On one of the afternoons I begin to adapt my letter to Tony and Pam into a newsletter for other relatives and friends. It is David’s idea and a good one. The trouble with postcards and letters is that after a while you can’t remember what you’ve sent to whom and become either repetitive or neglectful. A newsletter will also relieve David of any guilt about writing letters home without any effort on his part as we both know who will be producing it. I don’t mind, however, and I won’t be short of material.
Since starting out I’ve kept a journal because I couldn’t help myself. I found our experiences so new and captivating that the urge to write them down was irresistible. In addition, I knew that the many places we were visiting, often for a very short time, would quickly blur into a very few; which would be a pity because each was unique. And I knew that all the things that are happening to us would soon become a jumble, and could envisage a future time in which we would be unable to agree about what happened where and when and how and to which one of us, because memory is so fallible. And I feared that, with advancing age, memory might fail us altogether and I wanted to capture for that future time these challenging, life-enhancing, frightening, funny, maddening, magical, sun-filled days of unexpected liberty.
Liberty had not been part of the equation when planning improvements to our health and quality of life. We had not considered that for most of us living on an increasingly over-populated planet it is the sea, not Space – except for a tiny minority – that is the final frontier. And that for the present at least the great oceans of the world are still an unpredictable, ungovernable environment that is largely unrestricted, un-nationalized, unmonitored, untaxed, unprotected by social legislation, unrepresented by quangos, impervious to 24-hour news media, untrammelled by lawyers and emotional trauma counsellors or health and safety directives and not remotely politically correct.
We need a name for our newsletter and finally settle on Claytons’ Progress. I ask David what he feels he is progressing towards.
‘Unresponsibility,’ he says.
I misinterpret this and he says no, not irresponsibility, just not being responsible. Although David rarely brought his work home, or complained about anything or anybody, I can imagine that a staff of 350 and a long list of customers with pressing deadlines for more than a decade is at least one area of responsibility he has not been sorry to shed. The rhythm of our life is dictated nowadays by the weather and the hours of daylight, waking with the sun and heading towards bed not long after it gets dark. Its pace is mostly 5 knots, so that when we do eventually get behind the wheel of a car again we will hurtle along at 20mph, mortified by the manic speed around us. Unable to get the generator working we have to abandon any printing for the time being and lower the dinghy for a jaunt instead.
At the north end of the bay there is a fishing village called La Colonia. Every inch of its quay is filled with small, traditional wooden fishing boats as if, instead of the family car, every household has a family boat. All are painted white except for the wood-stained and varnished tops of their high prows, and in lieu of license plates each has its registration number on its bow. They are all immaculate and identical. To the right of them is the now familiar row of small, low, white boathouses. The village itself is captivating; a place of sleepy dogs, steep narrow streets, and a big, old stone church – lit up at night and one of our transit points – with a shady, dusty square across the narrow street from it.
We time our return to coincide with the thirty-minute opening of the post office. Its inside is as unlike a post office as its greenshuttered outside. A well-built, jolly man in navy blue sits at an old wooden desk strewn with rubber stamps, ink pads and mail. He takes our envelopes, keys the price of the stamps into his pocket calculator, shows the total to us with a smile and then drops our money into a small tin cash box. The walls of the small room are lined with shelves. Over these, and the floor, parcels tumble in cheerful profusion. There is a Christmassy smell of a recently smoked cigar. This is the Santa’s grotto of post offices and unlike any other Spanish post office we will ever encounter.
Back on board Voyager, the two heavyweight men on the ketch opposite talk non-stop. Their conversation seems to be focused on whatever it is that’s dangling by a wire from their main mast and which is out-chattering even them. During the afternoon they send the lad up the mast. During his long sojourn up there with a pair of pliers, he is harangued by the younger of the two men with endless instructions as to how the job should be done. Then he is stopped from working altogether while the man takes photographs of him from the bow and the stern. Because of the direction of the wind, however, all this is only a vague hum.
At around 5pm a rusting old coastal cargo boat, registered in Amsterdam, moves out of its berth on the end of the town quay. Its bridge is painted blue and has the words Ship of Fools written across it and there is a dead tree festooned with pale blue fishing floats on its foredeck. It lurches towards the bay’s entrance, lurches back, forwards again, and then anchors just where everybody enters or leaves the bay and is about as inconvenient as it could get.
I wake around 4am, disturbed by shouting, and go up on deck into a soft, still night. Apart from drunken revelry, which this isn’t, the sound of people shouting in the early hours usually means a marine emergency of some kind. When I get outside, however, it becomes clear that there is a humdinger of a row taking place on a boat that arrived yesterday: wooden, pretty, but of a type with no standing headroom inside. I think being unable to stand upright must cause a lot of stress when the first novelty of cruising has worn off. There is a long wail of weeping, strangely unconvincing, like a child’s when it can’t get its own way. Then a woman’s voice emerges, accusing. Then a man’s voice, louder and clearer, utters a trio of unflattering expletives.
Lights come on in the house on the shore behind them, and on a nearby motor yacht. The woman’s accusations, only partly heard, appear bizarre; not unlike the exercises in my ancient teach-yourself Spanish book. One such runs along the lines of, ‘You have a towel! If you have a towel, why can’t I have a towel? And if you go, you will drown.’ Part of me feels guilty about being there, listening; another part wants to shout, ‘Speak up a bit! You’re not making any sense!’ For after all, it’s their fault that I’ve left my bed at four o’clock in an otherwise tranquil morning. There is obviously a lot more shouting to come before they are done, so I search out my ear plugs before getting back into bed.
It is probably not the content of the present argument that is the problem, whatever that might be, so much as the tensions of living in a limited space with a limited income; when a boat that began as a dream of freedom becomes a form of imprisonment. And there’s not a lot of privacy on the water in which to work things out, either. Beyond them, at the bay’s entrance, the black and white striped lighthouse blinks with such a frail light that a hamster on a treadmill could produce it.
Next day we dinghy down to the small marina for a weather forecast and then up to the little stone jetty with the translucent green water and tiny boathouses. We cross the small beach with the pines and wild flowers and climb the hill to the supermarket. There is a bit of a wait at the meat counter – behind a man with one of those shallow, circular wicker baskets of the type restaurateurs seem to favour – while each cut of meat is individually parcelled up and bagged. It is an extraordinarily well-stocked counter, and with its selection of dressed game birds and rabbits it reminds me of the old high street shops of my childhood, before everything came in polystyrene trays and plastic film.
46
Mallorca: Porto Colom to Porto Cristo
We leave Porto Colom at noon with the wind on the port quarter and the genoa up. We have no log – probably weed around its paddle wheel – and the autopilot is not working. We arrive at Porto Cristo at lunch time and aim for the town quay for a variety of reasons. Most importantly, we’re not sure that Voyager will fit between the marina’s finger pontoons. The public quay is also closer to the tow
n, and a night’s stay there is a quarter of the cost of the marina.
It says in the cruising guide that stern anchors are required at the quay. So while still out in the bay, along with fenders and ropes, David has hauled our new Danforth anchor with its pristine white rope out of the forward locker and set it up ready for me to drop off our stern while he aims our bows at the quay.
When we reach the public quay, however, we find it now has lazy lines, making our stern anchor unnecessary. Unfortunately, and unbeknown to us, the boat on our starboard side has pulled up the wrong lazy line and it is lying across the space we are trying to enter. Out of sight below the water, and not where you would expect it to be, this lazy line gets caught around one of our rudders, bringing us to a halt short of the quay. The man who comes to help us I assume to be from the harbour master’s office, but he turns out to be a visiting English yachtsman, and very patient. It all provides endless entertainment for the people lunching outside the restaurant on the quay.
Before David can finally tie on the lazy line a woman in a blue uniform arrives at our bow. They always arrive while your hands are brown and stinking from a fetid lazy line and you’re sweating buckets from wrestling with mooring ropes in the hottest part of the day.
‘Money?’ I rub my fingers together. ‘Si’ she says smiling.
‘Five minutes?’ I signal hopefully.
She looks at her watch and shrugs amiably. ‘Five minutes, ten. Within an hour.’ She hands me a form to complete. I leave nasty brown finger marks on it. She ambles away.
Her office is on the quay to our right, just below the restaurant. It is a white-washed, flaking room in an old single-storey building with green shutters and a big atmospheric black-and-white photograph on its back wall showing what the area where Voyager is currently berthed looked like before development. It is similar to other pictures we have seen of fishing villages from around the 1880s. She observes our interest. Large numbers are always difficult to understand in a foreign language so she automatically writes down for us the year the photograph was taken – 1990. A lot has changed in eight years in Porto Cristo. She then provides us with a map of the town from her fax machine and directions to the post office, supermarket and laundry. As well as all the usual stuff, we still have the pile of towels used to mop up seawater from the leaking windows and vent during the recent storm. Although we had dried them out the following day, we have since had no opportunity to wash the salt out of them. Neither San Petro nor Porto Colom had a launderette and we did not have enough fresh water on board to do them by hand.
It is a lovely berth. Our cockpit faces the headland with its palm trees and four stunning arcaded houses. Our bow faces the quay and the restaurant. To its right is the old whitewashed stucco and green shuttered office of the Harbour Master. To its left is a truly disreputable toilet that constitutes the quay’s ablutions facility, with a door that someone appears to have put their foot through; then trees and a small rose garden. Despite its being the end of October, the dark red roses fill the warm air with their perfume and the trees are filled with songbirds. Beyond the rose garden the buses gather and their drivers shout the odds to confused tourists studying timetables.
We are surrounded by boats. Both sides of this long narrow harbour are jam-packed with them and most of them are German. Some are of the older, traditional type which I find rather beautiful, but for some unaccountable reason Voyager’s unusual lines are the central attraction of the quay. An endless procession of people stop to discuss her, stare at her, and pose for photographs in front of her.You have to choose your time to go ashore for fear of ruining some one’s holiday snaps by suddenly popping up in the middle of them.
It is a still, balmy day and utter bliss. After a bath and a late lunch we wander into town. There are a lot of tourist shops and in among them is a small shoe shop. My trainers have a hole in them and I am wearing my hated deck shoes. On board, over time, I have learned to avoid catching unwary toes under cleats or on the pointed corner of a low-lying window frame. This has allowed me to spend most of my time aboard barefoot and only resort to footwear when going ashore. Accordingly my deck shoes have never got any more comfortable and, even on so short a trip as this one, they are currently killing me. On a wire rack in the shoe shop’s doorway I spot just what I need. I go inside and point to the blue denim loafers. They are the kind the elderly fishermen out on the quay are wearing.
‘Senor’s’ explains the elderly lady assistant and tries to draw me over to a rack of women’s shoes.
I ignore her invitation, sit down, remove my deck shoes and present my wide, irregular feet for her inspection.
‘Ah!’ says the elderly lady and shouts the shoe’s name and my size to the even more elderly man in a small back room. He emerges and tries to give them to David and is puzzled when I reach for them.
‘Senor’s,’ he says politely.
I offer my feet for his inspection.
‘Ah,’ he says. He hands the shoes to me and returns to his stockroom.
Wide, seamless and comfy, I tour the town in them. They will last for years.
The town’s laundry says 48 hours on its window but because today is Thursday we can’t have it back until Monday and we want to leave before then. So we take our bedding and towels home again.
At Porto Cristo’s town quay you buy electricity and water by the day. So we pay for a day’s water, fill our two water tanks and do our laundry. David treads the larger items in the bath while I do the smaller ones in the galley. We festoon the boat as discreetly as possible but it reduces Voyager’s potential as a photographic backdrop considerably. Then we refill our water tanks.
We dine in the cockpit by candlelight, on chicken breasts marinated in honey and lemon juice and cooked in garlic and olive oil, served with baked potatoes, carrots and small French beans. There is an abundance of fruit in the shops at present, too, so the fruit bowls are brimming with juicy nectarines, pears, melon and grapes the size of damsons.
The dog-leg entrance to the harbour makes it very sheltered. It is also very beautiful with a heavily-wooded hillside curving round to the left of us. The trees on the waterline are lit from below at night and look like a grotto. To the right of us, behind the marina’s pontoons, is the affluent, colonnaded building of the Club Nautico with a restaurant on top and lots of palm trees, also magically lit at night.
It is all utter bliss – until bedtime, after which a German man with a booming voice on a boat in the marina directly opposite, talks non-stop into the early hours.
47
Mallorca: Porto Cristo
First thing next morning we get a ‘phone call from our estate agent in England. We have received an offer on our house. It is considerably less than the current asking price, which has already been reduced twice, so we make a very reasonable counter offer. The response comes in the time it takes the agent to redial our mobile ‘phone: this is a cash offer; we want to be in before Christmas (seven weeks away); take it or leave it, no negotiation.
We remember this man and woman coming to look at the house some months ago. They are both divorced with two children apiece and setting up home together. At the time, however, they both had a house to sell. Face to face he was also more civil. Presumably financial leverage has imbued him with a sense of power for the agent tells us that the man has now sold his own house and that contracts have been exchanged on his partner’s. He is particularly insistent that the family move in before Christmas.
It is the only offer we have so far received. A number of people have been interested, but all have yet to receive offers on their own houses. The market locally is dead. We could wait for a better offer, probably next spring or summer, but in the meantime we will continue paying all the costs of the house: insurance, council tax, general maintenance and heating throughout a long, cold northern English winter. A cash offer, with no complicated chain to drag the process on indefinitely, and the speed of the desired completion finally tips the scales. The wh
ole thing will be done and dusted in less than seven weeks and we shall be back in Mediterranean warmth for Christmas. We decide to accept the offer and suggest a very reasonable price for carpets but as we set off to find Porto Cristo’s supermarket I am decidedly irritable.
It is a long walk from the quay and I find the upper town depressing. The streets are narrow but without the usual Spanish small town charm – or pavements, so you’re constantly at risk from traffic or from people stepping out of shops or houses. After a long walk uphill the supermarket’s fresh produce turns out to be old and unappetizing. All we buy is a famous brand of frozen lasagne for the evening and two enormous, over-ripe bright-orange Sharon fruit.
It is a very hot day. Too hot. But it isn’t just the heat that is oppressing me. I want to sell the house as much as David does, but as my tiredness increases, so does my irritation. I know that refusing this offer would be what my father called cutting off my nose to spite my face, but I feel an irrational desire to tell the agent to leave our house on the market and the purchaser to take a hike. David says if I want to, I should do it, which makes me even madder and we have the inevitable argument. We eat the lasagne, which is awful, in silence and retire to separate beds hot and exhausted at 8.30. Two boats’ away a German man with a very loud voice talks all night over a recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The wind gets up and there is a bumpy sea, so all in all it is a disturbed night.
We rise late next morning and discover Voyager askew. Our lazy line has come adrift. And I am still grumpy. The trouble with intuition is that you can never be sure until later if intuition is actually what it is, or whether it is something quite different: such as resentment, feeling that you are being stampeded into something, taken advantage of, or just plain irritability. Whatever the reason, I have a bad feeling about our purchaser but unfortunately he is all there is. However, having accepted the offer our next task is to find somewhere secure for Voyager for a few weeks while we clear the house and complete the paperwork. David consults the Cruising Association’s Mediterranean Lay-up Notes and settles on Mahon, the capital of Menorca.
Dolphins Under My Bed Page 26