Dolphins Under My Bed

by Sandra Clayton

  There are two ways to sail a yacht from England to the Mediterranean. One is to lower your mast and motor through the French canals; the other is to sail down the Atlantic coasts of France, Spain and Portugal and enter through the Strait of Gibraltar. We preferred the latter, but knowing that this coastline is notorious for autumn and winter gales we wanted to have Voyager in the Mediterranean by the end of September.

  We could, of course, have reached the Med in only a couple of weeks with constant sailing, but having anticipated the voyage for over five years we felt we should like to see a few places along the way. If we wanted to do that, we had to go immediately. The alternative was to spend another winter in England and leave the following spring. Since our need for a warmer, drier climate had been the major factor in our decision to go blue water cruising in the first place, we loaded the car with things crucial, things useful, and lots of things I should only have had to throw away otherwise. They had filled the boot, the back seat to the ceiling, the roof rack, my lap and all around my feet. Many hours later we had staggered down the boatyard’s long pontoon with our first armfuls.

  Emsworth is one of those wistful places of shallow water, salt marsh, curlews and large egrets. Unfortunately a great flock of star lings had also moved in to gorge on local crops of soft fruit and berries from the hedgerows. As a result, our boat’s white polished surfaces had become purple and sticky as the starlings had excreted the seeds and a large residue of undigested fruit and juice over every inch of it. Before we could begin to put our goods on board we had to attach our hose to a tap and scrub off all the sticky purple goo that the birds were even yet depositing from their perches up in our rigging.

  Getting that first load on board had been the start of more trouble. When Voyager had settled into the mud she had done so further away from the pontoon than was comfortable for us to climb on and off her, especially carrying heavy loads. As the tide was just then rising to its full if inadequate height, David had tried to drag her closer, and felt something go in his lower back.

  Over the next few days he had taken on an increasingly disturbing shape. As he had done several times in the past, he had pulled a major muscle which had then gone into spasm and begun tilting his pelvis. The first time he had done this had been some years earlier, clearing a five-bar gate on his own when the horse that should have accompanied him decided against it at the last minute. Once weakened, the pelvis would twist if subjected to unreasonable stress. Bending double at the hips and dragging towards you eleven tons of boat with both keels firmly embedded in thick mud is about as unreasonable as it gets.

  The solution had always been deep tissue massage, rest and definitely no twisting or lifting. This, however, had conflicted with David’s determination to prepare our boat for the longest voyage we had ever undertaken alone. And unfortunately there had been an awful lot to stow aboard. Like many before us, far from getting away from it all, we seemed to be taking most of it with us. Some of it, such as the new life raft, large tool boxes and spare parts were essential. Some of it wasn’t. We seemed to have brought an awful lot of books and videos and … things.

  ‘I can’t believe you’ve brought so many clothes,’ said David.

  ‘I’d only have to throw them away,’ I’d responded lamely. ‘And anyway, they’re cotton and you can never have too much good quality polishing cloth.’

  David’s back had got progressively worse until he was bent in the middle, twisted to the left and crabbed sideways when he walked. He was also in a lot of pain. Nevertheless, he carried on for several days, stowing the unstowable into small inaccessible spaces and installing new equipment. It was the life raft that finally did for him and forced him briefly to take to his bed.

  In the days following, fellow boat owners stopped by to ask how he was, contemplate the encircling mud and ask tentatively when we were thinking of going. If they were dubious, no less were we. For both of us there was an unreality about all this. We had never even sailed across the English Channel alone before, never mind as far as the Mediterranean. Something had always cropped up to prevent us.

  3

  Emsworth to the Isle of Wight

  And now we sit, head on hand, watching the water rise and anxiously eyeing the port hull. About ten minutes after the starboard side has risen, the port hull finally struggles upward with a similar glutinous sucking sound. We are afloat.

  At a little after 1pm we start the engines and edge our way out through very shallow water into the channel that will take us through Chichester’s large, busy harbour and out to sea. It is the usual Sunday afternoon pandemonium in Chichester Harbour. Power may give way to sail but sometimes, with a wide boat in a narrow channel, it is not always that simple. Dinghy racers, intent on holding their course to achieve the greatest possible advantage over their rivals, criss-cross the channel. We cannot risk straying onto Stocker Sands to miss them, so we slow to allow one of the little boats to pass under our bows, and then accelerate to avoid the one aimed at our beam. Meanwhile, a yacht in full sail comes hurtling towards us on our side of the channel, while behind us a fast little speedboat jockeys to get past. A subsequent survey found that Chichester Harbour is home to 11,547 boats. On this summer Sunday afternoon at the end of Cowes Week, Europe’s most famous regatta, most of them seem to be out on the water.

  It is the first time Voyager has moved in a year, and we have been unable to try anything out; not least the new mainsail we bought during the winter. Our immediate concern, however, is the electronic equipment. There are so many things on a boat to go wrong, especially one that has lain unused for twelve months.

  At least the instruments all seem to be working; even the log, which usually seizes up when the boat hasn’t moved for a week let alone a year. So once out to sea we decide to try out our new mainsail. One of our boat’s features that we particularly prize is a self-furling main which allows us to pull this sail in and out easily by hand without need of a winch and without leaving the cockpit. This is a particular advantage for people in their mid-50s planning to sail long distances two-handed, especially when one of them is an unfit woman with weak hands and a dodgy back.

  David pulls on the outhaul and three quarters of the new sail emerge from the housing on the mast. The last quarter remains stuck inside. He heaves, strains, sweats and swears. At the point where his face changes from scarlet to purple he decides to use one of the winches to pull the last section out. As is its wont at difficult moments, the wind rises suddenly and dramatically. It sends the sail flying and the outhaul thrashing. The latter twists itself round the winch in a jumble and locks solid.

  For a time it looks as if we will have to cut the outhaul free. However, with the aid of a jemmy, and a large screwdriver hammered in between the rope coils, we finally manage to ease the tension enough to free it. In the meantime a supercilious couple, standing on a passing yacht with their hands in their pockets, observes us apparently knocking seven bells out of our winch with a hammer, raise an eyebrow at one another and pointedly turn their backs on us. It is not an auspicious start.

  We have no sooner freed the outhaul and got the sail fully out than the wind dies away completely, so we put the sail away again and motor on towards the Isle of Wight.

  As David admitted, although not until very much later, once he had put the mainsail away he had completed all the displacement activity that was keeping him from thinking about what he had committed us to: selling up, cutting ties, and not only leaving England but probably the last paid employment we would ever have. It was not even the sort of thing people like us did. We had no sailing background. No-one we had ever known until recently had ever sailed.

  I kept remembering newspaper articles about people embarking on similar ventures after years of boat-building and planning, only to sink just outside the harbour mouth. We were asking for trouble; you could see that in the eyes of almost everybody we knew. At an age when our contemporaries were planning retirement bungalows, we had committed ourselves and
our resources to a life afloat. And although I had every confidence in David, I knew that I was a lousy sailor. Only a very close relative, or the truly desperate, would have taken me on as crew.

  Our intention now is to anchor in the Solent for the night to the east of Cowes on the Isle of Wight, near one of Queen Victoria’s favourite residences, Osborne House. For in the same way that we shall not be eating in restaurants any more, we also plan to avoid the expense of marinas by anchoring wherever possible. We had anchored in Osborne Bay last summer but, unlike last year, when we approach it there are no other boats in sight. This adds to the unease that David has been feeling since leaving Chichester Harbour.

  It is a year since our last sail and yachtsmen always feel a little tentative about how the boat is after a long lay-up. So he decides to head for the security of the mooring buoys outside Yarmouth Harbour. We had tied up to a buoy there the previous summer also, and though unspoken, the fact that a mooring buoy is more securely fixed to the seabed than an anchor can ever be is more than a little reason for choosing one now.

  While uneasy at casting ourselves adrift, however, neither of us considers the possibility of turning back. Neither of us, we subsequently discover, had thought for a moment that since we still had a furnished house, we could always give up and go back to it. We just wanted someone to buy it, so that it would no longer be a large drain on our resources.

  Our plan is to spend a year in the Mediterranean, and then cross the Atlantic to the Caribbean – if we feel like it. The problem with telling people you are going cruising is that everybody says, ‘Are you going to sail round the world?’ We are as well-prepared as we can be, but we lack experience and are determined not to put pressure on ourselves to do anything that we feel we are not ready for. So whenever anybody asks the question, we always give the same answer, ‘No, we’re just going to head for the Mediterranean and then see how we feel.’

  By 5.30 that evening we are tied to a buoy just outside Yarmouth Harbour on a stretch of water called Yarmouth Road. There is a Ferris wheel behind the breakwater, but no sound at all beyond the odd seagull. A uniformed man in a small boat chugs out to collect £10 from us for a night’s use of the mooring buoy, and we settle down to chicken tikka masala and gooseberry fool, courtesy of a last minute shop-up in Chichester.

  There is a glorious fluorescent pink sunset, and as darkness falls a huge russet moon rises behind the ferry terminal. The wind is from the north-east and slight, but the sea is so choppy that we are both up on deck at 1am to reassure ourselves that we are still safely tied to the mooring buoy. It is so bumpy, in fact, that I had shot awake convinced that we were about to be dashed onto The Needles, that notorious group of rocks nearby.

  Actually, had we been adrift, we should have hit a lot of other things before The Needles, but in the dark irrational reaches of the night, a famous local landmark becomes a natural bogeyman. The truth is: it would not have surprised us at all if something had happened to end our voyage right there, twenty miles from where we had set out. But none of these things were spoken of at the time.

  4

  Finding a boat

  When I had suggested, five years earlier, that a catamaran might be a way of overcoming my resistance to sailing, David had immediately booked a weekend trial on one, complete with a professional skipper, to see how we got on with it. I felt quite relaxed doing 10 knots in blustery conditions with all the sails up and no heeling. I observed carefully the monohulls we overtook. They were heavily reefed and heeling mightily, their crews hunched into their cockpits at an angle of 45 degrees. I was standing upright and there was no impediment to my walking upright anywhere on the boat that I wanted to go. I could live with something like this, I decided. More to the point, I could live on something like this.

  The plan then was to find a catamaran that really suited us, and learn to handle it in all sorts of conditions. We quickly decided on a 40-foot Solaris Sunstream. Built for offshore cruising, it had full headroom for David, two roomy double cabins each with two windows and an overhead hatch for my claustrophobia, plus a generous galley for domestic harmony. Unusually for a yacht, it also had a bath. The only problem was that there were very few for sale, only thirteen of them having ever been built.

  We found Voyager in southern Spain and spent two weeks sailing her back to the UK with the help of Ian, the skipper from our weekend trial. He was also an experienced delivery skipper and a Royal Yachting Association instructor. Having a professional skipper on board was essential for us, as we were too inexperienced to have attempted such a trip alone.

  It was a fair distance to cover in the only couple of weeks the three of us had free at the same time, and most of it was spent at sea. The only time we stopped was for fuel and water or to sit out a gale. It was a tremendous experience to be under sail with a professional in our own boat in all types of conditions, especially the gales. As weekend sailors we had never been far from shelter. On a long sea passage you may not have that option.

  Bringing Voyager home to England was memorable in many ways. It was early March and my first experience of rough weather, but she took Gale Force 8 and 20-foot waves in the Bay of Biscay … like a plank. I had never seen stars in the night sky that brilliant before, nor hobnobbed with dolphins on virtually a nose-to-nose basis. I also overcame my greatest dread when I stood my first watch alone at night under full sail and coped perfectly well. Perhaps the most extraordinary event, though, occurred towards the end of the trip, as we entered the western approaches to the English Channel on our way towards Falmouth.

  It was near the end of my watch when I noticed small waves breaking the water’s surface irregularly beside the boat. There is a rhythm and a pattern to water as a moving boat displaces it. It rises as a bow wave and runs down the sides of the hull and these fast, erratic little flurries didn’t fit. They were also a couple of feet too far away for them to be made by us.

  I thought they might be caused by dolphins, and I waited for them to break the surface like they usually do once they’ve had a good look at you from below. But tonight they didn’t. I felt disappointed, but I also felt very tired. My three hours were up and I went below and woke David to take over the watch.

  ‘I think there may be dolphins about,’ I said, as he climbed into his wet weather gear in the saloon. ‘But I can’t see them.’

  He showed little interest. I’d woken him from a deep sleep and beyond putting the correct arm into the appropriate sleeve his main concern was forcing his eyes to stay open.

  It was a raw March that year and naturally the further north we’d got the colder it had become. As we headed for the English coast I was wearing three layers of clothing underneath my wet weather gear but still felt chilled to the bone in an open cockpit in the early hours of the morning. So I was very grateful to climb into the warm bed that David had just vacated in the port cabin. He would stand watch for the next three hours and then Ian, currently asleep in the starboard cabin, would take over for the three hours after that. I was looking forward to six hours of uninterrupted rest, apart from David’s chilled body returning in three hours’ time.

  The cold, plus the extra physical effort needed to do anything under all that clothing and wet weather gear, had made me more tired than usual. Once in bed I had curled into a tight ball to warm my knees and feet and was just drifting towards sleep when David spoke my name. I started, fearing an emergency, something round a propeller again, but he put his hand on my shoulder.

  ‘It’s alright,’ he said. ‘I just thought you’d want to know about the dolphins. There are dozens of them underneath the boat and …’

  ‘I know!’ I cut him short irritably, asking why he’d woken me to tell me about dolphins you couldn’t see that I’d already told him about before I’d gone to bed.

  ‘Just listen!’ he said.

  The sky through the hatch above our bunk was luminous with stars and I could see his face quite clearly. He was smiling a strange, dreamy sort of smile. So I
stopped grumbling and listened. There was music coming up through the hull.

  ‘You can’t hear it up on deck,’ he said. ‘I only heard it when I came down to the chart table to do the log. I didn’t think you’d want to miss it.’ Then he went back up on watch.

  I uncoiled and rolled onto my back. I was warm now and I stretched my spine and legs to their full length under the bedclothes. I gazed up through the hatch overhead and reflected on this extraordinary world of which I was going to be a part. There were stars above my head and dolphins under the bed. And somewhere in the depths of the sea something was singing. Whatever it was, it wasn’t dolphins. They communicate by clicks and whistles at high speed. These were musical notes and the pace was leisurely, almost languid.

  ‘Whales,’ said Ian when the three of us discussed it in the cockpit next morning. Apparently it’s not unusual to find dolphins and whales together, especially when they’re feeding; although he said he’d never heard that particular sound before.

  I had. More than forty years ago. And lying there in the warm darkness my memory had drifted back to my first year at secondary school and its Scots music teacher. Using tonic sol-fa, with a zeal worthy of Miss Jean Brodie in her prime, Miss Bonnell (‘that’s Bow-nell’) had lashed us up the major scale: doh, ray, me, fah, so, lah, te, doh – and once at the top harried us back down again: doh, te, lah, so, fah, me, ray, doh – as if despite our industrial environment a career as opera divas awaited us all. Up and down the scale we went, lesson after lesson.

  When she tired of this, she would slap her cane randomly at the notes written on the board beside her while we sang them, ad nauseum, at their proper pitch. And this was what I was hearing now; sections of the major scale.