by Anne Cholawo
When the tide was fully ebbed and Sally B finally exposed, we started baling her out. We also tipped bucket after bucket of fresh water from a nearby burn over the engine to try to reduce the inevitable corrosion that salt would cause. After a lot of baling, she was eventually completely free of water, both salt and fresh. She lay over on her starboard gunwale, with her keel jammed between two large boulders. Miraculously, the rocks had missed her propeller by centimetres. Only the iron safety bar had been bent and twisted a little out of true. Even her vulnerable wooden rudder was intact.
In the glow of several hissing Tilley lamps she looked like a dead thing. I realised that my idea of raising her upright with buoys had been over-optimistic. Even with five of us it would be impossible to move her a single inch to get anything underneath her. If we could not find a way to shift Sally B then she would have to stay where she was until the tide turned and she would fill with water again. Not only was she lying too far over on her starboard side, but she was also wedged hard into the surrounding boulders. It seemed more and more likely that she was holed too, but at this stage none of us could see where. Even as my sluggish brain was beginning to work this out, Gordon asked me if I knew how much Sally B weighed. I guessed she was between a ton and a ton and a half.
‘The BT winch might just get her up,’ he said.
I was willing to try anything, so Gordon suggested we cleared rocks away from a huge boulder further up the beach, enough to be able to get a substantial chain around it while he went to get the winch. Anne, Jan, Robert and I got busy clearing rocks and stones, and Gordon headed toward the BT windmills at the top of the hill. As the island’s BT engineer, Gordon was used to winching the windmills up and down for general maintenance. He not only knew where the winch was kept, but also how to use it.
Clearing rocks and stones at two or three in the morning is not much fun, but time was of the essence and we worked fast. At some point, Jan went all the way back to Leac Mhor to fetch a pickaxe so we could hack out a better purchase for the chain. Gordon soon returned with the BT winch, some heavy-duty chain and ropes. With his added help working on the boulder, it was finally ready to hold the winch. When used to lower or raise the windmill, the winch is normally bolted to a concrete block. However, we had to make do with a chain to secure it to this large rock. We got more ropes and somehow managed to feed them under and around Sally B’s hull and tie them to the length of chain that came from the winch.
Slowly Gordon started to crank the lever of the winch. With each turn a few links of the chain passed through the gears and finally it straightened and became taut. For a while it looked as if nothing was happening; Sally B was just too heavy and wedged too hard into the rocks to move. Then we saw her shift just a little. Then a little more. Incredibly, she was slowly coming upright. As soon as there was enough space between her and the boulders, the rest of us started to pack floats and buoys under her, trying to support her as she rose.
At around four thirty in the morning she had been raised enough for us to see what damage she had suffered. A sharp pyramid-shaped rock had staved in three of her planks on her starboard side low down, near to her prow. Although I didn’t know it until I got a chance to look in the fo’c’sle later, she had broken seven or eight ribs as well.
With even more incredible ingenuity, Gordon went back to his workshop and returned with a sack filled with anything that he could put his hands on to make a temporary patch for the hole. Inside the sack were newspapers, mastic for fixing leaks in corrugated roofing, a tin of tar, glue, nails and a piece of old hardboard. He crunched bits of newspaper and packed them tightly into the hole, then filled it roughly with glue, mastic and tar. On top of that he tacked the hardboard. He had made her temporarily watertight, so all we had to do was wait for the tide to come in so she could be floated off. By this time it was close to sunrise and we no longer needed the light of the Tilley lamps. As the tide lapped around her she finally floated free of the rocks and we could tow her to a safer position. We were all completely exhausted. Robert had gone back to Glenfield to pick up some item an hour or so before Sally B lifted free. He got to the house, sat down for just a moment and promptly fell asleep with his head on the kitchen table. When I got there to find out why he was delayed he was too tired to wake, so I left him where he was and went back down to the harbour. I got there just as Gordon and Anne were towing Sally B with their dinghy beyond the old stone pier, where she was infinitely safer. We tied her off and left her for the time being.
Incredibly, after their night of heavy activity saving my boat, Gordon and Anne still went and did their usual tour trips in Kaylee Jane that day.
In Glenfield there were three totally worn-out people. We had lost one entire night’s sleep and the night before that had not been much better. On top of all that, Robert and Jan had not had a chance to recover from their long drive. We lay on our respective beds, but I could not sleep or rest. My feelings of complete failure were all pervasive and I couldn’t stop the accusations going round my head. I was already projecting into the future and the knock-on effects of losing Sally B. She was my lynch pin, the source of my independence and livelihood on Soay. Without her I could not pick up or sell my winkles, get coal, wood, hen food or collect friends and family from Elgol. I would have to revert to the goodwill of my neighbours who were far fewer than when I had arrived nine years earlier. My biggest concern was income. I had hardly any reserve funds for a crisis like this. I certainly did not have enough money to get Sally B fixed at a boatyard or to simply buy another boat. She wasn’t even insured. My good luck had finally run out and for the first time since I had arrived on the island I saw that I might have to throw in the towel and go back to ‘civilisation’. I always knew that I was on borrowed time living the way I did, but I hated the idea of giving up. I was looking the reality of defeat in the face and it was not at all welcome.
Even though I was completely wrapped up in my personal feelings of loss, failure and fears of what this meant for my future on Soay, I could still appreciate the huge support and empathy I had found in Robert. Here was an honest, decent, kind and sincere man. I began to realise that the warm relationship we had both been so comfortable with for so long was much, much more than friendship. I had been a fool not to see before this moment that we were in love. The ‘death’ of Sally B brought us together in a way that may have happened anyway in time, but it was certainly a catalyst to a new and deeper relationship. It also helped to galvanise my determination to get Sally B going again. With Robert’s encouragement and support behind me, it felt possible. I also had and still have a tremendous sense of gratitude and respect for Anne and Gordon who went so far beyond the ordinary in giving their indispensable aid, expertise and tireless energy to help a distressed neighbour. Without them my boat would still be rotting where she lay to this day. You learn a lot about people in times of trouble. And I was about to learn a lot more.
* * *
A remote island is not the best place to resurrect an old boat, particularly one that has been totally submerged in seawater for at least eight hours. Salt water can do enormous damage to anything electrical. The moment Sally B went under, the power from her battery surged through the wiring and super-corroded all connectors and copper wires, including the thick wires to her starter-motor and battery. They lay limp and useless in the body of the wheelhouse like a tangle of begrimed and very oily spaghetti. Not only that but the alternator, starter-motor and batteries were completely useless too.
Finding a willing and competent carpenter to replace Sally B’s broken ribs and repair her splintered planking was the easy part. Oliver recommended a good shipwright on Skye and offered to ferry him to Soay in Golden Isles – that’s if the carpenter was willing to tackle the repairs on my boat. Luckily Alan was very willing to take on the job. He stayed on Soay for four whole days to finish it, coping admirably with the primitive conditions he had to work in. Alan almost seemed revel the challenge, although he was not able to co
mpletely replace the three damaged planks, as he would have liked. Instead, he made a very superior patch on the outside of her hull and steamed eight new ribs, riveting them alongside the broken ones inside the fo’c’sle.
Sally B’s salt damaged engine and electrics was a whole different ballgame. I could not expect my neighbours to deal with her, nor was I competent mechanically or electrically and I certainly did not have the funds to have her towed to the nearest boatyard for a refit. Her engine was really ancient and the best that I could expect would be that a boatyard might consider fitting another engine and rewire her. But, even if I had the money, the cost would be at least three or four times what she was worth.
I had only two choices: leave Sally B to rot where she was, or fix her myself. I couldn’t bear to walk away from her. She had given me so much and I had let her down very badly. Without my own boat I would be right back where I started, with nothing. I relied on Sally B entirely for my income, supplies and general transport. My hard-won independence had disappeared overnight. She was my future on the island. I rooted out the engine manuals and tried to make some sense of them. The threat of having to return to ‘civilisation’ and the thought of all that my friends and neighbours had gone through to help rescue Sally B, spurred me on as nothing else could have done.
Months went by in uncountable man- and woman-hours dismantling, unscrewing, cleaning, oiling and replacing salt-damaged parts. Slowly, by trial and error through nearly every hour of the day on her, I began to understand what was going on inside the engine. Robert also spent long days when he was on Soay, helping me to remove badly corroded engine parts that had to be dismantled or our whole effort would have been pointless. It is almost impossible to describe the series of dramas, despair, failures and sheer physical difficulties that we went through before finally reaching a point where I could reassemble the engine again. By this time I could talk about ‘compression’, ‘injectors’, ‘ fuel pumps’ and ‘governor linkages’ and know pretty much what I was talking about.
A day came when I could turn the crank handle of my newly assembled, freshly oiled and primed three-cylinder air-cooled Lister (with the valves decompressed, of course) and knew just by the feel and rhythmic ‘click’ of her brand new injectors that she was ready to go. However, I had yet to learn about the vagaries of electricity and wiring to be able to start the engine. I was not strong enough to hand-crank it and still needed the power to run the lights and VHF. This was a huge hurdle for me to overcome and it was to be another whole year before I finally, and to a limited degree, cracked the code. (My mother would have been proud of me!)
The following spring brought a fresh start. I went to tackle Sally B again with a clearer head. I stopped trying to make wiring connections based on wild hunches and started to record where I attached the wires more systematically. I had had to replace the ignition and all the other indicators that were on the control panel inside the wheelhouse as well as all the wiring, alternator and starter-motor. Working out what went where without any kind of circuit diagram began with trial and error, often with alarming results. One day I hit on the right sequence almost by accident. I turned the key and the starter-motor engaged with a terrific BANG. I nearly had a heart attack. I was so used to hearing just a feeble clicking sound or nothing at all it was not what I expected that afternoon. I had almost started to believe I would have to admit defeat.
By now Sally B was back on her mooring, so I had rowed out to her that morning with Tork and Kelpie for company in my Avon tender. It just happened that as I was getting aboard, two men in kayaks paddled into the harbour heading for the shore where they pulled up their boats. I vaguely registered that they were putting up a couple of tents but then I got stuck into rearranging wires and got that first shock as the starter-motor engaged with the engine’s flywheel. On a second attempt the engine tried to turn, but the battery did not have the power to make even one revolution. The engine had been idle for so long that it was unwilling to start. I knew that if I tried again the battery would simply keep losing power in its effort to turn the big, cold, unwieldy Lister engine. Then I had a brainwave: why not try to start it on just one cylinder? There would be less of a load on the battery and I could take the decompressor levers off the other two once the first one had started up (I do hope you are still with me).
I had nothing to lose. Without much expectation, I decompressed the middle cylinder and the one nearest to me and then turned the ignition key. The engine turned once. I held the key on, keeping the starter motor turning. Then it happened. A curl of smoke rose from the cylinder and it began to work on its own. I let go of the ignition key. The cylinder fired slowly at first and then picked up speed. Quickly, hardly believing what I was seeing, I flicked over the middle cylinder. It fired too. Then the last one kicked in. I jiggled the throttle and the engine roared into life. After a little I eased the throttle and the engine fell into that regular throbbing rhythm I had thought I would never, ever hear again. It was one of the most fantastic moments of my life. I had never experienced such a feeling of pure joy and triumph. Ever.
The engine had been idle for over two years. It was coated in oil, diesel and condensation and as it heated clouds of smoke and steam started to rise off it. It filled the wheelhouse and poured out of the door, trailing out into the bay like a large grey, acrid sea mist. The boat rocked as the dogs, sensing my euphoria, began to jump about madly, barking with excitement. I came coughing and spluttering out of Sally B’s smoke filled cabin. When I had the headroom to do it, I jumped about as well, punching the air and shouting at the top of my voice. What a genius I was. You would have thought I had just invented the first diesel engine! The peace of the harbour was shattered by Sally B’s chugging engine, accompanied by a chorus of my screaming, manic laughter, and barking dogs. A large, unpleasant cloud of steam and carbon monoxide poured out of the boat and swept gracefully across the glassy calm waters.
I just happened to glance in the direction of the two men making camp and noticed with some surprise that they were rapidly dismantling their tents and stuffing gear back into the kayaks. In no time at all they were speeding out of the harbour in a blur of paddles, and not one glance in my direction. I couldn’t understand it. Surely they were dug in for the night? I was far too immersed in the glory of my success to realise that they must have believed that I was raving mad.
Now the engine was going I didn’t want to stop it. I sat there for the rest of the day, watching it with a kind of awed fascination until even the smoke had gone. There was much more to be done before she was truly seaworthy, but the battle to save Sally B was won.
In the August of 2001, two years and three months after she had sunk, we took Sally B on her first major test run to the bay. Her deck and wheelhouse were festooned with bunting made by Robert and he had also brought a big bottle of champagne. We invited Anne and Gordon on board for a celebratory thank you.
The problems were not completely solved and Sally B would never have gone back to sea without the help and support of many people who seemed to turn up on the island almost miraculously at the right time. It would need another small book to acknowledge them all as they deserve, but I want to at least mention some of those people here.
Howard Williams of Glasnakille, Skye is at the top of my list. I first met him in Soay harbour just at the very moment I had discovered a serious problem with a badly threaded cylinder block stud-hole and I was in despair of how to fix it. We had never met before but he came back just three days later and fitted a new thread insert or ‘helio coil’ in less than half an hour. Howard has offered his technical support for years since then, fixing all sorts of mechanical difficulties that only he is able to do, whilst at the same time giving me invaluable self-help advice on engine and electrical maintenance. My Dutch sailing friend Anje Valk of the yacht Varber instructed me in electrical wiring diagnostics. Kevin Seymour and Sue Blythe of the yacht Islander, supplied me with a whole new throttle lever and cable for free and got me
a new VHF aerial as well as giving lots of good advice. Lastly, my brother Mark who spent valuable hours of his holiday on Soay drawing up a complete wiring diagram for my new alternator and then helping me to understand it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Taking the plunge
We had entered a new century, but at the beginning of 2002 I was only just beginning to catch up with what was happening in my immediate surroundings. For over two years Sally B had dominated my thoughts and I suppose I had been only semi-aware of other stresses and strains going on around me on Soay.
Although the school had been closed since Peter Davies left in 1998 to go to the high school in Portree, I had not seriously thought about what that might mean for the future of Soay. To me, Gordon and Anne Smith were as much an integral part of the island as Tex and Jeanne had been. I had come to see them as permanent fixtures and could not imagine Soay without them. So I was completely unprepared for the news when Anne told me that she and Gordon would be leaving Soay by the end of the summer. They had bought themselves a house on Skye. They had been planning to stay longer on the island, but their hopes were dashed when an initial agreement by the school authority to sell them the schoolhouse was reversed.
A school has special significance on an island. It’s an important part of the economy – a teacher’s salary provides an income paid by the local authority – but it’s also a vital part of community life and a symbol of hope for the next generation. This wasn’t the first time Soay had lost its school or school-age children. The stone schoolhouse, built in the 1870s, had seen many different uses before I arrived. In fact it had not been used as a school for at least twenty years when Donita Davies arrived as the new schoolteacher in the late 1970s. But, until Peter left, it had been constantly in use during my time on the island and the schoolhouse held special memories for me as it was also host to the island library. Every few months several plastic crates full of books would arrive at the Elgol jetty via the mobile library from Portree. The books were picked up, usually by Gordon, brought over by boat, carried up the beach and arranged on the windowsills in the schoolroom for us to choose. You could request a certain book from the library if you wanted to, too. (Anne and Gordon had a simple system for recording who had borrowed which book – cardboard pouches stuck onto a message board with each individual’s name on them. All you had to do was stick the library ticket from the book into the appropriate cardholder.) I had brought so many of my own books it was some time before I used the facility. However, when the school day was over, there was something very pleasant about going into the old-fashioned schoolroom to look through the books with the smell of chalk and paint in the air and the sound of the sea and birds outside the tall, imposing windows.