Sailing, Yachts & Yarns

INTRODUCTION

The short chapters that form this book are all columns that first appeared in Yachting Monthly. I am grateful to the publishers and the editor, my friend Paul Gelder, for making them available.

I had a false start as a writer back in the late 1970s when I strolled into the YM office on my return from an extended cruise to the Americas. I can’t recall why that visit happened, other than my having some vague idea of easing my parlous finances by selling an article or two. Once inside, however, I realised that I was on hallowed ground. Over by the window sat the late Bill Beavis, whose ‘Looking Around’ column had been the witty and informative heart of the journal for many years. Bill said hello, then he led me into a back room where I met the great Des Sleightholme, editor and sailorman extraordinary. Des had taken over the reins of YM from Maurice Griffiths himself. Out on the shop floor, as it were, Andrew Bray and Geoff Pack were two aspiring young journalists. To my amazement, this august collection of talent took the trouble to encourage a tyro like me, and in due course a simple one-page article was bought in. I then went away sailing again and my pen remained in its box for many years. Finding myself in a mangrove swamp in Martinique with time on my hands during some unseasonable weather, I wrote a piece on star navigation and sent it to Geoff Pack. Geoff was a fellow old-school ‘ocean walloper’ and I hoped he might take the point. He did, and later reported that when he showed it to Andrew Bray – now editor – Andrew published it and told him to encourage me.

Looking back now over a quarter-century, the rest seems almost to have been preordained. I sailed my ancient pilot cutter home from the West Indies and made contact with the magazine. Andrew was beating the bushes in search of a Yachtmaster examiner to head up YM’s new seamanship initiative. The job was freelance, and it came my way. Column-writing followed naturally in the wake of this and of the many cruising features I submitted. The early writing years were taken up with semi-technical seamanship and navigation interspersed with extended breaks to go voyaging. It was only when Paul Gelder became editor that I was finally given the green light to say what I thought. He sent back a piece I’d written about some boat-handling knack or other with the comment that, ‘there’s more in you than this.’ It was what I’d always wanted to hear.

Since that happy day, I’ve realised that being a columnist is a privilege. It’s one of the few areas in journalism in which one may indulge one’s personal thoughts. The magazine deliberately distances itself from the content, so the column gives it the opportunity to publish a viewpoint with which it may privately sympathise, but which it can, if need be, disclaim. For me, it’s a lot of fun too. The sea is a colourful environment where characters abound. It offers a unique mirror to reflect on human nature, sometimes genuinely heroic, more often asking to be lampooned. I’m indebted to Yachting Monthly for allowing me my soapbox. Every month, I clamber onto it with relish and, like Bill Beavis before me, take another critical look around the horizon.

Tom Cunliffe, December 2010

HOLY COW!

Playing the blame game rarely proves a useful exercise, especially when a greater power has marked your card

Some thrive on uncertainty, others would turn the tide to avoid it if they could. Like it or not though, the only thing we can be really sure of at sea is that we never know what’ll happen next. Last week, I dropped my biggest anchor on my foot. Was I unlucky, or was it my own stupid fault? There are arguments on both sides, but before examining what constitutes a genuine accident, it’s worth sparing a thought for a crew of Japanese fishermen as reported in the Australian Financial Review.

These honest sons of the sea were cruising home mending their nets when a large cow fell from the sky, plunged through the deck before their astonished gaze, continued past the fish hold and out through the bottom. You might be thinking that the beast would have been better employed supplying milk to the thirsty, but the fishermen had other priorities because their boat was sinking rapidly. When they were finally pulled from the water, nobody believed their story. Far from being returned to their loved ones, they were interrogated and slung in jail, presumably under suspicion of insurance fraud.

Weeks later, the truth was leaked by the Russian Air Ministry. Apparently the crew of a cargo plane had stolen a cow, herded her aboard, then taken off for home and a fresh beef dinner. The plan backfired somewhere over the Sea of Japan when the hitherto mild-mannered cudster awoke to the fact that her future looked short and far from pleasant. So violent were her berserk rampages that the aircraft’s stability was compromised, leaving the airmen little alternative but to shove the beast out of the door. The chances of her making landfall on the boat below were so remote that not even Mr ‘Jobsworth’ the assessor could blame the fishermen. It just hadn’t been their day.

We can contrast this misadventure with the affair of a young man in mid-ocean on a 21ft boat when his pressure-driven cooking stove ran low on alcohol half-way through supper. These units are considered by many as safer than propane, and lighting the rings follows a sequence. The fuel tank is pressurised with a hand pump with the supply to the burner turned off. The burner is now heated so that it will vapourise the fuel for combustion. This is done by igniting a small amount of raw alcohol tipped into an open pan under the base of the burner. With good timing, the pressurised fuel can be turned on just before the flames in the pre-heating pan die. If the burner is hot enough, the stove catches and roars into satisfying life. If it isn’t, you either get the benefit of a jet of burning liquid fuel, or nothing at all. If you miss the right moment and the burner is hot enough, you’re still in with a good chance of lighting it with a match.

Our gallant mariner’s stew was nearly ready but, as the gravy warmed up, the fuel ran down until it became obvious he must refill it. Rather than go through the whole ritual, he opted to open the tank and top it up before the burner cooled off, then pump it up again while it would still work. He’d done it before, but this time his luck was out and an awkward wave spilled his fuel container onto the cooker. This flashed up all right, but not in the way he’d intended. His beard was burning merrily by the time he leapt over the side. So was the cabin as he struggled back on board, but his fire extinguishers were well sited to save his skin and his boat.

An unfortunate accident? I don’t think so, do you? It is to this excellent adventurer’s credit that he was able to complete a fine circumnavigation, but if it had ended there and then, he couldn’t really claim to have been unlucky.

These contrasting catastrophes throw our more modest mishaps into perspective. We live in a culture of blame in which someone, somewhere must be held responsible for everything. If an out-of-control marina trolley pushed by a speed freak injures us as we sit minding our own business on a bollard, we probably have good reason to feel aggrieved. Accountability is less clear if we’re hurt tripping over an unfair plank on a pontoon. Many would sue as a matter of course. Others might take the view that failing to look where we’re going could just be our own fault.

Out at sea, it’s no good complaining about who’s to blame when things go wrong and urgent action is needed. The starting point for any subsequent investigation must be that we are responsible for our boats and actions, although accidents can happen from gear failures that the skipper couldn’t be expected to anticipate. We might look to the manufacturer of a nearly-new winch whose pawls fail in normal use and break someone’s arm with a flailing handle, but if a block that I didn’t bother to inspect this year bursts, then whatever the consequences I have only two choices. Either I foolishly curse my luck or I blame myself like a gentleman.

Happily, however, there are still misfortunes for which we remain as guiltless as the fishermen sunk by the cow. When the sea breeze we hoped would kick in and blow us home turns unaccountably into a stiff headwind, it’s either plain hard cheese or it’s an Act of God. Submit all claims to The Almighty, c/o St Peter, Pearly Gates Yacht Club.

PASSING IT ON

The kindness of strangers is witnessed again and again at sea and along the waterfront

Long ago, I owned a traditional wooden boat that leaked. At sea it wasn’t too bad because the worst of the cracks were between wind and water. So long as the planks were wet, they swelled nicely and kept her tight enough if you weren’t over-fussy. I’d pumped her merrily across the Western Ocean early one summer then spent a couple of months working ashore in New England preparing for a late autumn run down to the Caribbean. The boat had sat still in baking heat and looked as though she’d dried out alarmingly. Ever the optimist, however, I foolishly listened to the dockside comforters who promised that the boards would soon take up at sea. Sadly, they did no such thing, and as the last of the putty was washed out from the seams behind the cooker I was able to enjoy a fine panorama of the passing Connecticut shore while brewing my tea. It was when a strand of seaweed curled into my docksiders that I came to my senses and dropped the sails. The leaking stopped as we straightened onto an even keel. I ran every pump I had and limped into a likely harbour to re-caulk the topsides.

Funds were in short supply, so I hung off a cheap dock upriver to employ the time-honoured technique of driving cotton into the wedgeshaped cracks before stopping it over with red lead putty. A week saw most of the job done, but half a dozen seams were so wide open after I’d cleaned them out that posting subscription copies of Yachting Monthly through them would have been a realistic possibility. The trusty cotton went straight through, so I tried oakum, the teased-out rope yarns soaked in Stockholm tar favoured by larger ships. That went the same way and I was seeking a viable alternative to suicide when an elderly man shambled up.

‘Looks like you need a caulker, Son.’

‘A new boat would be nice,’ I muttered, eyeing my battered, dried-out planking.

The old boy peered intently into my seams.

‘Plenty of life left in her yet,’ he said. ‘I’ve just the thing in my shed.’

Then he wandered off. Ten minutes later he was back, humping a coil of hemp warp and a clinking bag of caulking irons.

‘This’ll do the trick,’ he said, unlaying the rope carefully. Without more ado he began stuffing the huge yarns into the waiting seams, and by evening the buildings echoed to the healthy ring of a caulking hammer whacking away at a sound hull.

‘Good thing it was me found you and not my Uncle Albert,’ observed the craftsman, stretching himself and stepping back. ‘He taught me to caulk before the War when times were hard. You wouldn’t have seen him wasting good rope. I’ve watched him do a job like this with welding rods. Leaked a bit to start with, but it all set up tight as a bottle once they rusted in.’

I shuddered and asked what I owed, but instead of a bill, he gave me some advice.

‘No charge, boy. I can see you’re tight for cash and I’m not busy. Just remember to pass it on one day....’

I made it to the Caribbean and one windy afternoon I found myself anchored next to a very basic cruiser with a young couple on board whose ground tackle wasn’t cutting the mustard. The toothpick and toilet chain thoughtfully supplied by their manufacturer would have held the boat for occasional fair-weather lunch stops in the Solent, but down here where the big winds boomed, they were a joke. The general ambience of the boat implied that they were stretched for funds and I was sorry for them, so in the end I surged an extra 10 fathoms of heavy chain for good luck and invited them to hang onto me for the time being. They hadn’t been alongside long when a singlehander who looked as ancient as my caulker rowed across with a large anchor in his dinghy. It was just what the doctor ordered.

‘Got a spare hook here,’ he said to the young man. ‘The wind won’t ease for days and I’m away tomorrow. You can keep it.’

A 45lb CQRs didn’t come cheap even back then, and the girl started to go through the motions of offering money with a hint of panic in her glance. The seagoing pensioner eyed up the situation.

‘That pick’s circumnavigated in my bilge and I never roused it out until now,’ he said bluffly. ‘So I don’t need it, do I? I didn’t expect to be richer when I woke this morning, and I’m no poorer now. I don’t want cash. Just pass the favour on...’

Last week, I re-equipped with a new portable chart plotter which left me with a perfectly serviceable handheld GPS to spare. The nearest boat jumble beckoned, or a quick click into eBay, but I remembered that what goes around comes around, and knew exactly what to do.

UNCHARTED TERRITORY

Recent advances in navigation are just a drop in the ocean compared to the advances of the great cartographers

I remember as a small boy sitting at Christmas dinner with my father, a man blessed with a more than usually inquiring mind. For reasons now obscure, my elder sister and I were discussing the implications of the world being round. Thoughtfully, he helped himself to a spoonful of sage and onion, then he asked us if we could prove we lived on a sphere.

To say that we’d been told at school was not accepted. My Dad was not a navigator, but rigorous education had led him to a conclusion shared by everyone who really needs to know the truth. Whether this is how far off the rocks we are, or whether we can believe the newspaper, the common denominator is never to trust a single source of data without corroboration.

This placed his offspring on the intellectual spot. Nobody had then been in space to photograph Planet Earth as a shining disc, curved horizons were accounted for by perspective, he even contrived to discredit Phileas Fogg and other alleged circumnavigators. As the plates were cleared, however, he relented and showed how our point could be established by referring to a man named Eratosthenes.

Eratosthenes was a Greek philosopher, a chum of Archimedes. I don’t suppose these two were a barrel of laughs on a night out back in 240 BC, but their mathematics shook the world. He had noted that the midsummer sun at noon shone straight down a well a few hundred miles up the Nile from Alexandria where he ran the library. Subsequently, he saw that on the same day of the year, it cast a measurable shadow outside his back door. From this, he calculated the globe’s circumference based on the angular difference in the sun’s height and the distance to the well. His principle was bang on and his numerical result wasn’t far out.

I didn’t give these issues any further thought until two days ago when I was turning the leaves of a late 15th century chart atlas drawn from empirical surveys originally collected by Ptolemy, another Greek, in around 150AD. His files had fallen into obscurity with the Roman Empire’s collapse and didn’t re-emerge until shortly before Columbus and Cabot put to sea, bound across the western horizon. The charts had rudimentary latitude and longitude. They also featured a form of conic projection, demonstrating beyond doubt that their author understood the spherical nature of the world he was depicting.

The rediscovery of Ptolemy’s work burst on Europe like a thunderclap. Even if a little short of ARCS standards, here, at last, was proper cartography a sailor could use. Seafarers had, of course, employed linear distance as a measurable and repeatable factor for centuries. Without it there could be no Dead Reckoning, and without that, they were more or less lost. Things were looser on land. Here, the concept of the world shared by many is best understood by considering the Mappa Mundi, crafted in around 1290 AD. On my way to the Ptolemy Atlas in Hereford Cathedral library, I was shown this remarkable artefact, drawn on a single sheet of vellum. The Earth it portrays can only be described as chaotic. At first glance, it bears no resemblance to the real Europe, Africa and Asia it depicts, but closer examination indicates that if a Brit had it in mind to journey to Jerusalem, a rhumb line would correctly lead him across Greece. If he chose to keep his feet dry, he could leave Constantinople to starboard and go overland. Shortly after passing the Ottoman capital, he would however, travel by Noah’s Ark, clearly marked along with a plethora of equally fanciful items.

The Mappa Mundi is really an encyclopaedia on a flat surface, designed to educate as much as to provide a passage-planning tool. This is an eye-opener on the mindset of the folk of that era. Only with the re-emerging Ptolemy maps and the hard-edged voyages of discovery that followed would man finally wake from the dreaming half-light of the Dark Ages into the sunshine of knowledge proven by experience.

The relevance of all this to us is surprisingly acute, living as we do in the immediate aftermath of a navigational upheaval. As I stood, fascinated by the stunning but ancient Mappa Mundi, it occurred to me that the revolution represented by the modern charts of Ptolemy to men like Cabot and Columbus leaves the recent eclipse of celestial navigation by GPS bobbing feebly in the broad wake of their caravels.

ON WATCH FOR EDDIES

Helping hands can be found in unexpected places down at the boatyard

Back in the harum-scarum years of the early 1970s, my wife and I subsisted on our boat in a Hamble River mud-berth. Our lives were in limbo between borrowing the cash to buy the ship and paying off the money-lenders so we could run away to sea. She made the more serious contribution to alleviating matters by organising the office of a well-known sailmaker; I limped along as a cruising instructor in between less reputable callings. Together with a community of ne’er-do-wells, we were moored stern-to on an ancient pier universally known as ‘Debtors’ Jetty’ where Moody’s Marina now stands (or did, until the family sold up). At its root was a gentlemen’s convenience of the old school. Behind this stood a row of colourfully dilapidated medieval cottages, inhabited by a mix of longshoremen and one elderly deckhand who always wore brass buttons and a tie. It was said he had raced against the Kaiser.

On winter mornings at low water spring, my wife’s journey to work began by clambering up a teetering gangway in the dark. She was then obliged to totter in high heels up the jetty with its inch-gapped boards to find whether her car, a yellow VW Beetle I’d bought in Southampton Auction for 50 quid, had been washed away by the midnight flood tide. Before she reached the gravelly foreshore that doubled as a parking lot, she had to run the gauntlet of a shadowy denizen of one of the cottages who made his living partly as a fisherman with a varnished teak oyster dredger, partly as the professional guardian of an equally well-finished yacht, and partly as a paid hand on a keelboat over at the Royal Yacht Squadron in Cowes. He was the last of a breed that had made the Southampton rivers famous for their seamen from the 1850s until WWII. Eddie was his name. Somehow, we always felt that he didn’t think much of the likes of us.

Eddie started work at 0600 no matter how inky the pre-dawn winter blackness, and my wife could always tell if he was taking a break from mending his nets in the lee of the loo. He kept a fag bent on for what