More Than Just Coincidence

by Julie Wassmer

  Outside the wind howled and halyards clanked like cowbells as the tethered boat bucked the waves. ‘No problem,’ I called back. ‘Maggie and I are good swimmers.’ We exchanged a smile but the Captain suddenly re-emerged, in jeans and a nautical sweater, looking unamused. ‘That won’t help much in a force 9 gale.’

  He picked up his beer from the saloon table and took a deep swig. Maggie and I charged our own glasses, smiles slipping.

  That night we made ourselves as comfortable as we could in a tiny cabin dominated by damp bunk beds. I took the top one, with a view out of a small, leaky scuttle. All I could see outside was driving rain and masts ducking and weaving in the wind. A gruff voice sounded suddenly outside our door. ‘Ready for lights out, ladies?’

  ‘Sure,’ I replied breezily.

  ‘Sweet dreams.’

  A switch was thrown and the Captain headed off towards his cabin. In the darkness, I heard Maggie whisper urgently: ‘What have you got us into?’

  We were laid up in Cowes, waiting for the weather to break, for several days. In the meantime, Maggie and I were given a few basic instructions. The conditions only ever improved marginally but the Captain, bored and frustrated, made an impatient decision to set sail in a force 8 wind. Maggie looked this up on the Beaufort scale in my library book. “‘Fresh gale,’” she read out loud, ‘“winds thirty-nine to forty-six miles per hour. Moderately high waves with breaking crests forming spindrift.” Whatever that is.’ She gave a small shrug and continued.

  “‘Well-marked streaks of foam blowing along wind direction and considerable airborne spray.’” We looked at one another.

  ‘Isn’t there anything that makes more sense?’

  Maggie flicked over the page. ‘There’s this.’ She began reading a description better geared to landdwellers. “‘Twigs broken from trees. Cars veer on the road. Progress on foot seriously impeded.’” She closed the book and glared at me somewhat accusingly.

  I reminded myself that I was supposed to be looking for positives among the negatives. I searched desperately for one. ‘He must know what he’s doing, Mags.’

  ‘Really?’ She seemed decidedly unimpressed.

  All we could do was hope for the best.

  The Captain had managed to recruit a local man to take care of the engine room. Al was just coming out of it when we first met, a short, stocky man with a dark, weatherbeaten face, gypsy-black eyelashes framing his pale-grey eyes. As he smiled, I couldn’t fail to notice that every other tooth in his grin was missing.

  ‘You must be ADH Julie.’

  He saw my confusion.

  ‘Able Deck Hand,’ he supplied. ‘That’s what you’ll be from now on.’

  ‘I don’t known about “able”,’ I ventured. ‘I’m new to all this.’

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ said Al reassuringly. ‘Sailing’s just a matter of common sense.’

  With that he disappeared back down into the hellhole of an engine room. I crouched down to see what was going on in there. Bilge water slopped around his ankles and I could make out noisy engine pistons rising and falling in the cramped space. The air was fast becoming thick with the smell of diesel until Al closed the door. From the other side, I could have sworn I heard the snap and fizz of a ring pull being removed from a can of beer.

  Maggie had gone off with the Captain in a dinghy to buy provisions and returned looking anxious. ‘You didn’t tell him I was vegetarian,’ she hissed. ‘He’s just gone and bought a year’s supply of cold cuts.’

  I tried to keep up her spirits. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll make sure you don’t get scurvy.’

  I could tell from Maggie’s expression that she hadn’t recovered her sense of humour.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon battening hatches and stowing breakables. In stark contrast to the filthy engine room, the rest of the boat was comfortable and stylish with all mod cons. It was kitted out in teak with white leather upholstery and boasted 13 amp power run off a generator so I could even plug in my heated hair rollers. I didn’t dare own up to the Captain that I had brought them along but everyone was to find out when they caused our navigation lights to fail just as we were trying to dodge a bunch of ferries and cruisers in the Channel.

  It wasn’t an easy voyage. We were beating into headwinds, tacking northwards with the boat on her ear most of the way. ‘By the time we reach Norway you’ll think you’ve one leg shorter than the other!’ the Captain laughed over the wind, like a demented Ahab. ‘Haul in!’ he shouted at us. ‘Trim sails!’ Or, while he hauled in or trimmed the sails, ‘Take the wheel!’ The rain lashed down but somehow I always managed to find time for a slick of lipstick, which I felt I needed even when wearing a survival suit.

  On the second day out, we lost a vital piece of chart after Maggie stood a wet coffee mug on it. ‘Don’t tell him it was me!’ she implored. The Captain reckoned he could plot an alternative course if only somebody could remember Pythagoras’s theorem. It fell to me to recall a verse from a childhood spent absorbing radio music almost by osmosis: a cheerful number sung by Danny Kaye about the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle being equal to the sum of the square of the two adjacent sides.

  The Captain wasn’t a fan of Danny Kaye but the song saved the day and he admitted that he would rather sail with learners who were good company than a ‘boy racer who’s willing to risk my boat for a few thrills’.

  Mindful of Maggie’s dietary requirements, I made vegetarian spaghetti, which slipped straight off plates on to already damp sweaters. Some way off the Danish coast, we ran out of water. The Captain didn’t seem too concerned as he had plenty of alcoholic supplies on board. ‘And what do we brush our teeth in?’ asked Maggie. The Captain tossed her a can of lager. If Maggie was exasperated, Al seemed to find beer a useful all-purpose substitute. Now, whenever the engine-room door opened, I could see plenty of empty cans floating on top of the bilge water.

  In spite of all this, somehow I managed to enjoy the voyage, appreciating what I now knew to be the object of the exercise: putting oneself though a lot of hardship in order to earn some enjoyable respite in a far-flung port. Our first port, however, turned out to be not so far-flung. Still in a howling gale, we limped into Esberg in Denmark to take on water. There was only one problem: dehydrated and somewhat confused, we had forgotten to take down the little mizzen sail with the result that, no matter how hard we tried to steer towards port, we kept being blown away from the quay by an offshore wind. Dry land was so tantalisingly close, and yet we just couldn’t reach it.

  When at long last we docked, Maggie was first out on to the quay and so pleased to be back on terra firma that she kissed the ground and promptly went straight off to find a ferry to take her home. I couldn’t blame her, but her premature departure meant she missed the best part of the trip. The next morning I awoke to an unfamiliar and initially unnerving silence: the wind was no longer screaming through the rigging. I went on deck to see a miracle unfolding: we were gliding through the smooth, mirror-like waters of a Norwegian fjord.

  The Captain spent a week with his children for Sommerfest, with Al and me as background crew. In this more relaxed environment, I began properly to learn the ropes—or rather lines, sheets and warps, as they’re more usually referred to on a boat. I swabbed decks, set sail and kept things generally shipshape. On midsummer night the Captain’s teenage children joined us and we decorated the boat with flower garlands. The Captain gave me a handful of Norwegian kroner and encouraged me to placate the sea gods by throwing the coins overboard. We drank aquavit and watched fireworks filling the sky with coloured light, reflected in the shimmering fjord below. Night barely fell at all over the water. It was magical.

  I was far from London and everything I knew, but somehow I felt at home in this sea gypsy’s life. I knew we would soon be returning and when the Captain came to find me on deck one morning, I assumed it was to tell me we’d be setting off that day. Instead he said: ‘How do you fancy coming along on another trip?’
<
br />   This wasn’t what I had been expecting. He could see that in my eyes. He could also see that I was tempted. ‘Hell, just do it! You’ve no ties in London, have you?’

  I thought for a moment. If I didn’t do something like this now, when I was completely free for the first time in my life and the opportunity was there for the taking, when would I do it? The money I still had from selling my flat would allow me to give up work for a while. I would be able to do more writing than I was managing at the Westy, and the Captain was right: I had lots of people in my life, good friends, but no ties, now, other than those I kept in my heart. As I looked out over a Norwegian fjord, I remembered a song from long ago—the one I had sung with my cousins outside a riverside pub at the Wapping docks.

  …Though the night be dark as dungeon

  Not a star to be seen above

  I will be guided without stumble

  Into the arms of my only love.

  I told the Captain another trip sounded like a good idea.

  I returned to London, handed in my notice at work and ended up spending the best part of four years sailing with the Captain. Seb was happy to keep my room at the Westy for me and I would go home from time to time for a week or so, usually when the boat was in dry dock or the winter weather too foul to sail in, to see my friends, visit Mark’s parents—to whom I’d grown very close—in Tunbridge Wells and generally catch up with London life.

  After the Norway trip, we sailed to Ireland, taking the Golden Sunset from Inverness to Fort William down through the Caledonian Canal and the Highland lochs, joined for part of the time by the Captain’s teenage daughter. The Captain was restless and keen to test the boat with a long voyage. He wanted to sail the Atlantic and investigate chartering possibilities in the Caribbean, which meant getting to Portugal by the autumn, the optimum time to make the crossing. I was up for it. My London friends thought I was mad. A couple of weeks sailing to Norway was one thing, but this was, they suggested, a little extreme. Some of them suspected I was running away from the real world, and perhaps I was. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to join the circus instead?’ asked my friend Theresa, rather drily.

  The problem was that the Captain didn’t know the Caribbean very well—his territory was the Far East—and his plans were vague. He dithered about where we should go, the French islands or the British ones, and I capitalised on his indecision by encouraging him to make a detour via the Mediterranean. I was dying to cruise the Med, envisaging a sort of nautical Grand Tour taking in places I had read about in the works of Gerald Durrell and Henry James—the Greek islands, Naples, Capri, Sardinia…So we sailed to northern Spain, then all the way down the coast of Portugal, leaving the boat in a swish marina for a while to have it painted up. After that we set off for southern Spain.

  By the time we reached Portugal we had fallen for each other. The Captain was not by any means my usual type. I had always gone for artistic-looking men, tall, slender and long-haired, almost androgynous. Yet as I got to know my sailing companion I found myself increasingly attracted to him. He was a real tough guy, but he was also a terrific character, very intelligent and had a good heart.

  In retrospect I wonder whether after my mother died I was somehow giving myself permission to seek out a man more like my father, someone big and strong who would look after me. It’s not uncommon for a mother to be a little jealous of the father—daughter relationship, and it occurs to me that, in our family triangle, this might have been the case with my mum. As a couple they’d had a great life before I was born, when she’d travelled around with my father to his darts tournaments, drinking, socialising and having fun. Then, all of a sudden, I’d arrived, all that had stopped, and some of the love, pride and attention previously reserved for her had been focused on me. Perhaps, to avoid encroaching on her territory, I’d learned to reject men cast in my father’s mould but now that she was gone maybe I was looking for my dad again. Or maybe it was just that, having lost both of them, I was simply searching for somebody to fill a protective role. Whatever the reason, the Captain and I formed a double-act of sorts: two misfits sharing a love of travel and adventure.

  From southern Spain we cruised the Balearics—docking at Mallorca, Ibiza and Menorca. On several occasions the Golden Sunset ended up stuck on Menorca for a considerable length of time because…well, mainly because it was a fabulous island. One of these spells, however, was prompted by a genuine emergency. In the Balearics, we received word that the Captain’s mother had died. He had to get back to Scotland as a matter of urgency for the funeral, to look after his old dad, who was in his eighties, and to sort out his father’s domestic arrangements afterwards. That meant leaving me with a fifty-foot ketch I wasn’t capable of handling on my own. We had to find somewhere to moor it, and me, for the duration.

  A friend of mine had spent a holiday in somebody’s villa in the Menorcan countryside near the port of Ciudadella, the old capital, a lovely medieval town. It would be ideal, Richard told me on the phone. It had a beautiful harbour, and lots of wonderful little restaurants, and he was sure if I went there and found this ‘guy called Manolo’ he would help me with the boat. So we set sail for Ciudadella, in the west of Menorca, and it did indeed prove to be an enchanting town. We dropped anchor and I waved the Captain off to Scotland.

  We could have gone to Menorca’s main port, Mahón, on the opposite side of the island in the south-east: an eight-mile-long sleeve of a harbour known as one of the safest in the Med. Instead I found myself in one of the most dangerous. I didn’t know that Ciudadella was prone to a phenomenon known locally as the rissaga—a meteorological tsunami, which is like a flood tide, but created by atmospheric pressure rather than anything tidal. Soon after I arrived there I went ashore to have dinner in one of the harbourside restaurants. When I got back to the boat I was horrorstruck to discover that it seemed to have sunk: it was sitting so low in the water. On the quay, the fishermen were calling to me, ‘Capitana Julie! Capitana Julie! You must get your boat out now!’

  ‘No puedo!’ I shrieked. Then, giving up on my schoolgirl Spanish, ‘I can’t! I don’t know how!’

  I could put up sails but there was no way I could manoeuvre the Golden Sunset in a small space like a harbour. Dressed for the evening in my high heels, I couldn’t even manage to untie the mooring lines on my own, so I was in a nautical quandary. The fishermen had to steer the boat out of the harbour for me and anchor me up safely.

  It turned out that this dramatic drop in the water level was one of the warning signs of a rissaga, which was why it was imperative that all the boats were moved. The fishermen were usually the first to notice any problem when they went down to the harbour at night, and they would quickly send the word round. Although there never actually was a rissaga while I was alone on the boat, the waterline fell dangerously low on several occasions. When it first happened I was panicstricken. I’d envisaged nothing more than being parked in Ciudadella for a few weeks, sunning myself and enjoying a few cocktails on the poop deck, while I waited for the Captain to fly back from Scotland. I hadn’t expected to have to actually drive the thing.

  I racked my brains for some useful information but all I could summon was a dim memory of an old Navy Lark episode in which Leslie Phillips had offered the instruction, ‘Left hand down a bit.’ I was on the phone to the Captain every five minutes from the bar, pleading, ‘You have to come back—the boat’s in serious danger.’ I was terrified that something would go horribly wrong. The last time there had been a rissaga, I had learned, all the water had receded from the port and a twenty-metre mini-tsunami had powered in, sweeping away cars on the shore road and destroying the harbourside restaurants.

  But having to manage on my own meant I had to live on my wits and make friends not only with the fishermen, but also with the man who ran the tourist boat and other locals. Soon it became a matter of routine that, when the rissaga threatened, they would come aboard, steer the Golden Sunset to safety and bring me back again when the danger had pass
ed. After a week or so my reputation spread and everyone in the port knew the Englishwoman who couldn’t move her boat.

  Reyes and Tanito, a young local couple who ran a bar, took me under their wing. I met people from other boats and before long I was caught up in the midsummer fiesta, San Joan, the biggest in the Menorcan calendar, which was marked by all sorts of traditional activities. I soon found it was one big, non-stop, threeor four-day party, fuelled by pomada, a poky cocktail of Mahón gin and lemonade, during which horses and riders took to the streets en masse, high-stepping through the crowd and even into people’s houses. There was traditional music, jousting on the sands, men going round with sheep on their backs and a strange custom involving people throwing sacks of hazelnuts at one another—a gesture of love, apparently.

  When the Captain returned I was ashore and spotted his red head as he beetled his way along the quay, nervously scanning the harbour for the Golden Sunset. Once he saw that she was still in one piece he visibly relaxed. He had left behind a helpless ninny and returned to find a woman wearing a skipper’s hat who knew almost everyone in Ciudadella. My Spanish had come on in leaps and bounds, too. It was all a bit disconcerting for the Captain but he took it well. For me, the realisation that I had coped on my own, albeit with a little help from my friends, was a turning point. It was a massive boost to my confidence.

  Ciudadella became my home from home while we were at sea and we returned there often. I invited a couple of girlfriends there once, for a summer holiday, while the Captain was off somewhere. They were London ladies, party girls like me, and turned up on the quay with cases full of make-up and beauty products, high heels and heated rollers. The man who operated the tourist boat, whom I’d befriended during the rissaga crisis, was always infuriated by anyone tying their boat to his when the quay was too crowded for them to find a proper mooring. He had been known to untie the offending vessels in the middle of the night, setting them adrift. But he was so amused by the camp ladies of the Golden Sunset that he not only happily allowed us to tie up to his craft but also let us leave our stilettos on it when we teetered back after a night out ashore.