Not getting wrecked

I wish I had read this post a couple of months ago. Reader, you cannot be too-well moored.

Time traveller?

Who is Alex Boote?

Rescue

My wife bellowed, then shot past the window, accelerating so fast that she assumed a reddish tint. I followed her out, and found her standing in front of the gate which guards our neighbour's yard, faced off against our very angry cat. Behind the gate, a very frightened juvenile starling huddled against a wall, shivering. No wonder: apart from being soaked in cat saliva, each and every tail-feather had been extracted from a now-naked behind.

Manouevering carefully to keep myself between the bird and any effective cover, I raced to catch it, expecting at any moment to be overtaken by the assassin (now using the cover of a high wall, to attempt a flanking manoeuvre). The little starling hopped and fluttered away from me for a few yards, then became hopelessly entangled in a dwarf pine - ouch! Seconds later, it was secured (in a former cat-carrier, the one we used for our cat (Sox) until he developed the muscle to simply shoulder his way through the door).

~

Google got me some key bird facts: starlings need lots of protein, and birds generally tail-feathers regrow in 4-6 weeks, their loss being a common defensive mechanism. I read that minus tail-feathers, flight should still possible (which made sense - not much survival value in sacrificing a tail if you have to walk away afterwards). Excellent news.

~

Our violently shivering little patient enjoyed a couple of hours resting and warming up in protective custody (our shed); fortunately for its peace of mind, it couldn't see our rascally cat as he tried, in succession, to tunnel through shed floor, to pry the doors open, to deglaze the windows. The would-be murderer was preparing to peel back the roof when I removed the patient to my car, and took off at speed, braking hard once or twice to shake any furry fiends from the undercarriage, and following up with a few hand-brake turns, just in case he was pursuing in another vehicle.

In a quiet lay-by between a small river and some exceptionally beautiful parkland, I put the cat box on the ground and opened the door for a flight test. With no homes close by, I could assume there weren't too many lurking housecats, and with plenty of bare ground, a flightless bird could easily be recaptured, while a flying one could soon reach good cover and good hunting. There was a momentary pause: then, with an explosion of beating wings, the patient shot from the box, and made an almost immediate lift off, climbing in a straight and steady line to a perch in a nearby a tree. The thrill of flight was amazing, as if I had taken to the air myself. I stayed a minute at the tree-lined river bank, enjoying the golden light of early sunset on the mass fresh green foliage and the warmth of a June evening; and then I drove home, to be sulked at by my rascally cat.

The Wrecking of Briongloid

The call came late in the evening from an unfamiliar number; a voice I had never heard before told me that Briongloid (Irish for "dream") was hard aground the rocks outside her home cove. Several hurried phone calls later, I was on the road to the coast, racing through the darkness in convoy with a hastily press-ganged brother-in-law, trying beat the water to our precious boat, and take the salvage opportunity presented by the approaching high tide.

A few miles down the road, the dash was ended by another call; a crew from a local boatyard had got her off. Too late to do any good now, we turned for home.

~

The next day, I saw her. Back on the trailer she had left so recently, her bottom paint still brush-fresh, but her hull now sadly battered, the smooth swell of her hull now sadly gouged and scraped, with cracks that penetrated the hull below the waterline. The rudder, refurbished mere weeks ago, smashed to matchwood, only fragments remaining attached to the gudgeons and the tiller. Inside, the flexing of her hull had cracked the interior. Below, a sinister crack ran right around the keel.

Not good.

Columba livia domestica

Our resident lap-warmer and dog-scarer was waiting at the door for his breakfast, wearing his most winning "poor starving cat" expression. The performance would've been much more convincing if he had remembered to clean his blood-soaked face...

It wasn't his blood; our back garden looked as though a lunatic anatomist had been doing his dissection al fresco. A blood-mad killer he may be, but he does very neat work, tidily discarding offal like the stomach and intestines. On this morning, he had dismantled a racing pigeon (his largest prey to date, owing to an unfortunate local scarcity of Struthio camelus). The unfortunate bird (hailing from a loft in Dublin city) had been carefully butchered by his experienced claws, the wings neatly jointed, and the head set off to one side as a trophy.

The most interesting anatomical feature remaining was the rib cage, picked as clean as a whistle, which allowed me to get a really good look at the keel, a high thin ridge of bone which projects from the centre of the chest, running vertically along the centre line. The size of this bone (I estimate it stood about 30mm proud of the rib-cage proper) indicated the huge size of the (since devoured) muscles - the living engines that can propel a pigeon through the sky at 45 miles per hour, for many hundreds of miles. Fantastic creatures.

Warp Drive

Early on a sunny Saturday afternoon, Briongloid slipped her mooring carrying mainsail, genoa, and a crew of four, and rode a rushing ebb tide into open water; her first proper sail of the season. Sails filled by a gentle force 2-3 from west-north-west, we began our first long tack west, our goal the vast arena of Holeopen Bay some 10km distant - my first proper sailing of the season.

Actually, I have omitted one "sail" from our rig: cut from denim, with an unconvential forked shape, it flew between the spreaders and the mast-top on Briongloid's flag halyard. I mentioned this addition to my (shore-based) wife in a mid-course phone call. On being informed of the current location of her brother's fiancee's trousers (they had been soaked during a lively dinghy transfer), she did not praise my sailorly ingenuity (the hoisting was done with a nifty combination of a snap shackle and a loop in the halyard created with the very wonderful butterfly knot, something I happened to have learnt the previous week). Instead, my wife inquired what, if anything, now covered the nether regions of her brother's "intended".
Proudly, I told her that said regions were well protected, since the lady in question was now wearing my trousers; this didn't reassure my wife quite as much as I expected*.

Hard-wearing and fashionable, denim sails remain a strangely rare sight on racing yachts

The outward trip was unremarkable; a fading wind persuaded me to motor the last km or so, and we dropped anchor where we planned at about the time we expected, in the strange shelter of Holeopen Bay, whose sheer walls rise two hundred feet from the sea. Our course mark was an ancient watchtower perched dramatically at the head of the cliffs, and it was in a small hollow beside that tower than three figures (wives, infant) - impossibly tiny from our anchorage - appeared and waved us a welcome. After a late lunch - which sadly we could not share with the cliff-top watchers - we hoisted the mainsail and prepared to raise anchor.

It was as I moved pull up our anchor that a gust heeled us well to port, sending my brother-in-law (both on the foredeck) scrabbling for handholds; the wind was back, and stronger than before; I immediately amended my choice of foresail to working jib. Once underway, we enjoyed a brief glimpse through headland-traversing tunnels that give the Holeopen Bay its name, then turned to run east for home. The jib did little for us on this point of sail, and the Voice of Temptation began to whisper seductive suggestions; I cast a thoughtful gaze across the great blue sweep of sea about us, sizing up the frequency of the white caps which had begun to appear, the level of the chop. Then, I put a veteran dinghy sailor on the helm, briefed a veteran kayaker with iron forearms on the controlling of "kites", and assigned a near-novice sailor to help me on the foredeck.

Well, down came the jib, and up went the spinnaker, the huge mass of coloured fabric filling the sky above me as I crouched beneath it on the rolling foredeck. At first, it only half filled; then we dropped the mainsail, and Briongloid surged forwards. I have to admit that I was far from certain of a positive result - to a non-racer like myself, spinnakers are broach-inducing monsters, and my crew-briefing concentrated mostly on broach-avoidance and broach-survival. Briongloid, however, remained upright, and the great walls of Holeopen Bay shrank away with unprecedented speed, as our bow opened a long white gash across blue-black water. From bow to stern, we exchanged huge smiles. Briongloid's hull fairly sang now; she seemed to have donned seven-league boots. Faster and faster we went, our speed building until we began to surf.

It seemed too good to last; but it did last, and we rode that wind home on spinnaker alone, right to the cove mouth, a golden evening of fast and thrilling sailing with a crew of good friends, racing across an empty sea for nothing but the joy of it, a sail I'm likely to remember for some time.

The final turn to enter the cove required downing the magical spinnaker, my new favourite sail; but down it would not come. Inspection showed the halyard had a twist or two about the forestay. We let fly the leeward sheet to de-power our colourful, wonderful monster, but the wind still kept too much pressure aloft to let us get our sail back. To maintain steerageway, I had my crew raise the mainsail - and suddenly, the pressure eased, and down came the spinnaker. I'm thinking that the mainsail sheltered the spinnaker, easing the tension on the halyard. The working jib was still hanked on, so was raised again in moments, and soon we were sliding gently back into the river mouth, boat hook raised and ready.

* Wet trousers are a common calamity when dinghy transfers are as long and boisterous as ours tend to be; a cheerfully oblivious attitude to beating straight through tide races has contributed its share of wettings, too. I now make it a habit to carry at least one full change of clothes plus "emergency towel" in a dry bag, and it was these spares that I loaned out; it is a bit early in the spring for trouser-less sailing.

Re-Launch

In which the saga of the near-sinking is concluded

In brazen defiance of ancient nautical tradition, the owner of the boatyard called with the news no boat-owner expects: repairs complete on time and under budget! Briongloid would be returning to the water on exactly the promised day.

~

On a calm and sunny Saturday, I found Briongloid floating calmly on the river by the boatyard, rafted to a fishing launch which itself was moored at a pontoon, her bilges drier than I could remember them. The tide was just right for escaping down-river - dead low, with the mud banks high, dry, and - crucially - visible. I ached to get Briongloid and her deep fin keel safely away from this alien place; you can't beat a fin keel for sailing into the wind on the open sea, but the same keel is a fatal vulnerability when aground on a mud bank (because if the water level should drop further, the boat will simply fall over, then flood when the water returns).

Before I attempted to get Briongloid down river, I had first to board with her dinghy and crew. The initial obstacle was the ramp to the pontoon - on this unusually low tide, it was as steep as a domestic staircase but with low-profile battens in place of steps. To my crew (my parents, combined age 144) it had something of the aspect of the north face of the Eiger. I made the first trip with a deflated dinghy (45 kg) on my back, descending backwards with hands on rails, as if using a ladder, then repeated the trip twice more, guiding my crew individually. They were too polite to say it, but I'm morally certain that they were reconsidering their decision to start a family.

~

We putted off down river, dead centre in a narrow and unmarked channel; nobody comes this far up river except locals, so why mark it? Clutched in one hand, I held my guide: a composite aerial photograph covering the first few miles of meanders. Taken at low water, the mud banks show clearly, as do landmarks on the river banks. I was betting that the outside of each bend would be deep, and the inside shallow...

~

This strategy worked beautifully for the first few bends, and soon we were alone on a stretch where the banks were silent and wooded, occupied only by watchful herons. Then, so gently that I almost thought I had imagined it, the bulb at the base of Briongloid's fin slid softly into the glutinous grey muck of the river bed. The best route away from a grounding is backwards; but full throttle in reverse gear did nothing but stir up some interesting vortices. For now at least, we were a fixture, essentially a small blue fibreglass island. Not a skipper's proudest moment.
Whatever my parents (never previously shipwrecked in their combined 144 years) thought of my seamanship, they were merciful enough to remain silent.

On a falling tide, this grounding would have been a serious mistake, liable to lead to a pretty severe wetting, at least for Briongloid. However, secure in the knowledge that the combined gravitational efforts of (a) a rock the size of Austrailia and (b) a spectral type-G star were, at that very moment, reversing the flow of the river, we did exactly what the likes of Charles Stock would do - made mugs of tea, and buttered the home-made scones supplied by a far-seeing wife.

Just when the scones were beginning to run low, eddies swirling out from under the hull on the up-river side revealed that the incoming tide was rising fast, reversing the flow of the river, and stealthily slipping over the mud. Reassured that Newton's laws still stood (more or less), I took soundings to port and starboard from bow and stern, revealing a definite gradient towards the stern. Adjusting my theory of the location of the main channel to this data, I was able immediately to motor free. After that, the keel touched once, but stuck no more; and off we putted down the Bandon River, breasting the current as we crossed from bank to bank chasing the main channel, watching rural Ireland slip past; apart from pastures and trees, the main features of that stretch were a ruined tower house, a demolished bridge (giving the submerged piers a very wide berth).

Near Kinsale, houses began to appear on the banks; passing under the road bridge (having checked for anglers and their dangling hooks) we entered the harbour proper, and at last met other boats, the usual miscellany: a gorgeous wooden yacht of classic lines and vintage, ultra-modern racing machines, a herd of gin palaces, a fleet of trawlers, a solitary coastal cargo ship - but all moored up tight - on a gorgeous March Saturday, we were the only boat on the move. As I tied Briongloid into a visitor berth at the KYC, I felt the sway of the pontoon, and smiled; we had reached the sea.