Dolphins Under My Bed

by Sandra Clayton

  We also use a tip he gave us and set a kitchen timer to ring at ten minute intervals because it is very easy at night to become drowsy or unobservant, especially into the third hour of your watch. We make it a rule that we do a complete 360° scan of the horizon every ten minutes. Having timed a commercial ship from a dot on the horizon to arriving level with us, we feel that leaving it any longer than ten minutes would be foolhardy.

  Between Guernsey and Tréguier our only navigational concerns are two reefs, or plateau as the French call them, the Plateau des Roches Douvres and the Plateau de Barnouic. They are both marked by navigational lights at night and David has plotted a course well clear of them. He takes the first watch and I go below, but the sea is too turbulent for sleep. When I get up to take over the watch, it is cold. So I put on my oilies for warmth and rediscover, for the first time in a year, the sheer user-unfriendliness of wet weather gear.

  I have a difficult relationship with my wet weather gear, or oilies as the two garments are still called from the days before man-made fibres when fabric had to be oiled to make it waterproof. It is also called foul weather gear as it protects the wearer from rain, cold, hail, sleet and breaking waves. Foul is the word that I feel describes it best, except when there’s driving rain and freezing cold and then I stand around murmuring how wonderful it is.

  The standard suit comes in two parts: high-waisted trousers with shoulder straps and a jacket. I find both monumentally uncomfortable. The fabric is stiff, slippery and it rasps and crackles as you move about. At the ankles, the trousers have an extra lining edged with strong elastic to deter water from going up your legs. Combined with the stiffness of the fabric itself, and the reinforcement at the knees, the whole leg is kept taut, and after an hour my kneecaps begin to ache. The trousers are good around the torso, though; coming up under the arms and keeping all your vital organs warm. It can be a little hard on the more tender parts of the female anatomy, however, thanks to its stiffening, heavy duty zip and Velcro. Like an Elizabethan stomacher, it is flat and unyielding. That’s the thing with unisex, of course, it is designed for men.

  The jacket has two endearing features: a high collar which stands up around the ears, and a really generous hood. The hood holds the collar up around the sides of your face and keeps out the wind, while its stiffened peak keeps as much rain off your face and spectacles as you could hope for short of an umbrella.

  The rest of it drives me demented. For a start, the man-sized sleeves are too long, but the cuff has a tight inner sleeve to stop the rain from running up your arm which ensures that you can’t pull the sleeves up a bit, not even enough to fill in the log or light the gas under the kettle. So I clear the chart table of instruments simply reaching for a pencil, and am an accident waiting to happen in the galley.

  And then, of course, there is my special bête noire. Velcro. It is everywhere: at wrists and ankles so you can make them tighter and even more uncongenial than they already are; down the front openings over the zippers to make them more wind and waterproof; and as fastenings for the pockets, collar and hood. But this is no ordinary Velcro. This is commercial strength. If I ever topple overboard it will probably be because all the Velcro on my wet weather gear snaps shut like a Venus flytrap and I am rendered helpless.

  Velcro is at its worst when you are roused from a deep sleep in a deliciously warm bunk to take up your second three-hour night watch in a cold, wet cockpit. Pick up the slippery trousers and they lock together at the ankles. Separate the legs and struggle in, and before you can pull up the zip you have to detach one of the jacket sleeves, the cuff of which has mysteriously leapt upwards and adhered itself to the front opening of the trousers.

  Pick up the heavy, slithery jacket and its right sleeve darts around the back and attaches itself like a limpet to its own front opening, so you’re effectively left wrestling a cold, damp, heavy, implacable tube. A broken nail and a strained thumb joint later and you’ve prized the right sleeve off the front opening, only to find it has been replaced by the left sleeve and the whole unseemly, oath-laden performance begins all over again.

  The jacket is also very long. The purpose, undoubtedly, is to protect the male backside from the elements. But it means my arms aren’t long enough to reach the bottom of the zipper, so I bend forward. All this achieves is that the bottom of the zipper gets closer to my knees. Soon I’m bent double and the stiff, Velcroed edges of that lovely high collar are now under my jaw bones and forcing my head back. No longer able to see the two ends of the zipper directly, I try to peer over my chin. This makes my eyes hurt so I try twisting sideways and get a stabbing pain in my neck.

  To make matters worse there are actually two zippers, parallel to each other; the inner one to enable a buoyancy aid to be zipped into the jacket if required. The trouble is that in poor light, half asleep and giving a passable impersonation of Quasimodo, one large navy-blue plastic zipper gets confused with another. I never seem to get the two ends of the same zipper together first go and waste valuable minutes trying to force the tag of one into the clip of the other. Then that lovely generous hood falls over my eyes and I can’t even see the two navy blue zippers, let alone fit the correct halves together. So I have to let both ends go while I push the hood back behind the collar.

  Just when I think that either my neck will break or my eyes pop out of their sockets the proper tag finds the correct clip. In sheer relief I forget to go cautiously, wrench up the zipper and suffer excruciating pain as the large, chromium-plated steel clips of the integral safety harness crush those tender female parts. However, I cannot immediately release the zipper to relieve this pressure because the Velcro on the jacket’s cuffs has adhered to the Velcro on the front fastening and with eyes watering and both hands incapacitated a voice from the helm calls, ‘Aren’t you ready yet?’ And that’s when I remember that I should have put my deck shoes on before the jacket because in my corset of stiff plastic, chromium clips, implacable Velcro, heavy duty zippers and reinforced kneecaps there’s no way I can reach my feet with the jacket on.

  When I do, finally, present myself on deck for duty there is the usual, added irritation. As well as restricting your movements, wet weather gear affects your hearing. What with that high collar, the hood, and all the attendant rustle and crackle whenever you move you keep saying ‘Sorry?’ or talking at cross purposes. A large French Navy boat appears behind us and I say, ‘Those fire exocets don’t they?’

  ‘No,’ says David, also partially deafened by his own crackling oilies, ‘it’s too big for a frigate.’

  ‘I said exocets, not frigate!’

  ‘What?’ he says.

  I groan and he goes below, returning with a French courtesy flag. As he raises it by a halyard on the starboard side deck I pom-pom the Marseillaise and he says, ‘Shut up, they’ll hear you.’ And I snap, ‘Not if they’re wearing their bloody wet weather gear they won’t.’

  David goes to bed after the 05.35 shipping forecast and I take over the watch. Two gannets and a seagull come to inspect us and just after six o’clock the sun rises. It is a fiery orange-red and molten, as if it is melting and dripping into the sea. As it ascends it solidifies into a hard silver disc that is too bright to look at any more.

  I feel surprisingly fresh considering that I have been without proper sleep for twenty-four hours, and settle into the helmsman’s chair with a French dictionary.

  It is probably fair to say that, in the main, the English and the French do not get on. Although physical encounters ceased long ago, the Cultural Wars continue. They are forever telling us – via our own radio, books and newspapers – that our women are gauche, our clothes appalling and our food inedible. For our part, we deplore their plumbing and the way they pretend they don’t understand us when we make a real effort to try to speak French to them. And then, of course, there is the Common Agricultural Policy.

  Despite our best efforts, our trips to northern France during the 1970s had not turned out well and the weather was alwa
ys terrible. However, we had made one last, determined effort in the early 80s to discover once and for all the magic of France that we were always hearing about but which had so far eluded us.

  Our car was burgled in a car park, and subsequently wrecked on a mountain road by a French driver. The French police seemed to make a special effort to be superhumanly offensive, and we were monumentally ripped off by the garage which ultimately got around to repairing our car while allowing it to be pillaged of those possessions we had been unable to carry home with us.

  The final insult had come during the stressful, luggage-laden and expensive journey back to England by public transport when an old woman on the Paris train, overhearing our English voices, began haranguing us with insults to the vast amusement of the other French passengers. And throughout this French summer idyll, for which we had sacrificed our precious two weeks’ annual holiday, it had rained virtually every day.

  After finally regaining our car we had turned our backs on France, and the French, for ever and discovered the magic of Italy annually instead. Accordingly, I am glad that we shall merely be passing quickly through the country. Nevertheless, I fully intend to put up a spirited English defence against Gallic hostility, and to that end sail down the Brittany coast with a French vocabulary propped above the wheel rehearsing numbers, common questions and a grammatically perfect way to ask for a marina berth for one night, please.

  When David takes over the watch from me I begin work on a sink-full of washing up. As well as the dishwasher I also miss the washing machine. The laundry bag is bulging already. Some considerable time later, my hands full of clean crockery, I turn from the sink and pitch forward. The laces of my deck shoes have come undone again.

  As well as a fraught relationship with wet weather gear, I also harbour a simmering hatred for deck shoes. I find them monstrously uncomfortable especially where, despite socks, they have rubbed calluses on various bits of my feet. And they have ridiculous leather laces which you can’t replace with sensible fibre ones because they go all the way round the back before they reach the eyeholes and are an integral part of the shoe.

  Leather laces may be traditional, and to some eyes even attractive, but they don’t stay tied which I would have thought was the raison d’etre of laces, especially on a heaving deck. So you have to tie a really tight double bow, which not only presses uncomfortably into the foot, but all this fiddling is something you really don’t need, especially in the dark and/or in an emergency.

  Even in double bows, however, these arcane laces still won’t stay tied indefinitely, although their untying is not random. Definitely not. They untie themselves in very specific circumstances, like this one, when you’re carrying the boat’s entire stock of crockery. Or when you’re trying to reef the genoa in bad weather and the outhaul gets stuck and you have to go to the bow to free the furling gear. As you struggle forward, with the deck heaving and waves washing over the foredeck – THEN – that’s when they undo. The descending foot clamps down on the incontinent lace, the ascending foot rises and Bingo! Both feet snap together.

  Then, wrenching your wrist clutching at a handrail, as the only alternative to pitching onto your face, you mutter things like, ‘God bless these charming little touches of a bygone age which have survived into present times while serving no apparent practical purpose whatsoever.’

  And you have to set about retying the blasted things before you can even begin to address the problem with the furling gear for fear of treading on them again and pitching overboard. And in your fury you tie them too tight and your insteps have little purple ridges on them for days afterwards. Unfortunately, there is simply nothing else in the world like a deck shoe sole for gripping a slippery deck.

  11

  Tréguier

  David has chosen Tréguier as our first French stop-over en route to the Bay of Biscay because as well as convenient it is also said to be beautiful. The town, and its marina, are approximately five miles up a river called Le Jaudy. On the chart the entry into this river looks fairly straightforward if you follow the entry route known as the Grande Passe. Had we known what it would look like in the flesh – or the rock, to be more precise – I doubt we should have gone there. From the sea it looks nightmarish.

  Like the rest of the Brittany coast, the mouth of Le Jaudy is littered with rocks. There are several channels through them and, like the others, the Grande Passe requires you to find an entry buoy. This buoy leads you into a safe channel running parallel with the coast for some distance – between small islands, jagged rocks and shoals – before you turn right into the actual river.

  It is around 10am as we approach, but even in clear daylight it is difficult to spot the entry buoy. Ahead of us we can see a boat on the other side of the rocks heading towards the mouth of the river, and obviously in the channel. This reassures us that this vital marker buoy is where we thought it should be and we continue on our course. We have just spotted the buoy and breathed a sigh of relief when the boat ahead of us turns round and starts coming back, which puzzles us greatly.

  However, everything we have read insists that entry into the marina on slack water is essential, so we press on. We reach the marker buoy and enter the channel. The other boat passes us, turns, and starts to follow us. Suddenly we realise that its skipper is using us to show him the way.

  This is rash of him since not only is this our first time here, but a catamaran has a much shallower draught than a monohull unless it has a lifting keel. I should like to be able to say that this cured me forever from suggesting to David, when temporarily confused, that he should follow another boat instead of sticking to his original course; but I live in hope. Like me with the couple on the Westerley, the skipper of this yacht has been tempted to assume that everybody else knows better than he does.

  Although its mouth is wide, the river itself soon narrows considerably. Its navigable channel, between submerged rocks, is narrower still and the place is littered with fishing buoys. Several times we have difficulty spotting the correct navigation buoy, and we are very cautious because apart from the Republic of Ireland this is our first real foreign port of entry. And it is France. After my experience with the gendarmerie and our car, there is no way I am going to tell the French coastguard that we have hit a rock and are sinking.

  It takes just over an hour to reach the marina. The sun is shining and the river is glorious. Woodland tumbles down to the water’s edge, with an occasional stone house among the trees. Elsewhere, fields rise steeply up from the river. In one of these fields wheat is being harvested, the sunlight turning it marigold-yellow like something out of a van Gogh painting.

  David has us hovering off the marina at slack water. We know from the cruising guide that they are going to be finger pontoons. These mini-pontoons extend at right angles from a main pontoon and, unless your boat is very small, reach only part of the way down your hull. So, unless you’re quick, the current drags you sideways and they grind their vicious little corners into the gelcoat near your stern. To prevent this, the helmsman needs to hold his vessel off on three sides until the crew ties ropes onto four cleats to do the job for him. If the crew gets it really wrong, the bows get mangled against the main pontoon as well. On the other hand, trying to cover four cleats at once is quite a lot for a solitary crewmember.

  I have everything ready: fenders hanging over both sides and a rope on all four corners. I also have a plan in mind of the order in which I am going to tie on these four ropes for maximum protection of the boat’s hulls. I am so determined to get it right in this heartland of Anglophobia that when the moment comes I throw myself over the side without taking a rope with me at all, and have to make an unseemly scramble back on board to get one.

  A marina attendant appears and helps me tie up. Breathless, I open my mouth to utter a word-perfect request in French for a berth. ‘One night?’ he says in English, before I can make a sound. I nod. After he’s gone, and as the magazine article had recommended, we put on double spr
ings to withstand the strong current which will travel up and down the river during the three changes of tide that will take place during our stay.

  My next priority is a shower. French plumbing has always been notorious among British travellers. Naturally, we do not approve of open-air public toilets in town centres, nor mixed-sex ones even when they have a roof and doors, but most appalling of all to us are the ‘squatties’, the hole in the floor with grooves for the feet.

  Surprisingly the marina’s shower block has real pedestal lavatories, but smaller and lower than anything seen since infant school. The floor is also under water. The reason soon becomes clear. The moment the flush button is touched, water blasts across the seat, your shoes and the floor where it adds to the slick that met you at the door.

  The showers respond to 9 francs, which release a cistern of water above your head that you operate by a chain with a handle on it, like a 1950s outside privy. After seeing what the lavatories can do, I decide to bathe on Voyager.

  We open a bottle of wine. So far so good, we say. So far so good. We have corned beef sandwiches for lunch and the last of Alderney’s gache bread with blackcurrant jam on it. Tired from a night’s sailing but happy, I nap for an hour and wake feeling relaxed and smug to have arrived safe and sound with more personal dignity than expected.

  David, meanwhile, has been looking at the charts for the next stage of our journey and we have a leisurely discussion about crossing the Bay of Biscay, which will be our next big challenge. A weather window has appeared in the shipping forecasts. There is currently an area of high pressure stationary over Biscay which promises a period of settled weather. We want at all cost to make our way across this notorious bay during these few days of calm.