Up the Creek Without a Paddle

I was awoken simultaneously by three unmissable phenomena. At this point of the year, the sun pierces the skylight and sends a laser into slumbering eyes at precisely the same moment as the lurcher, Mouse, nudges open the door with her nose and muzzles it, wet and cool, into an unsuspecting, outstretched, sleeping hand. This is accompanied by an impromptu cacophony of schlipp-schlipp and rubber-bewellied, life-vested and waterproofed man & boy ‘sneaking’ in to collect sail, rope, and clanging mast, all ushered out and into the bright day for the high tide now lapping the edge of the creek 30 feet from the end of my bed. I was suddenly very much awake.

Fortunately, there is always coffee for such situations and my mind soon caught up with my body, which was lucky because by now my body had put on some shorts and appeared to be going sailing. This took me somewhat by surprise. The brown water of the creek was rushing by and Michael had assembled an orange fibreglass deathtrap he called a topper, presumably from the reputation it has among the suicidal. Sailing in a one-man dinghy, Michael assured me, was nothing more than physics and common sense. The physics are undeniable, but the common sense I felt was pretty much up for grabs. Staying in bed, for example, might also be an excellent example of common sense.

Whilst the fine details of New Year’s Eve may have fused and clotted in my memory, and that wonderful evening has been reduced in resolution and recall to a sketched impression of subtle taste and long laughter, the sensation of sailing in the creek remains meticulously recorded in my mind. Even now, as we speed along the A26 through the ancient battlefields and modern cornfields of Flanders, I’m reliving the sensation of bobbing, casually, of the carelessly meandering tug of the small rudder, the whispering breeze of the warm air in the flaccid sails, the slow passing of the distant bank, the ripple of the stream and the elegantly leaning craft. The awareness of my own weight on the water, shifting, the crack of wind in the canvas, the jerk of the tiller, the sharp incline and arch of my back as I struggle to inhabit my own centre of gravity, the rush of the foaming waves, the far-off calls from the bank, the coursing of copious floods of coffee in my blood, mind racing, breathless gasping, legs sprawling, turning, spinning, soaking, straining, pulling, pulling, pulling. The physics may be waterproof but I—and my shorts—are not. In a miracle of Newtonian dynamics and a caffeine-induced glimpse of mariner’s intuition, last seen a hundred generations ago as my Viking forefathers, masters of the seas, sailed forth to conquer these shores, I executed a manoeuvre so deft and so daring that I could feel the warm, approving gaze of the Norse gods now upon my back. The millennia had not diminished our sailor’s instinct. In a single, swift gesture of controlled yet expansive seamanship, I steered my speeding craft into the safe harbour of a tangle of rope and cable between a big pink buoy and the solid hull of the neighbour’s blue boat with a hideous, screeching scraping sound and an ominous shudder. I had come to a standstill or, as we salty sea-dogs prefer to say, I had moored just of the coast.

What I had not done, much to Michael’s annoyance, is capsized. Neither had I managed to tack, which was the point of the exercise. Effectively what I had achieved is being blown to the bank without falling into the water. Tacking is a subtle concept of managing the tension on whatever that rope’s called that lets the sail fill with wind, the pull and turn of the tiller, and bodyweight and lean. And it happens in a flow, in a rhythm, in a softly melted sequence, the waterborne equivalent of the topspin forehand or a well-told anecdote. I was soon back on the water, investigating, searching, tickling, prodding for technique. My first turn took me off in a flailing, generous arc clear across the creek. It was ostentatious and for the onlooking throng riotously entertaining, but when it was over and I was still upright, I was facing the other way.

Each subsequent attempt revealed just a little more precision, a smidge of confidence and a touch of experience. The teasing, gradual revelation that is the learning process. I watched myself with this gloop of info, how I kneaded and prodded at it and cajoled it into some sort of intelligible shape. half an hour later and I was tacking on a sixpence and sniffing for the breeze. I was sailing.