moments later it dawned on me that we had wind from astern, and glancing back I saw a dappling on the water with occasional white flecks... there was something of a gust coming up from behind us. Hope flared. I called Clemmie.
“Can you fly a kite?”
“Oh, rathER! Have we got one?”
I nodded. “Get forward!” I said, and then, “Giovanni, take the wheel... yes... you... Si! Prendo il... the... bloody wheel! Conductore! Timoneer, you, savvy? Steer! Take the wheel!”
I galumphed forward and dragged the spinnaker out of its cave. There were perhaps four other girls on deck, May and Miss Iceland fortunately amongst them, and I soon had them all working, passing the sheet-lines and letting the main sail out to catch the new wind.
Clemmie and I feverishly dumped the sail out on the deck and swiftly ran our hands along the luff and leach to check that it wasn’t twisted. No time to re-pack it and launch it from the bag… we’d just have to send it up from the deck as it was. It lay there, an enormous, prolapsed heap of thin red, white and blue nylon which spasmed occasionally in the rising breeze; not a hint yet of the great, powerful, arrogant belly of barely-controllable power which it represented.
“I say, Skip, what’s all the ruddy bally-hoo?” asked Clemmie privately, and I needed her on top form so I told her. Her eyes lit up.
“Roger-dodge. Mum’s the word, what! Bit of a lark!” she grinned, and I thought, I like this girl. A lot. Despite the P. G. Wodehouse vocab.
I had an enormous struggle to release the spinnaker-pole; it had lain unused so long that the outer piston was almost seized with salt, but I levered and battered it with my knife, and got it free. The pole downhauls looked as if they had seen better days... a spinnaker puts enormous lifting strain on a pole, and the downhauls control this. Anyone who has seen a down-haul break under a well-loaded spinnaker will also have seen an enormous balloon of enraged nylon shoot vertically up above the top of the mast and either become hopelessly entangled, or heave the boat right over on her side. Or both. So I quickly improvised some reinforcement out of a sturdy mooring-line, and hoped for the best.
I headed back for the wheel, and Clemmie took the halyard. I set the pole-guy and had May and Giovanni stand by the sheet. And up she went.
For a moment all was quiet; I steered down a bit to allow Clemmie to get the spinnaker up in the lee, or dead-wind area, behind the main sail, which was straining gently out to port now. The luff of the spinnaker snapped petulantly once or twice, and Clemmie came aft again with the crouching gallop of an experienced foredeck hand, which is a very good trick if you can do it. Then, with Clemmie on the sheet, I had May bring the pole square using the guy and brought the wheel around to fill the sail.
It flickered twice, and then blossomed in an instant, filling with an angry ‘boom’ that rattled the rigging and heeled the boat ten degrees in an instant. The luff began a slow, sullen flogging as Clemmie and Giovanni winched in frantically on the sheet to tame it and then, as the flogging stopped, the sail began to develop its potential. The bow dipped and Iraklis settled. You could feel her accelerate. I pulled back the engine-throttle and put her in neutral... she was already sailing faster than she could ever motor, and the wind was rising still.
Clemmie knew her stuff with a kite. She never even looked at me, but did the sheets-man’s job to perfection, trimming the sheet and issuing instructions to May on the guy. The spinnaker swelled out, a great, proud distended belly of straining red, white and blue, its enormous power transmitted to the boat through the straining mast head, the thrumming sheets and the creaking pole. Iraklis was flying now, nine knots coming up on the log and her wide, creamy wake hissed like tearing linen as it curved past her flanks.
I could feel some weight coming onto the wheel a
s the great sail tried to bring the boat up to windward. Heads started to appear in the companionway, complaints at the disturbance and angle-of-heel giving way to a delighted chatter as they saw the great, noble bulging kaleidoscope above their heads.
I probably still wasn’t going to make it in time to stop Shergar, but at least now I was sure someone would point out the spinnaker and make him look round. I hoped so, because otherwise I was going to have to sail into the bay after him... and wind does funny things in Greek bays. Being in a Greek bay with a spinnaker up is like walking through a tiger-park with a pork chop tied around your neck and bleating like a lamb.
At last I saw it, the flash of flesh-colour above Shergar’s T-shirt-du-jour as he turned to look back, and I raised my hand high and stabbed emphatically off to the right. He got it second go, and I saw him turn back to his crew, point for a while at the passage he was almost into,3 and then lazily swing the wheel. Molto Allegro curved smoothly out of the bay, and just as smoothly my blood pressure fell away. An unimaginable lightness of heart and a great feeling of peace fell upon me. All I had to do now was get this rampaging great boat out of the bay it was entering without alarming any of my crew... who, with the exception of Clemmie, were still under the blissful impression that I was in control.
“Everyone sit down!” I called, my guts twisting as they took their time finding comfortable places. They finally managed it, after about a year or so. And then I slacked the pole forward, and brought Iraklis around slowly.
A spinnaker becomes more difficult to control as the angle of the wind comes more on the side of the boat, and it also becomes more powerful, because the relative wind-speed increases as it comes forward. Clemmie was still doing very well on the sheet, there was no flogging, but the heel of the boat increased by another ten degrees and the speed rose over ten knots. I had a good bit of weight on the helm now, she was trying to bring her head up into the wind where the spinnaker would flog and damage something. If you get this completely wrong you may even broach, losing all control as the boat goes over on her side and then, if the spinnaker sheet is not released pronto, you could be in dismasting country. Clemmie was doing exactly the right thing; looking straight into my eyes, calmly ready in case I told her to dump the sheet. Iraklis was almost on the edge, but not quite. I still had about a turn on the wheel before I lost steering control. We screeched out of that bay like Herbert von Karajan leaving a rap concert, almost eleven knots showing on the log and the crew shrieking with nervous exhilaration.
We got the wind behind us again and Clemmie and I got things more under control. I sent Iraklis screaming past Molto Allegro a mere twenty feet to her windward side, exchanging insults with Shergar whilst the pupils abused their lecturers. Vegetables were, of course, thrown, and fire returned… Billy-Bob scored a direct hit on Miss Iceland with a tomato, and May put a yoghurt right into a Swedish lady’s cleavage... but so great was our speed that we were soon out of range.
I didn’t try to go through the ‘right’ channel, not with the kite up... we carried on outside the island, and there found the wind decreased a little and went a bit more southerly, so we very gingerly gybed the spinnaker and main, and set off for Poros at a spanking eight knots with the wind over our port quarter. Of the rest of the fleet, O Geros followed. Never to be outdone he quickly set his own spinnaker, but couldn’t close the gap. The rest dwindled far behind, apart from the motoring Shergar, who, I noticed, followed us around the outside... he had apparently had his fill of channels for one day.
* * *
The wind started to come ahead of us again about three miles out of Poros, and we dropped the spinnaker. Plodding lazily on with the main only, Clemmie and I tidied it up and put it away... I wondered how long it was since it had seen the sun; how long it would be again. And then I went back to start the engine. It ground, and it whirred, coughed and stayed resolutely inactive. We set the genoa and Clemmie sailed slowly north-west on the dying breeze as I tried to look confident and descended into the engine compartment. And let me tell you, what I don’t know about engines... well, it would fill a very large, useful book about engines.
I poked around, uttering mendaciously confident platitudes to my concerned passengers whilst looking hopefully for something very simple and obvious which was within my capabilities... such as a large switch set at ‘OFF’; and then I suddenly remembered that, in the exhilaration of setting the spinnaker, I had put the engine in neutral but I hadn’t stopped it. It must have stopped itself. Fuel starvation? The tank was still at least a quarter full. Finally I realised that, with the engine running whilst the boat was heeled hard over, we might have got an air-bubble in the fuel system. At least that was something I could deal with.
After five minutes of pumping and grinding the starter, then slacking and tightening the injector-feeds, the engine suddenly roared into life. I walked on deck feeling a million dollars, wiping oil from my hands, trying not to look smug in front of my admiring crew, and casually put the engine in gear.
An appalling grinding noise, like a noisy ogre being sick into a cement-mixer full of rocks, clattered out of the companion way, and with a massive shudder the engine stopped dead again. Oh, deary me. Well, that is the essence of what I said. My actual vocabulary was probably just a fraction more authentically nautical.
My mechanical guru, the elusive Shergar, had already passed me and was thundering into Aliki bay, a useless half mile ahead again and with his VHF radio still tuned to Planet Zog. Without him I didn’t have a clue where to start with this problem, so figuring that whatever happened now couldn’t do any more damage than had already been done, I optimistically put the engine in neutral and restarted it.
It started with no problem, and ran perfectly. I thought for a minute. Gearbox problem, then. Well, there’s two in there... if one won’t work try the other.
As Mr Spock would have said, “It’s logic Jim; but not as we know it.” But it worked. Iraklis went smoothly into gear astern, and began to gather sternway. We quickly dropped the main, and with Clemmie and I each side of the wheel to hold it straight Iraklis completed the Grave-Robber in unique style, blithely reversing half a mile into the Bourtzi channel and so to anchor off Aliki beach. Here Shergar attended, certified the gearbox as dead on arrival, and so we enjoyed a lazy lunch by way of a wake for it before towing Iraklis effortlessly back to Poros. Molto Allegro’s great, purring beast of an engine barely raised a sweat.
* * *
There was a very merry last night. I took all my crew to Petros’s cafe for sundowners and then we met up with the rest of the gang for another meal of cheap but tasty traditional Greek dishes, some of which mysteriously became airborne. Spiros played master-of-indignities with raucous abandon, dishing out silly little prizes for the dumbest deeds of the trip. I got one for being pillock enough to sail into a bay under spinnaker. (Spiros had originally been a bit cross about that, until I explained why I had done it; but then he beamed and said, “Bravo, Palikari-mou!” ‘Palikari’ translates as ‘good lad’, and is something of an accolade. It is the sort of thing one calls a trusted friend, and is used in folklore to describe the younger revolutionaries who fought well against the Turks, so I enjoyed that).
The party went late into the night. Some of the kids went to the Kavos and Korali discos up on the rocks at the end of the dock, others stayed in the cafes or retired to the boats. I made a random last minute effort to chat-up the Swedish lecturer with the yoghurt-flavoured bosom, and after I had been very charmingly told to go and boil my head the American lady lecturer drew me to one side. For a moment I thought my luck was in, but she only wanted to talk about Shergar.
“Y’know,” she said (in a crisp American accent which was at the other end of the evolutionary scale entirely from Billy-Bob’s sub-Mason-Dixon porridge), “He never let up, right to the end. Last dang thing he said was ‘I don’t think I’ll ever be any good at this sailing business.’ He was an absolute hoot!”
The wine was in, the w
it was out, and I couldn’t resist it.
“Well, he’s a very truthful chap!” I said. Her brow creased.
“Whad’ya mean?”
“He’s a racing car driver, not a sailor,” I said. “He’s our mechanic. He really doesn’t know anything about boats at all. We were short-handed.”
She looked at me uncertainly for a minute, and then let out a whoop of laughter.
“Ah, you Brits and your sense of humour! You’re worse than he is!” And off she went, apparently perfectly convinced that she had been in safe hands all week.
We saw about sixty hangovers off at the ferry quay the next morning. The rattling old pantouffle farted and puffed its way back off the dock and plodded doggedly out of the bay. The skippers all sagged slightly. We bad each other weary farewells, and went our separate ways.
Shergar and I traipsed sluggishly back to the South Quay, where we collapsed on Petro’s terrace and consumed a pyramid of bacon sandwiches. He brought us both a beer on the house as well. We sat quietly, both quite drained by five frantic days. My body was pleading for sleep, and my get-up-and-go had not just got-up-and-gone, it had changed its name and emigrated without leaving a forwarding address. But a quiet day would soon sort that out, I knew, and then I would want to be out on charter once more... I had loved the experience, and it depressed me that there was no immediate prospect of doing it all over again. I didn’t think Spiros would have many other charters, even for a ‘palikari’, until after Easter at least. In all probability it would be the height of summer before he needed me. I could expect some deliveries, but it could be months before I skippered a charter-boat again, and the thought deflated me.
The Trojan Walrus Page 9