Mistress and Commander

by Amelia Dalton

  ‘What? Drain the water! Does the Water Board start to empty the canal while there are boats moving?’ Cubby asked incredulously. With no water to sit in and float on Monaco would simply fall over. From my trusty Motorola, I rang the next lock-keeper.

  ‘This is the Monaco! Good morning!’ I said impatiently. ‘We’re at Laggan locks. Do you think you could stop draining the reach? It would be really helpful if we could get through into Loch Oich before you drain out any more water!’ I tried to sound polite.

  The lock gates swung open, scrunching back against the wet slimy wall, and Monaco pushed through the gap, heading as quickly as the depth allowed along the reach, pushing on north. Surprisingly, round the corner appeared a dainty white yacht. Cubby, polite seaman as ever, gently eased Monaco over to the side to let her past, red-to-red even in the canal. Monaco slid to a complete stop.

  We peered over the gunwale as the water inexorably slipped away. More and more of the canal stonework began to show followed by a brown muddy strip of canal bank growing wider as we watched. The casual laissez faire of the west coast was sometimes just too exasperating. It seemed ridiculous to be stuck in a canal, five feet away from the bank with the prospect of serious damage looming.

  ‘What’ll the fuck’ll we do?’ Kate called from the foredeck.

  A man standing on the towpath with a little white dog on a lead shouted at us. ‘Hello there! Just work her back and forth, you’ll get her off. Just keep going – back and forth! Don’t give up. I used to clean out this section. It’s just the mud. Keep going! You’ll get her off.’

  Backwards, forwards. Backwards, forwards. Cubby worked the propeller and Monaco rocked back and forth. Slowly, oh so slowly, she slid into the middle of the canal and with a sigh of relief we waved to the helpful dog-walker and chugged on towards the deeper waters of Loch Oich.

  With no more frights, we arrived. It was good to be back in Peterhead in spite of the fuel problem and a massive list of maintenance tasks. Usually they were done in January but it made sense to do it all now. Sitting waiting for high water so Monaco could be loaded onto the carriage and pulled onto the slip out of the water, Cubby and I were enjoying golden syrup sandwiches as we went through the list together. Caulk the hull and deck, strip off old antifouling paint and renew, replace the sacrificial anodes, replace the bilge pump impellors, send the life rafts to be serviced, test gas detectors and fire systems and of course everywhere had to be painted from mast tip to keel. In addition to the regular maintenance there were the Department of Transport inspections and with Monaco high up out of the water, the inspector could poke and prod every inch of planking on the hull and deck as well as test bilge pumps and safety equipment. We would have to do fire drills, test navigation lights and practice our MOB (man overboard) strategy, but bizarrely not once had any of the inspectors been into the engine room. There had been no risk of them seeing our Coke-bottle contraption.

  It was always a costly time but all three of us enjoyed it. Bill regarded Monaco as ‘his’: he was always the first on board, bouncing lightly onto the deck.

  ‘Well, it’s yourselves! Danny, this is Amelia, but you’ll remember Cubby and Kate.’

  Danny the apprentice carefully spread newspapers on the seat, protection from the greasy blue boiler suits, and Kate appeared with more sandwiches. It felt like a homecoming as we caught up on the news while the tide slowly rose.

  ‘And how’s your dad, Cubby?’ Bill’s Scottish manners were never forgotten even when sitting on a newspaper in a boiler suit.

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry, I forgot to ask – how did the trial go? He was waiting to come up in front of the beaks for netting salmon,’ I added, for Bill’s benefit.

  ‘Well, the old bugger got off. He was waiting for the trial, but someone didn’t like the fish farm in the loch. So they slit open all the netting on the cages, the fish got out and the loch was fair boiling with red fish. Next morning the police turned up with their van filled with his nets and asked him if he would mind netting the loch for them! He’s escaped again.’ Even whilst waiting to go up the slip, to mention ‘salmon’ on a boat would be bad luck.

  ‘Danny,’ said Bill, turning to his apprentice, ‘what’d be the two things you don’t get at home very often?’

  ‘He’s not old enough,’ Kate butted in. ‘Don’t embarrass the lad, Bill, and he lives with his ma too,’ she added, her tone motherly.

  ‘Aye, well, he’ll need to learn afore it’s too late!’ went on Bill. ‘The answer, ma boy, is a blow job and a lobster sorbet!’ ‘

  ‘Ye daft thing!’ responded Cubby with a grin. ‘It’s not a lobster sorbet, it’s lobster thermidor! Have you no idea of the finer things in life, man?’

  Out of the water up on the slip it was impossible to live on board. We couldn’t use the gennie so had no power to run a tap or turn on a light. We took up residence in our regular time-warp fifties B&B, living on bacon butties, peas and chips in the warmth of the Fisherman’s Mission, or drinking tea with the seventy-odd engineers in the Stickers canteen. It was a different world from shooting parties and opera picnics and I loved feeling part of this good-humoured, hard-working community. From the diminutive seventy-year-old plumber, Henry, who suddenly suggested he could organise a central heating system for Monaco to run off the engine cooling system, to the god-like harbour master, who controlled the fishing fleet’s movements, my life was populated by vibrant and fascinating characters. I had established a good relationship with Bill and the workforce at Stickers, having earned my stripes by working as hard as anyone else through the cold and snow on previous winter maintenance visits. Watching Bill and asking questions had taught me about the machinery and though I was still a girl with a poncy voice, they respected me for turning a Danish trawler into a successful little expedition ship. Monaco was a fishing boat with a difference and Bill was proud of her.

  Cubby, with no boat to drive or passengers to be responsible for, was on holiday. There was a mass of maintenance he could be doing but he needed a break. Kate spring-cleaned the cabins. So it was left to me to be with Bill and Danny working on the engine. There was no pattern as to why the engine faltered. Each cylinder – there were five – had its own fuel pump which of course wouldn’t work properly unless there was fuel to be squirted in to it by the injectors. Bill, short of precise details, decided to remove each injector for cleaning, testing and resetting. My arm ached as I held the torch illuminating cylinder number 2. It was cosily warm in the engine room. The big red diesel engine took days to cool down and it glistened with a sheen of oil as Bill explained about injectors, turbo blowers and the function of the lubricator with its row of little glass tubes. I wanted to understand it all. I needed to learn the intricacies; after all it was a machine, even if a complicated one, and there must be a logical explanation for the problem.

  After ten days Monaco was at last back in the water, inspections passed, injectors cleaned and tested, so hopefully the problem was solved. In addition, there were sight glasses fitted into three sections of the fuel lines so Cubby could check the pink diesel was flowing along the pipes. She looked smart, her green hull and white superstructure shining with fresh paint – an oddity amongst the fishing fleet I thought, as I waited, standing in the rain outside the door to the canteen.

  We were ready to go but there was one last thing to do before we returned to Oban. It was Danny’s twenty-first birthday and I felt Monaco should mark the occasion. A garish pink Ford Sierra with bunches of balloons painted on the bonnet in lilac and silver came into view. This must be her. I waved and the car drew up by the curb beside me. A boldly dyed blonde slithered out from behind the wheel, sheathed in a skin-tight iridescent green catsuit, and strutted round to the boot. The passenger door flung open and a dumpy leg encased in purple velour reached down to the pavement.

  ‘Hello! I’m so pleased you’ve arrived,’ I said, wishing she’d hurry up. ‘They’re all waiting inside the canteen, tea break is nearly over. Can we go straight in or do
you need a loo or anything?’ I’d found her through the Aberdeen Yellow Pages and was beginning to think it might not be such a good way to mark Danny’s twenty-first after all.

  ‘How far do you want me to go?’ she asked, burrowing amongst the plastic bags in the boot. ‘Will suspenders be enough or d’you want the full lot off? I brought my ma to keep it all right, just in case ye want me to take all my clothes off.’

  I thought of the assembled Baptists in the canteen. No, I did not want her starkers amongst the God-fearing engineers – Bob might have a heart attack.

  ‘Oh no! Suspenders will be fine, no further, thank you,’ I replied firmly. ‘I’ve got the chairs into a circle but no one knows why. When we go in I’ll point out Danny to you. He’s no idea either, so it’s all still a surprise.’

  She hauled a cumbersome silver ghetto blaster and whip from the boot and followed me, tottering along in her black thigh boots. We picked our way around the pools of oil and diesel on the workshop floor, Ma stumping along in the rear, boredom oozing from every step.

  Once the ghetto blaster was plugged into the tea urn’s power socket, it began bellowing at the neon-lit men in boiler suits. The catsuit started wiggling and writhing. She squirmed around the circle making her way towards Danny, slowly undoing her iridescent sheath, peeling out one arm and then the other. She pulled Danny into the middle of the circle of watching engineers. The door flung open and in came the boss who propped himself against the wall. Ma was asleep on a chair by the urn. Danny, lanky and blushing, stood solidly beside the writhing blonde in his navy blue boiler suit. Looking him up and down approvingly, she ran her hands down his boiler-suited legs. The tempo slowed. Still writhing, she rubbed herself up and down against him, undoing the boiler suit buttons as she went. Delving inside she caressed his now twenty-one-year-old chest. Slowly she undid a few more of his buttons. Danny was noticeably impressed. Chivalrously he joined in, helping her out of the catsuit top revealing a surprisingly dainty leopard print bra with red nipple tassels. A crack of the whip and off came the bra. I glanced at the boss but he didn’t look as if he was going to put an end to the afternoon tea party. There were grins, wolf whistles and shouts.

  She cracked the whip again and slithered out of the catsuit legs to reveal a matching leopard-print thong and suspenders. A roar went round the canteen as she threaded the whip through the lace at the edge of the thong. Then she went back to working on Danny. Stroking his naked chest, she curled down in front of him, pushing down the boiler suit as she stuck her bum up in the air. The boiler suit legs slid down, over his knees and bunched round his ankles. Sexy young Danny was revealed sporting the palest pink, home-knitted, woolly long johns.

  I’d earned a few more stripes and I knew we’d never be forgotten. If ever I needed urgent help, I thought, I would only have to ask.

  Thirteen

  Monaco was back in Oban. Cubby, confident now all had been fixed in Peterhead, when asked by the coastguards to help with a prestigious exercise, enthusiastically agreed. Forsaking the still, empty house, VAT returns and loneliness, I zoomed north in the Flying Tomato to join the fun.

  Monaco was regarded by the coastguards of Stornoway and Oban as an auxiliary lifeboat. They all knew us well. They always knew where Monaco was and what she was doing, not least because of Cubby’s irrepressible gossiping on the VHF. His gloriously sexy voice regaled the west coast world with gossip and jokes: almost everyone twirled the dial to tune in when they heard him. Wherever we went whether to pick up tatties or prawns, we had friends on boats, in crofts and on islands. Wherever Monaco tied up there’d be someone to catch a rope and come on board for a blether and a bit of dry Dundee cake washed down with nerve jangling Nescafé.

  It was a compliment, an affirmation of a professionally run operation, to be asked to take part in this major exercise especially in the potential weather conditions of late November. The exercise would test new software developed for the Search & Rescue teams, which would improve their chances of finding things lost at sea. Objects in the sea react differently to weather, tide and currents. With the new software, when a call for help was received, the type of object, prevailing weather and tidal conditions would be entered into the national computer system. It was hoped the new software would indicate where they should search. They needed three different objects to test its accuracy. Monaco was to drift powerless for three hours, a stuffed dummy would be thrown overboard and the third object was a life raft. Monaco with no power would be at the mercy of the tidal current and wind: the dummy would be affected by current only and the life raft purely by the wind. We were also to have a casualty needing hospitalisation to be picked up from the deck by one of the rescue helicopters.

  With a reporter from the Oban Times and our ‘casualty’, Andy from the Oban Coastguards, on board, Monaco headed out across the bay in the star-studded black of mid-November. We were off to the deep waters south-west of Barra Head at the southern end of the Outer Hebrides: seven hours steaming into a glorious winter night, clear and crisp with barely a breath of wind. With no passengers to worry about or feed, we all crammed into the wheelhouse. This was part of what had enraptured me so many years ago: the blether, the craic, the ability to find entertainment in the simplest things far removed from a predictable life of social acceptance and correct behaviour.

  ‘For Exercise Only. For Exercise Only,’ Cubby’s liquid voice oozed into the VHF handset. The green glow of the radar screen and little pools of light from the instruments and VHF dials glowed in the dark of the wheelhouse. I cupped a torch in my hand, and a little shaft of light squeezed out between my fingers so he could see the script. Kate appeared in the wheelhouse, while Andy was out on deck ready. Monaco calmly waited motionless in the still of the perfect November dawn. Cubby carried on, steadily pacing each word.

  ‘Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. This is Monaco. Monaco. Monaco.’ My heart gave a little lurch: hearing ‘mayday’ followed by ‘Monaco’, even when I knew it was purely an Exercise, was disconcerting.

  Calmly he gave our position, continuing to read, ‘It’s blowing hard from the sou’west, heavy rain and poor visibility, there’s a bugger of a swell.’ (Typically, he couldn’t resist a little embroidering.) ‘We’ve sustained damage. We’ve a crew member with a smashed leg. We’ve lost a lady passenger overboard. We’ve no power. We’re in need of assistance.’ Flying through the ether across the whole of the west coast went all the fictional details. Grinning, he released the transmit button and we waited for a response from the Oban coastguards.

  A voice burst from the green VHF growling into the wheelhouse, ‘I don’t know where you’re gettin’ all this fuckin’ weather!’ It seemed someone fishing not far away was sceptical of Cubby’s description of the flat calm peaceful conditions.

  Having reached the designated spot three hours earlier, we had followed our instructions. We had tipped our lady passenger overboard, provocatively dressed in some of Kate’s most erotic undies – a peek-a-boo bra, suspenders and fish-net stockings and of course no knickers. The life raft had followed, its inflated roof bright with reflective tape, and Monaco had drifted at the whim of wind and tide. But the lack of wind, and still conditions, resulted in all three objects – Monaco, the life raft and body – remaining in a tight little group. The body was close to Monaco’s port shoulder while the life raft sat serenely a few metres away.

  We waited.

  In the grey light of dawn, a lumbering Nimrod aircraft, bristling with aerials, flew over Monaco. It banked, turned back towards us, dipped its wings in salute and was gone. Next, just above the water, two grey Search & Rescue Sikorsky helicopters clattered up and quartered the sea around us. Three bright green streaks raced across the radar; the cavalry was coming – lifeboats from Barra Head, Port Askaig and Tobermory, each wanting to reach Monaco first. As they closed in, doors were pushed back and everyone waved. We knew the crews well, so it felt increasingly like a party in the pale morning sunlight.

  The coastguards had s
uggested I should be the ‘casualty’ to be winched up off the deck and swung into the hovering chopper. But the thought of dangling over the sea terrified me and I was not leaving the Monaco. Besides, I’d probably miss the party.

  During the night Cubby and I had made everything ready. The navigation lights high above gave enough light to check all the ropes were secure and fenders tied down: nothing loose to fly about in the downdraught from the chopper. It seemed to hover horribly close to Monaco’s mast as I stood waiting, reminding myself not to reach up to grab the winch man as he landed on deck. Andy, strapped into a stretcher, slowly disappeared into the aircraft’s welcoming belly.

  The other chopper quartering the sea had found the body.

  ‘Monaco, Monaco. Channel 77.’ There was a smile in the voice over the clattering sound of the rotor blades.

  ‘Channel 77,’ replied Cubby.

  ‘Monaco, we have retrieved the casualty. I expect you’d like the props back before we take her to Glasgow Royal Infirmary?’ Moments later the Sikorsky swooped past. And Kate’s undies plopped down in a squelchy bundle in the middle of Monaco’s deck. The exercise had been pretty useless as a means of predicting the search areas for the rescue services as there was not enough weather, but no one seemed to mind. The debriefing turned into a ten-hour party thanks to the Tobermory lifeboat crew.

  In the following dark December days Monaco needed work. Without work and company, the long dull winter days engulfed both Kate and Cubby and a blanket of inertia would descend. Dive charters or commercial work, whatever I could find, would do. But worse than the winter malaise, the big red diesel, known for its reliability and power, had again faltered. In spite of Bill’s assiduous maintenance in Peterhead there were moments when the sight glasses were just a mass of bubbles, almost empty, no pink pulsing diesel running through the pipes. Sometimes, it seemed a miracle Monaco kept moving at all. There was little reason to go to Peterhead again, and Cubby thought Colin with his Oban nous would be able to sort the problem. He had come down and refitted the unlikely Heath Robinson Coke-bottle contraption. It worked, no hiccups, no faltering and Cubby seemed happy, but I worried the Department would find out and of course the west coast gossip worked overtime. Besides, it couldn’t be thought of as a permanent solution; we needed to find the root of the problem.