Salt in the wound
Count Camaris weighs anchor and sails Hoop out to sea. His ocean-going yacht rides the swell as a tropical breeze runs through my blonde hippie hair, and I fist pump the air in relief at my change of fortune. Yesterday I left a man for dead with a Puerto Rican gang on my heels, and today I’m a carefree deckhand on a luxury yacht headed south. Taking a deep breath, I assess the situation – this is my chance to start over.
Hoop is a handsome vessel built in the Baltic. Seventy feet long and seventeen feet wide, she's a twin screw, ketch-rigged cruising yacht powered by two diesel engines. Besides the teak side decks, there's also a large roof area for sunbathing and a spacious stern deck for fishing.
Below deck, the count’s capable wife, Anna, is in the galley making sauerkraut despite the tropical heat. Mickie, their youngest daughter, climbs the rigging on lookout duty with eleven-year-old agility. Quick-witted Johanna, heir to hereditary titles if she were a boy, lounges on deck reading poetry to nineteen-year-old Lucie, who’s itching to get the sails up – the only flaw in this maritime idyll: the first mate. Jerry is British, a former soldier, and a rogue.
This is the third time lucky with Count Camaris. We first met in the Canary Islands last year when I was sailing across the Atlantic. Our second meeting was in Antigua when all crews celebrated their safe crossing and welcomed in 1975 at a new year’s beach party. That was two months ago and yesterday I spotted his two-masted motorsailer Hoop in San Juan harbour. On the spot, the count offered me a job as a deckhand in exchange for free passage to Vancouver, Canada – a proposal I could not refuse.
It's been a year since I left England. My rite of passage was a first-time sailing trip on a 37ft sloop. Under the skipper, John Farrell, and his stern mistress Carola, I sailed the Gay Gander from murky winter weather to clear blue Caribbean water. The pair dismissed me at the journey’s end, but from them, I’d learnt seamanship, navigation and how to live a sailor’s life. So, at twenty-two, with a rucksack and my well-thumbed I Ching copy, there was no choice but to do or die or scuttle back home.
This is where life got messy, and I met Jerry. He was Mr Fixit in Antigua and offered me a job running weed up to the Virgin Islands. We fell out when I refused, so I hightailed it to Puerto Rico instead. There, an American showed me the kindness of strangers and took me in after finding me sleeping rough on a San Juan beach. Being broke, I had to find a job without a work permit. That’s when I started working for Ned, a hustler and pimp part of the San Juan mafia cartel. He paid me to escort the wife of a high roller so her mobster husband could gamble without distraction. Rewarding though the work was, the job ended with Ned sprawled on the floor and me needing to leave town fast. On the plus side, I made off with the pimp’s percentage hidden in his hat, so at least I have some cash.
But like I say, the presence on board of Jerry is awkward, as he seems intent on raking up a past I’m happy to forget. We’re tidying away the mooring lines when he fixes me with his dead eyes and says, ‘So, this friend of yours in Puerto Rico? The geezer who let you stay in his place. The one you say was as bent as a nine-bob note.’
‘Yes, what about him?’
‘You’re telling me you didn’t have to peddle your arse for rent?’
Getting no reply from me, he continues in his rough way. ‘Good thing if you are a shirt lifter, though. Leaves the field open.’ He nods towards Johanna and Lucie, lying prone and suntanned under the Caribbean sun. ‘With luck, I’ll shag them both.’
He’s using the gay tag as a way of gaining some kind of advantage with the girls, neither of whom has deigned to notice either of us. They’re well out of our league, sun bleached blonde, beautiful and blue-blooded, so hardly likely to be interested in a pair of chancers picked up like flotsam on route.
‘Stop such nonsense,’ I say, looking down the deck where the girls are lounging in the bright sunshine. ‘I know them. One’s too classy and the other’s too innocent for you.’
‘Stand by your bed, Saint Mick,’ Jerry says, elbowing me in the ribs. ‘The skipper’s on his way.’
Looking like the aristocrat he is, Arno strides down the deck. Taller than us, his Teutonic presence is commanding.
Like many an ex-soldier, Jerry defers to rank. ‘We await your orders, captain.’
‘Good,’ the count replies in his guttural accent, his mouth opening wide as he speaks. ‘It will be a refreshing change to have a crew who does what I tell them. The women on this boat all too often have ideas and opinions of their own. Johanna, in particular!’
‘Is that a recommendation to stay single?’ Jerry asks. ‘I was married to the army once, and I’m not sure I can make the commitment again.’
‘Take it from me,’ Arno replies. ‘I’m looking forward to the end of this trip when I only have my American Express card for company.’
Jerry and I laugh in case we’re supposed to.
‘You think that is a joke?’ Arno responds, pointing out to us, ‘for the record’, that with an Austrian upbringing, he says what he means and means what he says. Put on notice, Jerry and I exchange looks and stiffen to attention. ‘We will motor on while we set our sails in a wind that should take us all the way to Panama.’
‘How long until we get to the Canal?’ I ask.
‘Mit Glück, Mick, about ten days if the weather is good for us.’ – The word weather becomes wezzah in the count’s mouth while th sounds like d. ‘Then it’s through the Canal and out into the Pacific and a glorious thirty-day sail to Hawaii, where we will cruise and snorkel that glorious paradise until we make the dogleg back to Canada – the journey of a lifetime.’
‘Can’t wait,’ I babble, excited as a child about Christmas.
‘Trouble with sailing,’ quips Jerry, ‘is you get no choice but to wait. You wait for the wind, for the tide, for orders and...’
‘Sadly,’ Arno interrupts by way of a jest, ‘you both get to wait for breakfast. First mate, you’re on the helm in fifteen minutes so help raise the mainsail and then Mick hoist the jib and wait for Anna and Lucie who will show you how to put up the topsail. We only use it when we have a crew on board.’ With this he turns and marches back to Hoop’s large centre cockpit where Lucie, with her hair tied back, is ready to sheet in the main.
‘I can see him in a uniform.’ Jerry says idly picking at the peeling varnish of spruce main mast. ‘Wonder what he did during the war?’
Trying to work out the count’s age and thinking he must have been too young to fight when Germany subsumed his native Austria, I reply. ‘May have been a Hitler Youth.’
Jerry mimics a Sieg Heil salute. ‘What a fully signed up Nazi?’
‘I don’t think children had any choice.’ I counter.
‘Maybe I can claim those girls as a war prize,’ Jerry suggests.
Shaking my head, we raise the mainsail. ‘Man, you’re incorrigible.’
‘Watch your language, you little poof,’ Jerry scornfully replies. ‘I’ve no idea what you mean.’
Going forward to haul up the headsail, the escape from my past is complete. Still, as a wave breaks over the bow, the sting of salt on a fresh cut reminds me of what a close shave I had when Ned attacked me with a swordstick; forewarned about his secret weapon, the knowledge gave me a moment's advantage. So he was out for the count - not me.
As we head out of territorial waters, it’s a relief no one knows where I am or where we’re heading. It’s also exhilarating to be back amongst the sounds I love; the rumble of rigging blocks losing tension, then snapping taut, the air singing through the rigging and the clunk of the rudder on its pintles from the passing swell. As a getaway boat, Hoop is hard to beat; she’s a steel-hulled ketch with a raked wineglass stern and a sheer line that rises gracefully towards a four-foot spruce bowsprit. With scratches and scrapes on the black-and-white paintwork gained on the voyage from Europe, she looks up to anything the sea can throw at her; an ideal vessel for a live-aboard family preparing to take on the Pacific Ocean. Hearing the Maple Leaf ensign snapping in the breeze, I let out the cry, ‘Canada, here I come!’
‘Don’t get too excited, geezer,’ Jerry says, betraying his West London origin. ‘It’ll be the longest two months you’ll ever remember. Boiling one end, freezing the other and dull as ditchwater in between.’ Leaving me with his gloomy Eeyore sentiments, he works his way back up the starboard deck hand over hand on the lifelines, to take a turn at the helm.
My role on Hoop consists of hoisting and dropping sails and although it’s too lubberly to refer to her as a cutter ketch, she has two headsails so there’s plenty of work. Apart from keeping watch and taking my stints steering, that’s the job. Sadly for me, it’s brute muscle that’s wanted here not my talent as a navigator, a skill learned on Gay Gander and despite the skipper describing me as a bow wave of optimism trailing a wake of chaos, despite that, we always reached our destination.
While waiting for Anna and Lucie, I go to the foredeck and stand in the bow pulpit as we head for the Mona Passage, a strait which separates Puerto Rico and Hispaniola. Fraught with variable tidal currents, it is the shipping route to the Panama Canal and connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean Sea. With a stiff breeze consistently blowing from the east, a cloud-dappled sky and the romance of open water ahead, the omens look good for a safe passage.
Soon the Caribbean islands are disappearing behind us and my step is light on deck as Hoop’s prow cuts a furrow in the deepening water as it turns from indigo to gunmetal blue. With the deck purring beneath my feet courtesy of Dick and Harry, Hoop’s Perkins twin diesel engines, we surge south by southwest across the Spanish Main, where pirates and buccaneers once captured galleons laden with pieces of eight. We are heading towards the Isthmus of Darien, the thin sliver of ground connecting the Americas, a geographic equivalent of Michelangelo’s fingers of God and Adam on the Sistine Chapel.
My reverie is short-lived as eye-bright and eager Mickie, agile as a monkey, clambers up the ratlines. Like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, but with a blonde pudding basin haircut, she separates the halyards with the easy dexterity of an eleven-year-old who’s spent the past nine months at sea. She treats the boat like a gymnasium and swings confidently through the rigging while below her mother and sister Lucie heave out a sail bag from the fore hatch.
‘This sail is called, Moeder en Bloed,’ Anna says in a linguistic mix of her native Dutch and adopted Canadian; structural peculiarities I’ll have to get used to.
‘That’s Mud and Blood to you,’ Mickie explains. ‘Unless you can speak lots of languages like me.’
‘Is one of them double-Dutch?’ The remark earns me a quirky look and a poke of the tongue. As we pull the topsail out of its canvas bag, I understand the name. The brown and ox-blood-striped canvas is the last piece of the sail plan we need in order to catch as much of the warm easterly wind blowing across our beam. The light material flaps excitedly in the breeze, seemingly eager to fly puffed out and proud between the masts.
As Jerry heads us into the wind, we haul the triangular cloth skyward to set it in the space between the mainsail and the mizzenmast. ‘This will oomph us up,’ Anna says, cobbling words together in her usual way. ‘In bad weather, we drop the main and make way with just the jib and the jigger.’
With a kindly face and no-nonsense attitude, Anna is immediately likeable. She has mothered, nursed, and fed her family since Arno’s decision to take a sabbatical from teaching at university and bring them all on this adventure. Physically strong and self-willed, she stands on the deck like a force of nature while Lucie, cut from the same cloth, teaches me how they trim the sails.
‘Start trimming from the bow and work your way back,’ she says, pointing out the jib’s tell-tales, the guides to a sail’s efficiency. Lucie’s attention to detail serves as a warning – there’ll be no wind wasted when she’s in charge. ‘Get the yarns on both sides of the canvas streaming straight back,’ she continues. ‘If the leeward one stops, head up closer to the wind, or fall off if the windward one hangs down.’
‘What like this,’ I say, in a slightly camp voice while showing her a limp wrist, before realising it may send her the wrong signal. The gesture stops her in her tracks as though she sees me differently.
‘I like you, Mick,’ she says. ‘I think we’re going to get on.’ There’s almost a sigh of relief in her voice. ‘It will be good to have a friend to talk to.’ Hearing a sound, she looks up and catches Mickie who jumps down from the rigging, and they scamper back to the cockpit to make full sail and go all out.
As Jerry steers us back on our course south-southwest, Mud and Blood fills and expands with a crackle and whip. Impelled by the wind, Hoop picks up speed, heels slightly and settles into a broad reach. Roused by the commotion, Johanna appears in the cockpit.
‘Papa, turn the engine off,’ she says, all tousle haired and haughty. ‘I can’t think.’
‘Whatever you say, my little countess,’ Arno replies, ‘although let me say back in the home country, thinking is not to be encouraged in a lady.’
‘Papa, you are such an old dinosaur. With our fortune and lands all stolen, what is a girl to do except get an education?’ Before her father can reply, she adds, ‘And don’t say find a husband!’
Bending to Johanna’s will to make his own life easier, Arno stops the engines. From the noise of pumping pistons to the gentle ripple of sails, there is a moment of transformation as diesel fumes evaporate and the elements take over. Using only nature’s wind and a big spread of canvas, Hoop shows a lively turn of speed.
‘Now she’s talking,’ I mutter, relishing the sensation as waves glance off the hull with a sound like chattering children. Looking down the deck, I see Lucie sheeting in the main using a powerful winch. She has control over the boat, moving quickly between instinctive tasks until all the well-trimmed sails almost transforms Hoop from a motor sailor into a racing yacht. Exuding a spirit of independence and self-belief, Lucie then takes over the helm from Jerry. She’s authentic and windblown, a poster girl for a feminist manifesto.
Soon she calls me up to feel of how Hoop performs under sail. I look around to familiarise myself with the new surroundings. Under a protective windscreen are the gimbal compass, indicators of depth and speed, as well as the engine controls. A fold-down seat allows whoever is on the watch to stand or sit at the helm. With good all-around visibility Hoop’s cockpit is higher than the deck and few areas of a ship have more uses than the cockpit of an offshore sailboat, be it lounging about on a quiet day at anchor or handling a fast-moving situation at sea. After an hour’s excitement and exhilaration at handling her, I go below, leaving fifty imperial tons of pedigree sailboat in Lucie’s capable hands. If Freddy Fate is dealing me cards today, he’s come up trumps.
