Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat (2 page)

And that was that. I had passed the interview—albeit as the only applicant … which, thinking about it, is really my preferred sort of interview. All of a sudden I was a Greek island yacht skipper, with a bigger pay packet than I’d ever had before, and a long summer of sunshine and sailing before me. My ship, you might say, had come in.

I skipped ecstatically across Battersea Bridge, to where I was staying with my sister. And as I skipped, the first shadows of doubt began to form. From what I had seen of these Joyces, I liked them; and they were family to some cherished friends of mine. I didn’t want to let any of them down. Perhaps my critics were right, and it was time I started to take this business a little more seriously.

When I returned to Sussex, I took Ana to our local pub and told her about my amazing good fortune. Now, as luck would have it, there was, drinking in the pub at the time, an acquaintance of ours called Keith, who had for some months been trying to worm his way into the favors of Ana. I remember him as a rather malodorous person with a black beard, a boyish, chubby face, and not the remotest
snowball in hell’s chance of making it with my woman, because—apart from anything else—he was too damn tight even to buy a round of drinks.

I was crowing to him about my exciting windfall when he stopped me and said: “It so happens that I’ve just bought my first boat. She’s moored at Littlehampton and I don’t have a car, so if you drive me down to the boat, I’ll give you a sailing lesson.”

We cemented the pact with a beer … which I bought.

A
FEW DAYS LATER
, on a bone-chilling misty April morning, I found myself on the dock at Littlehampton, watching while Keith buggered about with what appeared to me meaningless and boring preparations for the forthcoming voyage. His boat was a bit of a disappointment, too—a grotty little twenty-one-foot craft banged together out of plywood and tin. It had the advantage, though, he told me, of being extremely cheap. She was called, whether coincidentally or not,
Ana
, and this set me to wondering just what sort of hideous designs Keith had on my girlfriend. Still, you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth … and you certainly didn’t want to look Keith in the mouth; his halitosis, poor boy, could drop a man at fifty feet. He worked for the Department of Health and Social Security.

After an eternity of fidgeting about with ropes and a
bucket, Keith started the outboard motor.
Pibble pibble ibble obble ibble obble
, it went. We slipped the mooring lines and pottered out into the river, then down past the pier and out into the high sea. I stood half frozen by the mast, thinking of Odysseus leaving Ithaca, and trying to look important and knowledgable.

Two minutes after passing the head of the pier we were surrounded by mist. I forgot Odysseus and started to think of the Ancient Mariner. This, then, must be the sea, I thought. It was calm, with just a faintly disagreeable heaving about it, and you couldn’t see a thing. I shivered. Keith turned the engine off, which was a blessing as the sound it made was extremely irritating. Silence … apart from the slop of the waves against the side of the boat, and the drip, drip of the water condensing on the rigging.

“Right,” said Keith excitedly. “Time to get the sails up.”

I went below, where, confined in a tiny and evil-smelling space it was even more unpleasant than above, and passed the sails out to Keith. Then, with a mild feeling of nausea I helped him unfold them and fix them to the various shackles and stays. This was good, as it engaged me in meaningful occupation for a minute or two. We hoisted the sails, made fast their ropes, and, with Keith taking the tiller, sat back to watch what happened.

“We’re sailing!” cried Keith, beside himself with excitement. I couldn’t see it myself; as far as I could gather we were just bobbing up and down in a great wet white bowl of nothingness. It was chilly and damp and I was thinking to myself that perhaps I had made a terrible mistake,
because if this was sailing, then I didn’t like it, not one little bit.

“Look, we’re actually making headway, we’re bowling along,” shouted Keith in an excess of misplaced euphoria. I licked my finger and held it up to see if I could detect any breeze, cat’s paw, zephyr, or other sign of movement. Nothing. He pulled the tiller over and shouted the words, “Ready about … LEE HO!” I stared at him incredulously. What sort of thing was that for one sensible adult to shout at another?

The boom swung gently toward us. It seemed we were supposed to duck under it and shuffle onto the other side of the cockpit, keeping the ropes in hand as we went. The boat apparently swung round but, although we were now ostensibly facing a different direction, nothing else seemed to have changed. Actually, it was impossible to be sure where you were facing, as the closeness of the thick white fog had a peculiarly disorientating effect. I no longer knew where the shore was, even though it couldn’t have been as much as a hundred yards off.

We ate our cheese and tomato sandwiches in silence, more as a way of relieving the monotony than because we were hungry. In a desultory fashion I read bits of my book about sailing, but if the truth be told, I was going off the whole thing fast. For most of that long, gloomy April day we went bobbing first this way, then that, in the middle of nowhere. Occasionally we would drag a finger in the water to see if we could perceive any sign of movement. The fog sat heavy on the sea and refused to lift. From somewhere came the mournful
whooing
of a foghorn buoy and
the halfhearted clank of a bell. This was just about as depressing as a thing could be.

Finally Keith, too, decided that he’d had enough. He started the engine and we turned to where he reckoned the pier was. We were actually a fair way off; I suppose the tide must have taken us. The fog lifted just a little bit, and we could see in the distance the pier that ran out from the mouth of the river. Slowly, unbelievably slowly, we approached it. I could hardly believe how slow our progress was. It took us the best part of an hour to cover what must have been less than a quarter of a mile, and the closer we got to it, the slower our rate of approach seemed to be. As we puttered beyond the lighthouse on the end of the breakwater, an ordinary garden snail could have given us a run for our money.

We moved on up the river—the dock was still about a half a mile off—our progress becoming feebler and feebler. Keith wound the little outboard up to maximum power, a horrible high-pitched scream. Now that we were in the river we were making even less headway, for the tide was ripping down here at full bore. All the ditches and streams and rivers of rain-sodden Sussex were pouring their turgid waters into the river Arun, and the Arun was hurling them down against us and our poor desperate little boat, along with a thousand million tons of seawater that had somehow got mixed up in the equation.

Finally we stopped moving altogether, although if you looked over the side of the boat at the wake, it appeared we were thundering along. I took a sight on a couple of posts on either side of the pier, and realized that with all the effort of that screaming and overheating engine we
were not moving one inch. The day’s sailing had been boring in a quiet sort of way; this part was also boring but with the unspeakable noise of the engine to make it worse. There was a sense of humiliation, too; we felt a pair of utter berks, completely immobile in spite of the motor giving it all it had got.

People strolled out along the pier to have a look at us. They would lean on the wet railings and consider us for a few minutes, perhaps even point us out to the kids or give a wave, while we did our best to preserve some dignity and look as if we were in command of the situation. Eventually boredom would set in and they’d disappear, perhaps to have tea in the tearoom up in the town. But an hour later they’d be back. The river of course was still raging past us, so we’d be exactly where we were before, and they’d greet us again with unfeigned surprise and enthusiasm, waving as if to old friends. We must have looked a ridiculous sight.

We were stuck in that river for the best part of two hours—two of the longest hours I’ve ever known. At last, though, a powerful fishing boat came up beside us, and a fisherman, a big man with a lot of condensation and what looked like bits of fish in his beard, leaned over with a grin and asked us if we wanted a tow. We did. He threw us a line and set off upriver.

Keith was at the back holding the tiller. I was on the foredeck, holding the rope and wondering just what to do with it. “Quick, pass it through the fairleads and hitch it round the bitts,” he yelled. What the hell was a fairlead? And I couldn’t for the life of me remember what or where the bitts was.

I looked at him uncomprehendingly, as the slack in the rope snaked out over the edge of the boat.

“All right then …”—Keith was beside himself now, waving his arms about like a dervish—“just take it and cleat it off round the bitts.”

I didn’t know what the hell he meant, could hardly hear him above the screaming engine. Surely he hadn’t said, “Take it and beat it off round the clitts!”? I sniggered to myself at this rich notion—and the rope snapped taut, nearly heaving me bodily off the front of the boat. But somehow I kept my balance and held on grimly, squatting on the foredeck like a downhill skier crouched for speed. We moved up the river, the fishermen shaking their heads in disbelief.

Round the corner and we were beside the dock. The current was a little slacker here as the river was wider. The fishermen waved us good-bye and I dropped the rope into the water. Keith steered us nervously to the dock with the screaming engine. “Prepare the warps!” he yelled.

I looked around. What the hell were the warps and where were they?

“All right, you take the tiller and I’ll do the warps; just steer us into that dock over there.”

I stumbled to the back of the boat while Keith staggered to the bow. I took the tiller, happy at last to be doing the fun bit. I eased in toward the dock and gave a professional sort of a blip to the throttle … whereupon the engine stopped. Keith spun round, tripped on a warp, and, with a foul oath, fell overboard. One moment he was there; next moment he was gone. I heard a mad scrabbling, a splash, and then … just the rocking of the boat.

For a brief moment, I wondered if I should try to rescue Keith, but as the boat was now spinning in the current, all set to rocket back down the river and out to sea, I couldn’t see there was much I could do … and besides, at least he’d be out of the running for the girlfriend. Poor Keith … I really hoped he was all right and had managed to thrash his way to the shore—though there didn’t seem much point in dwelling on such matters. I pulled the starter rope on the engine … nothing.

“Chris!” There came a strangled croak.

“Yes, what?”

“Help me back onboard, you arsehole!”

“Thank God, Keith!” I exclaimed, peering over the side. “You really had me worried there!” And with a lot of undignified heaving and grunting I started to pull the poor sodden bloke back onto the boat—no easy matter as he was on the big side anyway and, with the wool of his clothes having absorbed a couple of bucketfuls of river water, he must have weighed about as much as an average walrus. This operation inevitably resulted in the loss of much valuable time, and although the tide had slackened off a bit, by the time the poor shivering Keith had got the engine restarted we were shooting out sideways past the end of the pier again. We didn’t say much at this point; I felt he was being excessively morose and uncommunicative.

This time it only took us about forty-five minutes to cover the half mile back to the dock. Keith filled the time usefully with an exhaustive explanation of the procedures with the warps and the whole business of docking, and when we got there it went smoothly, without a hitch.

After a long and tedious episode during which Keith beavered about making the boat “shipshape,” as he insisted on calling it, we had a beer in the yacht club and discussed the lessons we had learned. I had had no inkling of the danger Keith was in—nor the boat, nor myself, for that matter. It seemed to me that if you fell in a river, you swam to the bank and got out, simple as that. I had not taken into account the awesome power of the tides—and this on a little river like the Arun. I was inclined to treat the whole thing as a laugh; it had certainly been a lot more fun than the so-called sailing we had been doing earlier.

All in all we got off lightly. Keith’s boat didn’t get wrecked; he didn’t drown; and to his credit, he seemed to bear me no grudge for my part in the shameful debacle. Also I learned a thing or two about sailing, although perhaps not as much as I should have done. Had I taken a little more notice of what was going on, things might not have turned out as badly as they did. I fear, though, that I am a rather obtuse person.

IT MAY SEEM ODD
to you that either Keith or I would ever want to sail with each other again—but we did, the following weekend. This time there was actually some wind, and with it, or rather against it, we sailed all the way to Chichester Harbour, most of the trip being in the dark.