Storyteller, poet and Northings’ contributor Ian Stephen will be checking in from his landfalls on his latest storytelling trip.

2 September 2008

Last day at sail loft 2 before strolling along the hoil to join a boat – or rather two boats – on the home run to Brittany. They’ve been to Faroes and one of them on to Iceland. The crews have stories to tell and some of them are on the blog of photographer Guy Boily who is aboard (Google Guy Boily and click on the sailboat icon on his home page)

The plotter from the wreck of David's boat - needs a wipedown - it's coming along

My mate Shuggie who built the Norwegian pram (boat with cut off front), he met them because they flew the Free Tibet flag – we’ve all become friends. There have been dinners. There have been sessions of tunes and yarns (also called, by Australians, talking shite and, by Americans, bullshitting). What the hell, it’s the national sport of the Isle of Lewis and that’s flickin’ well that.

So we sail tonight. Apologies to the An Sulaire Trust meeting – apologies to any others who are waiting – have done my best in the available time, but must pay the blacksmith who will probably only accept the basic rate for the unpatented mast-gate fitting he has improved from an old design, and built to necessary and sufficient standards to get Broad Bay sailing again. More of that story later for those who are also promiscuous in their dealings with boats.

And he won’t accept payment for the wittiest yarns streaming out through the design and build process. But he can’t adopt his normal price-ing structure this time (he’s not going to make a part-time lectureship on business practice at UHI) which is – just bring it back when you’re finished with it and I’ll make it into something else.

But this thing happened this year – the paid work just didn’t seem to be there for the coming year and I wrote the Scottish Arts Council to apply for a bursary. The application asks if I can yarn, on paper but in promiscuous fashion, from love affair to love affair – though most of them are with vessels.

The literature dept said yes, so I can eat for two years, and only last week realised that I could say yes to the kindest of offers – to join a crew and share their boat which is also their home these days and nights.

So the planned route is Port Ellen, Bangor, Howth, Scillies and a hop across to maybe Brest. So maybe I can meet again some of those met at Ouessant Island Writers festival.

But I’m not thinking to the possible landfalls. I’m thinking of the list that’s still major. Thinking of my eldest son who is kayaking torrents in Nepal and how I tut-tutted watching the last minute scramble before he managed to leave.

And the loves left behind. I have to go to Vigo (a boat not the place) to collect some gear and do a last check. Will bail Graassavig (Shuggie’s pram) on the way out. Will phone the Loch Erisort team to say sorry, we’ve a sail to get the renewed Broad Bay sailing but won’t be there to step the mast for another few weeks.

Can maybe order the life rafts as part of the preparations for next year, adventures for an Sulaire and for El Vigo. Shuggie and me are thinking on Faroes. I want to meet folk who’ve looked after their fish and their boats and still go with long lines to the sea with the minimum investment and fuss. They should maybe be the ones doing the business studies modules.

So here’s some photos of the loves left behind – and the photos will come with me to show new friends – in the Macbook, the contemporary battered leather wallet with the images of those you have no choice with – the ones you care for. You rub oil into their boatskins at certain times. And other times it’s healing compounds to sores .

False start … 3 September 2008

I know why the GPS broke. Because I didn’t pay the blacksmith. It was high on the “to do” list but it slipped. Calum Stealag lit his eyes – he didn’t need the forge and fitted the job in between trailers and digger-shovels. Don’t pay me yet, you’ll be needing something else you’ve forgotten. Buit that was weeks ago.

Yesterday, I got to the the poy-oy, got some of the the promised stuff in the mail and remembered the euros – not bloody many of them to the quid – and time slipped.

So it was the classic, lifejacket on as the warps are coming off, ten minutes to departure time.

Guy Boily's photo catches Ian telling a Stornoway audience about the blacksmith's shop

You could see Jean’s way of working, over the tide tables and the computer- assisted passage planning in my kitchen. He researches carefully, listens to advice but then a plan is a plan unless something like wind changes significantly. Tide is less fickle than breeze. So by and large the streams will turn when the arrows point the other way – if you’ve worked forward or back from the correct High Water time correctly.

Splitting the stated hour halfway so the map of the tide for high water will start half an hour before the time in the table and end half an hour after. And the time will usually be given in GMT but watch out because some fisherman’s table will give it in BST. So it’s not complicated, you just have to be careful.

Right that’s the end of the nav stuff. All the points are in the system or rather two systems, one on each vessel. We’ll go side by side. And I’m on the helm of Bonny taking her out of my home port in the calm dark. Well, dark apart from the fishing boats coming and going. And all the winking nav. lights. We’re showing a tricolour light at the top of the mast. But we’re not a sailing ship now. We are a power driven vessel. But how could we be otherwise in the absence of any trace of wind and a glass Approaches.

Michel and Guy know I’m taking a short-cut from the prescribed channel. But they know I know the way out of town and there’s also nearly 5 metres of tide over the charted depths. But I don’t show off because Sandy’s crabbing gear could be waiting to catch us. It’s the happy medium as my ol’man called it. It used to be called between prudence. In its French pronounciation the word is the radio proword for radio traffic relating to safety at sea.

A propos. Michel asks if I’m fine after the port hand buoy if there’s no autohelm for now. I outline the route. He’s happy but the boat’s fixed GPS will not talk to the plotting software so our position won’t appear on the electronic charts. For me this is not a problem. We have paper charts and 3 hand-held GPS sets aboard. And it’s a clear night with a series of marks and light to pick up along the way. There’s the sequence of red aeronautical warning lights on the Arnish wind turbines. But Michel says we’re turning round.

I’d be the same. If a problem occurs when you’re at sea, you deal with it. But you don’t want to start a long voyage with a key bit of gear not working. It’s fixed almost as soon as we’re tied up and in amongst the electrical contacts. But Jean is clear. Two hours is too long to catch the coasting from tide to tide. We leave again in the morning.

So I slept in my own bed, 100 metres from the two boats. I’ve made soda bread. I have to retrieve my wallet from Bonny – to get my card, to withdraw cash, to get to Inaclete road and thrust some cash in Calum’s direction before we sail again.

Turbulence and patches of calm…  5 September 2008

It’s Friday. This is Port Ellen. There are some fine marina berths just upharbour from the ferry. We arrived last night at the back of eight. A shade under an hour ahead of my estimate. It’s not that the pressure was on the navigator you understand, just that it’s a fine game of chess. With tides at their strongest, you don’t want to fight them at the major headlands. They have personalities. But you’re going to have to take them head-on sometime on a long trip.

Lighthouse

Kebock Head glooms above the Sound of Shiants. Waterstone Point and Neist Point throw the basalt of Skye and substantial downdrafts of destructive air to the Little Minch. Caliach Point, Northwest Mull, is one of the many awesome Gaelic old women who demand respect. Suffer the consequences if you don’t. These chidings often consist of turbulent water – a washing machine of broth with a head not as smooth as that on the pint of Guiness we’re going to have if we make our Irish landfall.

These are the ones to be wary of. But then there are the icons which are our milestones. There’s Heisker light, out on its own before our run down to Coll. There’s Dubh Artach, the grey masterpiece of the Stevensons, with its red red band. I was aboard a lobsterboat once, trying not to hinder the work as I listened to the rhythms of the guys, to make poems as a crew. Steven’s Dad was a keeper on that one. I met Steven again this summer, crewing on the Sound of Harris ferry. He clocked me – and aye, there was more security with Calmac than there was at the lobsters.

But there are two vessels, traveling together. I got worried at night, not seeing the light or loom of the other for too many hours. There is the same navigation software on each boat. The same waypoints, the same theoretical electronic red line. But on my watch I allowed the boat to zig-zag the line to get good speed under sail.

We met again soon enough. The tides are pretty much predictable. Their direction and strength will be close to what’s in the books and charts if we’ve done our sums right. Wind is more fickle and we’re not getting the push we’d hoped for so we’re a shade behind schedule.

I work aboard Bonny, from High Water Ullapool, Jean skippers Délphinea and calculates from the Dover figures. Jean sails with his wife, Edith. He’s had his heart attack and has some living to do. Michel is the owner-skipper of Bonny. He distributed newspapers and ran a restaurant and got only the 1st of May off work for many years. He’s a cool skipper.

His companion, Guy, a French-Canadian photographer, loves to experience wilderness and often travels by sea-kayak. He found out about the adventure on the internet. There was to have been 3 boats carrying twelve people. But these 4 took their 2 vessels to Stornoway, Faroes, Westmann Islands and Iceland. There have been engine as well as electronic failures. Always at times when you wanted them badly. There has been a lot of waiting for weather. And there have been meetings.

And the stray cat they picked up in Stornoway. A poet by trade who wants to write prose about boats and sea. And the people on these things.

I’ve been welcomed into this community. I like to put dividers on paper charts and note the times of changes of current. Jean and I, on different boats, agreed we would lose the favour of the tide at the Rhinns of Islay. He and Edith went fishing. We put up a poled-out headsail, with the wind behind us and accepted that we would sprint to the headlands and crawl round them. But in light wind, it would not be dangerous.

That’s pretty much what happened. A little local turbulence, hypnotic patches of calm and whirls on the flattish swell. A lump or two across it all. I picked a transit – shoremarks in line – the aerial on the white gable. It took forever for the aerial to walk to the lighthouse and the outbuildings and the point thereafter. But it did. And our speed came back. The skipper was smiling again. And we had one beer each, ashore in port Ellen, before devouring Guy’s stew of chilly.

Délphinea arrived in the early hours. We’ve studied wind and tide together. We’re in a good vantage point to plan rounding Mull of Kintyre and taking on the North Channel. It looks like there will be 30 knots of breeze tonight and rain with it. I’m for waiting. There’s also a book festival in this village. I’m reading Ali Smith and she’s appearing. It looks like fair tide and wind before that scheduled time but things can change.

But, for the anglers amongst you – Délphinea scored with these small mackerel caught at a trolling speed of 2 knots. Guy sauted them in their own oil and served with a simple rice dish. Michel went up the road for a single bottle of white French wine. Waiting could be worse. These tiny mackerel taste sweet and true but we have to wonder why we’re catching them these days. We never used to see them on the West coast of Scotland.

Yarning His Way to Brittany…8 September 2008

It’s a tricky breeze to begin with. Good for getting a feel for the boat under sail. Like most fairly modern style yachts she’s very manoevrable under sail and power. But. The ‘but’ is the price you pay. That broad shape which gives you space aboard and the underwater shape that lets her turn on a tanner (as we used to say) gives her a certain quirk.

Ian Stephen’s Brittany Weblog

When you have a bit too much sail up for the gusts she’ll round right up into the wind without asking and lift her rudder out of the water. You’ll have guessed that the consequences of this interesting behaviour include a loss of all steering.

The solution (longer term) is to reduce the amount of sail. But you also need to develop co-ordination so that the rope controlling the main sail is freed in the gusts. This slackens off tension so the powerful shape vanishes from the sail. It’s just cloth for as long as you want. No longer an aircraft wing. This is called dumping the main.

So we rehearsed calling the word ‘dump’ when the gusts came and soon we didn’t have to say anything at all. We put a second reef in to make the sail smaller and went out past the headland to play, just on the turn of the tide south. The local turbulence didn’t last long. We settled to it with dark coming up. A positive force giving us access to all these tribes of stars. Guy, used to clear Canadian winter skies, talked me through some. That ‘W’ shape is Casseopia.

We look for loose gear or lines, above or below deck, which could cause trouble when we start to jump. The sailor’s routine preparation for battle. My turn on the pans so I make the stew while we’re in the lee of the land. I like the limits of the galley of a boat – it’s a tight form – haiku cooking. Guy, a veteran of outdoors expeditions is a master. He gleaned dessert. A Canadian on Islay found fat sweet brambles. Scurvy is now unlikely.

In clear water we decided she could take a good bit more and gave the full mainsail a try. She gained speed but was still comfortable. The speed was as much as we wanted to get through on the one tide. The engine could rest for this leg. The process outlined above always produces a similar result, whatever the vessel. The crew start to grin but none so wide as that on the gob of the skipper who is justifiably proud of how his boat looks after us.

We were tramping, stomping, cooking on driftwood. Crackling through the constellations. Normally the watch system is pretty fixed. A three or four hour pattern by day, two or three by night. This boat works more intuitively. We sense when one is up for it, peaceful and exhilarated at the same time and good for another hour. Or needing to rest the eyes and appreciate the surfing motion from down below.

Our tidal atlas is pencilled to show the movement hour by hour for this very night. And the current does pretty much as predicted. Strangely the wind does too. It might be a shade fresher which is not a problem. Michel has the spinnaker ready to fly but we pole out the normal foresail instead in about 20 knots of breeze.

There’s a surge of power, a bit more than the electronic steering can handle so Michel asks if I’m up for hand-steering for a while. He checks the electronic chart on the computer below as I read the surges. A guy called Kenny Mobil taught me to do this on an open Lewis lugsail boat, a lot of years ago.

It works for Bonny too. You anticipate the wave getting a grip. Apply a touch of rudder then and ease it when she breaks free of her hull-speed to gain the momentum of the wave. That way you can ease her over her theoretical top speed which should be related to her waterline length.

Michel is grinning bigtime so I know we’re keeping the direction of the plot but ahead of our hopes. There’s no more talk of stopping at Bangor. We’ve altered a shade or two out into the channel where the tide might be slacker. If it’s slowing us now it’s compensated by an increase in the wind strength. We’re eating up the miles. Steady at over 6 knots and kissing 7 when we surf.

This can’t last forever and it doesn’t. When the breeze diminishes the sun comes stronger and every wet Irish song about the mountains of Mourne. Seems just fine… We’re all boys together so of course , when the breeze falls low behind us, we fly the spinnaker and convince ourselves it will make up the speed. It looks and feels good but it still doesn’t deliver the bloody vittesse man.

A word about language. It’s a fine mix of franglais aboard as Michel and me are determined to free off the rust from our vocabularies. Mine was never that huge but as the actress said it’s what you do with it. The expert translations of Guy are reserved for navigational issues. A good passage is better than drink or silicon spray in terms of lubrication. We’ve made the right call, together, and the three of us know it. Jean’s high sail on the bigger boat comes up well astern of us in excellent visibility in the Irish Sea.

He’s on the VHF. He can’t believe it’s us, an hour or two ahead, looking good to catch a Guiness in Howth. How could that happen? We rehearse our story about flying the kite all night. Since Jean must have caught a green and white glimpse of it. Entirely effing appropriate as we crossed the sea-border.

Everyone needs a shower sometime…11 September 2008

In out of the Irish Sea in near calm, eyes hunting for the black bulges of creel-markers. Racing-marks. And a group of 3 flashes that will indicate an East Cardinal mark which is the sign to swing in to the channel into Howth harbour. This is the north end of Dublin Bay and I’ve been here before, over a year ago, coming in for respite from 30 knot headwinds.

Yarning His Way to Brittany (photo - Guy Boily)

This has been an easier passage – a smaller boat but favourable wind. Michel is still grinning because we read the tide and wind well and made good time. We have to weave through the inner channel markers with the tide low but we’re tied up in time to get up the road for a single Sunday night pint.

Jean and Edith join us before too long but they don’t want a drink. They hugged the Mull of Kintyre in Delphinea and had a bumpier ride to start with. Nobody plans to move on tomorrow.

It blew hard as promised though Monday and Tuesday. We plot and plan, looking for the right relationship of current and wind-changes. We consider a short hop to Arklow, a longer one round the corner to Kilmore, rather than the track into Milford Haven. We want to be west to take advantage of a forecast wind shift.

You can only plan so far. It’s certain we’re going nowhere for 2 days. We eat cassoulet chez Jean and Edith. The burgundy is out and political discussion is permitted. Michel is passionate on the Tibetan cause and the principal that every small thing you can do to keep the issue under discussion is worthwhile. Jean is more sceptical.

But it’s going to blow up again soon. Tragic, we’ll just have to go into the city. Michel plays the part of the hard skipper. We’re going to take advantage of a short lull in the wind to crane the boat out. After lying for some time in Stornoway and Vagur, Faroes, there are signs of enough weed and growth to slow us down. It’s also a chance to check all is well below – the out-drive of the diesel engine, the rudder and the engine cooling water intake. If we’re good boys, and get the job done fast, we might get out to play.

It’’s as efficient as it gets. The hoist is booked. Michel drives her over and the crew pull string and chat to the workers of Howth sailing club. Kevin is wiry as Guy and myself and swings on the hoist like an acrobat. We have to be careful the lifting straps don’t foul the sail-drive (business end of the propulsion). An error here and our transit south could be seriously delayed.

I realise that Bonnie is spelled with the i and e when I gaze at her name as she hangs in mid air. There’s a gasp as Michel sees the amount of mussels, barnacles and weed growth that must be causing friction as she moves through the water. We’ve done well to get her moving so fast on the way down. We’re going to notice a difference.

I connect to the internet, here on board and get some advice from mates who know Dublin. Lawrence Tulloch, a Shetland storyteller and lover of fiddle tunes, names Slattery’s, Capel St. I find it, and it’s off the main tourist route, a band are tuning up.

But I eat borscht along the road. Rather than Irish stew. I’ve earned this deviation because I’ve been an efficient tourist so far. I saw the Jack B Yeats paintings in the 20th century Irish Section of the National Gallery and I’ve been to the fabled world of Trinity College Library. It wasn’t only the Book of Kells. The associated books were equally interesting though the magnificence was toned down a shade. Upstairs, botanical drawings are displayed in cases under racks and racks of leather volumes . The wooden ladders to the higher shelves are worn by the toes of centuries of scholars.

Jitke joins me there. We have a Polish beer and the Czech girl pronounces it not bad. She is one of a gang of scholars and translators and lovers of language and literature I met in the city of Olomouc. She lives with an Irishman. What does she miss? I expect to hear of bread and beer and pork done in a particular way but Jitke misses her friends and family. I think of all the Dublin people settling in different European cities. The Lewis men and women missing the chat of home. Though, yes, Jitke says, Irish wit and banter is pretty similar in tone to Czech. The widespread passion for books.

She takes me further off the track. This used to be her local. The Guiness is as smooth as I’ve tasted, cheaper too and the music in the corner is not strained. It’s not a performance. It’s just part of the pub. I look around, a few pints in and conversations are happening in all directions. Jitke guides me to the station.

It’s not over yet. There’s another yarn on the train home to Howth. A Scots guy and his Dublin mate. The Scot’s a traveller. He homed in to a Mexican girlfriend, lives a few blocks away. But Nepal was good. Mountains. That was a place you could go back to.

I get home to find the boys still up. They didn’t find music in Howth. We have a small one of 15 year old Islay. Possible that we’ll be at sea this time tomorrow.

Arrival Scillies… 13 September 2008

You blink as you sense an activity. Two guys up. I did a longish stint before handing over to Michel. A skipper needs the last watch. He’ll want to do the pilotage into St Mary’s. it’s not dark now. No stars, through the hatch. Looks like sun again. Fine morning. The boat is still under sail but slower. Her cloth was well powered up during the night. Carrying us through a few contrary seas against a long groundswell. Wind and sea held few surprises – pretty much as we plotted. So we didn’t need our safety margin . We planned a few hours grace in case steeper seas slowed us or the tide didn’t kick in as predicted. So we cruised slowly round St Mary’s fishing as we went.

Guy dismantles the carburretor of our infernal combustion engine for the dinghy

As ever the key to a longer passage is the time you set sail, to get the best advantage of wind and tide to get you down the road. This one’s worked for us. But, better than that, we’re all grinning because the sailing was exhilarating and the dolphins rode with us for hours. I dozed between catching the September sun striking the picture-book lighthouses. These Isles are not as awesome as the bare coasts of Ouessant but there’s plenty of wrecks punctuating the soundings on the chart.

Michael pretends to be amazed as I stir. Monsieur Ian, he says, and in French, tell me exactly what it is you are doing aboard this ship?

This is not Stornoway? I reply, managing that far in one of his languages. He shakes his head. Scillies.

Too much wine, I say. Not for the first time. Last time this happened I woke in Buenos Aries.

Two creel boats buzz around. They both carry mizzens (steadying sail carried at the rear of the boat) as the Danish fishermen nearly always do. Beside the lighthouses they make the arrival scene an Alfred Wallis painting. I plotted the distance off the coast at St Ives at one point of the two night sail. You think of W S Graham, Greenock’s rep among Hepworth and Nicholson et al. You think of the natural connections along the sea-roads. I was told Dublin has a significant collection of St Ives artists and so of course does Stromness at the Pier.

Maybe we’ll see auxiliary or mainsails soon on larger ships. They won’t be squares or triangles. And of course they’ll be carbon this or Kevlar that.

There was no sail on the trawler I altered course for last night. A significant shift, as dictated by the Rule, enough to get our skipper out of his bunk at speed. He saw the electric plot, observed me swing back to the line and returned to bed a happy man. His yacht, small enough for open water crossings, was right down there, clearing St George’s Channel.

So the fiction of our plot done in the harbour of departure, internet-assisted, became the history marked by a dotted red trace of a sensor. Fact summarised by pixels.

This is another fact, the last noted in my personal log of this stage of our voyage.

0940. Nil result on sea-bass or mackerel or pollack or coalfish or anything else from the line our skipper trolled. Thus the breakfast/lunch/supper consisted of Irish lamb’s liver marinaded in parsley, olive-oil and Tabasco, fried with smoked bacon, onions and apple slices.

Another crunch question…  15 September 2008

Michel said it, direct, in English. It was night-time about the change of watch. On this boat, like many good ones, it’s not done to the second. Considerate crew trusts that it’s all going to work out, like an average speed. Or maybe cool guys just aren’t that bothered. We all know we can wake anyone when we need to. If there’s anything worrying or we just need a rest.

Our sister ship Delphinea is in there somewhere, sailing well, Dublin to Scilly

You’ve studied all the information, watched predictions of the passing of fronts. Talked to the charming lady who took her Hallberg Rassey (quality Swedish-built yacht) to Ouessant last year and Norway the year before.

She confirms her plan is on the right lines from her own knowledge of many passages down the Irish coast, often towards Brittany. Yes, leave a good bit before the slack, stem a bit of tide at first, out here where it’s not so strong. That way you’ll get the full push when it matters. Andy, you know that down off Arklow it doesn’t flood for 6 and ebb for the same but more like 7 hours one way 5 the other. So you want to get that one right.

And yes she agrees, that westerly, even when it’s strong, should flatten the swell of 2 days of gale pretty quickly.

At the butcher’s the guy who sells us well-hung beef and cuts them to the required thickness, he tells us a boat based here in Howth went down in Biscay last night. A training boat. Lot of folk aboard but they were all lifted off safe. These guys came here for their stuff.

We can see why as he slices the best quality lamb’s liver Guy has seen. Works out a discount on a whole piece of sliced ham. We’re a proper ship being provisioned. We’re planning on 2 nights at sea and food is important to guy, Michel and me.

We did as we planned and it worked for us. Some favour “Cotweb”, I go for “Windfinder”. We needed a more specific forecast than the BBC or general inshore picture to make a decision on whether to aim to go the whole way to Scillies in one bite. We went for it. We’re there now, in St Mary’s harbour and the Wi-fi works on the mooring. The ship’s undersides, slippery again, slid south.

When the engine went off and our boat speed was still more than we needed to catch the next wind shift, Michel relaxed. That’s when he asked the question.

Ian, why did you come with us? You didn’t know us?

En Francais, he says when I start to answer.

I thought I could only make myself understood in French after 3 and before 4 glasses of wine. But I also remember these lucid moments on the night shift on a coastguard watch. Between the fatique, the lartness. Clarity. Wasn’t that the virtue the young Joyce or his character Stephen Hero sought in Portrait of the Artist ….. Claritas

I tell him I trusted the feeling. He said the same with him and Guy. And we have a mutual friend we both respect. Uisdean brought us together. He’s the same with everyone, a guy who hangs around the harbour, a doctor, an admiral – they’re all the same to him. For me that’s important. So if Uisdean thinks you guys are sound…… And I did want to sail to Brittany.

Michel nods. He’s heard enough. He passes me the hand-cream, asks me to remember to rub plenty in. He noticed I wasn’t looking after them too well.

So now the engine is resting. Guy has done wonders. The temperature and revs are steady and the fuel system is clean. Bonnie was plagued with mechanical problems all the road north. She’s in fine fettle now, sailing at 6 knots steady and trying to nudge 7 at times. I plot the course on paper to back up the electronics. We’re doing 6.1 knots steady over the ground. That’s the distance from one fixed position to the next, the miles we’re really covering. It’s all we need.

Guy is going to corner the world market in dolphin shots. He’s grinning from ear to ear like a happy angler. I look at the back of his Nikon and see he’s revitalized every photoshop cliché because anyone can see from this sequence that there is no intervention. Guy has found a secure stance and an anti-vibration lens. He’s caught the orchestration of 3 mammals leaping together and the splashes made across the high swell of St George’s Channel. The gannets are plunging. A Concarnea trawler is blazing blue.

The wind’s west and we’re surging along. The dolphins stay with us, We’re fast enough to play with. The boys have these big sirloins inside us and we go the whole way. I put the Peatbog Faeries on the sound system and the brassy gallus riffs head out over the waters. Out as a counter-rhythm to the fiery fine-reaching of a 30ft Dufour that’s not long had her arse wiped.

Last leg…22 September 2008

We fail to catch a sea-bass en route, trolling slowly as we anchor under sail in the lee of Houat. This is an Island that holds memories for Michel and it’s the perfect stop en route to the Loire. Michel makes a show of throwing the last of the supermarket bread over the side. I’d thought of keeping it till we were in fresh water with ducks on the water. That will be one more day, if we get our calculations right.

Lorient spire

We do catch mackerel but Guy has cooked chicken so we leave them for tomorrow. Tomorrow brings a red sunrise and we have good sailing towards St Nazaire. We watch the buoys on the water and see them tilt from one way to the other. It’s the moment of slack water when river current will flow with the wind for a short time. When we’re at the crucial part of the channel, the tide will begin to carry us up. We need to be all these miles up the river for high water, when we can enter the sidewater that will be Bonnie’s last stop this year.

An Aberdeen-registered gas carrier goes up before us. The strong breeze is now making the waters stand as the tide gives us a good 4 to 5 knot push. I’ve been revising lights and shapes shown by different vessels.

I realise the tug at the stern of the Aberdonian is flashing us. One. Starboard. The ship has gone aground and the tug is trying to get the angle that will pull him off. I look again at the electronic chart. There is no water to our starboard side. We have to go decisively to port. But there’s another big ship being towed at the port side of the channel. We slow the motor but it’s coming downstream. Only solution is to give it some revs on the engine Guy has lavished attention on and go hard to port then up the middle between the two.

That’s what we do and it works. Another small boat does the same. The Aberdonian is going nowhere fast, We look astern to see the mud churning. A second tug joins her. This incident of course leads to days of banter. The Scotsmen blocking the river or the piratical French tugs causing havoc to their allies from the north. Every story has different viewpoints.

There are fishing traps at the muddy edges of the channels further upstream. I wonder what they’re catching. I sense the quiet emotion in Michel and Guy, something in the grip on the tiller, the uncoiling of the mooring warps. They are occupied in driving the boat out of the stream into that narrow channel. So I photograph the reception committee. Michel’s family and friends and grandchildren are out in force, waving welcome banners.

The evening and the next few days go by in a blur of delicacies, slow sips of good wine and stories. There is a bottle of local Loire valley wine from 1981. Brought round by a friend whose father made it. Sunday roast and a supper of oysters.

On Monday we drive to the boatyards and flake away sails and prepare the boat for the lift-out. A mate of Michel’s brings a trailer for all the gear. It will be a total clear out. While we wait for the tractor with its hydraulic lifting trailer, we chat to fisherman working the very edge of the channel we navigated. They lift a net from time to time and scoop out shrimps. A rosy man tells us he measures his catch by how many pounds of butter it will take to fry them. That’s about 4 packets worth.

Too late, I think of the mackerel we caught but did not eat. They would have done well for bait but the boat’s fridge has been off for a day and they’re too far gone. I feel the weight of our small crime like the chill of late September in the breeze. When Guy phones home via Skype that night he finds it’s 2 degrees below zero in Quebec.

We’re planning the next adventure, in my boat this time, if I can get all the jobs done over the winter. The hospitality continues. We see a mill on another river. Banter with the lock-keeper. She will be Michel and Christiane’s neighbour when they’ve done the renovation.

Michel’s mate of 40 years standing has driven all the boat gear to store here, in the huge building. He brings us back to the converted farm, prepares food for us, shows us how the thousands of trees he planted over 20 years are developing. Talks us through the renovations, done with his visiting grandchildren in mind.

I think of the years of building, renovating, maintaining in my own life in my own distant home island. How there came a time when it was all just too much of my life. It’s that chill in the wind again. And yet the next day we’re picking grapes for a few hours at a family run vineyard and eating like lords again and sipping the best products of the Saumur region winery. It’s a bit like bringing the peats home in Lewis. But the regional specialities differ.

The shrimp fishers have told us that yes, sea-bass still come that far on the tide. So we probably had a better chance of catching one within 100 metres of Bonnie’s berth than anywhere along her Breton or Cornish or Irish route.

It’s another subject for the banter that will have to continue by e mail or phone for a while. Till the next one. We might be too far north to have a chance of a bass but I’m told they still catch halibut around the many Faroese islands that Michel and me have still to visit.

A word about food…25 September 2008

A word about food. Some would call this adventure-sailing. A 30 ft boat with 2 smelly males returning from Faroes at the tail end of the season. Even the stray male cat picked up at Stornoway feels the chill at the beginning and ends of days. October is nearer than August.

At the Island of Houat, a half day sail from Lorient, the bay is dressed with winging anchor lights. People who may have not used their boats so much during the year realise they’d better get a last week-end in. The long beach which would not disgrace Tolsta, Lewis has a scattering of sunbathers and one swimmer. But the temperature dips before the sun does.

The Free Tibet flag

Guy dehydrates good meat stews for ice-camping expeditions. He has not done that for this trip. The standard boat standby is no longer corned beef but pasta bake. If you have an oven. If you don’t it’s pasta in a bought sauce livened up with some chopped onions and peppers. This trip, since Stornoway, has been a pattern of 200 mile legs and 2 night landfalls. Most of our food has been bought and eaten fresh. It’s difficult for Guy as a Cilliac (wheat allergy) to make sure everything is safe for him. On the boat we clean the breadcrumbs off the knife before it’s placed in butter.

I made Cullen Skink with the fine quality undyed smoked haddock bought from the van at Port Ellen. Guy makes a 3 day chilli with 3 beans, ground beef and plenty garlic. We have caught a few mackerel at different points along the route and one lythe (pollack) at the Scillies. Guy cooks perfect rice on one of our 2 burners and I introduce variations of kedgeree, with some smoked mackerel or salmon between the fresh fish, marinated in lime, olive oil and parsley.

When we berthed at a small marina across the harbour from the big docks at Lorient, Guy baked his own bread, using the oven aboard Delphinea. Corn-meal, rice-flour and millet are mixed with linseed and a yeast mixture with molasses sugar. But he’s also built up a relationship with the bakers in a shop that sells nothing he can eat. The bakery frontage is built from reclaimed boards. The breads have the same look of realist painting but they’re not more than an hour out of the oven. And this is nearly closing time.

The artisan baker used to be a business professional – an accountant perhaps, who had traveled a parallel track to Guy. Both men decided that success was not such a successful way of living. So Guy refuses to sell his few acres to property developers and the ex-accountant smiles and has conversations with the queue of customers who appreciate that something more than yeast has risen the bread.

There is an implicit respect for the 2 adventurers who left this harbour 5 months before. They’ve sailed between England and Ireland, between the Scottish mainland and the Inner and Outer Hebrides. They’ve crossed in one boat with a limping engine to Suderoy, Faroes then joined the second boat in the expedition to voyage to the Westmann Islands and Iceland. And back. All these adventures of engine trouble and charts falling off the screen and tows and repairs have happened before this cat did the pierside jump at SY.

All these crew-changes. Lorient registered boats have made plenty in my home town. But the offshore fleet is small now and the big vessels are lying idle. Small boats set larger and larger numbers of traps to cover their costs. We had to dive and dart between them in the hard slog against the wind, from Oeussant to Lorient. Michel wonders how any of them make a living. Maybe it explains why one of their crewman makes a pretty unmistakable international gesture back at me when I attempt a comradely wave.

That and the huge fleets of pleasure boats, moored all along this coast. Most of them will not go as far as Scillies, far less Faroes. That and the Free Tibet flag might explain why the baker throws in a loaf of his special fruit bread for Michel and me. Michel is looking content. He eats only a handful of the steaming old style baguette as we saunter for a beer. We take Guy’s chilli, 3rd day in and at its best, with the bread, across to Delphinea. The ambience is more thoughtful than celebratory. It’s possible Edith and Jean might not live together still, after sailing together for half a year.

Next day, Guy catches up with photos and filing and his own blog (www.voilierguy.canalblog.com ). Michel takes me on the tour. The layers of trade and war are to be seen in the citadel at the entrance to the port. We walk to it and see the splendours and models of the engineering works that went into massive shipbuilding.

We look across to the sad remnants of the submarine pens and the carbon fibre and Kevlar spars of a new kind of shipbuilding. We call by a side street that still looks like the ones in the French Higher handouts and confirm that all the Bonnie team will be happy to accept a supper invite. Pierre and Pat live here and Pierre was on the expedition, sailing with Jean as far as Tobermory.

The time lost in repairs and diversions amounted to too much for Pierre to continue. He has his own boat project. He is a Breton who lived elsewhere and had to come back. He tells me about his grandfather who was French Navy and his father who worked for some time in the rebuilding of Germany before also having to return.

Pat has heard that Michel and his team like their food. She sautés 4 types of mushrooms including ceps and chanterelles. She roasts du foie de mouton. Good liver is a sought-after cut in France. They would have appreciated the Howth (Irish) butcher’s care with his slicing and wrapping of the same meat. The firm potatoes are of course fried in butter.

We have brought Bourgogne pinot noir and of course some of that thrice daily bread. Guy has brought his own. We laugh a lot. Pat is curious how we got on, 3 men in a tight space. She asks me direct. I tell her it’s a cool boat. We consult together on when to sail. Everyone says his piece. Of course Michel is the skipper but he listens to his team. Guy is the ace on fixing things. I work out tides, Michel does the same and then we check we have the same result.

There is now a notebook full of hours before and after high waters. So far it’s worked. Michel says in 2 days the key is the Low Water at the entrance to the Loire. We must enter exactly on the slack to be sure of working the flood up the river and we need the high water to enter the sidewater where Bonnie will be moored.

We’re given free rein of internet and phone. Pierre gives me an insight into a larger expedition than the one I picked up fifty yards from my front door. A larger cast in its opening stages.

It’s a subdued send-off in the morning. Jean will wait a while before taking his boat towards Bordeaux to lay her up. Edith looks sad at times. There must be a strain in being only two on board and now only two left in Lorient. There must be a strain on all these months of winds and navigational decisions. We’re a bit slower on Bonnie too, ready to sail but nobody’s been up to the bakers today.

Far from the Shiants 27 September 2008

Speaking as a navigator
guessing between
a prile of tidal periods
I can understand
in retrospect
now that the hull’s been released
everything but
the suddenness.

Even the Mull
North Channel
streams south of Arklow
St George’s Channel
all allow
a grace of slack.

But I remember
3 hours into the passage
warning whorls at the Sound of Shiants
where the blue men hold the boat
and test the eloquence of all aboard.
And if they’re satisfied they slack their grasp.
We thought we were through.

Now that we’re
lifted out for winter
and separated
from our ship
even the skipper
has difficulty
in dealing
with the freedom of a world
that now seems too large.

© Ian Stephen, 2008

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