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.
