The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow

by A. J. Mackinnon

  There was still water in the creek, but not nearly as much as there was in the boat. She was yet again up to her gunwales in mud, crabs, stinking weed and salt-ooze. Perhaps she had caught under some projecting ledge as she lifted higher and higher on the incoming tide, or had snagged on something similar as she dropped again, or a dozen other playful possibilities. Whatever the facts, the result was as though she had spent several centuries under the sea and had just now been brought to the surface like some miniature latter-day Mary Rose. There was so much water in her that as I climbed out of my long trousers and into some swimming trunks in order to bail, I thought she may even have managed to hole herself, settling onto some underwater spike during the night. Only time would tell.

  When the boat was clean and dry again, there was only a faintly glimmering eel of water winding down the creek. I would have to hurry if I didn’t want to spend another twenty-four hours in Sitting-bourne. I set to the oars with a will, launching myself into the day’s journey. With the last of the tide carrying me down the creek to the East Swale and thence to Whitstable, I reckoned, I would be well on my way by the time the morning was half done. Then perhaps an easy run down the coast to Margate, where I could stop for lunch, and then a jolly slosh round the coast to Dover in time for a six o’clock pint and a bash at the cryptic crossword before supper. Super.

  So it was that, despite the darkness of the hour and the distressing odour of rotting crab still clinging to me, I set off in a jaunty frame of mind for what was to be, without a doubt, the worst day of my life.

  5 a.m. – 9 a.m. I row down the rapidly emptying creek, shaving mudbanks as I go, the dismal waste on either bank still mercifully hidden in the grey murk of a dark dawning. Soon a breeze springs up. It rapidly increases to a stiff wind, blowing directly on the nose from the north-east and countering any effect the outgoing current might be having. A moment’s respite to play with the idea of hoisting the sail has me two hundred yards back upstream grounded on a rapidly drying mudbank. A few Olympian heaves with an oar haul me off into the stream, but it takes me half-an-hour to regain my former position. By nine o’clock I have only just reached the conflu-ence of the Swales and can turn eastwards down the broad stretch of water lying behind the Isle of Sheppey. At last I can hoist the sail and tack into the wind.

  9 a.m. – 12 noon. After the four-hour strain of rowing into the wind, it is delightful to be sailing. I must be careful, though. Although the water stretches broadly away to either side, the navigable channel is narrow, and even I in my shallow little craft must not venture too far from it. Once or twice, in an attempt to lengthen a tack, I feel the centreboard drag stickily in the soft mud and must pull it up before I ground completely. Navigation buoys mark the way, my old friends the green bells and red boxes, but I am also introduced to a new type of buoy, the cardinal markers, and these cause me some small confusion.

  After several interesting encounters with mid-channel mud-banks, I have formulated a working theory on how to treat these cardinal buoys and am pleased to see that I am making good progress. The landscape is exactly as I imagine the setting for Ran-some’s Secret Water: a huge sheet of water between low, featureless land, the tallest thing the old black beacon post rising out of the glass-grey mirror. To the left, the Isle of Sheppey rises gently in one vast green expanse, sloping up to a solitary farmhouse in a clump of trees and a windpump. To the right, the distant rises are painted in swathes of that artificial chrome yellow that I have seen from afar two days ago; the remote fields of oilseed rape beginning to glow radioactively under a darkening sky.

  12 noon. I have reached the end of the Isle, and the Swale has bent north-east and widened out into a great triangle to join the sea. The town of Whitstable lies visible across a wide expanse of lumpy grey and white water directly to the east, but now, at low tide, this is barred and broken by the oyster beds of Whitstable Flats. I must continue in the main channel as it runs straight into the nor’easter for several miles until I can bear away to starboard and head directly to the shelter of the harbour. The wind, now that I have emerged from the shelter of the Isle, has become stronger. It is an iron bar ruled straight across the sea from Holland, thrashing the waves to a savage chop of white horses, and already I am beginning to feel the strain of these heavy seas.

  12.30 p.m. This is dreadful. The waves are too big – distinctly ‘gurly’ in fact, as Sir Patrick Spens would have it. Without a jib I am having a hard time tacking into the wind, and the main problem is trying to go about each time. With a jib, one needs only put the tiller across and the wind catches behind this little sail and pulls her nose around, readying her to shoot off on the next zigzag. But each time that I try to change tack I lose way, am slapped sideways by the next grey fist of water and find myself blown back down the channel a hundred yards before I can regain control.

  Another problem is that the vast triangular acres of Whitstable Flats are too shallow to allow me to sail directly across them to shore, but not yet so dry that they prevent the vicious combers from sweeping across, driven before the wind like grey Furies. I am suffering the double disadvantage of being out on an exposed body of sea and yet hemmed in a narrow channel – and I am not coping.

  After half-an-hour of weeping frustration battling with the wind and waves, I learn a trick when going about. At the very moment of changing course, I release the tiller for a perilous few seconds, grab an oar and haul Jack bodily around onto the next tack. There are a few seconds of jolting and sloshing and the frenzied flogging of the mainsheet, and then the wind fills the sail and the brave little dinghy kicks off towards the further bank of the channel. I then have a minute or two to bail the boat like a madman with my plastic half-milk-bottle, before repeating the process. Even this bailing is a precarious task. To balance the force of the wind in the sail, I must sit out as far as I dare go, my bottom right on the windward gunwale, my torso leaning out backwards over the sea and clinging onto the mainsheet for dear life. To bail, however, I must lean right in, stooping to scoop the water from the bilges, and then the dinghy, no longer balanced, threatens to tip right over. There are two occasions when the lee gunwale sluices right under and Jack is suddenly awash with the briny flood, and I decide that bailing is perhaps something that can wait a little.

  Having said all this, I am, incredibly, enjoying myself. I am wet through, I am bone-cold and my tiller hand is cramped painfully to its task. I am also making a bare mile in the hour. But I am filled with adrenalin, I am singing When the Foeman Bares his Steel defi-antly to the storm winds, and I am enjoying establishing a balance to counter the worst of the gusts. And besides, I am nearly to the open stretch and will soon be able to turn and reach smoothly down to Whitstable. Tee-hee and Taran-taraaa!

  1.23 p.m. I stop singing Gilbert and Sullivan and start singing For Those in Peril on the Sea. My boom has just broken.

  Well, no, not my entire boom, just the vital bit. The mainsheet to control the mainsail is attached to the end of the boom by a large pulley. It is this pulley that suddenly decides that our chances of survival are actually not that high and decides to make a break for it. One moment it is there, the next it has vanished with a splash overboard. The sail flogs uncontrollably. The loose mainsheet convulses into knots. I coolly re-attach sheet to boom with a special knot invented on the spot and continue to sail. We have just blown back half a mile in the interval.

  1.27 p.m. I discover that my new knot is a rather clever sort of self-jamming knot. Although I can still haul the sail in, I cannot let it out again, it seems. This means that when gusts come, I can no longer spill the wind to balance the blow, but must instead lean out even further. This is only made possible by actually standing on the gunwale, a stunt for which Mirrors were not really designed. I am now riding Jack like a windsurfer, and the rigging is emitting strange moanings and hummings. I am astonished at just how fast a Mirror can go. I am going to die.

  1.52 p.m. Bailer blows overboard.

  1.53 p.m. I turn the dinghy
sharply to retrieve it. This is a feat of utter stupidity, for in doing so I run straight onto the eastern mudbank that here lurks a foot below the water. There is an almighty CRRA-A-A-C-CK from beneath the keel. Centreboard? Possibly …

  1.59 p.m. Bailer is back in Sittingbourne by now. Boat still sailing into the wind, oddly enough, so it can’t have been the centreboard after all. Boat horribly full of water, so I use the pith helmet to bail. Marvellous! Much better than the old bailer, can’t think why I didn’t think of it before. Am beginning to get really rather cold and tired. Make slow but steady progress towards the corner spit just five hundred yards ahead, sloosh, slap, wallop, splash, thud, plosh, clunk. Thank God I don’t get seasick.

  Ever.

  I think …

  2.35 p.m. Getting there. I am going to make it. I am actually going to make it. Decide to experiment tentatively with the centreboard. Gingerly try pulling it up a little. Stuck.

  Gingerly Tug harder.

  Still stuck.

  Another pull and … whoosh! Up she comes like a cork from a bottle – or rather half a cork from a bottle. I am left clutching just the top half of the bloody thing, broken off in a jagged line halfway down, while the lower half drops smoothly out of the bottom and reappears as a distant and useless bit of flotsam a hundred yards away. I’m sorry, but bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger, bugger. I am going to die.

  2.40 p.m. I have allowed myself to drift onto a nearby mudbank. I am two miles out to sea. Consider myself lucky that I am in a flat-bottomed dinghy and not in some deep-keeled yacht. I take my anchor, newly bought in London, wade ankle-deep to the end of its warp and proudly stamp it home in the mud. I shall have to sit out here and wait for the tide to come in and cover the flats, and then drift or sail straight to the nearest bit of dry land when I’m ready. All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well … 2.47 p.m. No, it won’t. I am quickly freezing to death. Being soaked to the skin and sitting fully exposed to the North Sea gale is rendering me inexpressibly miserable. I need to be cool and resourceful yet again. I decide to rig my blue awning up over the boom, which is immediately and surprisingly eff ective in keeping the wind out. Then I change out of my wringing wet clothes into some merely damp-through ones I find at the bottom of my bag.

  And then – and I think this is really the bit of my entire year’s travelling that I am most proud of – I – listen to this – I make myself a brand new centreboard out of some matchsticks, a safety-pin and an old gull’s wing. Well, no, sorry, carried away there a little, not out of those materials, but, almost as ingeniously, out of one of the duckboards that I use for sleeping on at night. This is the right thickness, but needs trimming to size with my Leatherman Multi-Purpose Handy Saw Attachment. Then it needs a hole drilled through the top so that I can jam a stout bit of rope through to make a handle. I also rig up a much better arrangement to allow the mainsheet to run freely to ease off the mainsail. By the time the tide comes in, my little ship will be equipped to sail to shore with dignity.

  Those tasks done, I have nothing to do but wait. The tide is beginning to race in again, but it will be another hour or more before the stretch of flats downwind of me will be fully covered. As the waters race over the sands, they slap and jolt the sides of Jack de Crow and she crunches uneasily in the two inches of grey-tawny water. The wind is stronger than ever now, and I fear for Jack’s poor bottom. I am also, for the first time in my life, feeling distinctly nauseous, with the crinch, slap, judder of the boat beneath me. An hour or more to wait.

  There is nothing for it. The usual solution. Hauling out my mattress and my sleeping bag, I think of another storm long ago over Galilee and fall fast asleep.

  4.30 p.m. I awake. Jack is fully afloat and there seems to be a clear run to the shore about two miles away to the south. In that direction I can just make out what seems to be a long line of cottages above a strip of shingle, but after my experience in Sheerness I am reluctant to trust the dinghy to the vagaries of an exposed beach again. Besides, there will be no pubs or B&Bs so far out of Whitstable, which lies further off to the east. I stow my sleeping bag (damp), my mattress (damp), put on heavy-duty clothes (soaking), pack away the awning (sodden) and take in the anchor (damp but it doesn’t matter). I then hoist the sail and begin the four-mile skim to Whit-stable Harbour, which I decide is a much better choice than the row of rather snooty cottages on the beach. All will be well, and all …

  4.33 p.m. Bugger Whitstable Harbour. In three minutes I have hit five oysterbeds and my Admiralty chart says quite distinctly that vessels grounding are liable to pay damages. Snooty cottages it is. I can get there without having to lower the centreboard, and, more importantly, before I die of hypothermia. It has begun to rain.

  5.07 p.m. I have made it. I ground on the shingle with a rushing crunch, carried the last few yards by a sudden swoop of scum-topped wave. I am numb, exhausted and wetter than an incontinent walrus, and want nothing more than to find a hot bath, a mug of Bovril and a warm dry bed.

  But I can’t, not yet.

  The sea has dumped me on the steeply sloping beach only halfway up the tidal reach. I cannot leave the dinghy here, but nor can I lift it any further up the shingle unaided. There is nothing for it but to spend another weary hour crouched shivering by Jack’s side and, with every wave that comes swirling in higher than the rest, to float her another foot or two uphill. An hour later, and it is nearly dark. The last and highest sea-wave takes her up with an almighty rush as though spitting her contemptuously from its mocking jaws, and she settles with a weary creak and scrape onto the dry shingle above the tide. She is safe now.

  6.15 p.m. I climb, bone-weary, out of my sodden clothes and find some relatively dry ones to wear. In doing so, I receive the final blow of the day. Somewhere between the early departure of the morning and this late staggering ashore, I have lost my wallet. Credit cards, bank cards and seventy pounds in cash. This has happened almost certainly while I was thrashing my way in and out of dry-ish clothes while sitting out in mid-ocean. Therefore, the wallet is now in all probability at the bottom of the sea. Well, thank you very much, God. That is positively the last time I sing hymns to you, mate. I may as well just lie here and let the herring gulls finish me off.

  6.20 p.m. An angel appears. It is not in the form I have become accustomed to, that of an elderly but sprightly lady bearing brandy, dog leads and good advice, but rather an anthropology student called Arif. He is a Moslem, and I am changing my religious allegiance forthwith. He takes me to his flat nearby, gives me two mugs of hot Bovril, lets me ring the Sittingbourne hotel to see if by chance I have left the wallet there … no, I haven’t … and then loads up my sodden luggage into his car and drives me into Whitstable to a bed and breakfast, pointing out the laundromat and bank on the way. The B&B is, under normal circumstances, utterly charming. Tonight I bitterly resent the fact that it is located right on the seafront, as I never want to see salt water again in my life. Nor gulls, nor ships nor frilly shells, nor lighthouses nor lampreys, nor oilskins, oysters or compass-roses. In fact, for the next three hours the pavement beneath my feet is going up and down, side to side, to and fro, and I cannot walk a straight line. I am dying for a drink to compensate for the wobbling, but my new-found religious beliefs will not allow it, let alone my penniless state.

  7.20 p.m. – 11.30 p.m.

  1. A visit to the laundromat to put my clothes through the wash with a handful of borrowed change from Arif, blessed be he and his sons and his sons’ sons forever;

  2. A train ride back to Sittingbourne and a dreary walk to the derelict warehouse to see if I dropped my wallet on the wharf-side when I changed into boat-bailing gear in the early hours of the morning, but to no avail;

  3. A visit to the taxi office to see if the driver has found my wallet dropped anywhere in his cab as I paid him that morning, only to be told that that particular driver has gone home and cannot be contacted;

  4. A return by train to Whitstable to find that
the laundromat has closed for the night with all my washing still safely inside but me outside and condemned to walk the streets shedding small crustaceans with every step and smelling like a fishing net;

  5. A return to the B&B to find that the taxi company has managed to contact its driver and that, yes (praise be to Allah), my wallet has been handed in;

  6. Another train journey back to Sittingbourne, a joyful reunion with my credit cards, and then the last train back to Whitstable, there to find that every bloody pub in town has just closed – except one: the Turk’s Head, appropriately enough to my new faith, which serves possibly the nicest bowl of red-hot Hungarian goulash the world has ever known;

  7. Bed.

  The day has undeniably been a disaster. I am more tired than I knew it was possible to be. My left wrist, from thirteen hours of gripping the mainsheet in icy conditions, is hurting abominably; my little ship is lying on a distant stretch of inhospitable shingle with a faulty main-pulley, a jury-rigged centreboard and no bailer. I have spent an entire day suffering the strain of battling against wind and tide, the elements at their foulest, and have travelled all of seven miles. I have abandoned the faith of my childhood and grown to loathe the sea. And as I lie here between white linen sheets, and the rain drums on the windowpane and the old sea slap-slaps the wall beyond the darkness, I realise the oddest thing of all. I am happier than anybody else in the entire world.

  Good night.

  Cake and Carpentry

  Gae, fetch a web o’ the silken claith,

  Another o’ the twine,

  And wap them into our good ship’s side,