I had seen nothing quite like her. She looked as if someone had mated a tug with an American stern-wheel river-boat, and yet I still experienced a most irritating sense that I should know what she was. Her forward end was hauntingly familiar. I did in fact wonder if someone had welded two ends of dissimilar ships together... but that couldn’t be, because, as the light shone full on her side, I saw that she was carvel-built out of wood. And with that discovery, the penny dropped... she was an old Royal Navy Ton-Class minesweeper, and someone had dumped an accommodation block on her main-deck.
The Ton-Class were ubiquitous in their day, a numerous family of ships in the British Royal Navy and built for, or sold to, a number of other navies too. Made of wood, to reduce their magnetic field, they had high bows to counter the harsh northern seas, a traditional naval capped funnel and a long, open main-deck which gave them their distinctive profile. With their double-diagonal carvel construction, they were tough as nails too... effectively double-hulled... and twin engines and rudders made them pretty manoeuvrable.
Doughty little ships, by the early eighties many had been paid off from naval service. I had seen them being used as training-ships, trawlers and static floating accommodation, but the extra accommodation puzzled me. I had never heard of them being used as passenger ships, and even if that was her purpose, she was in entirely the wrong place. She had a large Cayman Island ensign at her stern... and Greece is very restrictive about allowing foreign-flag carriers to operate in her waters. I wondered what the ship’s current function could be.
The Poros waterfront did not keep secrets long, of course. Swan was not an inconspicuous visitor. Her high bow and accommodation block were almost as big as the Ydra and the Danae, the larger ferries which served the island, and her ensign was so big that it almost swept the quay. Her owner, Les, a larger-than-life chap with a vaguely Mid-Atlantic accent, a spade-beard, a ringing laugh, a beer-belly and more teeth than a crocodile’s wedding photo, was not exactly a recluse either. The story of our new neighbour was soon out.
Purchased from the Royal Navy and fitted out for dive-chartering, Swan was neither fish nor fowl: the bridge and forecastle were rather as they had been in her naval service, Spartan and utilitarian, except that the cabins had double beds installed. She retained communal heads and shower compartments in the forecastle. The new accommodation block was composed of twin bunk cabins without en suite facilities... comfortable, basic housing which was adequate for divers but completely useless for normal passenger service. Underneath the cabins, the old mine-sweeping deck was enclosed in a single, long bar-restaurant furnished with plastic patio tables and chairs.
Les was quickly a familiar face in the watering-holes of the town and frequently invited parties back for impromptu barbeques. Invited to one of these, I got to know him a little and rather liked the chap... he was extremely noisy when happy, and he became happy very readily. His extrovert ways were not calculated to endear him to everyone, especially the officials he had to deal with, but I got the impression that he was a very genuine character beneath the persiflage.
Having fitted out Swan as a dive vessel for the Caribbean, Les had crossed swords with various official entities there and simply sailed away. On a whim, without any research on the matter, he had decided to do ‘a bit of diving in Greece’, and when he arrived from Gibraltar he announced to the port police that he had ‘come to do some diving on the antiquities’.
Now, Greece was so sensitive on the subject of uncontrolled access to historic artefacts that diving was actually banned unless one had a government-approved dive supervisor; so Les’s declaration, coupled with the casual revelation that he had fifty sets of diving equipment on board, was the equivalent of Lord Elgin returning with a back-hoe and an empty truck. Greek officialdom had a collective seizure. By the time they recovered sufficiently to make a decision what to do about this, Les’s South African captain had left the country because his visa was expiring; so Swan sat in Poros, with all her diving equipment firmly under customs seal, and without a crew apart from her enthusiastic but highly landlubberly owner. And in Greece, July is the month when the Meltemi starts.
* * *
The Meltemi is a north wind which predominates in the months of July and August, and it can be anything between a robust sailing wind and a howling gehooligan. Meltemi is taken from the Turkish Meltem, which may have its roots in the Italian ‘mal tempo’ or ‘bad weather’; but the original Greek name is the Etesian, or Annual, wind, derived from the word etos, a year. The two different derivations always seem to me to mirror the two culture’s differing confidences on the sea.
At times, the Meltemi can be so severe that it almost closes down the Aegean, and at any time it makes that sea uncomfortable for all but very confident and adventurous sailors. It is also a wicked spreader of wild fire... extinguishing fires in the Meltemi is a Herculean endeavour. Nevertheless, it is welcome in one respect at least; it tempers the heat.
In a normal year, the Meltemi starts around the second week of July when, just as one begins to feel that the temperature will go on rising until the fishermen started to land ready-poached fish, the Meltemi begins to blow and finally tames the heat.
Strongest in the Aegean, the Meltemi is still significant in the Argo-Saronic; but its effect is rather different. At moderate strength out in the Aegean Islands it typically starts from a morning calm, building to force six or even more in the afternoon, and begins to die again mid-evening, leaving a lumpy sea.
I soon found that, on the Peloponnesian coast, however, it would typically rise to a stiff northerly by about midday; then the heat rising off the land started the thermal wind, and the Meltemi would be countered by the south-easterly Bouka Doura. This normally brought the wind to a calm about two o’clock, and then it reversed to blow from the south, rising to force five or six by early evening, before dropping again.
All this is jolly useful to know when getting up and down the coast in a normal Meltemi; but the Meltemi that hit Poros just after Les’s captain made his adieus was the other sort, the sort which takes no prisoners. A full Meltemi can last a couple of days or a couple of weeks, and it is an unremitting, whistling torrent of northerly air which blows day and night, raising high, short seas in open waters and sending lethally strong spilliades cascading down the backs of any high ground to bedevil any water on the supposedly sheltered side. The best place to be in a full Meltemi is tied up firmly to the lee side of a strong pier. Swan got it half right.
* * *
My day started very pleasantly. Sleeping al fresco on my terrace, I was awoken by the earliest probing fingers of the resurgent sun, and, being sufficiently refreshed, I decided to start the day. Trotting down to Kanali Beach, I had a coffee at a beach bar and watched the searing orange orb detach itself from the eastern horizon near Agios Yeorgios.
As I plunged into the ocean to wash away the vestiges of night I heard the trumpeter of the nearby naval school saluting the raising of the flag, and then I pottered along to the all-night bakery behind the beach. This was doing a steady trade from a fifty-fifty mix of sprightly, early rising enthusiasts heading smartly out and dishevelled all-night revellers limping in, and I bought a piping-hot, fresh spanakopita, or spinach pie, for breakfast.
As I munched my pie, I wandered back over the canal into town, strolling along the North Quay as I noticed that the north wind was already sending reconnaissance parties of skittering flurries across the sheltered waters of the bay. Not a good day to be on the North Quay, on the windward side of the town, I noted; and then, with the complaisance that came from the fact that I didn’t have a boat to worry about, I ignored the matter. When I reached The Snailery, close to the cinema, I saw the Fengari churning away up the bay, evidently with work in hand. This left the high starboard bow of Swan pretty much unsheltered from the north.
By about midday I was smugly content, sitting at George’s Cafe in perfect shelter as the flag at the clock tower above me crackled and snapped in the
rising wind. With an early, icy, invigorating beer in my paw I watched with compassionless complaisance whilst frequent blasts of wind hurled spray lashed the yachts and heeled them sharply over as they escaped from the North Quay, running helter-skelter round in to the shelter of the channel.
Gina and Andrea, winding down after their nocturnal shift before going to sleep on a beach, were with me. Shergar and Miss Iceland, who was back again, had joined me, and also Yiorgaki and his brother, Simos. This latter was a young Merchant Navy officer who was currently doing his national service as a sub-lieutenant in the Navy, and was the First Lieutenant of a World War Two-Vintage Fast Patrol Boat which was tied up at the naval school. In the finest Poros waterfront tradition, the combination of heat, beer and lack of immediate commitment had induced in us all a languorous detachment from care.
Into this lotus eating assembly suddenly came the bustling, pristine white figure of the Chief of the port police, an entity from whom I normally kept a polite, watchful distance. I always assumed that he knew I was working from Poros, and since he hadn’t bothered me I supposed that, so far, I hadn’t upset him. It was my earnest wish to keep things that way.
“Kalimera!”
He bad us all good morning and, without waiting for a response, he addressed me, in very fair English.
“Captain Tzoulian, please can you tell me... I believe you are First Captain,1 yes? You have diploma? From British?”
I admitted that this was so. In fact, I held a British Chief Mate’s certificate, but I had already passed a Liberian Master’s examination for a foreign-flag vessel I had sailed on. This news seemed to please him.
“And you sail on big ship? Real ship?”
“Yes, that is my job,” I told him... I was somewhat concerned about why he wanted to know this, and gave him a fiction he could reasonably accept. He nodded.
“Please can you help me? I have big problem. Is one British ship, this one Swan. She have to move. She have problem, and she have no captain. She need to go to anchor.”
“What problem has she got?” I asked. The reply came in a flood of Greek, which Simos untangled for me.
“The anchor is dragging, and she is blocking the ferry quay. There is a ferry coming very soon. They want you to move her.”
I agreed to take a look, and we all trooped around, out of the shelter of the town and awnings, into the teeth of the Meltemi gusting across the bay from Neorion. Things were, indeed, a bit grim.
Swan had been lying with two anchors out and her stern very professionally tied to the quay with four stern-lines and two crossed lines to brace her; but the wind on her unprotected starboard side had been too much for her anchors. Her starboard cable was almost slack, and her port one was as tight as a bowstring across her bow, grinding ominously on her stem.
She had fallen to port so that she was at an angle of about thirty or forty degrees to the quay, with her port quarter grating horribly against the concrete. On her small poop-deck, Les was making a valiant but futile attempt to get a large fender into the non-existent gap.
“You are captain, you can take her to anchor, yes?” asked the port policeman, and almost turned away... he seemed to have complete confidence that this would now be done. I hastened to disappoint him.
“Ena lepto... Please, a moment, Captain,” I said. “I can’t just walk on board and take over this ship. I don’t know how it works, what condition it is in. And unless they are declaring a distress, I need the permission of the owners.”
Simos translated this, and the port policeman’s face cleared immediately.
“No problem. Thees the owner.”
He waved at Les, and shouted to him, “Hey, Meester! This man Captain. From British, same as you!”
He waved at the streaming Cayman ensign which, having a Union Flag in the corner, was all the evidence of nationality he evidently required. “Now, you go. You go now. Go anchor.” And with that, off he went.
Les came down the gangway.
“Can ya help me getter outa here?” he demanded, whilst crushing my hand and looking at me as if he was buying a horse with a limp.
“Dunno,” I replied, “Is everything working?”
He shrugged.
“Think so. Dunno why not, it all was.”
“Can you get the engines started?”
“Yep, I reckon I can. Just not too sure about the fuel tank switches.”
“Ah!” I had a think about that. “Right, I’ll tell you what. You get the engines on line, and we’ll start running them ahead, to lessen the weight on the quay. Meanwhile I’ll have a look at the bridge. Then we test the steering gear, then the anchor winches. Then, when the engines are up to temperature and we’re sure they’re running OK, we’ll see. Have you got a bow-thruster?”
He shook his head at this last. Pity! That might have helped.
“I’ll give you a hand with the engines,” volunteered Shergar, and the two of them disappeared up the gangway.
Followed by the rest of my interested crowd, which had now grown by the addition of a port policeman and an ordinary policeman, I explored my way up to the bridge. On arrival, the first problem I identified... in my calm, professional manner... was the complete lack of a steering wheel!
If the lack of any apparent means of steering was set aside, the bridge appeared otherwise well-equipped. I quickly found the other bits I needed in the short term... standard Teleflex-type engine controls, a rudder-position indicator, VHF radios and voltage-metres which seemed to indicate good current available. A large captain’s chair and a smaller engineer’s one faced a compact and crowded instrument panel where I noted two large switches labelled ‘steering gear’, which I left alone for the moment... even if I could find out how to steer, I didn’t know if the generator was large enough to take the load.
I found a trap door into the space below and opened it, wondering if the steering position was below the bridge as in some other warships, but unfortunately it appeared that this was an access to the captain’s cabin, and the captain apparently had a mate, who was in the process of dressing. I closed it again with a quick apology.
A phone buzzed, and Les informed me that I could start the port engine using the key on the bridge. It came up second time, and I set it at one thousand RPM, out of gear, to watch the temperatures. Then I asked Simos to go and check that the port propeller was clear of ropes or obstructions. When he said it was, I gently put the engine in gear and increased power a little to try to reduce the contact with the quay.
The phone buzzed again, but the starboard engine resolutely refused to start. I asked Les to come up on the bridge.
“Can I start the steering gear?” I asked. He shrugged again, a deep, comprehensive gesture which eloquently said “Only one way to find out!” and pressed the button. The light flickered on. He pressed the second button, which also lit up.
“And now, how do you steer her?” I asked.
For a reply, he lifted a piece of varnished plywood revealing the shaft where the wheel should have fitted, and a chrome plated lever which was obviously a non-follow-up steering backup system.
“We took the wheel off to varnish it,” he announced, “an’ then we never put it back. We didn’t use it much, see, an’ the instrument panel is too slopey to put the beer on.”
“Have you got the wheel?” I asked. He shrugged again.
“Probably.” He looked vaguely around. “Haven’t used it fer ages.”
I sighed and tried the lever. It seemed to work.
The port police chief was back on the quay, shouting through the whipping wind to know if we wanted the lines letting go. I went down to talk to him.
“I only have one engine,” I told him, “and I don’t know how the ship will handle in so much wind. The safest thing to do is slack the anchors, and let her come alongside.”
This was translated by Simos again, but before he was halfway done the port police chief was becoming agitated. Simos said, “He wants you to go, now. There is a fer
ry coming, he needs this space.
I looked at it. True enough, there was no way to get a ferry onto the quay with Swan angled across it. I desperately wanted to help out... as I have said before, I like helping anyway, and I especially liked helping this guy, who could probably have me run out of town if the mind took him... yet I also didn’t want to end up being held responsible for wrecking the Swan by taking her out in a strong wind without all her equipment working, even in an emergency.
“Les, do you have an official logbook?” I asked.
From the now familiar heave of his shoulders and pout of his lips, I inferred that I might as well have asked for world peace and disarmament.
“OK, are you the owner?”
He grinned like a Cheshire tiger, delighted at last to be able to answer a question in the affirmative.
“And is the vessel fully insured?”
Again, he was happy to please me with a positive answer.
“Right, then I need a witnessed letter from you saying that the situation is an emergency...” I pointed at the damage already sustained by the Swan’s port quarter... “and asking me to put the ship in a safe position.”
Les nodded and went off to do this without demur. He was a very obliging chap when it lay within his power. I had a rather different response for the port police chief when I turned to him, however.
Explaining to him, with Simos’s help, that I was willing to help but needed to be indemnified in case of a problem, I asked for a letter to confirm that I had been asked to remove the vessel by the port authority. If I had asked for the sole rights to his favourite daughter, I couldn’t have had a more negative reaction.
The Trojan Walrus Page 27