Dolphins Under My Bed

by Sandra Clayton

  With Britain’s infrastructure in ruins, and food rationing in force until 1951, the country then struggled through a long period of post-war reconstruction and economic recovery. It is hardly surprising if food on the table, a shirt on their backs, shoes on their children’s feet and aspirations to a home of their own one day were the priorities of post-war existence. Foreign holidays for the working classes had to wait until the 1970s, when improvements to the economy and cheap air fares to Europe made spending their two weeks’ annual holiday abroad a possibility.

  Sadly, the cycle goes on. World News, courtesy of BBC World Service and our daily contact with the wider world, catalogues – as national newspapers rarely do – the endless misery, loss and deprivation caused by one country invading another or by civil war. And you grieve in your soul for the men, women and children, not simply struggling to survive the current onslaught, but for the decades it will take them to re-establish even a minimum standard of housing, health care, education and diet. They are the reality behind the picturesque forts, crenellated battlements and fortified city walls that as tourists we all love.

  There is a Saturday Night Concert in the town tonight – a woman, very loud – until 1.30am. Ear plugs are an essential part of a boat’s manifest.

  We had intended to leave this morning, but the latest VHF weather forecast changes our mind. The morning begins calmly enough, but by 9.30 the wind begins rising. By afternoon it has reached 40 knots, a fierce, hot wind that dries you up and leaves you torpid.

  Some of the gulls are flying backwards, squawking in protest, and you wonder why they don’t find shelter until the wind lessens. But then you wonder if they are actually the younger ones practicing their flying skills, because other gulls are using the ferocious wind like thermals, wings held stiffly and not fully extended, gliding sideways at high speed. Yet others conduct aerial fights in it, squabbling, being buffeted up and down by it as they turn to snap at each other, their feathers on end and in constant danger of collision with masts or one another but never quite connecting.

  Unless the forecast changes drastically overnight, we might still be here tomorrow. With luck there won’t be a concert again tonight, it being Sunday.

  There isn’t a concert and we are to remain for two days more, not one. The mornings are always deceptively mild but by noon the wind roars overhead in a sky bleached white and so bright it makes your eyes ache when you step out into the cockpit. Our mooring ropes snag against the cleats. The halyards on neighbouring boats and on the marina’s flagpoles beat a deafening tattoo. The water in the shelter of the marina remains comparatively calm, but beyond the harbour wall the wind is so strong for a time that it blows the surface up into spray spirals 15 feet high. It all fades away by bedtime, leaving the boat to fall back onto the quay where the agitated water sets the fenders rasping against the concrete.

  There is also a constant click-clicking around us that we cannot identify. It is loudest when you are down in the hulls. David suggests it is water lapping into a niche in the concrete pier to which our starboard hull is tied.

  With sailing out of the question we explore Almería each day, glad of the shelter provided by the marina’s walls to reach the town as the wind buffets and beats us, lifting us off our feet the minute we let our guard down. Yet as invariably happens, once inside the streets, parks and castle walls of any town, you would never guess that a gale is blowing just off the promenade.

  I introduce David to the new supermarket. There is no queue at the bread counter today, nor fish at the fish counter either. There rarely is fish on Mondays in Spain but at present the weather is keeping the fishing boats in harbour well beyond the Sabbath. We do find what turn out to be delicious locally-made meat balls, however, to have with pasta and sauce. We also buy some eggs.

  ‘Free range,’ David says looking approvingly at the label and putting them in our wire basket.

  On one jaunt we finally discover the Post Office, so reclusive it requires three separate sets of directions to find it, and stumble upon Almería’s old supermarket. We spot torch batteries through a discount pharmacy’s open doorway, go in to buy some and see wine for sale at the far end of the store. Putting a couple of bottles in our wire basket we notice a flight of stairs behind the wine racks, climb them and bingo – a large supermarket. It’s odd how Spain hides them up flights of stairs without any apparent sign to say they are there.

  Gradually the barometer grows more stable and David gets the charts out in anticipation. We are both concerned about the unsettled weather and it is another spur to hurry towards winter quarters.

  36

  Almería to Garrucha

  We push off at 9.40 on Wednesday morning for Garrucha, 50 miles away at the start of the Costa Blanca. The boat is covered in brown dust from Almería’s building site beyond our stern and the direction from which the wind has come with such ferocity during the last three days. Today’s forecast is for a strong breeze from the west. The reality is light airs from the south. After days of violent wind it is now so slight that we have to motor.

  It is bright sun and a rolling sea to Cabo de Gata, but once we leave this cape behind us the sea becomes calm. Just after noon, with a light breeze from the south-west, we put up the genoa. It is a warm, languid afternoon. By 5pm the wind reduces to light airs from the west and is very erratic. The genoa wafts and flaps, and we switch it from side to side several times before finally pulling it in.

  We motor close to the coast until, about 15 miles from Garrucha’s marina, a fisherman in a dinghy, whom I have been watching for some time, and who must have been aware of our approach for at least half an hour, suddenly roars towards us shouting and gesticulating for us to turn out to sea. He may have been laying a net between himself and a second small boat; or not, as the case may be. It is hard to tell in all that shouting. He accompanies our flight out to sea for some distance with both himself and his outboard motor in a state of mild hysteria. Then, forking an arm left when he deems it appropriate for us to turn back in, hurtles back inshore himself. All this aggravation and you still can’t buy a couple of decent trout in the supermarket.

  It is almost dark by the time we reach Garrucha. The marina is inside the town’s small harbour. We cannot see a waiting pontoon, but fortunately a marina attendant appears and waves us alongside the fuel dock. He is a charming man who, despite no English at all, eloquently demonstrates the lowness of the concrete wharf and the need for us to lower our fenders to avoid damaging our topsides. The fuel dock has just closed so we can stay there for the night. We are grateful; it means there is no lazy line to mess about with. David goes off to pay.

  A thin, embittered-looking man with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth appears. I nod a greeting but he looks through me, takes up a hose and begins spraying water over the boat across the dock from us. I go below and get the covers for our helmsman’s chair and instruments before he drenches everything. On his return from the marina office David dodges the spray to plug in our electricity cable, and I have cheese omelettes, tomatoes in olive oil and basil followed by melon topped with lemon juice, brown sugar and ginger on the table by the time he has planned a course for tomorrow. We intend to make an early start.

  This is an arid coastline, treeless and brown, but with groups of affluent buildings. In an English-language magazine we picked up along the way, Garrucha is described as a fishing village but it contains some very individual and impressive houses, tucked behind high walls, wrought iron gates and masses of trees. Affluence or not, Spanish pavements can be dangerous to your health. Workmen have a tendency to dig them up, or remove street furniture, leaving holes unfilled and no warning to pedestrians. Vigilance after dark is particularly important, especially here.

  It is a warm night. We buy ice creams and simply wander. The streets are leafy and shadowy. There is a small market with stalls groaning with more beads and semi-precious stones than I’ve ever seen in my life, but no customers. The quay itself is very quiet an
d there seems to be no petty crime or vandalism. They even leave the linen on the tables at the open-fronted fish restaurant when they close up for the night. By 10pm we are in bed.

  37

  Garrucha to Mazarron

  We are away by 5.30 into a calm sea and a dark morning with the lightest of winds. The fishing boats are still out, just beyond the sea wall. The men are working under bright deck lights that turn each boat into a splash of brilliance in the darkness. It spills over the edge of each boat, reflects off the moving water and creates a shimmering pool of light around each darkened hull.

  We need the early start to get to Tomas Maestre, 70 miles away, in daylight. We have been unable to get a forecast. The only notices on the window of the little white wooden marina office are about forthcoming social events. Our Navtex is providing nothing of any use to us either. There are warnings for Croatia and France but nothing for the Costa Blanca.

  The wind becomes a light north-easterly breeze and we are motoring almost into it. Half an hour later it has edged a little more to the north and we are able to put up the sails and motor-sail, close hauled on a beat. By 7am the wind speed has doubled and we can cut one engine and run the other just to keep us on course. By 9.30 it is up to 20 knots and rising. I go for a lie down on the bunk to read until David calls me to help him reef the sails. It takes me ages to get my deck shoes tied, and even then one of their wretched leather laces comes undone in the middle of reefing. I tread on it, and it snaps off. There isn’t enough left to re-tie, so now the shoe won’t stay on and I keep falling over.

  Within half an hour the wind is gusting to near gale force and showing every sign of increasing. It is another ten hours to Tomas Maestre. We decide to make for a bolt hole instead and change course for Mazarron, an ancient centre for lead and iron-making and only three hours away. Unfortunately, this change of course brings the wind so close to Voyager’s nose that we can only motor. The combination of the wind’s direction and strength sends large waves crashing against her bows. She rises up onto their crests and falls into their hollows. She thrashes from side to side. Waves hitting the port bow send sea spray up over the wheelhouse roof and diagonally across the cockpit to the starboard quarter. The sun catches it and makes colours out of it. We are travelling under our own personal rainbow.

  At its height the wind speed reaches 34 knots – Gale Force 8 – and the rainbow spray is replaced with a rhythmic bucketful of cold seawater that hits you on the side of the head if you forget to duck at the relevant moment. It is a cold passage as well as wet, even in foul weather jackets and I’d hoped we’d seen the last of those. On deck, flying salt mingles with the brown dust of Almería. Below deck, sea water enters through a starboard vent and soaks the entire bathroom including all the towels. In the port hull the laundry bin scatters its contents, the saloon coffee table goes walkabout, several windows leak and David’s favourite hat (from the Lifeboat Institution) is torn from his head and blown overboard. It is also on plunging, rolling days like this, as your foot shoots off the galley steps for the umpteenth time and every hand rail slips from your grasp, that you regret your liberal use of polish on the internal woodwork.

  At 1pm, another charming man is waiting on a pier to help us berth bows on. An English couple, from somewhere down on the pontoons, also come to help hold us off which, given the strength of the wind, we appreciate very much. The attendant lines us up with the end of the concrete quay and hands us a lazy line. Unfortunately it is not in an ideal position for a catamaran and when we haul on it to hold us off the quay we are askew. Before he leaves, the attendant asks us to square ourselves up when we can as we are taking up one and a half spaces.

  While David goes to pay at the office, I decide that a tin of tuna bought in Bayona would be nice for lunch. Its box is entirely in Spanish apart from a blue circle with the words ‘Dolphin safe’ in English, and I ponder the significance of this as I remove it. Spanish tinned tuna tends to be very oily but delicious. Unusually, this is an oval tin. The wall can opener opens only its long sides, spilling oil over the draining board and the rim of the upturned washing-up bowl. I try the manual opener but the can’s edges are too distorted by now for that to work either.

  Something strange and elemental can happen when you are prevented from getting food out of a tin. This is nowhere described so well as in Jerome K Jerome’s 1889 classic Three Men in a Boat where they fancy tinned pineapple for tea but find that they have forgotten to pack a tin opener. A terrifying kind of rage descends as they attempt to get at the contents by other, increasingly violent, means and what begins in cheerful anticipation ends with the battered but still-unopened tin of pineapple being hurled into the river and the party feeling that something very close to evil has touched their lives.

  Something of the kind happens with my tuna. The only way to get at it is to prize it out from under the lid with a knife, and while I narrowly avoid severing a couple of fingers on the raw edges of the tin a hyperactive fly arrives. I can’t abide flies in the galley. You know they’ve spent the morning walking about on a garbage dump or round a lavatory bowl and now they’ve come to wipe their feet on your lunch. Putting down the tuna tin and the knife, and grabbing the kitchen towel, I take an irritated swipe at it. The crumbs on the breadboard – and all that pointless flour they dredge over certain types of bread – rise into the air and come down again: over the stove, the worktops, the galley floor and steps, and even part of the saloon.

  Now I am angry.

  I wash the tuna oil from my hands, get out the fly spray and wait. And wait. The fly soars, zooms, spirals, circles and loops-the-loop. It is the Waldo Pepper of flying circus flies, but it will land sooner or later and I can wait. To spray the thing wantonly in mid-air will simply spray all the food in the galley as well. Finally it lands on my bare right foot. I am delighted at its choice and spray it liberally. The fly rises from my foot and lands on the edge of the fruit bowl. Groggy but unbowed it sways there, challenging me. ‘I still have the strength,’ it seems to be saying, ‘to traipse my disgusting little feet through your nicely-washed grapes before your fly spray finishes me.’ Outraged, I bring it down with the first thing that comes to hand – the tea towel, fresh out this morning but now something else for the burgeoning laundry bin.

  I resume the amputation of my fingers on the tuna tin until a very peculiar sensation in my right foot reminds me that household fly spray is a mild form of nerve gas, and rather than poison my entire system I trudge off to the heads to wash it off. When I get back, the deceased fly has been replaced by an equally hyperactive relative. The focus of its interest is the draining board, smeared as it is with aromatic tuna oil. Taking up the kitchen towel again, teeth gritted, eyes riveted on the newcomer I tense, waiting for it to land. Behind me, I hear David enter the saloon.

  ‘Is lunch nearly ready?’ he asks cheerily.

  At that moment the fly lands. With a howl of rage I slam down the towel with a violence that sends the washing up bowl shooting across the sinks and into a stack of saucepans, making the whole galley rattle.

  ‘I only asked,’ he says, and wanders back outside.

  The wind has dropped and, as the attendant requested, David begins to straighten Voyager. Naturally, when he has bits untied here, there and everywhere the wind rises suddenly so I leave the galley and go out to help. A monohull arrives and I go and briefly hold its pulpit off the quay while someone gets ashore. The two people on board are rather smug individuals. For a monohull a lazy line is much easier anyway but nevertheless they have tied up, prepared lunch and eaten it before our tuna fragments have even arrived in the cockpit. Once there, we are plagued by flies. We take our food below, and have not quite finished it before a violent bang sends us running for the foredeck. We had not been satisfied with the new setting of the lazy line and our uneasiness turns out to have been justified. It has come adrift and our starboard bow is hitting the concrete dock. Our smug neighbours come out to watch. By the time we have tied fenders ove
r the bow, commissioned an old tyre from a pontoon to hang over the dock, retied the bow ropes and winched in the stern rope (removing a bit of cockpit gelcoat in the process) it is mid-afternoon, but we don’t want to risk going into town to shop yet in case we slide forward again. So we decide to wash the boat instead.

  The sun has baked the combination of salt and soil to a light brown crust all over Voyager. Worst of all are the windows. Indoors it resembles a nuclear winter. David gets out our hose. It doesn’t fit the tap. We get out two buckets, but no water comes out of any tap anywhere on the marina. The office – which according to the hours of business listed on its door should be open – is closed. As we are reading this notice, our smug neighbours pass us on their leisurely way into town. They shrug. ‘It’s the off season,’ they say in strongly-accented but perfect English. It is very irksome to be patronized in your own language. In the end we fill our buckets from our own water tank and soap and rinse the windows. They are still a bit smeary after we’ve finished, but at least light can get in and we can see out.

  The shower block turns out to be rather nice, despite the huge green cicadas strolling about, and when I get back to Voyager a Swiss boat has arrived. The wife immediately wants to know which other languages I speak – ‘French? German? Italian?’ – as she finds English a bit tiring. I’m exhausted and my day is not over yet. Nor do I think my tiny repertoire of good day, excuse me, thank you, two beers/coffees please and where is the supermarket? will make for very good conversation so I make my apologies and totter below to prepare for a trip into town. The lazy line has remained stable and if we don’t go soon the supermarket will be closed for the evening. As we set off we meet the smug couple coming back. The supermarket, they say, is 1 kilometre away.