When the Tree Fell to Pieces

Dover is the Kentish transit town. Hundreds of thousands visit every year but few of them remain here more than a few hours.  Many of them pass through fatigued at the wheel of immense trucks. Others less legal, huddle hopefully in the trailer behind a wall of boxes filled with cut-price lawnmowers and cheap Sodastream knock-offs.

Hunkered down unwashed in the bilges of GB-SUE we may look like scruffy victims of the Snake-Head gangs, but in fact we are simply riding out a windy day.  Unwilling to leave the sanctuary of our berth we keep our mooring lines tightly wrapped round secure points and our fenders soaking up the blow.  The winds, which on occasion hit 35kts, are despatching clouds swiftly over the southern horizon and releasing harmonics from the standing rigging.  The low tones add a note of menace to what inland is barely noticed as a breezy day. 

It is apparent that today will be the day we deep clean the boat inside and out. 

In order to undertake a clean of this depth and intensity we require specialist tools and so we need a visit to the nearby chandlers to secure supplies.  Sharp & Enright have had a shop in Dover since 1865 and with the exception of a government-issue No Smoking sign, the door remains today a portal to the Victorian times in which the business was established. 

On entry, a polite older store-keeper will approach wearing a blue shop coat and soliciting your advice on how he may assist.  

"Do you have any rubber gloves?” you ask, and he will dive into depths of the building that the window light cannot penetrate and minutes later resurface carrying a selection of gloves in each hand. They are all of different colours and each colour identifies a resistance to alternative corrosive substances that you may on occasion wish to dip your fingers into.

“Do you mean like these Sir?” he enquires in the manner of an Edwardian Valet.

On receiving the news that you are also in the market for six shackles of assorted sizes he leads you to a wall lined with rows and columns of plastic containers. He pauses for a moment with his hand fluttering in the air like a hawk considering the topography – and then opens exactly the right box and supplies the goods.  He arranges them on the same wooden worktop that Sharp & Enright ordered new back in 1865, and on learning that you will take them all, adds up the price using a stub of pencil and a torn scrap of paper provided for the purpose.

Outside on the street a middle-aged couple with matching haircuts are checking their purchases.  They have methylated spirit, brushes and varnish.

 “It would have been quicker and cheaper in Asda”  the man remarks, and with those few words he puts his finger on  the change in retail habits that may eventually consign this wonderfully archaic shop to no more than someone’s memories  and two or three preserved photos in the closest local library. 

We walked back to the boat carrying our purchases, wondering if the wind would calm down and talking about who would run the store when the Old Boys decided to throw in the towel. As we walked down the ramp headed for the boat our view opened out and this is what we saw across the marina from us:

In this photo the wind is coming from behind the viewer and into the picture.  It is blowing with such intensity that it has taken on the job of pinning the 12 meter, 13 tonne Swedish ultra-yacht up against the sterns of the three motor boats moored on the opposite side.

Were it not for the agile fendering work being undertaken by two of the crew, the noise of grinding metal and plastic would have represented the most expensive sound any of us were likely to hear this month.

Whilst the wind continued to blow as it had been blowing for the last 48 hours, the skipper of the Lobster and Chips, (not her real name) was left without options.  He couldn’t go forwards and he couldn’t back up. He was unable to free her from the tangle of davits and mooring lines that held her tightly like an anaconda embracing a fawn.

The situation offered no obvious solution to the three or four of us stood around gazing in morbid fascination at the hideous scene.  We each knew that it could as easily have been us arriving in the face of a near-gale, and some of us offered silent thanks that our boats were tied up secure and pointing into wind.

Luckily for Lobster and Chips there was one person on the pontoon who knew what to do – a German named Ronnay who sized up the situation and asked his wife to search out their Man-Overboard retrieval system.  This consisted of 100 meters of thin floating line with a weighted sling attached to one end.  The idea was to throw the sling across the water to the crew of the L & C and then bend on a heavy gauge line and use the first line to pull the second across. 

Unfortunately for the entangled yacht, Ronnay’s Man Overboard retrieval system had been sitting at the bottom of his cockpit locker for ten years, and since neither Ronnay nor his wife had been unlucky enough to inadvertently exit their boat in a manner requiring use of the device, it had spent the decade getting more and more tangled.  What came out of the hold was a large ball of rope with a sling connected.  After a few seconds trying to unpick ten years of chaos he just grabbed the whole bundle and threw it into the marina relying on the wind to carry it southwards as it taunted the struggling boat.  For once the wind obliged.

After a couple of attempts the crew managed to get a boat hook on the line and within a few minutes they held one end of a 50 meter mooring line with the other paid out across the water to our side.  They tied it on to their stricken boat.

“No, no, no!” shouted Ronnay,  “This is your boat – you must do the pulling!” and he bent down and tied his end in turn, to the pontoon.

The crew got the message and quickly untied their end, ran it through a block and loaded it onto their heaviest winch. 

From this point forward it was now a question of mechanical force over the wind.  They cranked ten meters of line in, and we could see that Ronnay’s ingenious plan was working.   A lot more winching and five minutes later they were safely tied up in the next berth to us, smiling relieved smiles and hunting down hull cleaner to erase the scuff marks from their topsides.

“Bit windy out there…” remarked the Dutch skipper with English understatement and he handed a bottle of decent French red to his German rescuer. 

For a moment standing there in Dover I felt dislocated - like a visitor to my own shores. I was embedded with a group of people who loved Britain more than I do and travelled here to see sights that casual familiarity had hidden from me.  It occurred to me that Spanner and I, the crew of GB-SUE, were now part of that different community.  We were members of a local flotilla of amateur sailors hanging out in the pretty bits of seaside towns waiting. We also cleaned and mended, but mostly we waited; for the wind to blow at the right time at the right strength and in the right direction.

I picked up my broom clambered back aboard and started scrubbing.  As I leant to the handle looking for the all the world as though I was born with an honest work ethic and a brush in my hand, I felt a connection with our boat, the weather, and the simple nature of our current situation.  I turned and looked at the other yachts in the dock waiting with us and nodding in the breeze, and as I did the sky lightened, the sun came out - and I was sure I felt the wind begin to ease.

I Dream of Emma

I am an old man, and I have known many troubles, but most of them never happened - Mark Twain.

I had thought (because I hadn’t really thought about it properly) that deciding to go off on an adventure would mark the end of my worries.  I pictured GB-SUE flying a beautiful spinnaker she doesn't possess, slicing through the ridges and furrows of foam-topped waves whilst I, reclining against the aft rail and steering with my foot, lay bathed in honeyed sunlight fixed with the joyous sensation of time spent well.

Instead my worries are like serried ranks of Space Invaders descending towards me.  As I neutralise each one, another comes from behind to take its place.  Liquidate that one in turn and a whole new line appears - this time moving a little faster, and making it harder to draw a bead.

Money is an obvious one to start with.  Not simply, ‘Do I have a sufficient supply?’, but also, ‘Can I pay my tax bill?’ and, ‘Can I pay the one after that?’

I also spend time considering, ‘What (or who) should I take with us if we have to abandon ship 200 miles offshore?’ and, ‘Can we tow the life-raft with the dinghy?’  And also, what is the Spanish for – ‘Exhaust Elbow’ or the French for - ‘Listen Jean-Paul, if you had any idea what I have had to put up with over the last 24 hours you wouldn’t be bloody telling me I can’t park here.’?

I worry that we haven’t planned enough and then I worry that we’ve planned too much.  I try to picture what it will be like when we’re out there, and then I worry that I have no idea what it will be like when we’re out there.

I worry that I will forget how to calculate tidal rise (or fall) – that we will sail onto a rock, or a sandbank, or into the path of the Emma Mærsk.  I worry that the sails won’t go up, or come down, or that the halyard will part, requiring Spaniel to make an ascent of the mast in a heavy swell.  I worry that the winch will jam whilst she is up there – leaving her suspended 40ft in the air like a human pendulum, and leaving me with little option but to drink medicinal beers and recline contemplating the situation with my eyes closed in an effort to think up a solution...

Spaniel doesn’t have these worries.  She has little patience with my troubles and tells me that by constantly going around in circles over the same concerns I take much of the enjoyment out of the small amount of planning we are doing.

I worry that I am diminishing her enjoyment of the small amount of planning we are doing.

So far none of my worries have materialised.  I had assumed that by undertaking extensive research on every aspect of what I thought we might plan to do I would release myself from worrying about it.  The opposite is true.  I realise now I need to do less research, not more.  It’s a control issue.  I am trying to have control over something that by definition is uncontrolled.  It is futile and self-defeating and tiring to try – like attempting to reason with an infant or an environmentalist.

Mentally letting go of something that preoccupies is very tricky.  The moment I realise I have forgotten about it the brittle scaffold of nonchalant unconcern collapses in a heap and I am back where I was, fretting about my inability to stop worrying about it.  Sometimes I wonder how many levels of nested recursion I can reach.  What if I worry about my inability to stop worrying about my inability to stop worrying about worrying?  Is there a theoretical limit to this type of mental knot-tying?  I wonder whether to put the question to Spaniel – and congratulate myself on how wise I have become when I decide against it.

Letting go...

I realise that there are parallels between my reluctance to let go and the letting go we commit to when we embark upon adventures like this.  Spanner is happy to cast off her bow lines and blow with the wind wherever it will take her (as long as it’s in the general direction of Ramsgate).  I feel we should have a detailed passage plan that covers each potential eventuality.  I am fearful of what I don’t know.  S. is different – she is interested to see what lies beyond the limits of each blue horizon.  Her freedom to embrace experience is exciting to me – being so different to my own natural state.

I start from a position of liberation and move towards entrapment.  For me the ultimate liberty occurs when an idea is first proposed.  This trip came about as we were travelling home from Epidavros, on a coach.  As we motored through the Greek countryside and across the Corinth Canal, returning to our other life seemed such a pointless waste of time.  Swept free of banal existence on an intoxicating wave of optimism we wondered why it was we weren’t already living on our boat and waking each morning to strong sunlight and a breeze over salt water. We scratched a few numbers on a scrap of paper, looked out the windows at a distant set of sails on the Saronic Gulf and founded our plan.

I am an old man, and I have known many troubles, but when did I get so old?  I used to be impetuous, but now I think I welcome delayed gratification.  I tell myself that looking forward to something gives more depth and colour to the entire experience.  What it actually does – for me at least, is grant opportunity for concerns and anxieties to leak out and stain the grand design.  I can see that now, and my aim is to subvert that process.  Each time an objection rears from the path I’m just going to turn aside and find a different course.

The way to find freedom is not to go looking for it – it’s just to go...

As soon as I get Spaniel down from the top of that mast - we are gone.

An Unaccountable List to Port

As boat owners, we’ve finished with the business of wandering round the boat show aimlessly looking at demonstrations of drilling upside down, turning your house into a power generation installation, or clever appliances to help you remove a hot kettle from the top of the roller reefing in a hurricane.  These days we want stuff.  We have a budget and we’re in the market.  We have purpose, we have The List.

For me shopping is like an Umberto Eco novel.  I know that other people get a lot of enjoyment from it, I understand that it often centres around something I am interested in, and I realise that devoting time to it will likely leave me in an improved position; but I am not well versed in the mechanics of the process and I find it difficult to get into.

Spaniel OTOH, is a World Class Shopper.  If she was a tennis player at the same level she would be Federer – were she into Motor Sport, she’d be Vetel (or maybe Lewis Hamilton) and if she played Darts, she’d be single... but I digress.  There was no time to waste.  Into the huge North Hall she strode, purse clutched tightly and head held high – tasting the air like a viper and preparing to strike with terrifying speed at whoever held the best value supplies of Cock Bungs.  These are not, as you’d perhaps imagine, a facsimile of Russell Brand offering an ill- advised bribe to an undercover tabloid reporter, but instead a tapered piece of softwood intended for insertion into a leaking valve.

I followed behind like a junior apprentice, carrying The List.

The List was made out with the exact specification, size and price of the items we were looking for.  If The List said 18mm Navy, three-strand, polyester mooring line, then woe-betide any foolish sailor who inadvertently paused at a display of 16mm warp, or ran an idle hand across any other rope of the wrong weave or colour.  He was liable to be sharply reminded to stick strictly to The List.

We started off fairly gently at the Sheets, Lines and Halyards department and then hopped across to Hardware where we furnished ourselves with knitted nylon fender socks of an appropriate gauge. In the process we learned amongst other things, that Basildon is the UK capital of bilge pumps and that Alanis Morissette is the public face of the leading collapsible bucket manufacturer. We then stepped it up a gear and went straight into Dinghies. 

This is where the wheels came off.

We spent an hour at the Dinghy stand being upsold from our initial choice, (which was a glorified LI-LO fitted with an electric strimmer engine) to a six seat, sub-woofer equipped RIB with five-point racing harnesses and dual Mercury 300hp outboard engines. This boat menaced into one’s ownership with certification from the CIA  to say that it qualified as Military Hardware and was therefore subject to multiple export restrictions. Breach of any of these would earn the owner no less than a fourteen year (no-remission) stretch in the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, Nashville, Tennessee.  

This was most definitely not on The List.

I was about to sign on the dotted line (thereby binding our house and all our worldly possessions to a staggering marine mortgage that continued into the next geological epoch at 10% above base) when Spaniel recovered her focus and suggested we go for a cup of tea first.  We stumbled away from the stand, heads rapidly clearing and feeling as though we had been drugged and fallen down the rabbit hole.  As we walked and talked we realised that with a beam of only 11ft 6” at her widest GB-SUE would probably balk at having a 28ft RIB strapped across her arse.

We decided to look for something more suitable and almost immediately came across a 2.3m Chinese-made inflatable that came with a warranty and in a choice of colours. Best of all - it was on sale for less than our budget.

“That’s the type of thing,” exclaimed Spaniel, “where’s the list?”

As I went through the motions of emptying my pockets I experienced the same sinking feeling that I felt after using my Stanley knife to score a straight line on the base of the liferaft. 

“I left it on the dinghy stand,” I confessed.

A halt was called to the proceedings whilst we debated what to do.  It was 3pm – we could go back to aimless wandering, trying to remember what we’d written: “Did we need an Eritrean Courtesy flag Hon?" or we could cut our losses and get out early, miss the traffic and come back the following weekend making an early start with a New List. 

Filled with a revived sense of ambition and purpose we headed for the exit.  On the way out (tucked away in a corner as though it had sneaked past security to get in) we noticed a Vintners.

“Shall we just have one little sample?” I said, gazing at the line of opened bottles, “After all, we do deserve it for not buying that RIB.”

Spaniel – herself an expert at twisted logic, readily acquiesced and we pulled up a bar stool and prepared to have a few drinks at someone else’s expense.  I tasted an agreeable Portuguese red and wondered how many free-loaders like us they had to serve it to before they sold a bottle.  I was safe from making a purchase because I knew that Spaniel had the credit card and she knew as well I did that we had a first class off-licence just yards from our front door at home.

 
An hour later we left, £245 poorer and the temporarily cheery owners of half a case of white port and a variety pack of Prosecco, none of which we had intended to buy, and, as I reminded her, none of which had previously appeared on the absent document.

 “Bollocks to The List. Let’s go and get pissed.” she said.

I thought that was as good a motto for the day as any - particularly as it rhymed, and I repeated it to myself silently as we pointed the car north and drove home to follow her orders.