A Book of Death and Fish (31 page)

We can’t evade the difficult subject of the deaths of boats. After these years in the Coastguard Service, of course I think of this boat and that boat. Ones we lost. But there were people aboard, too. I could intone the names of the vessels, over the years, like a prayer. But it wouldn’t change a thing. Reports have been written and cases closed.

So I’m talking here about boats that were broken up. Incidents where there was no-one aboard. So it was more of a matter for insurers, if they were insured, rather than life-saving services.

They do say that if a vessel is seriously damaged, by accident or storm, then a total loss may be an easier situation than a partial one.

Even as the hospital porter, you could see that this could also apply to the human body. It might not have been a good thing if the owner of that liver I’d once burned, had somehow pulled through. The torture in the mind, which had led to the terrible bodily injury, would be prolonged. But I also know that you can write off a body too soon. I once met a cheery soul being discharged from the Lewis Hospital. His offspring told me that I’d met their father already. A month back, I’d wheeled him in for an emergency resuscitation, then made tea for his grown-up bairns.

The consultant had indeed got his heart beating and the air circulating. He advised that the old fellow was not likely to survive more than twenty-four hours. But that would be a mercy in itself because it would give their sister a chance to say goodbye. Four whole weeks later, here was that same old fellow telling me a parting tale, from the wheelchair. He told me about another man who came very close to stations with names in an unknown tongue.

‘Did you hear about the Lewisman who got a job on the trains in Wales? He was to call out these long names of stations they stopped at. He couldn’t manage that. So what he called out was this: If there’s anybody here for there they’d better get out now cos this is it.’

There was light in this old cove’s eyes all right as he delivered that one. His voice was strong enough. Good job no-one had written this man off. Similarly, I wouldn’t want to be the one to make a final decision on whether to operate on a failing vessel or to put her out of her misery.

Remember the old
Peace and Plenty
. I was already patching the patches, when she was in my care, back when I first got together with Gabriele. In the following fast years of the new career, and the state of fatherhood and the building of extensions to a solid Coastguard house, her care was neglected.

In the case of a human being, it would be difficult to judge that one particular life was more worth more effort in its saving, than another. In the case of a historic vessel you could make a strong argument for putting your resources into the
Peace and Plenty
.

She had that full rounded stern. Just looking at her, you’d know she would rise to big water or jabble. Very beamy, not very deep in the water so she could be pulled up and down the shore. Something sharper towards the bow then fairing out and coming in, not too fast, to that ample backside.

The records showed that she was built by the man who swam ashore with the rope from the
Iolaire
. She was eighteen feet overall by seven-foot six in the beam. You could see the engine mounts and the cutlass bearing so she must have once had an inboard. Sure enough, there was the bronze seacock that would have allowed seawater to circulate and cool the head of the motor. Maybe a little petrol Stuart-Turner. Bonny, dinky thing. Designed and made by British craftsmen in durable materials to give you year after year of trouble. Or the Kelvin Poppett. Since petrol isn’t nearly dangerous enough to carry on a boat, you have two tanks and a changeover. Two lots of fuel taps and two breeds of explosive vapour. You started her on petrol and switched to the cheaper paraffin when she was hot.

There was a rudder still fixed on rusting pins. She was painted up in white, greys and black. I’d just stand back to appreciate her from all angles. The fellow who sold her to me didn’t really want to part with her. ‘If you can save her, she’s yours,’ he said. That’s love. Or maybe he just needed the cash to pour into the next vessel he was already in love with. It happens.

I looked closely but, by then, I’d given my pal Mairi a bit of help with a few repairs. Enough to guess it might be easier to build a new boat. ‘What about the hysterical society?’ I suggested. There were very few surviving examples of this type of craft because they were launched from hard shores and worked to death.

But plans for a maritime museum got a knockback. Eventually they would build flats instead, on the site by the harbour. You already know I took her on. My coastguard colleagues and my fishing mates gave me a hand. Their repairs kept her in use, which is the best way to preserve her. A dry wind will crack the shell of a wooden boat open in a day or two if she’s left exposed, on land.

When it all became too much I knew enough to keep her under cover. When she was dry and the generations of paint burned off, it was clear that said paint had played a structural rather than decorative role, for quite some years. I thought there might be enough forensic evidence, to recreate her shape. The shape of a clinker boat is all made up of planks that were flat originally but cut in convex and concave curves. So there’s not a single straight line amongst them.

A boatbuilder friend – a guy I got arrested with once, helping to Keep Nato Out – he gave me a hand. This cove ran a wind-powered workshop across the dark side of the Minch. I got him to take the shapes, transfer the lines of the planks. The original keel was still sound. The plank shapes were preserved. I suppose that’s a bit like rich guys getting their bodies frozen. Who knows where the human spirit lives but the physical structure could be revived once medical science had advanced sufficiently to solve the problems of ageing and disease.

When you saw the whole set of curves for one side of the boat, these were enough to tell the full story. Everything was in the flat but all the information necessary to reproduce all three dimensions was in the cut
of these planks. That’s an engineer’s approach to timber construction. It’s a set of components which have to be joined together. The method of assembly should consider the possible need to dismantle some parts of the construction to repair or replace those parts most likely to wear out first. I don’t know if human bodies are built like that.

I learned that clinker build beats carvel construction. The latter is when heavier planks are fixed flush on a pre-built skeleton of oak. The former Viking method has a better strength to weight ratio, up to a certain scale of vessel. In Norse-type boatbuilding, the norm in the Scottish islands, the cut of the overlapping planks produces the shape. Boats used to come across the North Sea, like flatpacks, generations before the Rana boat kits were brought in to the UK. Ikea before its time. I wanted to commission my mate to build another
Peace and Plenty
. Diesels were getting lighter. But I was outvoted. The democratic family unit. For about half the cost of building a small open wooden boat, we could buy a yacht big enough to go places and sleep aboard. Sounds convincing, put like that.

But when it came to getting a boat with a lid, I couldn’t see beyond clinker construction. All through Scandinavia, they build simple yachts like that, the Nordic Folkboat. They were all to the same plan, for racing, but it all got going just before a series of events which put development of recreational sailing vessels on the shelf for a while.

The three main Folkboat countries suffered different fates during World War Two. Norway was invaded, Sweden was neutral. Denmark had a unique position, in being protected from British invasion but allowed to keep her own government. The independent administration allowed the Nazis to outlaw and subsequently deport members of the Communist Party (twenty-two deaths in a concentration camp) but refused to enact laws against the Jewish population. This legal step was of course the first move which would have inevitably led to deportation, by train to a camp at the edge of a town in what used to be Poland.

The sacrifice of these political opponents might have been on purely practical grounds. The administration had to give something to the occupying force. Like in yachts, where you have sacrificial anodes. You spend
a little time and money installing zinc anodes in strategic places. So the corrosion will affect the weakest metal first. Steel will last longer before it’s attacked. Bronze should look after itself anyway.

Post-war, the Folkboat class flourished. Of course Britain won a dispensation to build them with a significant difference to everybody else’s. Smooth carvel hulls so you could sleep on them without such a loud rippling on the overlapping planks of the original clinker design. The addition of cabin tops, of various shapes and sizes, ruined the streamlined sweep of elegance but provided a little more space for cruising sailors. They were no longer Nordic Folkboats, in class, so their sail numbers have to say FB rather than F.

I looked at a good example of one authentic Nordic Folkboat. I brought along a friend, a little shorter than me. When he laid down on the third bunk it was clear that our fast-growing Anna wouldn’t be able to stretch out to sleep on this boat, if she carried on sprouting. Gabriele was a bit wider than before but she hadn’t gotten any shorter. So I searched and found a sturdy example of a British cruising Folkboat.

We were still looking at clinker construction, because overlapping, lighter planks are a very good thing in a 25ft sailing yacht. This cabin was kept low but was longer than in the original design, so you had three usable bunks and a simple interior.

Those of you with a sound grasp of physics or who have been listening instead of switching off when technical information enters a story – you will be aware that the speed of any displacement craft (i.e. one that floats in, rather than planes on top of, H
₂
O, salt or fresh) relates to its length. So if you have enough sail to get the boat leaning and the top is longer than the waterline, you can go faster.

Beyond a certain number of degrees, the turbulence will slow the boat and more than cancel out any advantage. But, up to that point, she’ll like to lean. Of course you don’t need to bother with all this if you just install a decent diesel with enough horsepower to drive her at a nice easy cruising speed. She’ll not go quite as fast as these occasional little bursts in fair breeze but I’m willing to argue that the average speed, over a distance, will nearly always be better.

The British Folkboat,
Polaris
, was out on a mooring in Portree harbour. Her Yanmar looked like it hadn’t done much running – a bad thing, I thought. Not much detail about that in the paperwork. Only miles of notes about bits of sailing gear and navigation aids which might have come from the original Ark if Captain Noah was into electronics. There was a recent Decca navigator which gave a display in lat and long so you didn’t have to do a fiddly interpolation on a Decca chart.

I changed the filters while my boatbuilder mate dealt with wire and string. We bled her together and we were off. There wasn’t a lot of wind. I nursed the Yanmar and we had a good push from the tide. We crossed the Minch, overnight, in good weather.

Next day, Gabriele and Anna came out for the gentle introduction. Conditions were squally. When she leaned over, we could stand up, vertical, in the cockpit.

‘Is she supposed to do this?’ Anna asked.

I said, ‘Well, you flashed up that website, showing them racing.’

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘That’s alright then.’

And it was.

But just to make sure, I had the mast craned off and we replaced every bit of wire and searched for weak links and had bits welded and spent plenty of time and money. We bought a crisp new foresail and, come spring, Anna and her pal provided the child labour to scrape and paint till she shone. We’d have her in good nick ready for the season. Of course I had to get the Yanmar out. That took a bit of jiggery-pokery, with improvised derricks.

Anna must have sensed I was quite keen to get into the innards of the squat little Japanese unit. ‘Will you be taking it to bed with you?’ she asked.

I would not call any of the tasks we completed, to revive the Folkboat, major surgery. But maybe all our hearts are partly divided, if we are honest. I still thought of the keel and the plank-shapes of the
Peace and Plenty,
stored more in hope than expectation.

It’s about a voyage. Well, no, it isn’t, it’s about an arrival. It’s about sailing up close to an island off an island, out from another island in the Uists. The Sound of Flodday. You know
Fraoch a Ronaigh
? An exile’s song, remembering the place names, the features on the landscape of that group of islands. Mapping them by moving the melody from one place name to the other. This is one of several Gaelic songs used to strong effect in a film. No, I don’t mean Talitha Mackenzie’s voice in
Zena, The Warrior Princess
. I’m thinking about a low-budget and very strange Scottish film with gory bits but without much of the blockbuster effect. Some very good performances though and of course excellent scenery. But I can’t remember the name of it, the director, or the names of the actors. That’s why documentation is important. Memory is suspect.

Tante Erika
was being navigated by Gabriele and me after dropping the offspring off in Lochmaddy. Anna had signed up for a week’s drama workshop in the studio theatre in Benpeculiar. We sailed out of the loch in moderate to poor visibility and met dense fog. It clung to us so we sailed blind up to the entrance to the loch, referring to a hand-held GPS in the cockpit. I don’t think I would have trusted Decca that far.

We said we’d only go in there if we had a hundred metres visibility. The Yanks could decide to go to war and flick the switch on all the satellites. Maybe fifty would do. Metres, not satellites. It’s one of several anchorages known as Acarsaid Fhallaidh – a hidden place. There’s a gap between rocks and you don’t see it till you’re up to it. The way you’d think to go – that’s not navigable – rocks everywhere, just under the surface. But the narrow way has enough depth any state of tide and no obstructions. Like a parable.

The Uist boys had told me not to worry even if the pilot book is a bit guarded. You’ll be fine. We were. We went in to find good holding in stiff mud. And then we looked around. The fog was moving. A tumbling burn appeared on the lit shoulder of a hill. And there he was.

Another of our icons. A proud and independent head. I couldn’t count how many points. Just call it a fine tall head on a hefty stag.

I think I told you I had to boil a head like that once, though not as fine as the live one we were observing. I had to chop the wood from old furniture and decayed roofs of outhouses. Once you got it to the boil, it wasn’t so bad to keep it going. I could get on with weeding the radishes and Webbs Curlies. But I’d to keep going back to keep the water boiling so the fur and meat fell off the skull. It wasn’t that much of a rest for my foot. I’d have been as well on the hill.

The romanticism of the sight before us, made me think of Scott. I’d brought
Waverley
along on this trip. I wanted to decide for myself if the superstar author of the day had indeed taken a romantic line on the tragedy of the ’45 rebellion.

You could argue he invented the historical novel. First, he composed long, rhythmic poems that sent hundreds of people, rich enough to travel, out from their drawing rooms to the Trossachs.

He was also the guy quoted by a landscape consultant, employed by one of the world’s largest suppliers of aggregates, to prove that blasting away a whole small mountain on the east coast of Harris would be no great loss to the world. He maybe saw it on a poor day. Our mist is kind of wet when you’re walking or sailing in it, rather than looking out from a castle window.

We had just navigated down the indented east coast of North Harris. That’s Gabriele and me. Sir Walter wasn’t really with us. We’d explored an inlet or two, tight channels between reefs, taking you into good pools under these grey hills. One navigator’s log could say ‘impressive’ and another ‘intimidating’ when you were looking at the same geological faultline. A high fold, formed by extreme heat.

The same observations are open to conflicting interpretation. Take the Crusades. These reformed Viking raiders, settled in fertile Orkney. Some
of them were converted and spent some of the great wealth they’d gained, from the taken lands, on expeditions to the Holy Land. So they saved their souls. Or they caused havoc on land as they had on sea. Depending on your standpoint.

I was getting the feeling that Scott was inevitably and profitably (in more ways than one) caught between the classical liking for order and an attraction to mountain chasms. There’s quite a tendency for some of his characters to leap over them. The chasms, I mean, not the classical buildings. He was simply having a classical day when he witnessed the east side of Harris. Roineabhal was under dense cloud and all these complex shades of grey were lost on him. On that occasion. Next day it could have been different.

If we look to science we may learn that the suggestion of east Harris being reminiscent of a lunar landscape has a sure foundation. Although Lewisian gneiss prevails, Roineabhal itself is composed of anorthosite – hence the proposal to remove it and use it for making motorways. This is in fact a predominant rock in the samples gained from the Apollo expeditions. Trust me, I’m telling you a story.

To take it a bit further, let’s look to the arts. Can I inform you, if you don’t know already, that Stanley Kubrick composed his shots depicting the landscape of Jupiter, in
2001, A Space Odyssey,
from that of Harris?

A man made a fortune and made himself bankrupt in building his dream castle in stone. (But probably not anorthosite.) The same man produced dialogue which printed the voice of less privileged characters with respect and fidelity to their Scots voices. Not just for colour.

The easts and wests of islands. My olman had a foot in both camps. So he could see how all that luxuriance of machair and storm beaches on our wild west side needs the more plain heaps of lunar boulders that comprise the east side of Harris. The bursts of colour shining from that grey can be intense. Like the bright maroon garnets you’ll sometimes find in the rocks. I was maybe beginning to understand a bit more of what the olman wove into that cloth, the stuff he made when the markets were fickle.

Let’s not forget the west side’s rugged shores are savage to a mariner’s eye. Mangersta is brutal. And the Barvas navigators would only take the
risk if there was documentary evidence that a fishing was to be had. Think of all these boulders strewn across the alkaline green strip back from the surf-line. The power that drove them there. And then there’s Arnol, the murder-village. All these stones that were an asset if you were building dykes and blackhouses. But my olman would still tease our
Siarach
relations. Aye, he said, the good lord must have been cutting it fine on the Saturday night. The Sabbath was fast approaching so he gathered all the rubble left after making the world and dumped the lot at Arnol.

Strange how the bristling tension that seems to have become a background hum to your relationship, in place of passion, can ease without warning. The strain came off Gabriele aboard
Tante Erika
. Even after our daughter left the ship, we were easy together, most of that trip.

I was beginning to think I could get used to the way speed is bound to vary when you’re indulging in this sailing carry-on. One or two days we even achieved a better average than the rebuilt Yanmar could give, without busting a gut and devouring diesel. I knew we could keep things secure for at least a bit longer. You just have to take it from one tide to another.