Dolphins Under My Bed

by Sandra Clayton

  This is not the most auspicious moment to enter Gibraltar’s waters but I begin singing Rule Britannia anyway. David says, ‘Oh God, yes,’ and pulls on the halyard to the right of the steering wheel, thereby lowering our Spanish courtesy flag. Unfortunately you can’t remove a flag from this halyard from inside the cockpit. You have to climb out onto the side deck and balance there while you twiddle about with bits of fraying, knotted string. It’s a man thing.

  David already has one foot over onto the side deck when I say, ‘One more step and I’ll leave you – not that I’ll have much choice anyway because I’ll never be able to find you again in these conditions.’

  A Seacat ferry, big and very fast, has recently set out from Algeciras to our left, on its way to Tangier on the other side of the Strait. We are just now crossing its wake. It adds even further to the general turbulence and David leaves the flag lying where it is, between wind-shield and shroud.

  Our goal now is the Immigration & Customs dock and, according to the cruising guide, its entrance is identified by a red flashing light. Although it is 7.30 in the morning it is still pitch black. Driving rain is reducing visibility to almost nothing.

  Suddenly an enormous hull looms up at us. We are now definitely amongst the shipping. We had seen no light to warn of its presence. After a brief panic, when we think it is coming directly at us, we decide it must be at anchor, although we are level with it before we can make out its anchor chain. The problem we have is that the anchor light on a large vessel is high up on its superstructure. At a distance, in this murky gloom, a small white light merges into the gauzy blur of lights on the shore. In the meantime, we have been sailing blindly at its huge black hull. Another one looms up in front of us. The blackness, the driving rain, the roughness of the sea and our tiredness all become disorienting. Having negotiated our way around a second ship, we are confronted by a third. David finally spots a red light and we begin making our way towards it. Vast hulls keep looming out of the blackness, and while David steers I squint round our salty, smeary windshield, using a finger like a windscreen wiper on my spectacle lenses as I call out, ‘Another immediately on your right,’ or, ‘One directly ahead!’

  When we finally reach the red light we have been following it turns out to be on a commercial dock. But by now the sky has begun to lighten enough for us not only to make out the ships’ anchor chains, but even the lines of laundry across their afterdecks. I am so pleased to finally be in the Med – although it is not the sort of conditions we were expecting – and I am particularly delighted to have arrived at Gibraltar.

  We finally find the correct red light and approach the Immigration & Customs dock. It has a young Englishman in uniform standing on it with his hands in his pockets. Now, I am sure there is nothing in his manual to suggest that he might pop a bow rope round a cleat for you while you run and take care of your stern. On the other hand, nor will there be anything which says he has to start interrogating a two-man crew in a 25-knot offshore wind before their first rope goes round a cleat; not least because it puts both boat and crew at risk.

  Getting a high-sided boat alongside a pontoon in a strong offshore wind is not easy. You have to stop driving the boat forward before you damage its topsides against the pontoon, but of course the minute you ease off on the acceleration the vessel begins to drift away again. Getting ashore with a rope is a matter of waiting for a bridgeable gap between boat and quay and then jumping. While David makes a sterling job of getting Voyager alongside I take my best chance and throw myself off the foredeck. The pontoon is slippery from so much rain and as I slither along it the wind almost blows me off the edge of it. I stagger forward and wrap the bow rope round the first cleat I come to. The boat is already being blown away from the dock and I’m desperate to get the rope tied. If David can’t hold her and he has to circle, it will be doubly difficult with me on the dock and just him on board. That’s supposing that the trailing bow line doesn’t wrap itself around our props in the process, which in this wind would be disastrous.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ says The Uniform. I assume he means my actually landing on the pontoon and not getting crushed between it and our topsides. I just wish he’d move away a bit. He follows me like there’s an umbilical cord between us and gets in the way of my increasingly frantic efforts to tie up.

  ‘Where have you come from?’ he shouts over the wind.

  ‘Cadiz.’

  ‘Didn’t you hear Tarifa Radio?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ he wants to know.

  I can’t think of an answer. The Med has been our objective since leaving England and I haven’t thought any further than that. He repeats his question. I straighten up trying to think of a reply for him but my mind is a blank. I look up at David at the wheel for him to answer but he is looking anxiously at our stern. In the few seconds that I have been delayed the wind has driven our stern away from the dock. In a few seconds more it will have gone too far for us to retrieve the situation. The man is close to me and blocking me off from our stern. Mortified I sidestep round him and dash for the stern line I had looped over the rail on our approach, ready for me to grab and tie up, but it is now well beyond my reach. David has to leave the controls and throw it to me. Then, while he guns the port engine to try and drive the stern back in, I haul on the rope. It is a job for a navvy rather than a middle-aged woman with a bad back and weak wrists, but desperation produces a desperate kind of strength. I gain a couple of feet, tie that off and then haul again. I am bent up double tying up the latest bit of slack as the man’s shoes settle a couple of inches from the cleat.

  ‘What flag are you flying?’ he shouts at me over the wind.

  My head being just above my knees, and my ears obscured by a high crackling collar, I assume I have misheard. ‘Sorry?’ I wheeze from the effort of hauling 11 tons against a 25-knot wind. My arms feel as if they are leaving their sockets.

  ‘What flag are you flying?’ he shouts again, only slower and louder.

  I twist my neck to look upwards, at the large Red Ensign flapping furiously above our heads. It seems a strange question for an Englishman to be asking.

  ‘British,’ I reply, giving the stern rope one last pelvis-wrenching heave and tying it off around the cleat.

  ‘Then would you please take that down,’ he shouts.

  Bewildered I straighten up and look in the direction his finger is pointing. At first I cannot work out what he is pointing at. Then I catch sight of the tiny Spanish courtesy flag cowering between the windscreen and the shroud.

  Welcome to Gibraltar.

  I don’t think it is what I say that sends him scuttling off to his portacabin so much as my tone, along with a general uncertainty as to where I might shove our Spanish courtesy flag.

  He turns out to be Immigration and he shares the portacabin with the Harbour Master, a Gibraltarian. Both men seem suspicious of us and unable to understand why we left Cadiz, although we explain that the 24-hour forecast for the journey was good; as indeed was the journey itself until the last hour or two. We are asked again if we heard the transmission from Tarifa and we say we were unable to hear it. They say, ‘You’re lucky,’ again, and we don’t know what they mean, but gradually this convoluted interview appears to centre on the broadcast by Tarifa Radio. They never tell us what was in it, and we don’t ask. We sit quietly, waiting to know of what we are accused.

  We are tired and bemused. They seem confused by us, but finally pass us onto the Customs officer in the portacabin next door whose only interest is how many cigarettes we have on board.

  Once free of officialdom we tune the VHF to channel 72 and call up Marina Bay marina for directions to a berth. It is pier 4, bows-on to a concrete pier and a lazy line off the stern.

  Unlike the British marina system and northern France, where you tie up to a finger pontoon, in many southern European and Mediterranean countries you tie your bow to the main pontoon by two ropes about ten feet apart to stop it swinging
, and then pull up a lazy line. This is a long rope attached to the pontoon at one end and to the seabed at the other, and which you tie to your stern. In this way marinas can berth many more boats on a main pontoon, pier or quay than if they installed finger pontoons or simply let boats tie up alongside.

  How it came to be called a lazy line I can’t imagine, because it couldn’t be more stressful. First of all, at the pontoon end, you start by pulling it up off the seabed from which it emerges encrusted with hand-lacerating barnacles, mud and untreated sewage. You then have to overhand it down the side of your boat as you walk to the stern. As the length of rope you are leaving behind you drips nasty brown stains all over your topsides and side deck, the length of rope you are pulling up in front of you is busy trying to wrap itself around your propeller. Before you tie this fetid mass to your stern cleat, however, you have to haul it in tight to keep your boat at a 90° angle to the pontoon, which takes an extraordinary amount of strength to get it tight enough to prevent a catamaran from drifting. This done, you mop up the mess, disinfect your hands, then pick up your mobile ‘phone and book your husband in for a hernia repair.

  A very pleasant young Englishman helps us moor, and hands me our lazy line. Tired and frustrated as we are it is a disaster-in-waiting and I allow it to get wrapped round one of our propellers. The young man is also a diver in his spare time and, for a fee of £20, when he has finished his shift he comes back to remove it. He is down for about 15 minutes and removes bits of fishing net from both propellers while he is about it.

  He tells us that the border is closed again today, for the third day running; blockaded by Spanish fishermen demanding fishing rights in Gibraltar’s territorial waters. People cannot get out to their jobs on the Spanish mainland, or to visit their families and it is causing endless hardship and frustration as usual.

  Even when it is open, someone else says later, the Spanish border police keep cars in long lines in intolerable heat for hours on end for no reason. And no-one knows, of course, how long a closure will last. In 1969 the Spanish closed the border until 1985. The Immigration official and the courtesy flag begin to edge into perspective.

  GIBRALTAR

  34

  Marina Bay Marina

  It is a super berth, opposite one of the most attractive apartment buildings I have ever seen, a row of bistros and cafés, and the kiosks for the diving school and the dolphin safaris. We have the north end of The Rock towering above us to our right, and the drama of the airport runway a few hundred yards to our left. Gibraltar has a short runway requiring a rather sharp take-off and arrival.

  We have a sleep, long hot showers and a lazy meal aboard while a whisky-voiced singer entertains lunchtime patrons at the restaurant opposite. We are also more than usually grateful to have arrived safely after we realise that what we entered Gibraltar Harbour in was not a squall but the start of a gale. It continues to blow for two days, and its arrival was probably the subject of the Tarifa Radio broadcast we had been unable to hear.

  The yacht on the opposite side of the pontoon from us belongs to a sailing school. During the afternoon there is a tremendous crash. We rush for’ard thinking our lazy line has given way and our bow has hit the concrete pier, only to discover that whenever one particular student wants to go ashore, instead of lowering the gangplank she simply unties it and lets it crash down onto the concrete. With the wind too high to venture out for several days, the tutor has them practicing knots, tying on fenders and studying their Competent Crew handbooks. In the few days we are there he looks increasingly strained, as if he, like his doomed gangplank, will not last out the week.

  Rested and refreshed we decide the budget can afford dinner out and arrive at one of the restaurants opposite bang on for their 7.30 opening time. The seafood is delicious. There also seems to be something about relaxing after a stressful passage and, as at Tréguier, I seem to absorb my fellow diners like blotting paper. There are five people, some of them American and probably airline crew, at a nearby table; two women and three men. The youngest and prettiest of the two women is very loud and very boring, and appears to be trying for the world record for how many times she can get the word like into a sentence. The forty-something man opposite her begins the meal with an expression which says, ‘So, she has a voice like a corncrake, but she’s very attractive.’ By the second course his face says, ‘I’m not that desperate.’ During dessert his eyes glaze over and by the time the coffee arrives he appears to have a headache.

  Two enormous family groups take up half the restaurant, along with babies in bouncers, toddlers in high chairs and an elderly, sombre chap in dark glasses whom everybody entering kisses on the cheek like a Godfather. There is a highly-polished vicar with a woman in frothy lemon frills, and an aggressive-looking young woman with ‘Benetton’ emblazoned across her ample chest who is dining with her mom.

  Today is Monday and we go into town. We drop off our films for developing, buy an English newspaper and some postcards, and collect our mail from the poste restante counter at the post office up Gibraltar’s pedestrianised Main Street. It runs steeply up through the centre of the town and the start of it is only a short stroll from the marina. You have to cross a busy road to get there but drivers are extraordinarily attentive to crossings here, stopping the moment someone even approaches a kerb; so much so that you almost feel obliged to cross even when you hadn’t intended to, rather than give offence. At the top of Main Street we browse in a book shop and buy a copy of Jane’s Fighting Ships so that in future we shall know which vessels are accosting us at sea.

  Then it is back to the boat with our mail to catch up on the news over coffee. After that we get out the bicycles and set off for Safeway’s supermarket. We discover on the way that Gibraltarians don’t use their indicators much. Mostly they come to a halt, smile, wave you on, and then make their turn.

  Safeway’s is Britain Abroad for ex-patriots. We buy our favourite Irish recipe sausages and real bacon, Scottish crab pâté, and organic thick cream from Somerset to have with Welsh scones and English gooseberry jam. We could have had trout from Devon as well, but decide to get something local at the fish market later.

  While I put the shopping away David resumes the search for propane gas. There is no facility in Gibraltar, he is told, but there is a supplier in Alicante. This is becoming like the search for the Holy Grail. I tune in to Gib Radio. The presenter announces that, it being late September, Burberry and Barbour are now available in the high street and the weatherman suggests it is time to get out our winter cardies. That night, sitting out in the cockpit in T-shirts and shorts, I wonder how long it takes for your personal thermostat to adjust to Mediterranean temperatures.

  I also finally see a plane take off from the runway this evening. There are very few flights each day, so despite being so close, they are a source of interest rather than an intrusion. I want to wave, but David says waving is naff. We are in bed by ten. Apart from anything else, that was my first bicycle ride in years.

  The high winds continue for several days and then there is no wind at all. The mood on the sailing school yacht opposite becomes mutinous.

  One day is particularly damp. ‘Worse than England,’ says an English neighbour of the leaden skies and deadening humidity. We write postcards in the morning, go into town to post them, collect our photographs, buy swordfish very inexpensively for dinner from the fish market, and feel grossly overcharged at the launderette. We had done six times that much at Lagos for less. ‘Local Mafia,’ hisses a neighbouring live-aboard, doing her washing by hand. The following day is bright, hot and sunny.

  For a small place there is a lot to see on Gibraltar and it has a long history. Long before the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans and all the rest of those early sea-borne traders and invaders found their way here it was home to Neanderthal Man. Or Gibraltar Woman, actually, for a woman’s skull dating from the end of the Ice Age was found in a quarry at the foot of The Rock’s steep north face in 1848. It was almost a decade
later that male remains of a similar age were found in a cave in Germany’s Neander Valley near Düsseldorf and gave the name Neanderthal Man to the low-browed, heavy-jawed species which walked semi-upright and pre-dated homo sapiens.

  The Rock of Gibraltar is also one of the legendary Pillars of Hercules – the two promontories at the eastern end of the Strait of Gibraltar – the other being Jebel Musa on the African side. In ancient Greek mythology, Herakles (Hercules being the later Roman/Latin translation of his name) erected the pillars as tribute on the way to capture the oxen of the three-bodied giant Geryon, which was one of the twelve fabled Labours of Hercules.

  Real-life ancient mariners had arrived here by the 8th century BC, leaving less ostentatious tributes to their gods before sailing out into the Atlantic and the unknown. In more modern times Gibraltar was successively conquered by the Moors, Spain and Great Britain. It has been British since 1704.

  The Muslim invasion of Europe started in the Bay of Gibraltar, where the Visigoths sided with the Muslims by lending their ships to the Berber Chief, Tarik Ibn Zeyad, who landed by what came to be called Tarik’s mountain – or Jebel Tarik (say it quickly without the final syllable) – and ended up naming The Rock as well. Its porous limestone means that there is never a shortage of water, so even when the Iberian Peninsula is arid and brown, The Rock is still green.

  The famous Barbary Apes roam free on the Upper Rock Nature Reserve, and the Great Siege (1779–1783) resulted in one of the great mining feats in history. With pick and shovel, British soldiers dug 34 miles of tunnels through The Rock, from one side to the other, so that a gun could be installed to fire on besieging French and Spanish ships in the bay below.