Dolphins Under My Bed

by Sandra Clayton

  We get a taxi back to the marina. It takes a circuitous route, but for a very few pesetas we get a scenic tour. Spanish taxi drivers also seem bent on providing a master class in rally driving. They push each journey to the limit and spend their lives in near-collision. Radio blaring, this one shoots forward the second our doors close and narrowly avoids flattening a small girl on a bicycle. Neither looks surprised, or even as if they’ve noticed particularly. One reverses slightly, one changes direction a bit. The whole journey is like that.

  We are now back on Spanish time, so our clocks and watches are all correct again. I cook chicken cacciatore and spaghetti and we sit out late. A cruise ship sparkles under a full set of fairy lights, and ferries glitter back and forth across the bay. By 10.45, with Voyager already battened down for the night, a sudden gale blows up with thunder, lightning and torrential rain. The latter will save us spending time tomorrow washing her.

  We rise late. David fills our water tanks and empties the previous night’s rainwater from the dinghy. I clean the galley. The refrigerator proves the value of procrastination when the gas part begins working again. It may have been affected by condensation and dried out while being run on mains and 12-volt electricity.

  When I try to take a shower up on the quay the water runs for a few seconds and then stops. I try the other showers. Then I wrap my towel around me and go round a dividing wall to the washbasins. It is the same there. Cranking a handle of what might be a stopcock above the sinks makes no difference. The door opens and exposes me and my towel to the entire commercial dock as a pleasant Spanish woman with no English enters. ‘Agua?’ I say, hoping that she is familiar with the system. Bless her, she tries everything. Only the lavatory cisterns produce water. I dress and stand outside the iron grille guarding the window of Reception. Two determinedly non-English-speaking Spanish men keep their heads averted in close conference at a distant desk. I go back to Voyager and bathe on board. The four-man crew on the yacht beside us conclude a long, jolly, boozy lunch and set out to sea.

  The precursor to any sea passage is always a weather forecast. You don’t leave without one. Unfortunately, we have been out of range of BBC shipping forecasts since Northern Spain. Elements at the BBC would like to abandon shipping forecasts altogether, feeling that there are so many other sources of this information that it is no longer necessary. It has, on a number of occasions, contacted the Royal Yachting Association (RYA) and other bodies suggesting the service should be dropped or drastically reduced. Fortunately, the RYA has so far prevailed in retaining the forecasts. However, the BBC has reduced their content so that the coastal forecast is now given only once a day instead of twice, and Trafalgar is included in the six-hourly shipping forecasts only once in every twenty-four hours, just after midnight. We are talking here of around twelve minutes of potentially life-saving broadcast time in every twenty four hours. Germany, by comparison, with no Mediterranean coastline, nevertheless provides forecasts for the Med. France, with only a limited Atlantic coastline, gives forecasts all the way to the Caribbean.

  And it is not just leisure yachtsmen who benefit. It is a back-up to commercial vessels along with deep sea and coastal fishermen when their other systems go down – which they do. And when they do, a radio transmission at a dependable time (as well as shortening its broadcasts the BBC also keeps changing their times), albeit crackling with static and sometimes barely audible, can be the difference between life and death for someone at sea. This doesn’t seem a huge amount to ask of one of history’s great maritime nation’s public broadcasting service.

  One of the other sources of information that the BBC probably assumes is available to sailors is Navtex. All along the Portuguese coast we still had good information via Navtex but for south-west and southern Spain we do not pick up any signals at all. All maritime countries signed an agreement to put forecasts on Navtex in English 365 days a year. We will subsequently be told by other yachtsmen that Spain doesn’t bother during what it considers to be the off-season and so nothing will be available until the following Spring. We don’t discover this for some considerable time, however, and keep our system up and running, confident of picking up vital information eventually.

  Fortunately, there is a current weather forecast on the marina office window today. It is favourable and we prepare to set off around 5.30pm. There is by now quite a strong wind blowing onto the pontoons, however, and a neighbouring monohull skipper pushing off ahead of us gets into difficulties. Colliding with the pontoon as he tries to reverse out, it takes the two-man crew plus David and a passing Finn to get the boat straight again and set it on its way.

  Having seen their difficulties, we work out a strategy and the two of us get off rather well, although we have no time to gloat. It is a blind exit from the marina and we are immediately confronted by a huge container ship attached to a tug. We whiz across the tug’s bows and hang around on the other side of the harbour while both vessels make their stately progress out to sea. At least the wait gives me a chance to get in the ropes and fenders in comfort, as the sea beyond the harbour turns out to be very choppy: a combination of the strong wind, last night’s gale and Atlantic rollers. It is hitting our port bow and is far from comfortable. I hold us into the wind while David pulls out the mainsail and through the windscreen I recognize in the distance the yacht from the marina with the boozy crew. I also catch sight of something else.

  The only way I can describe it is that it resembles a floating version of the vehicle Mel Gibson drove in the film Mad Max and the Thunderdome only much, much bigger. It is huge, square, and judging by the way the light reflects off its irregular corners, made of metal. While it is difficult to be sure in which direction it is actually pointing at any given moment, it always seems to be coming towards us. It dwarfs a tug attached to its far side which we glimpse only very occasionally during one of its sideways lurches. And although it is inevitably being towed by the tug, from our vantage point it looks like a close run thing as to which of them has the upper hand.

  We spend so much time eyeballing this thing, trying to work out what it is, that we lose track of the boozy yacht until it gets dangerously close. Like us, they are staring at Mad Max instead of where they are going. Fortunately we miss each other, although I am somewhat confused about their intentions because the last time I’d observed them they had been nowhere near us and pointing in a different direction altogether, not sailing directly at us.

  ‘They’ll be on their way back to the marina,’ says David, watching the yacht’s erratic progress as we pass each other.

  ‘You think they know something we don’t?’ I ask.

  ‘Nah,’ he says.

  The only other vessel out here, apart from Mad Max and his tug, is another yacht. Soon this too turns and heads back towards the marina.

  ‘Are you sure they don’t know something we ought to?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s Saturday,’ says The Optimist reasonably. ‘Like we used to go out for a sail on Saturday afternoons at Holyhead.’

  Yes, and the wind always got up, and the rain came down, and drove us all back to our moorings. Only now we’ve got 18 hours’ sailing ahead of us, not 45 minutes.

  The strong wind that had made getting out of the marina such a challenge continues and we bang into it until around 7pm when we change course and it becomes a little easier. We are also able to turn off the engines and just sail. The sea state remains unnaturally turbulent for the strength of the wind and we can only attribute it to the effects of Hurricane Ivan on the other side of the Atlantic. I go below at 8.30pm. The rolling is disruptive and the squawk that always comes from the autopilot seems unusually high-pitched. It is difficult to get to sleep and I am getting a headache. I don’t normally use earplugs during a passage in case of emergencies but around 9.30 I capitulate. I suppose I must have finally fallen asleep because the next thing I am aware of is both engines starting up. As they rev, rest and rev again, I rush blindly from my bunk.

  ‘Wassamatter?
Wassamatter?’ I gabble as I stumble up the galley steps.

  ‘There’s a boat in front of us,’ David calls from the helm.

  Up in the cockpit, bleary-eyed and spectacle-less I stare past him. I am expecting a yacht. Instead my horizon is filled with the hull and blazing deck lights of a freighter.

  ‘The bastard turned left straight across our bows,’ said David. ‘That’s the second one tonight.’

  Having travelled towards us for some distance on our port side, both vessels, several hours apart, had suddenly changed course a short distance from us and crossed our bows. This one has been the closer of the two and, had David not started the engines and taken evasive action, Voyager would have sailed straight into it. It hovers now, on our starboard side, as if whoever is – or should have been – on its bridge, having noticed us at the last minute, has panicked and cut his engines. As we stare at it the ship goes full-steam ahead and is away to the horizon with an awesome turn of speed. It is close to midnight and not worth going back to bed so I make us a mug of tea each and then take over the watch.

  We would subsequently get into conversation with a man who said he had been Third Officer on a super-tanker. What he told us altered our whole approach to big ships. He said that most yachts didn’t show up on his tanker’s radar screen and its crew rarely looked out of the bridge windows. He said one night his ship nearly mowed down a large, three-masted schooner, but someone noticed a pair of crosstrees sticking up outside a window at the last minute. He also said that because of a super-tanker’s weight and speed it took fourteen miles to bring it to a stop. Others since have said that it takes as much as twenty.

  33

  Cadiz to Gibraltar

  As you change over a watch you pass on useful information. If shipping is more than a few miles away it is only a pinprick of white light, because the red and green navigation lights which tell you in which direction a vessel is travelling are not visible beyond a few miles. It is therefore helpful to be told: that ship is travelling north to south; that one is going away from us; that one has barely moved for hours and is probably biding time until morning; I’ve been watching that one for an hour and I still haven’t worked out what it is doing, etc.

  It all helps you to acclimatize quickly to the blackness, the lack of horizon and a confusing array of lights by identifying the big fast-movers, the stationary fishing trawlers, small yachts up close whose lights can be mistaken for big ships a long way off, or stars or planes, or the red lights on the tops of distant tower blocks that are a navigation warning to aircraft.

  ‘What about that lighthouse to starboard?’ I say.

  ‘What lighthouse?’

  ‘That one,’ I say pointing.

  ‘There is no lighthouse,’ he says, not looking.

  ‘Yes there is. It’s flashing.’

  ‘Not possible,’ he says. ‘There’s nothing out there.’

  With a noisy intake of breath I stare remorselessly at a faint flashing beacon until he is obliged to turn his head and look at it.

  ‘Ah,’ he says and goes down to look at the chart.

  He returns moments later. ‘That’s Africa,’ he says. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

  According to the chart, the lighthouse at Tangier can be seen 30 miles away and we are just in range. And I finally realise what it is that I have been able to smell ever since I came stumbling up from my bed. I can smell Africa; warm, woody, spicy. David sleeps in the saloon during my watch in case we get attacked by any more freighters.

  Shortly after midnight, between Cadiz and Tarifa, we sail through the site of a famous sea battle. It was here, off the shoals of Cape Trafalgar, in 1805, that a British squadron of 27 ships engaged with 33 ships of the combined fleets of Spain and France in the Battle of Trafalgar. The latter lost eighteen vessels during the battle. The Royal Navy won without losing a single ship, establishing Britain as the world’s pre-eminent naval power for over a century.

  At one stage of my watch I am surrounded by freighters. At another, the coastline appears to be closing in, but the lights turn out to be a line of fishing boats drifting slowly towards me on the tide. One particularly active and bloody-minded Spanish trawler skipper zigg-zaggs in front of me so many times, and I change course so often to avoid him, that finally I reach a point where I say, ‘Oh, sod it!’ and hold my course. The result is that the trawler skipper and I are so close that I can look straight into his startled eyes but what I am really looking for are signs of whether he is trailing a net for me to run into. My irritability is not helped by the fact that I am having to wear my foul weather gear. There was a squall during David’s watch and everywhere, including the helmsman’s chair, is sopping wet.

  We have been under sail since shortly after Cadiz, which means that the autopilot has been draining the batteries. So, instead of using the console lights, I check the instruments with a torch. The battery on the big yellow plastic one is flat, so I am using a small black rubber one which means if you put it down in the dark you can’t find again. I try keeping it in my jacket pocket which unfortunately isn’t big enough for it. So, having wrenched the Attack Velcro open and had it seal itself shut again four times, I have the delusion that maybe the Velcro will adhere to the matt rubber torch just enough to hold it in the pocket. But will it? Will it Hell.

  ‘What kept dropping in the cockpit?’ David grumbles when he gets up.

  When you finish a watch it sometimes helps to get yourself off to sleep if you read, and after I get into bed (and one tries hard to keep one’s bedding spruce) I become aware of the blackened fingers turning the pages of Oliver Twist. It takes more than one trip to a launderette before all traces of that wretched black rubber torch are removed from that particular bed sheet.

  The Mediterranean loses more water by evaporation than it receives from the rivers emptying into it. The difference between the two is made up from a constant flow of water from the Atlantic Ocean through the Straight of Gibraltar at an average speed of two knots. With the combination of this current and a following wind it is an exhilarating sail. Our plan is to arrive at Gib after dawn. The good conditions mean we are ahead of time so when David comes up on deck to take over the watch at 3.30am we reef the genoa to slow us down.

  As we approach the town of Tarifa, Channel 16 crackles out from the VHF with a Spanish voice on Tarifa Radio calling channel numbers rapidly in English. David tries all the relevant channels, but finds nothing on any of them. We sail on.

  As any regular sea-goer will know, Channel 16 is used, by international agreement, as an emergency and a hailing or call-up channel. If you want to call up the coastguard, or hail another boat, you do so on Channel 16. However, as soon as you have made contact you immediately go to another channel, any one of a number of working channels, to have your conversation, thereby leaving 16 free for others to use. It is the only channel which is permanently monitored by the coastguard, and on which gale and navigation warnings are announced, along with the numbers of the working channels you can tune into to hear them.

  In Britain, every mariner who is in charge of a VHF radio is required to take a course in the proper use of it and to pass a test before getting an operator’s license. However, we had not been long at sea before it became apparent how much things would improve, for mariner and coastguard alike, if the people who are going to transmit information to shipping had to spend a few days and nights at sea on a small boat with standard equipment to discover for themselves the quality of a large proportion of the transmissions received aboard.

  You get crackle. You get static. You get periods when all you pick up is one word in three. You get people giving information at high speed in a voice with a strong accent. You get people who mumble and young people who are clearly embarrassed because colleagues in the control room are making fun of them as they make their broadcast. There is wind, rain, sea and engine noise and atmospheric interference. The range of the average VHF radio is about 20 miles, but the nearer you are to that limit, the l
ess audible the broadcast is. And if you happen to be on the foredeck struggling with a sail when the broadcast takes place, you are not even physically within hearing distance anyway. So for something really important, like a gale warning or a navigational hazard, a repeat announcement a short time after the original would not go amiss.

  Even with the genoa reefed we are flying along and at 5am Tarifa slips quickly by. At 6 o’clock David makes the final turn towards Gibraltar and happily records in the log, ‘We are in the Med!’ At 6.30 he wakes me for the approach into Gibraltar Harbour.

  I have been on deck only a short time when I notice that the wind is increasing rapidly, the way it does just before a squall strikes. I call a warning down to David at the chart table, assuming he will want to put another reef in the genoa.

  ‘I think I might take it in altogether,’ he says absently, ‘we’ll be amongst Gibraltar’s shipping soon.’

  ‘It’s 20 knots,’ I say, flicking my torch at the wind speed indicator again.

  He remains below studying the chart.

  ‘21 knots.’

  Sometimes David can be maddeningly calm in conditions I consider stressful.

  ‘22 knots,’ I shout, starting both engines.

  ‘All right! ’ he says, banging his head on his way out through the companionway doors. ‘I said I’d take it in, didn’t I!’

  In the short time it takes us to haul in the genoa the wind gauge reaches 28 knots and then the squall hits us. The wind soars up to Force 8 and we pitch and toss. When running before the wind, however, it is easy to forget that the actual wind speed is greater than that shown on the wind speed indicator. To get a true reading, you have to add your boat speed. In truth, we realise belatedly, the wind behind our stern is not Force 8 but Strong Gale 9.