Ready About

(embarking on the uncharted waters of matrimony)

Gadfly on Linlithgow Loch: winter sailing

“One bloody second, two bloody seconds . . .” The dinghies were on the down-wind leg of their race, and the cry rang out across the waters of the loch (for sound often travels farther over water than the speaker realises) as Derry, a mild-mannered solicitor through the week, encouraged his crew (wife on weekdays) to get the spinnaker up before any of his rivals. If she failed within the permitted three seconds, the race might well be lost, and it would be Her Fault.

As any crew knows, spinnakers are an invention of the devil, refusing to come smoothly out of the wee container where they snooze till called upon, tying themselves in nameless knots, flapping about thunderously – but just occasionally, when a sunny mood is upon them. if they are satisfied with the suffering they’ve caused, they open out, fill with wind, and cause the boat to leap forward as though prodded with a toasting-fork, hurtling past the opposition who are struggling to dominate their own devil-spawn and roaring nautical curses that I cannot represent in these chaste pages.

This was the new way of life, learning to sail; and it was a far more complex business that I, in my total ignorance, had realised.

When I was a lot younger, during a family holiday by Loch Tay, my Dad and I had rowed against a strong breeze to the west end of the loch, then fed the oars into the sleeves of an overcoat and, holding the oars up, sailed briskly back to the holiday house. So that was sailing sewn up. A doddle.

Gadfly on Loch Earn
with previous owner

And now, having decided on the switch from climbing to sailing (which would of course be a doddle) I made some of the least sensible moves possible. Going along to the local sailing club, I found a boat that was for sale, and bought it, in order to voyage out (so my dream went) to some otherwise inaccessible interesting island like Rhum.

Only the boat was a Hornet, it needed a crew, and most of all it needed some knowledge, this much was clear. Obviously, the way to get the knowledge was to go out on the loch and learn by sailing Gadfly (for this was the boat’s name).

A good enough plan, as far as it went. But the Hornet is a high performance dinghy: long and narrow, it depends on an agile crew on a sliding seat (trapeze, these days) to keep it upright, and every tiny change of position in either helmsman or crew affects what it does. So learning to sail in a hornet is a bit like learning to drive a Porsche 911 with a passenger able to access the controls. And when you do wrong things in the Hornet it tends to fall over on its side, or even go upside down, and then you must pull it upright, climb back in, sort out the muddle and try to do better. The stuff of nightmares, many of which I had in the early days.

But the bit about the Hornet is that when you do the proper things it goes like the clappers; and in particular, in the right conditions it planes, i.e. climbs up on its own bow wave and suddenly accelerates so that spray covers you and you can see nothing – the sheer glory of it is worth every bit of pain. Gadfly sang when she planed, first a note around middle C, then as she speeded up, a fifth higher, then occasionally the speed increased again and she fell silent, possibly awed at how fast things were happening.

And so a season passed, making mistakes, finding out how much there was to know, falling into the loch and climbing back into the boat, and, just a few times, getting it right and going like the clappers. Sailing was fairly addictive, it turned out, but doddle it was not.

Not only was learning to sail far more interesting than I had imagined it would be, but also sailor-watching turned out to have its interest. For, as you might guess by considering Derry and the spinnaker, an alteration takes place in a man once he grasps the tiller of a dinghy (and no doubt this holds true also for yachts, and possibly massive great liners too.) Suddenly he ceases to be a mere bloke, he is now In Command, and must shout orders and be obeyed, NOW, or even sooner.

I think this happens only to males; I have not personally seen females helming dinghies, so I can’t be sure, but my middle daughter has quite a bit to say on the subject, and I quote her:

It's like the difference when I sailed with Arabella and Cordelia, "I think we might be going about in a minute - oh we aren't – oh never mind". Compare man-sailing:

"GOING ABOUT - LEE, HO!! - YOU FOOL, YOU BLOODY F*CKING FOOL, WE’RE CLAPPED IN IRONS, FOR GOD SAKE etc”

The sailing club contained a wide variety of very fine, kindly and agreeable people (once separated from their spinnakers), but not many of them young, and none with quite the tendency to push the envelope that had been normal in the climbing scene – unsurprisingly, for this was a generation that had long since put aside any youthful wildness, and had by this time reached the peak of their chosen careers.  

prize for most capsizes: me, Derry, wife/crew

Although they believed in their hearts that falling out of the boat was not really respectable, in their generosity they awarded me a prize. For the most capsizes.

From time to time there would be a regatta and a batch of visiting Hornets would appear, bringing with them the lore and strategies learnt in the harsher environment of the Firth of Forth, and an engaging rustle of envelopes being pushed was heard on our tideless inland waters.

For this was urban youth, who built their own boats and sailed across to Fife for regattas and slept on the beach under the hull, and to whom capsizing was an integral part of envelope-pushing, for they could get the boat back up in seconds and never think that anything untoward had happened.

Furthermore, these were folk who had decided that solo was the way to go, and they were building OK dinghies to that end. No surprise, then, that I was attracted both by their life-style and their move to going solo, for I now felt that solo was the only way to learn, since everything that happened would then be due to one’s own action – instant unarguable feedback.

So it came about that I got a spouse and an OK. And started on the lengthy business of getting to know them.

my OK, spouse at the helm

The simpler of the two, not being human, was the OK. Leaving out all that technical stuff about bendy unstayed mast and sail size, the OK was fast, planed easily, capsized  easily, went upside-down a lot – which was obviously enormously enjoyable; and when there was hardly a breath of wind I was able to learn a little about how to control the beast, and even began to win a race or two.

The spouse was a lot harder to learn, and I would admit that by the time the marriage ended I still had only the barest outline of an idea about what way of living with him worked, if any.

There are a few things that seem certain: he was brilliant in a boat; he loved to experiment even if it meant losing a race; he believed that in all life situations there was a captain who made decisions and a crew who implemented them; the idea of equality was obviously unsound, because unless you had one person in command, the boat would fall over. How about if you weren’t actually in a boat? But in spirit he always was in a boat.

The earliest boat in our marriage was of course the Hornet, but it soon gave way to the OK, of which we had one each, mine more often than not upside down, his always perfectly trimmed and overtaking other boats, except when he was practising capsizes; I timed him once, when he capsized and righted 21 times in three minutes.

OKs ready to tow

We towed these OKs to regattas behind an Austin Omnivan in which we could live. Usually the spouse would be busy adding to or subtracting from, his OK right up to the start of the race. There would be a gun signal 10 minutes before the start, another 5 minutes before, and a third to start the race. I remember a race at Oban regatta when he was still varnishing his new mast at the 10-minute gun, screwing on the fittings at the 5-minute gun, got to the start in time, and (if I remember correctly) won.

whalers waiting for the tide

At one time he bought two whalers at South Queensferry, sold one, rigged the other with his old Hornet sail and some other sails he had lying about, and we sailed it down to Cramond in the dark, watching narrowly for big ships, for we had no lights.

One cold spell in winter when all the lochs were frozen he constructed an ice-yacht out of an old bed-frame and some skates, rigged it with an old sail, and we towed it to Lake of Menteith, hotly pursued by paparazzi, and launched on the ice as darkness fell. Alas, the wind had died down completely, and the next day the thaw set in.

Drascombe lugger landing on Graemsay

When we lived in Orkney we had a succession of dinghies – Firefly, Albacore, Laser; and a lovely Drascombe lugger (the kind of boat I'd imagined for going to Rhum); and a windsurfer (windsufferer according to middle daughter) and canoes and anonymous dinghies which he built and rigged for cruising about Scapa Flow, beside which we lived for a while.

proa on the move, Stenness Loch

Meantime, experiments continued. The last was a proa with kite sail. The proa is basically a canoe with an outrigger enabling it to be held upright; the kite sail provided lift as well as horizontal force, and could be levelled off to lose wind and stop. The spouse built a quarter-size model to try out on Stenness Loch, to see if it actually worked, which it did. As so often, more new ideas almost immediately came boiling into the spousely brain, and the full-size kite-proa never materialised.

What he needed was a wealthy patron with a big workshop beside the sea, who would provide him with materials and a bit of food, in an environment suitable for trying out successive products. An admiring audience of knowledgeable racing dinghy aficionados would have been a plus, but not essential.

These were things that I, a mere low-paid Classics graduate, could never provide: for, as is well known, Classics is what unfits you to earn the wealth which it teaches you to despise.