Читать книгу Sea Change - Ian Dickens - Страница 19

PORTSMOUTH TO PORTUGAL 15.10.00–22.10.00

Athin sun bathed the Port Solent Marina with a rich autumnal glow, making start day perfect for the visiting spectators. For the sailors, though, the only thing we were interested in was wind. And at that hour not a breath of it stirred the glassy surface that led down to the Solent and the start line.

But it was only six o’clock and there was plenty of time for a breeze to arrive before the midday gun signalled the first thousand-mile race down to Portugal. Even at this early hour the shower block was packed and filled with good-natured banter between all the crews, who had endured a restless night. Steaming, towel-clad forms shook hands with others with shaving-foam-covered faces. ‘Have a good one!’ were the repeated parting words, and out of sight of the spectators and the families a true spirit of togetherness existed among these amateur gladiators.

As the sun rose and breakfasts were cleared away, the fleet began to prepare for the momentous departure. Families who had opted for the quayside farewell lined the pontoon, and as I watched the grasping hugs I was glad that we had said our painful goodbyes in private. And while the last-minute leavers concentrated on trying to be brave in such a raw environment, the rest of us untied our lines and allowed the broad white hull to slip slowly away. In the intensity of the moment, no one had really taken in that the act was severing our final connection with the UK for the best part of a year.

In the marina’s lock we offered ourselves up as a perfect goldfish bowl to the crowding TV cameras, brave-faced parents, press photographers and eager voyeurs. Poor Stuart had to endure this moment to finally hand over his two-month-old son, who was oblivious to the attention being focused on him. The tiny sleeping form had stayed on board for as long as possible, but now he was handed over to Liz.

As they embraced yet again, a final warm, proud and gentle kiss was placed by the father on his baby’s forehead. The press, spotting the value of the picture, moved in for the kill. A hundred shutters rattled to the motordrive’s command and captured the moment for the benefit of the world. Stuart looked like he was ready to hit someone, as the things most precious to him were transformed into a commodity that would flog a few more papers the following day.

The lock gates opened and we motored out of the marina with ‘Jerusalem’ playing loud from London’s speakers. We had wanted to give our boat a proud signature tune, and as the choirs built and the brass section bellowed, we felt we could not have picked a more rousing and emotional choice. Glasgow had gone one better, though, and stole the show completely. On her foredeck stood a lone kilted piper and as the green and yellow hull slipped through the water, the swirl of the pipes sent the familiar refrain of ‘Speed Bonny Boat’ back across to the waving families. The melancholy lament sent the hairs on the back of my neck alive and the ever-present emotion bubbled to the surface once more.

We came down the river to Portsmouth surrounded by a mass of spectator boats and formed up on the towering grey hull of HMS Glasgow, who had slipped her mooring to become our guardian stake boat. In a giant armada, the Royal Navy led us out of her most famous harbour and we must have made an impressive sight as the Round Tower slipped by, crammed full of frantically waving spectators.

My grandfather had witnessed this scene so many times in his naval career and then watched with pride as his sons had grown into the role, commanding their own ships. Now it was my turn to make such an exit and I was sure that the ghost of my grandmother joined her husband to witness it all once again. Waving a hanky and wishing God speed to her grandson would have been a routine that was comfortably familiar.

They would have been doubly thrilled, as another grandson, my cousin Mark, stood on the flight deck of the destroyer waving enthusiastically down at the race fleet. Unlike me, he had joined the family ‘firm’ and, ignoring the decorum that was supposed to go with his commander’s uniform, he marshalled Anne, Holly and Michael into view at the guard rail, where they waved and hollered with unbridled enthusiasm. His help in getting them on board such a privileged vantage point had been the perfect foil for the emotions of the day. If I was having an adventure, so too were they, and while the sights and sounds on board the warship would no doubt appeal to Michael, the attentive care from the uniformed crew would prove equally popular with the women in my life.

Waving is an odd thing.

A wave is only complete if acknowledged by a wave in return, so that communication is established. Having made the connection, all you can then do is wave some more, so that is exactly what we did. I waved at Anne and Holly and Mike and they waved back. I waved at Mark and I waved at his wife, Debbie. I waved at Aunts Audrey and Mary, whose naval-officer husbands would have loved the moment. They all waved back. I waved again and they waved too. They waved at me and I waved back once more. I gave a ten-second burst of waves and they responded with a slow, fifteen-second salvo, as if they were at a Pink Floyd concert, so I responded once again with a double-handed rejoinder.

Then a spectator boat passed by with a full commentary spouting from the tannoy about the crew of London, and sisters and nieces and nephews and in-laws and outlaws all waved enthusiastically, so the trade-offs started all over again.

It is a mute and pagan form of connecting and after a bit you wonder what else you can do. Perhaps a back-handed wave, or a windscreen-wiper flip or a through-the-legs Ministry of Silly Waves version, to keep the communication fresh and interesting.

And then Charlie and the team centred their Tiger Moth display right overhead and gave a beautiful send-off with the tightest and sharpest formation, waving from their cockpits on the downwind flyby (I employed a simple, strong, forearm sweep for this moment in order to return the greeting) and Charlie very sweetly ensured that the formation took in the Royal Navy on his circuit as well, so that Anne, Holly and Michael could be acknowledged too.

On either side, the other seven sixty-foot racing yachts surged through the water, with sponsors’ flags flying proud alongside the individual colours of Glasgow, Liverpool, Bristol, Plymouth, Jersey, Portsmouth and Leeds. Behind us sailed Clipper Ventures’ corporate fleet of ten 38-foot racers and around them all buzzed a grand-prix grid of wave-bouncing ribs. Ahead lay a further massive fleet of around two hundred yachts, motor boats, dinghies and gin palaces that had secured a waterborne vantage point to watch the start. With the Tiger Moths departing, helicopters took over the skies and the beach around Southsea Castle was awash with spectators.

It all blurred into an amalgam of sights and sounds, with only a vague awareness of the number of spectator boats all around us, the twenty thousand people watching from the shore and the downward-pointing TV cameras from overhead, and thumping helicopter blades and radio calls and clock watching, as I gave the countdown to the crew. And then, in the midst of all the confusion, an echoing ‘BANG’.

Off went the start cannon in a great blast of blue-black smoke, up went a huge cheer and suddenly all that had gone on before – not just the previous few hours, or the previous day, or the farewell party, the engine-servicing and first-aid courses, the maintenance period of the last month, the training races of the month before, but also the previous September, when I replied to Clipper’s ad and explained to the family why I thought it a good idea, and before that all the self-important politics from the work place – all of my past fell by the wayside and we were a racing yacht, off around the world, with every crew member playing his or her part to make it happen to the best of our abilities.

No one heard the buzzing helicopters. No one waved, oblivious now to spectators. No one took in the armada around us and everything came to a culmination of expectation, focus and concentration that, gratifyingly, saw us cross the start line in first place.

Except the whole thing was a bit of an anticlimax as there was still not a breath of wind and the pent-up energy and potential of our ocean-racing yacht remained, well, firmly pent up. All that training and preparation and readiness to show off our brave, heeled-over, ploughing-through-the-water-at-a-ridiculous-angle skills would have to wait for the secret, over-the-horizon land and in the meantime we could hear, uncomfortably, the peals of laughter coming from the shore as the spectators took in the ridiculousness of the moment.

We lolloped over the line in first place, drifted a bit, created some apparent wind from the movement and managed to turn around the first mark. The tide stream heading out of the Solent gave us some more apparent breeze and we made it past HMS Glasgow at Gilkicker Point at a snail-like pace and then attempted to head over to Cowes for the next mark.

It was here that the wind gave out completely and we watched, helpless, as the tide pushed us past the wrong side of a vital buoy which, if missed, would mean disqualification. We tried to combat the problem but the tide was stronger than our headway. In the end we were forced to throw out an anchor to stop drifting even further away and then wait an agonising five hours for the tide to turn, in order to drift back towards the start. And still not a breath of wind blew, so it was anchor time again in order to wait the outgoing tide once more, before we could slip past the correct side of the buoy.

What a ridiculous moment. Here we were, at the beginning of a thirty-six-thousand-mile odyssey, anchored two hundred yards off the shore of Cowes, enduring snide comments from passing weekend sailors. ‘You haven’t got very far, have you?’ or ‘You’re going the wrong way – Portugal’s over there’ issued forth from a steady stream of smirking homeward-bound locals. How funny these jibes were, especially when we heard them for the twentieth time, and our sides almost split with mirth. Our patience, just three hours into the race, was being sorely tested. The dictionary suggests that ‘frustrating’ should be the word to use, but it was not nearly expressive enough to describe the moment.

But even though we were at anchor, there were still problems to resolve. The generator decided to choose that moment to pack up and Stuart and I spent three fume-filled hours down in the darkness of the aft watertight compartment, attempting to coax it into life. All our efforts failed and, as it powered up the water maker, the boat went on to immediate water rations while we were still within a few hundred yards of a land-based tap.

With the cynical yachtsmen firmly tucked up for the night and lost in a land of dreams that took them out to where the albatross flies, the merest hint of a breeze finally whispered its way around the sleeping houses of Cowes and crept out across the water to us. In the small hours of Monday morning we eventually got going, unseen by anyone and in the darkness of the night, we sniffed the first real breeze off the English Channel. A few hours later and the lights of England slipped lazily over the horizon as we entered an alternative world where time takes on an entirely new dimension.

In a normal week the seven days have a structure and a personality. Monday is dreaded, Wednesday marks the halfway point, Friday means a big night out and the weekend is for football scores, dinner parties, lawnmowing and lie-ins. Ashore, radio alarm clocks were introducing Monday morning to the groaning masses, while out at sea, on board the racing fleet, the week took on a completely new structure, with its own unique agenda, rules and foibles that were not structured by diaries or timetables. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays still existed, but they did so in a parallel universe where time stood still.

And if time had stood still, the front-runners had certainly not. Two boats had just managed to slip around the windless mark before marooning the rest of the fleet and because of the lack of wind and a heavy dose of bad luck, we were now fourteen hours behind the lead boat. And in our diary-free, timeless home, other problems started to test us as we tried to play catch-up.

Over the next few days we sat in the confined space of the generator room, trying again to fix the duff engine, bleeding diesel, stripping electrics and bypassing solenoids, but all to no avail. Showers were definitely off, but at least we would all grow smelly together.

We smelt a faulty propeller-shaft brake burning out its disc pads in choking plumes of blue smoke and had to revert to a much more seaman-like solution of strong rope and secure knots to solve the problem.

We saw the bilge fill with sea water, pouring in somewhere around the engine exhaust system, that required constant bailing.

The spinnaker halyard snapped with a loud bang, dumping the sail into the water and just as we finished that ‘all hands on deck’ drama, the team on watch played midnight fishing with a boathook to recapture the topping lift after a shackle sheared at the end of the boom.

We watched as Stuart pummelled the computer screen when it failed to give him weather updates and we tried to restore the wind-reading instruments that suddenly decided to uncalibrate themselves on the cockpit display. Gary reached for the rewiring kit when the compass lights gave out for no apparent reason and Ali cursed the skipper of a large French trawler fleet who decided to motor across our bow at two in the morning, oblivious to our presence somewhere off Ushant Point.

Ex-nurse Ellie marvelled at Anna’s swollen, bruised forehead and two black eyes, gained from being pitched into head-butting a forestay in the middle of the night, and we watched alarmed as Aki, Danny and then Andy were sent, cannon-fodder style, up the seventy-foot mast to fix the broken spinnaker halyard.

Aki went first and at the top of the pendulum-swinging mast he was tossed around like a rag doll as he tried to sort out the lines. The impact of his body hitting the mast was so great, his sailing boots were shaken from his feet and plunged into the sea with a loud splash. Danny volunteered to replace him and was gingerly raised aloft. The poor chap also lost his grip and he too was swung out over the ocean, before returning, legs either side of the mast, in a bollock-smashing moment of agony.

Then up went Andy, our testosterone kid, who loved the added thrill of danger. He too slipped, coming back down with blood pouring from a wound caused by impact with the upper mast spreaders that required a couple of stitches to staunch the flow. I watched and took notes, while Ellie conducted the operation. It looked a lot trickier than repairing ripe pears – especially as fruit tends not to howl out in agony when pierced with a sharp suture needle. Stuart joined in as another trainee doctor and administered a tetanus jab to Andy’s mooning backside. As the patient lay face down on the engine cover awaiting the shot, the rest of the crew clustered around and helped Stuart’s aim with a series of helpful observations. And at no point did anyone think it was anything other than completely normal.

We decided that enough damage had been done for one night and agreed that the problem could wait until the hopefully calmer morning. The selection process for such perilous trips was based on crew members’ weight, since they needed to be winched aloft, and, realising I might be the next ‘volunteer’, I set on a crash course of heavy eating at breakfast. It didn’t work, though, so up I went, hanging on for my life, threading new halyards at the top of the mast and then going up again half an hour later to check if they were free-running. And although I am not a great fan of heights, the view from such a lofty vantage point was breathtaking.

It seemed that bad luck was in the ascendant as we battled to overcome all the difficulties that came our way. But battle we did, with a never-say-never Blitz spirit, and as each day brought a new problem we dealt with it, dispatched it and challenged the gods to try us some more.

London beat through Force Eight storms that sent several of the crew to their bunks with debilitating seasickness. The foredeck crew struggled up at the bow to change sails. Stuart took flyers on the weather and bucked the fleet trend by pushing out to meet the weather fronts in the Atlantic, in order to get a broader reach across the Bay of Biscay, and we had a collective teeth gnash when those fronts failed to materialise and wind shifts took us in the wrong direction.

The two watches alternated through nights of rain, spray and prolonged tiredness as we raced for longer than we had ever endured in our training. But, through all the problems, there remained an incredible focus, spirit, commitment and desire that saw us make up all the lost miles, and more, as we came back through the fleet.

It provided a huge test, which we passed with flying colours.

And, by electing to live life at such extremes, we enjoyed rewards that were correspondingly inspirational. We were the only people in the entire world to sail under a harvest moon in a heaven alive with pinpricks of starlight and criss-crossed with shooting stars reflecting on a phosphorescence-creaming sea, and hear a gentle ‘plop’ in the water just a couple of arm lengths away from where we sat. There, in the moonlight, swam a lone dolphin, keeping us company in the long night. We sat awestruck by sunsets and sunrises that no one would ever see from land. We saw schools of whales alongside the boat and marvelled at the breadth of the vast grey-black backs that lolloped out of the water right alongside us.

We watched, fascinated, as the torpedo-like wake of a large male whale headed straight for us, a rippling, oily, eight-foot-across shimmer of water betraying the beast’s presence as it nosed forward, diving at the last minute and giving our keel the gentlest of nudges as it passed by below. We ran for the birdwatcher’s guide to identify two large brown boobies, flapping their huge and heavy wings, far out to sea. Anna fed an exhausted sparrow that came out of nowhere, in the middle of nowhere, and settled in the cockpit, hopping from crew member to crew member and sharing the Alpen and Weetabix breakfasts we were eating. We baked fresh bread, we made pancakes and challenged each other to produce the best supper on board. And no matter which team was on watch, the crew drove the boat with more stamina and willpower than we thought possible.

As the Bay of Biscay gave way to the coast of Portugal, the bows of London headed back in from the Atlantic and for forty-eight hours Stuart, Gary, Ali and I battled with the elements at the wheel. One hour on, one hour off, in two different watches, we ran, under spinnaker, in a Force Eight blow with a huge following sea. The knife-edged course needed was marginal, and could easily have resulted in an on-the-side broach, with the boat blown over nearly horizontal, or in a mass of sail cloth tangled around the forestay. It required a massive amount of strength and commitment.

With my hour on the wheel done, I headed for my bunk but struggled to find a position comfortable enough to let sleep come. Muscles that had never been tested over such lengthy periods by such powerful forces shrieked in agony, no matter how I lay in my narrow ‘coffin’. And just when the burning ache subsided a little, it was my turn back at the wheel, for another sixty-minute workout. But everyone, as they had from the start, delivered and did so big time. So much so, that London set a Clipper Ventures speed record for the leg of 17.4 knots – amazing when one considered the thirty tons of hull, fourteen crew and several hundred tins of baked beans that we carried.

Whether it was 14.00 or 02.00, the boat was being driven with the same dedication and focus, which was why, twenty miles from the finish, we rounded Cap St Vincent, Europe’s most westerly point, and found ourselves reeling the competition in at a rare rate of knots.

The towering cliffs, with their dramatic lighthouse, were a spectacular landfall, and as we rounded them close in to shore and headed east down the Algarve coast, the Mediterranean came to greet us. The last remnants of the onset of a British winter fled and a warm sun baked down on to a glistening azure-blue sea that revealed two of our competitors just a few miles ahead. We knuckled down for one final push as the sun dipped into the ocean behind us and the race carried on into the night. In light and fickle winds, London slowly narrowed the gap and then overtook first Jersey and then Portsmouth. From being more than a hundred miles behind in last place, we had worked our way up to third.

At the end of our first race we had beaten Liverpool, Glasgow, Leeds and Jersey and just missed grabbing Portsmouth’s scalp by a mere twenty seconds after a thousand miles of racing, thanks to a wind shift in their favour just a mile from the finish. Fourth, after all our difficulties and problems, was a result we were mighty proud of, and with ‘Jerusalem’ pouring out of the speakers we motored in, breaking the silence of a sleeping Vilamoura. Back on dry land, we wanted a beer, we wanted to party, we wanted to celebrate our safe arrival, but the bar owners and restaurateurs had other ideas. In the hotels and timeshare apartments clustered around the harbour, clocks, watches and radio alarms were showing 02.00, and for the landlocked the rules said ‘sleep’.

When the sun rose we were truly back amid normality, where people and shops and supermarkets and traffic reports and lawnmowers and newspapers from home and all-day fried breakfasts existed, and the secret world beyond the horizon faded to a distant blur once more. Already, after just a few days, we were questioning whether true normality really existed ashore. By comparison, the simple reality of living where the planet was at its most raw was startlingly attractive and honest.

I got to a telephone in a huge hotel that towered over the marina, amused at the memories that it brought back. A year ago I had been there, suited and booted, for the annual winter sales conference. Reps with their golf bags, PowerPoint presentations that looked at profit margins and retailer incentives, earnest messages from the sales director at black-tie banquets, all echoed like ghosts around the foyer. Now the staff looked down their noses at the boat bum in shorts and T-shirt who had dared to enter their marbled halls in search of a phone.

The mere seven days that had passed since the emotional departure felt like seven weeks, so varied and intense had been our experiences. I connected up my laptop, sent off e-mails to announce my safe arrival and attempted to try to convey at least a little of the drama and intensity of what we had been through.

I spoke to home and learnt that our journey had been dutifully watched on the web and, with twelve-hourly updates provided by Clipper, they had been able to share every high and low. My father, who for years had dismissed computers and e-mails as the devil incarnate, was especially fascinated by the level of information on offer and had spent the week standing at my brother’s shoulder, poring over the facts on his screen. Like an anxious admiral back in Whitehall, he became immersed in the race, zipping from the official Clipper site to weather sites, to satellite pictures and back to the race site again. At seventy-four he decided that a laptop was now a must and, much to the amazement of the family, went off to PC World, bought the kit, signed up for an e-mail account and logged on. The town of Crowborough is a fair distance from the sea, but, from that point on, all the maritime sites in the world came flooding into East Sussex and on to the bridge, from where he directed operations.

The weekly shop, the allotment, the Telegraph crossword, all the day-to-day routines that fill the life of a retired couple, were replaced with real adventure. Mum stepped on to the bridge too and they settled down to run the race with as much involvement as if they had been on board alongside me. From home, similar stories were relayed and the official website was getting an amazing number of hits, as friends logged on to chart our progress. The on-board diaries that I was writing for The Times On-Line seemed to be hitting the mark and, with James Landale filing regular pieces for his paper, our every move and emerging emotion was shared by an enthusiastic audience.

After a week at sea living in such an intense and public environment, the crew headed for the sanctuary of hotels, as hot water, a steady bed and personal space were suddenly hugely sought-after commodities. Despite having enjoyed the luxury of the five-star gaudy conference hotel the year before, I prided myself on readjusting to life after expense accounts and negotiated a room for £30 a night including breakfast, in a slightly less impressive building in a backstreet. No minibar, no welcome bowl of fruit, no luxury bath stuff and no global TV, but it was fine. In fact, after my bunk, it was luxurious.

But years of living at someone else’s expense is a hard habit to break and I used the room phone without a second thought, checking for e-mails every hour out of force of habit. I wanted to share my digital pictures and fired them off down the wire, thinking nothing when the large files took an age to send. While my laptop clicked and buzzed, I took a bath and fell asleep in the warm water. My pictures were still making the journey forty minutes later.

When I checked out of the hotel after three days and returned to my bunk, the bill for the room came to a very respectable £95. However, I feared that Anne might be less impressed when the credit-card statement came through, demanding a further £350 for the communication charges. Breaking the corporate habit would clearly be harder than I thought.

We had a five-day stopover to recharge our batteries, but Portugal was hardly a holiday. With so many parts of the boat failing on the run down, we had our work cut out to complete the long list of fixes before the race start.

Day after day, every boat in the race fleet was a hive of activity as the late sun-holiday chasers watched us at work. Lots of Brits were in town taking advantage of the half-term holidays and a regular stream of questions were directed at anyone in Clipper team kit.

I hired a bike and zipped through the crowds along the bar-lined waterfront where the red-skinned package-tour crowds sat and ate plates of baked beans and read their Sun and Daily Mirror. I became a familiar face at the two local chandlers as we sought all the vital bits we needed and tried to contain my frustration at the repeated shrugs of the bored girl behind the counter.

‘Do you have one of these?’

Shrug.

‘Where can I get one?’

Shrug.

‘Is there another town nearby that might have one?’

Nod.

‘How far away is it?’

Shrug.

‘Do you have a telephone number for the other shop?’

Shrug.

Very frustrating days, made all the more frustrating by trying to complete jobs with a lack of knowledge and an even greater lack of the right tools.

Our spinnaker pole had been bent and needed repairing. Clipper were adamant that we had to do it ourselves and I spent two absolutely bloody days with a recalcitrant hand drill, salt-encrusted pop rivets and a useless pop-rivet gun, trying to effect a half-decent repair.

In the end Alan and I took it to a local sail loft, where a helpful Canadian surf dude allowed us to use his workshop. His world was one of calm tranquillity, and surrounded by whitewashed walls with white ceilings and white floors, we finished the repair, to the buzzing accompaniment of sewing machines stitching together yards and yards of crisp white sail cloth. The radio played gentle music and the dude’s female colleagues looked shyly over their hard-working machines, casting coy and blushing smiles in my direction.

At the very end of the stopover I got just four hours to myself and after the hard work of the previous few days, plus the rigours of several weeks at sea ahead, I was determined to maximise it.

For £10 I rented myself a Lambretta and with sunglasses clamped firmly to my face I zipped away from Vilamoura to find a bit of peace and quiet. I took the coast road and screamed along at full throttle, revelling in the freedom of speed, escape and solitude. After about fifteen miles the concrete eyesores started to dwindle and the coast turned rocky and dramatic. Following my nose took me to a small deserted beach in a sandy bay and I found a sheltered rocky cove bathed in the warm October sunshine. Perfect.

I stripped off and immersed myself in the cool of the sea, luxuriating in the freedom of the moment and then lay in the sun, reading, sleeping and daydreaming for a couple of hours of blissful relaxing solitude.

On the way back I followed my nose again and when the tarred road ran out and became a dusty track, I continued to follow it, winding my way through vineyards of rusty-leafed vines and deep-green orange groves, where the fruit hung heavy and lush on the branches. Wizened old olive trees filled fields lined by crumbling stone walls and the occasional dog was startled by my buzzing scooter as I zipped through rundown farmyards.

As I rounded one corner it was my turn to be startled. Peering over the hedge at the curious noise were four outstretched necks attached to the biggest ostriches I had ever seen. It was the last thing I had expected and my journey home nearly ended in the ditch.

The break from the race was minuscule, but even so, getting away from the boat and having time for myself was an essential thing to have done. I felt much better for it as we reconvened for a crew dinner to say goodbye to the ever-smiling Roy Riley. He had been allocated to London by The Times to cover the race start and, as well as sending back daily images for his employers, he had become an indispensable and popular member of our team. Despite our best efforts, ‘The Thunderer’ was adamant that Roy was needed back in the capital and as he headed gloomily for the airport, a cab heading in the opposite direction carried a slightly more excited fare. Andy Wilkinson joined us from the UK and London was ready to go back to sea.