Sea Legs

Sea Legs

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Sea Legs Guy Grieve

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Contents Prologue 1

Tenderfeet in Bonaire

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The Dictator, the Supermarket and Keylime Pie from Hell

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Islas de Aves, Los Roques and the Great Leap

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The First Big Passage

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Water, Water Everywhere

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Bittersweet Island

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Escape from St Croix

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Christmas and the Golf Club by the Sea

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Superyacht Pollution

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Double Dutch and then Sinister Monkeys

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If the Garden of Eden were an Island ‌

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Oscar Saves the Day and the Rasta Fruitmarket Robbery

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The Good Green Grenadines

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Boatyard Life 4

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The Real Pirates of the Caribbean

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An Inauspicious Departure

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America’s Backyard

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Through the Heart of a Navy Town

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New York Harbor

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July Standby

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The Great Reckoning Begins

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Zero Hour

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The Graveyard of George’s Bank

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Sea Scroungers

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On the Edge of the Abyss

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We Enter the Arena

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Hard Times

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The Sweet, Beautiful Scent of Ireland

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Tobermory Harbour

Afterword

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Prologue A man can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 56.39N: 05.71W

The alarm clock went off and after hitting the snooze button a multitude of times Juliet at last forced herself out of bed. I turned and lay with my face in the pillow, trying to imagine being active and effective for another day. As usual, I was struggling to produce the spark needed.

‘C’mon Guy! We’re running late!’ Juliet muttered as she pulled on a dressing gown and stuck her feet into a pair of slippers to ward off the winter chill. She walked towards the window and pulled back the curtains, hoping to drive me from my bed with an invigorating burst of sunshine. Instead all that was revealed was the uniform grey of another dreary British morning, frigid rain running mournfully down the glass. I saw her shoulders lift for a moment as she uttered a deep sigh.

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Though she rarely admitted it, I knew she was as fed up as I was.

She went through to the boys’ room and I heard the usual protests as she tried to get Oscar up and ready for school. ‘No Mum, please, not the curtains!’ I heard him begging, articulating my own thoughts from a few minutes earlier, but then his protests died as he too realised that opening the curtains made no difference to the light levels in the room.

I heard Juliet’s footsteps returning and hurriedly pulled myself out of bed, staring out of the window as an almost theatrical curtain of rain glided across the tufty lawn. I saw a few dead leaves blow across before a gust of wind beat the rain so hard against the window that the view was totally obscured, and for a moment I had the impression of being underwater.

Reluctantly I went downstairs to join in the daily panic of getting Oscar off to school. As the minutes counted down to the school bus’s arrival we charged around with increasing urgency, finding trainers for football, lost homework, packed lunch and jacket,scarf and hat. With four minutes to go I found myself pleading with Oscar to put his shoes on faster.

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‘I’m trying Dad!’ he said, frantically fiddling with his laces, which had been tied in an impenetrable knot.

At last he was ready, dressed in enough layers to survive an arctic winter, and after a flurry of hugs and goodbyes ran down the drive. He leaned into the wind like a seasoned fisherman, but nevertheless his hat blew off, and he stopped to retrieve it before climbing into the waiting bus. Nothing could be seen inside, as its windows streamed with condensation from the children’s fetid breath, many of whom were no doubt nursing heavy colds. I sighed as I thought of the impossibility of remaining healthy through a British winter. At any given time at least one member of our family was either suffering with, recovering from or just about to succumb to some kind of upper respiratory infection. Right on cue, I heard Luke, our younger son, installed in front of the television already at shortly after eight o’clock in the morning, omit a barking cough. I stumped through to the kitchen, where Juliet was pouring tea.

‘There’s no way I’m going to be doing this for the next ten years!’ I announced.

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‘No?’ She passed me a piece of cold, soggy toast. ‘So what are you going to be doing?’

‘I don’t know. But I know I’ve had enough of this. The weather, the routine, the colds, school, the house … Every day is the same, and so drab – it’s like Groundhog Day!’ As if to confirm it I reached for the butter and began spreading it on my toast, as I did every day. Juliet looked amused.

‘I’ve heard all this before Guy – it’s exactly what you said before you went off to Alaska. So what’s your suggestion: escape back to the office?’

I had to laugh. ‘Well I could certainly do with a manager again …’ I thought about my sporadic attempts to earn a living through writing tid-bits for magazines and newspapers. ‘Let’s find a way to somehow buy a boat,’ I said, ‘Let’s buy a boat and go sailing. For a long time. We’d have a chance to learn, and travel, and spend some real time together for once instead of this …’ I gestured around, ‘This half-life we’re leading.’

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This was not a new idea: spending some time living on a boat was something we’d both dreamed of for a long time. We had a little experience, but not much: Juliet had sailed with her family as a child, and I had recently done a couple of courses.

From time to time we would go through a spate of browsing for boats on the internet, dreaming of a life afloat. Not that we could afford it, as Juliet quickly reminded me.

‘But how would we pay for it?’

‘Sell the house! Come on, let’s do it – let’s sell everything and go!’ I jumped up on the last word like a child at a magic show.

She shook her head firmly. ‘No way. We’re not selling the house – that would be madness. Forget it.’

‘Why not? What’s this house ever done for us? We pour everything we have into it and it traps us in square rooms which are bad for the soul.’

‘Oh don’t start that square rooms stuff again. This is our house, it’s all we have and I’m not risking it for anything.’

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‘But you like the idea don’t you?’

‘Of course I do. I love it. But not at any cost.’

‘Well, you’re the clever one – try to think of a way.’

She said nothing, just wiped the kitchen worktop in silence, but I knew she was with me.

Later that day I was working fruitlessly on a batch of emails in our cubbyhole of an office when Juliet came in and stood behind me.

‘I’ve been thinking, perhaps we could just about do it’, she said thoughtfully, staring out of the window at yet more greyness.

‘Do what?’ I pivoted round on the plastic Ikea chair, which threatened to topple over as it had never been assembled properly.

‘Raise the money to buy a boat. We could probably extend the mortgage by enough to buy something… But nothing too 11

expensive’, she said hastily, as I swung back round to open the Internet browser.

Thus began a period of frantic organisation, as we somehow persuaded our mortgage lender to lend us more money on the pretext of ‘home improvements’ in the days before the credit crunch, extending ourselves way beyond what we could afford. Each evening after the boys were in bed we trawled the internet, researching everything that we could find on the subject of boats, families and the sea. We read inspiring stories of star-filled nights, swimming on pristine reefs and idyllic islands that could be reached only by boat. We read some hairraising tales too, of pitch-poling yachts, near collisions, divorces, madness and even loss of life. But through it all one great character emerged above all others. The sea. It was, surely, the greatest road on earth, and as I drove along the narrow lanes of Mull I would stop and stare out across the great ocean that lapped the rocky shoreline and find myself easily lost in the beautiful, timeless reverie of escape.

Nine months later we found ourselves at the airport, on our way to Bonaire, an island fifty miles north of the Venezuelan coast in the Netherlands Antilles, where our new boat – a 4112

foot Hans Christian yacht named Forever – lay patiently waiting. Our house had been let, our animals temporarily rehomed and Oscar had been officially withdrawn from school.

Yet inside we had begun to falter. As the day of departure drew near, we grew less confident in our abilities, and less sure of the wisdom of abandoning our secure lives for an entirely new life at sea. We had wanted an adventure, but we were stepping into totally unfamiliar territory: would we be able to cope?

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One: Tenderfeet in Bonaire 12.09N: 68.17W

In the harbour office, Carlos said: ‘Here in Venezuela we have a saying …’ He smiled, revealing an enviable set of teeth. ‘We say, persuade your worst enemy to buy a boat.’ He chuckled at his own joke, as he processed my credit card in the machine. I looked on, shifting from foot to foot with the usual anxiety as to whether the payment would go through. The machine beeped and buzzed, unreadable words forming against the yellow background. It spat out a piece of paper, which Carlos ripped off with a flourish.

‘You see my friend,’ he said triumphantly, brandishing the piece of paper in front of me. ‘It say refuse. This expensive world, hey?’ Clearly I was livening up his morning.

After repeating the performance with a number of cards I managed to pay the bill, buying us a few more days in the safety of the marina. From the back of the office I could see a woman staring over at me. I raised a hand in greeting, but her 14

eyes dropped back to the computer screen. Probably hates rich white people, I reflected, particularly ones that can’t pay their bills.

As I stuffed my documents into my bag, Carlos stood to hold the door open for me. Outside, it seemed as if a blast furnace had started up – the mighty heat of the tropics.

‘So what are your plans with Forever?’ he asked. His words were polite, but his expression held a hint of mockery.

‘Well, the plan is …’ I tried to muster an air of confidence.

‘The plan is to sail her back to Scotland.’

‘Scotland?’ He tilted his head. ‘Scotland, England? You take the wife and the childrens too?’

‘Yes, we’re all going together.’ I tried to make eye contact but failed.

‘You a skipper?’

‘Yes, in a way. I’m what you would call a day skipper in 15

Britain.’

Into my mind floated a picture of the shabby sea-cadet hall in the town of Maryport, where I had gone to study my dayskipper theory.

‘Day skipper?’ He sounded outraged. ‘But what about the nights?’

This was a question that had occurred to me as well. ‘Well,’ I shrugged my shoulders and sighed. ‘I guess the nights are the same as the days, mostly … we’ve got my father-in-law with us for a bit too, to get us started.’

Carlos clearly wasn’t convinced. ‘You must be careful,’ he said, fixing me with a look that left me in no doubt that if anything went wrong he, as well as everyone else, would hold me entirely responsible.

There was nothing more to say. There was no hiding it – I was an idiot. And so was Juliet for that matter. We had sunk everything into a naive dream, taking out an immense loan to buy a sailing boat with the romantic idea that we would live 16

aboard as a family whilst sailing her back to Scotland. What made things infinitely more worrying was the fact that we were not alone: our two young children, Oscar and Luke, were dragged into this too. Who would care if two adults sailed naively into the blue yonder and landed up sinking? But with a four- and seven-year-old in tow the stakes were infinitely higher. At least we had persuaded my father-in-law, James, to come along and help. J., as he was affectionately known, had years of sailing experience behind him and would be a reassuring presence during the early days of our journey.

With a million questions and thoughts hanging over me like a cloud of biting insects, I hitched my bag onto my shoulder and set off into the sweltering heat. The island’s main road was drab and scruffy, and cars and motorbikes zoomed past throwing up clouds of dust. On one side of the road a salty lagoon stretched towards scrubby low hills with a few sadlooking flamingoes standing in its midst; on the other lay the marina, where a variety of gleaming yachts floated beside wide pontoons. I passed a group of men working on a shabby collection of homemade fishing boats tied up alongside the quay and smiled in greeting. But no one smiled back. Of course who could blame them. Trying to catch fish for their 17

families from such makeshift vessels must have been tough, made infinitely worse by having to return to a quayside that lay beneath the immense yachts of visiting Americans and Europeans.

It was midday and nothing moved. The tables in the harbour restaurant were laid up, tempting passers-by like baited lines waiting for a fat school of silvery fish. At the empty bar a local girl sat flipping through a glossy magazine. I said hello, but she barely looked up.

Back on the pontoon my spirits lifted when I saw Forever, our new floating home. Forever was a cutter-rigged sailing boat of the ‘Hans Christian’ design. She was stoutly built, with a deep keel below the water, a 6-foot-long bowsprit and a rounded ‘canoe’ stern. Compared to most of the towering yachts around us, her rigging was relatively short and hung around a stocky mast and immensely strong-looking boom. Below substantial lifelines, her bulwarks stood a foot above the deck, capped all the way around with a richly varnished teak cap rail.

Somehow she managed to look sturdy and delicate all at once.

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I stopped for a moment to look at her, torn between pride and disbelief at what we had done.

Although she was small compared to many of the boats in the marina she felt immense to us. It seemed impossible that she was ours – the culmination of months of dreaming and planning, now rather frighteningly real. As I stood marvelling, a hatch on the deck creaked open and shut, then open and shut again like a clam flexing its muscles. On the third opening it was pushed right back and two strong hands placed themselves on either side of the frame as the figure of my father-in-law emerged onto the coachroof. Although in his seventies, a lifetime of hard physical work had paid off and J. was as flexible and strong as many men in their thirties. He sat in the hatch with his feet dangling inside the boat and his back to me. He smoothed back a shock of curly hair and called down: ‘Oscar!’

‘Yes Papa?’ Our older son’s voice floated up from inside the boat.

J. stretched his hand down through the hatch. ‘Hand me that pot of grease.’

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He let his half-moon glasses fall on their chain, reached into his shirt pocket for a little brush and began working at the stiff hatch mechanism.

As I watched him I felt a mixture of emotions. I loved him for having the heart and imagination to volunteer to spend some time with us as we learnt the ropes, but he was a genuine eccentric – confusing, inscrutable, uncompromising – and not always easy company.

J. was from an academic family, his father a Cambridge Don who had been part of the Enigma programme during the war.

He had worked in the City until his love of the sea and yearning for adventure led him to drop it all and, together with his wife Audrey, head to the Isle of Mull. In the early sixties, Mull was a very different place from what it is now, far more remote and cut off. Soon J. and Audrey found themselves playing the classic west-coast-island game of inventive survival. From small-scale farming to delivering coal to running a coastal puffer, they did anything and everything to keep their young family going. I was astonished when Juliet told me that they had only got mains electricity when she was sixteen, making do before that with an idiosyncratic generator and tilly lamps. Though the journey had no doubt been rocky, 20

she had had a wonderfully wild and free childhood. J.was a true Renaissance man, and despite his academic background was intensely practical, turning his hand to anything from construction to flying light aircraft. He had never lost his love of sailing, which had been a large part of his motivation for moving to the Highlands, and we felt lucky to have him with us to steer us through the early days. A man of few words, those words that he did offer left one in no doubt that he was firmly in control.

‘Hi J.,’ I greeted him from the pontoon. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Rather slowly.’ He answered in characteristic terse style, rubbing sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘I suggest that you and Juliet get yourselves sorted out so that we can leave this infernal harbour.’

I stepped over Forever’s lifelines onto the hot wooden deck and took a closer look at the hatch. ‘Looks a bit stiff, hey?’

‘Yes it is. We need to get everything in order and then your job as skipper…’ he emphasized the word sternly, ‘will be to keep it that way. Work, Guy.’ He pointed the grease-smeared 21

brush at me. ‘You must do a daily inspection of the rigging, hatches, sea-cocks, engine, batteries, water reserves and fuel.

And once a week you should have a maintenance day. Come here – I want to show you something.’ He stepped out onto the bowsprit. ‘See that little piece of steel that keeps that pin in place?’ He was pointing towards the bottom of the forestay, where it was attached to the deck. ‘That cotter pin will cost less than one dollar. If it starts to corrode and you fail to replace it, one day it will break. Then the forestay will come free and the mast will become unstable and could even fall down. In other words, all hell could break loose for the sake of a tiny piece of rigging worth one simple dollar. Now, you’re not going to let that happen, are you Guy?’ I shook my head, trying not to feel irritated at the Nelsonian tone he was adopting. I told myself there were years of experience behind his words, and I needed to learn.

Just then Juliet emerged from the companionway. A strand of her fair hair had come loose and she wound it round her fingers in a moment of distraction before briskly pushing it back behind her ear. She had been sorting out the contents of the lockers and I could see that she was feeling under siege 22

from the heat, the mosquitoes and the boys, who had been squabbling all morning. ‘I’m taking the boys for a drink’, she said. ‘They’re going stir crazy down there and I need some air.

Boys!’ she shouted, ‘We’re off! Bring your shoes.’

‘J., why don’t you go with them?’ I suggested. ‘I’ll carry on with the hatches.’

He handed me the rag. ‘Use this,’ he said, stepping nimbly over the lifelines and onto the pontoon. Oscar and Luke trailed up, pale and sweaty. They were still suffering from leftover British colds, which hadn’t been helped by the drastic change in climate and twenty-four hour journey to get here. J. bent to lift Luke across and then stood back to watch Oscar, who refused to be helped. ‘Be careful Oscar,’ he said. ‘If you fall between the boat and the pontoon you’ll be crushed.’

Worried, Oscar looked over at me. ‘Aren’t you coming Dad?’ ‘No Ozzy.You go ahead with Mummy and Papa – I’ve got stuff to do here.’

He climbed over the lifelines, judging the gap between the

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boat and pontoon carefully before jumping across. J. patted his head and I watched them walk off together.

Ten minutes later I was continuing with J.’s work on the hatches when I heard a shrill call.

‘Ahoy Forever! Anyone home?’

The voice was coming from the water. I peered over Forever’s port side and was greeted by the sight of a middle-aged woman and a rather threadbare man, looking up from an under-inflated dinghy that was crammed full of shopping, empty bottles, grubby-looking lifejackets, fins and snorkels and a number of greasy coils of rope. Teetering on top of it all was a golden-brown spaniel with sagging eyes and matted hair.

‘Hi! Could you take our painter?’ The dinghy sagged and puffed as the woman stood to throw me the line. Her accent was English and she had the bossy tone of a nautical version of Barbara Woodhouse.

I tied a round turn and two half hitches round a stanchion, aware that she was watching me. ‘Well, at least he can tie his 24

knots – that’s something’, she said to her companion. I smiled and prepared to engage in that classic British conversational game of strike and counter-strike, all hidden beneath a veneer of polite joviality. My paranoid mind began to wonder just what Forever’s former owners, Mike and Tessa, had said about us. They were stalwarts of the local cruising community and, unlike us, hugely experienced. It seemed our reputation had gone before us.

‘My name is Linda Campbell,’ the woman announced. ‘And this is Henrik, who’s just sailed over from the Netherlands.’

Henrik smiled shyly and an image flashed into my mind of his leathery body being dragged into a cabin by Linda. ‘We’re moored opposite the town beach – wonderfully breezy over there, unlike this place. Family around?’ She peered around the deck as if they might be hiding somewhere.

‘No, they’ve gone out for a walk. I’m Guy by the way.’ I shook both their hands and then sat down on the coachroof, wondering if I was expected to invite them aboard.

‘Are you planning to sail her?’ Linda asked and I knew the first missile had been fired.

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‘Yes’, I said, prepared this time and determined to sound confident. ‘We’re going to take her back to Scotland.’

‘Is that so?’ She raised her eyebrows sceptically. I wondered what she’d been told by Mike and Tessa – or perhaps she had just spoken to Carlos.

‘Of course many people undertake large journeys at sea when they don’t have the experience – I think it’s irresponsible personally, especially with children on board. Not that I’m saying you don’t have the experience of course …’ She fixed me with a steely look. ‘Do you?’

Silence fell as I stared down at the deck – she had scored a hit and she knew it. I changed the subject. ‘What about you?

Have you been here long?’

‘Eight years.’ She was trying to sound casual, but now it was her turn to feel uncomfortable. Two could play at this game, I thought.

‘Wow, that’s quite some time. Why, if you don’t mind me 26

asking?’

‘Well it just sort of happened.’ She looked at me directly now, her guard down. ‘I sold my house in Devon and bought the boat. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I’m stuck with it. The boat is not in the best of shape you see – can’t sell it and not safe to sail anywhere until I get it fixed up. So for now… looks like I’m staying here.’ There was little humour in her laugh.

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ I replied, liking her more now.

‘Oh well, such is life’, she sighed. ‘Your boat looks in pretty good order though – do you have much to do?’

I regaled her with a long list of our concerns ending with cockroaches, which we had been warned would invade the boat if we stayed in harbour too long.

‘Cockroaches!’ She waved a hand dismissively. ‘That’s nothing – I’ve got rats on my boat!’

And with that she motioned to me to untie their line. As I 27

watched Linda and the silent Henrik putter off towards the harbour mouth, the sides of their dinghy barely clearing the water, I reflected that to an outside observer Linda’s life must have seemed perfect – living on a sailing boat moored up on a Caribbean island, soothed by the trade winds and warmed by a tropical sun. The reality, however, was quite different. Her boat, which was also her home, was falling apart and was probably going to either sink or blow up some day soon. In the meantime all she had for company was her aging spaniel, the odd passing sailor and a hold full of rats.

I paused for a moment, remembering the interrupted hatch greasing job and J.’s stern words on maintenance, and made a mental note to complete the job another day. Instead I crept rather guiltily below to examine the chart of the Caribbean Sea. I pushed my finger towards the little island of Bonaire.

When we had bought Forever we had planned on working our way east along the Venezuelan coast and then up the Windward and Leeward islands, from where we could begin the journey back to Scotland. But we had failed to take account of the prevailing weather – a basic error and the first of many lessons that we would learn the hard way.

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I traced a line along the intoxicating arc of the Leewards and Windwards, to the US and British Virgin islands. This was where we wanted to go, but how? Travelling directly east into wind and weather would make a terrible start to our journey and very likely damage the boat, to say nothing of her crew. It would also mean risking some of the most dangerous waters in the Caribbean, along the impoverished coastline of Venezuela where, understandably, piracy was not uncommon. The alternative was to sail north-east for the Virgin Islands, which would give us a better course, but would also mean over four hundred miles of open water in an untested boat, with no possibility of shelter should any problems arise. Now – too late – we realised that Bonaire had turned out to be a risky place to start. We were trapped in a corner of the Caribbean at the wrong time of year with the wind and weather against us.

Whatever course we chose, it was not going to be easy. **** The next morning, I was brewing up some coffee when I heard a chirpy voice singing out from the quay. It was Tessa.

My heart sank, though I knew we needed advice from her and her husband Mike, who had sold us the boat. Having lived on 29

Forever for ten years they knew her systems backwards, and we were grateful to them for passing on their knowledge. It was a painful process however, and on this third day of intensive instruction we felt little wiser than we had at the start.

‘Come aboard Tessa!’ I called, trying to match her cheeriness.

‘Do you want some coffee?’

She came down the companionway steps, looking more glamour model than seasoned sailor with her dazzling teeth, immaculately tanned skin and sun-streaked hair. Although well into her forties Tessa was in outrageously good shape – in fact she was positively vibrating with energy and vitality. Just looking at her made Juliet and I feel tired and grey by comparison.

She looked around as she stood at the bottom of the steps and I knew she was missing nothing. Forever now distinctly bore the mark of a family boat – a scene of chaos with toys, books, charts and manuals piled everywhere; no doubt a far cry from Tessa and Mike’s serene and uncluttered existence. Juliet was

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picking up toys and leftover breakfast things, trying to look efficient and failing. She smiled at Tessa.

‘OK, where do we start?’ Juliet had spent the past two days figuring out the domestic side of life at sea and had taken Tessa’s suggestions about stocking up, preserving food, cooking at sea and washing. Now she was clutching a notebook in preparation for more complex lessons.

‘Well, how about the SSB radio? We haven’t covered that yet.’ Tessa bounded over to the chart table and tapped an instrument that might as well have been the Enigma cipher machine for all we understood it.

‘The what?’ Juliet stood, pencil poised over paper.

A slight pause and a barely concealed sigh as Tessa reminded herself that she was dealing with two very stupid people. ‘The single sideband radio. It’s another form of radio communication that comes into its own when you’re out of VHF range – you’ll need it for getting weather reports when you’re crossing the Atlantic …’ her voice tailed off as she seemed to contemplate the ludicrousness of this concept, ‘…

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but that’s some way off. SSB is real easy once you get used to it. The trick is to make sure that you can get a good connection with a frequency that will hold while you send your message. This is the pactor modem,’ she pointed at another obscure electronic item. ‘It links up to a laptop – must be in here’, she rummaged in a leather attaché case. ‘Just wait until you get the green lights signaling a connection and then send off your compressed files. We use Sailmail – you’re welcome to use our account for a while, it’s paid up till the end of December.’

Juliet valiantly made notes as Tessa talked, but as time went on her pencil slowed and eventually froze as Tessa went into more and more detail – what good connections sounded like, which of the 160 potential channels might best suit us and the various names and frequencies of the weather reports. After a while Tessa stopped and touched her shoulder.

‘Juliet?’

She shook herself. ‘Yes?’ ‘Shall I stop for a bit?’ Tessa pushed her sunglasses up on her 32

head, and I could see real concern in her eyes. ‘I know it’s a lot to take in at once – we can take as long as you need.’

Juliet bit her lip, and I knew Tessa’s kindness was hitting her hard. ‘Actually that would be great Tessa – I’ll read over the manual tonight and see if I can get the basics. Then hopefully I’ll understand it more when we next talk about it.’

Tessa nodded. ‘OK. Anyway, it’s Guy’s turn now, Mike said he’d be here at ten.’ She flashed a sadistic smile at me as, right on cue, Mike’s voice called out from the quay.

Mike was a big man, some years older than Tessa. They had met ten years ago, married and lived on Forever ever since, making several ocean crossings on her. Now they had washed up in Bonaire, unable to continue sailing due to various health issues that made life aboard too difficult for Mike. Giving up sailing had left a wound in his heart that was there for anyone to see, and I sensed he was emotionally adrift as he tried to adjust to the new realities of his life on land. From their stories, it was clear that Forever had been a palace to them and I saw the scene through Mike’s eyes as he peered down the companionway into her dark interior. When Forever was 33

theirs, mornings aboard must have been serene and orderly, whereas now he was confronted by a cluttered space with two half-naked boys squawking and resisting as Juliet tried to persuade them into their clothes. And with each new bit of knowledge that they passed over to us they must have felt yet more threads linking them to Forever fray and fall away.

Mike sat heavily in the cockpit, wiping the sweat from his forehead with a big hand as the sun started its inexorable rise towards the leaden heat of midday. ‘OK Guy, I’m gonna show you how to use the watermaker. Can you open that hatch down there below the steps?’

He pointed down the companionway and after manhandling armloads of belongings out of the way I managed to reach a hatch that gave access to the inner workings of the boat.

‘Now you run that water maker only when the engine is on – it uses too much battery power otherwise. It runs at 800psi; adjust that nut with your spanner and hold it at that pressure till the system runs well, then use the tester tube to taste the water until it becomes potable. When you’re happy turn the Y valve to direct the water into your tanks – make sure you get 34

it right or you’ll fill up your fresh water tanks with salt water.

Is that clear?’

I heard a little cough behind me and saw J. standing halfway up the companionway. ‘I’m not sure Guy has followed that Mike, could you just run him through it one more time?’

Mike shot J. a look that must have passed eternally between older men as they watched a beginner grappling with the first rung of a tall ladder they had long since climbed. But I was determined not to let pride get in the way of learning.

‘Actually that would be useful,’ I said. ‘If you don’t mind Mike, could you run it past me again?’

I heard some sniggering behind me. The boys had witnessed the whole scene. ‘Dad, you’re so stupid!’ Oscar blurted out. I tried to give him a stern stare but only succeeded in sending them both into gales of laughter.

‘You’re like Homer Simpson,’ Luke gasped, and the two of them rolled around with glee, thoroughly enjoying watching me being the pupil for once.

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And so it went on. Mike repeated and repeated; I asked dumb question after dumb question; J. rolled his eyes and sighed; the children giggled and squabbled; Juliet grew more anxious; the crease in Tessa’s brow deepened and the day got hotter and hotter. **** By midday we had our heads deep within the bilges, inspecting the interior of what now felt more like a Russian space station than a simple boat. It was so hot that I had stripped down to my boxers, and the boys had long since flaked out and lay comatose on the sweaty seats of the saloon.

All around hatches were lifted, engine and tanks were exposed and lockers were open. In order to get access to the workings of the boat it was more or less necessary to dismantle her, turning her beautiful woody interior into a hellhole. Wisely, J. had opted for a walk around the harbour.

‘Please tell me you have some cold beers here?’ Mike asked as he guided me along the wiring with his torch. ‘You’ve got the freezer working haven’t you?’

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‘Well I was getting around to that Mike. Isn’t it very heavy on the battery?’

As he shook his head, large drops of sweat fell on the teak flooring. ’Not when you’re in the marina Guy – you’re hooked up to shore power. Remember what I told you about switching to shore power on the console over there?’ He gestured behind him without looking. ‘That’s the Xantrex system – it manages the amp flow and shows you the voltage levels of the house bank and starter battery.’

‘Right.’ I hoped that my face showed nothing but calm comprehension. ‘I’ll just hook us up to the shore power and then we could possibly enjoy a cold beer a little later?’

‘Actually I’ll pass on that if you don’t mind Guy.’ Mike stood up stiffly. ‘That freezer takes a long time to get cold and I’m not a fan of warm beer like you Brits. I’m all done for today – we’ll catch up tomorrow.’

After we had thanked Mike and Tessa for the hundredth time we slumped back in the wreckage of the saloon. A depressed silence fell upon the boat and I felt like crawling into my bunk 37

and going to sleep, but the boys were now awake and I knew something had to be done to shake us out of our torpor. ‘Hey, let’s go swimming!’ I suggested.

Luke pulled himself up off the bench. ‘Can I take my snorkel?’ he asked.

‘Can we have an ice cream too?’ Oscar chimed in and I felt a pang of guilt as I realised how patient they were being. So far this experience was definitely not the big adventure they’d been promised.

Laden with towels, suntan oil and snorkelling gear, we traipsed a mile or so along the dusty road to the beach. All the way there Luke regaled us with his plans for snorkeling, how far he was going to swim and what he was hoping to see. We made non-committal noises in response, suspecting that he might not find it as easy as he thought, but knowing better than to try and tell him so. At the beach, a ramshackle pier jutted out into the water and reggae music drifted from a nearby bar, where relaxed tourists and locals sat around drinking and playing cards. The boys squealed in excitement and ripped off their clothes. Juliet helped them put on their masks and 38

snorkels and then forced Luke into his armbands. They all plunged into the water and I smiled as I watched them, knowing how good the silky water would feel on their skin. J. had settled himself with a book and a large rum by a table in the bar and I lay on the sand, grateful for a chance to forget my worries.

I was drifting on the edge of sleep when I felt drips of water falling me. Could it be raining? I opened my eyes.

‘Dad.’ Luke was standing above me, blocking out the sun. I could see he wasn’t happy. ‘What’s wrong Luke?’

‘I hate snorkelling and I don’t like that water – there’s too many fish. The yellow ones keep following me’ Beyond him I could see Juliet and Oscar standing together in the water, exclaiming over something they had seen. We had read that Bonaire is famous for some of the best snorkelling in the Caribbean and they were clearly loving it.

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‘Oh go on Luke – it’s perfectly safe, the fish won’t hurt you.’

Grumpily he turned and trudged back to the water. I drifted off again but a few minutes later I heard him screaming. I shot to my feet to see Luke hurtling out of the water, Juliet close behind him. ‘It’s all right Luke, it won’t hurt you!’ I heard her call, but he carried on running until he reached me, stopping in a shower of sand.

‘Come quick Dad, I’ve seen a horrible thing – it was chasing me.’ He was panting and I could see he’d had a real shock.

‘What?’ I squinted out to sea, half expecting to see a dorsal fin.

‘A huge stripy thing, a snake’, he said.

‘A snake?’ I frowned. ‘In the water?’

‘Yes!’ he shouted. ‘It was black and white and it chased me. I don’t like this place – it’s dangerous!’ He ripped off his mask and threw it on the sand.

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‘I think it was an eel,’ Juliet said, ‘I saw it too. But it wasn’t chasing you Luke.’

‘It was!’ He dragged me by the hand towards the sea where he scanned the water’s edge from a safe distance. ‘There!’ he pointed triumphantly. ‘See? It’s a snake.’

‘It’s a baby moray eel, Luke.’ I stared in fascination at the little creature, which was swimming along the water’s edge with an odd twisting motion. ‘Completely harmless if you leave it in peace.’

‘It’s a snake,’ Luke said stubbornly. ‘And I’m not swimming in there if there’s snakes.’

We retreated to the bar, where Luke retold his drama over and over again. A few minutes later I heard muffled crying and turned to see Oscar limping up the beach. What now? I thought. Even a simple trip to the beach was turning into a disaster.

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‘Something stung me Dad, I don’t know what it was.’ He lifted his leg and sure enough there was a fiery red patch on the side of his foot that was swelling rapidly.

‘OK, we’ve got to do something about that.’ I stood up and made my way to the bar. ‘Excuse me …’ I addressed the girl behind the bar ‘My son has been stung by something in the water, do you have anything …?’

‘Vinegar’, she said, her smile as dazzling as the overhead sun and came round the bar to examine Oscar’s foot. ‘Probably fireworm.’ She doused Oscar’s foot liberally with vinegar, while he whimpered quietly. ‘There. It’ll sting for a bit but you be OK now.’

Thanking her, we returned to our table. ‘See Dad’, Luke said, with a distinctly smug look on his face. ‘I told you this place was dangerous.’ **** The next morning we prepared ourselves for the first hurdle.

We were going to move Forever to a mooring off the town 42

beach, away from the mosquitoes and stifling heat of the marina. From there, we would make the final preparations for our journey. After a tense breakfast we started the engine. J. stood beside me as I took the wheel.

‘She’s going to have the most appalling prop walk,’ he said.

‘She’ll do everything she can to go to port when steaming astern.’

I nodded and gazed ahead over what seemed like miles of boat. The bow looked impossibly far away, the space was confined and expensive boats lay on all sides. I could see that J. would dearly like to take command, but was forcing himself to hold back. He stood at my side like a lifeguard, ready to jump in any direction to save our ship.

‘Let’s start off with the wheel hard to starboard as we cast off, and listen to me as we head off.’

Juliet was standing on the bow and I could see she was as nervous as I was. The boys were huddled in excitement in a corner of the cockpit. By now we had an audience: people from neighbouring boats had gathered to see us off, some 43

hovering nervously on the decks of their boats, ready to fend us off; others standing on the pontoon hoping for a bit of sport. There is nothing sailors like more than watching a beginner mess up.

‘OK Jules!’ I shouted, a sailor’s heartiness in my tone, at least.

‘Let go!’ She pulled the line in as we went astern and I looked over my shoulder at the gleaming yacht that lay close behind us.

‘OK, now ease the wheel round to port,’ J. said. ‘Hold it hard as the water will want to flick it away from you.’

With a sweaty hand I did as instructed and gradually Forever’s stern swerved out of her berth and into the wider harbour.

With a sigh of relief I slipped the engine into neutral and brought the rudder amidships. But she kept moving backwards and was now rapidly approaching the line of boats on the other side.

‘Bloody hell – she’s still moving.’ I hastily put the engine ahead.

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‘This is a heavy boat and once she gets going she’ll take quite a while to stop,’ J. said. ‘Better allow yourself at least six boat lengths from where you plan to stop – depending on wind and current of course.’

As we turned out of the harbour, the fetid calm of the marina was instantly replaced by a new world of energy and light. A fresh breeze set everything clinking and choppy waves bounced Forever up and down as we felt the full force of the trade wind. The sea was such a bright blue it was almost painful, and pelicans dive-bombed on all sides. The boys hung over the side in fascination, and we were all smiling with the joy of being free of the marina at last.

Safely tied up to one of the mooring buoys that lay in a neat line along the town beach, we sat for a while in the cockpit, marveling at the new world in which we found ourselves. A joyful detachment set in as we found ourselves looking onto the island and no longer a part of it. We could hear neither cars nor people – the only sounds were wind and water and the only smell the sea. The boys were rapt, lost in it all as they hung over the high cockpit sides looking down into the water.

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‘Dad, look: Papa, Mum, Dad!’ Luke beckoned furiously, scared and excited at the same time. He pointed down into the water and as we crouched around him the dark blue shape of a manta ray, perhaps eight feet across and stippled with white, drifted serenely out from the shadow of our keel.

Later, we dropped off the side of the boat into the cool, clear sea and sank into its clicking depths before breaking the surface with relaxed shrieks of happiness. At last we were getting a glimpse of the dream that had brought us here, and while the family splashed and played – Luke holding firmly onto the bathing ladder in case the manta ray made a reappearance – and J. circled the boat virtuously, I floated with my feet resting against Forever’s rounded sides. From the water she looked immense, and I gazed up at her in amazement that this beautiful boat was ours; that we were on the verge of a journey that we hoped would eventually take us back to Tobermory, our home harbour on the Isle of Mull. We had a long way to go, but we had taken the first step, and it felt good.

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GUY GRIEVE A family’s thrilling voyage around the Caribbean and across the Atlantic Ocean Yearning for adventure, Guy Grieve and his wife Juliet leave their comfortable life behind and buy a yacht called Forever. Taking their two small sons, they plan to tour her around the West Indies, up the North American coast, then back across the Atlantic to Scotland. There are moments of blissful happiness like sailing with playful dolphins or gliding into New York by water. But there are also terrifying dangers – pirates and storms among them.

Buccaneering, funny and heart-warming, this is a true story about grasping life with both hands and discovering what it really means to be a family.

Guy Grieve is an adventurer and entrepreneur whose fight for sustainability has led him to start up a much-acclaimed ethical fishing company on the Isle of Mull (he dives for the scallops personally). The year that he spent living alone in a cabin in Alaska became the book Call of the Wild, and his foraging expeditions with chef Thomasina Miers became the Channel 4 TV series and book Wild Gourmets; he went on to co-present Living with Monkeys for BBC1. Guy Grieve lives on Mull with his wife and two sons @guygrieve | ethicalshellfishcompany.co.uk • Guy Grieve has a longstanding column in Coast magazine (circulation 1.8 million) • This is a swashbuckling adventure that few will be able to resist • Guy's book The Call of the Wild sold over 24,000 copies

4 July 2013 | £18.99 9780747595427 | Hardback 9781408834060 | eBook Publicity contact: Anya Rosenberg Email: anya.rosenberg@bloomsbury.com Tel: +44 (0)207 631 5722

First published in Great Britain 2013 Copyright Š 2013 by Guy Grieve The moral right of the author has been asserted.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7475 9542 7 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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