NEXT MEETING 10 SEPTEMBER 2009
LIZA COPELAND

2000 at the Hough End Centre

FULL PROGRAMME (in pdf)

To be a sailor you need to be – at least in a fairly restricted sense – bonkers. Why otherwise would you spend good money to be thrown around on malign liquid and in turn be bored, uncomfortable and terrified? For offshore sailors this remains a mystery; the only key to it, adventure. And if sea sailors view canal cruisers as a different breed it's perhaps because they can't see where the adventure comes in: the waves are ripples, refuge is anyway just feet away and there's always a pub across the tow path.

But if you thought there weren't any bonkers ones, you haven't met the Darlingtons. They have made two epic journeys in their narrow boat Phyllis May: the first to Carcassonne in the south of France and the second to the USA. They were accompanied on both trips by their whippet Jim (Narrow Dog) who looked as if he thought they were bonkers too. To the Ds he is, according to their website, “cowardly, thieving, and disrespectful”. To me he seemed aloof and disdainful as befits his view of them.

On the first voyage Phyllis May travelled from her home port at Stone, Staffs to London and then, after waiting for some settled weather, down the Thames to Ramsgate. The last part of this passage was in darkness but they were thrilled by the phosphorescence which Terry told us was due to micro-orgasms. This news was received respectfully by MCA members, always willing to learn of the goings-on of sea creatures, particularly erotic bioluminescent behaviour. The flushed cheeks in the audience quickly returned to their normal winter pallor as they realised it was probably just a slip of the tongue – and an outstanding one at that. Minds anyway moved on when the Ds set out across the Channel the following day. A potentially risky venture, the sea was exceptionally calm and the only hazards were the Goodwin Sands and the wakes of ferries (green water over the coachroof) as they approached Calais. Then down through the canals with an enchanting tour of Paris, through the quiet Burgundy Canal, down the Rhone with the usual scary tales of intimidatingly large barges, to Sète, across the Etang de Thau and thus to Carcassonne.

The book describing the voyage (“Narrow Dog to Carcassonne”) did well and they were soon off again, this time to the USA. They had Phyllis May shipped to Portsmouth, VA and then took her down the Intracoastal Waterway. After the Great Dismal Swamp Canal, their major surprise was that much of the route was not quite like say the Leeds-Liverpool Canal: much of it was through vast estuaries and sounds and rather exposed. They needed charts, a GPS and proper VHF. They also needed two Sea Captains to help them but they did make it to the east coast of Florida. It was then just a matter of nipping across the alligator-infested 30-mile wide Lake Okeechobee in the fog and down the Caloosahatchee River to Fort Myers and the Gulf of Mexico. 1100 miles in all. Read about it in “Narrow Dog to Indian River”, Terry's second book.

What Jim (or to give him his full name “Brynula Great Expectations”) made of it all we can only speculate, informed by pictures of him looking variously haughty, lithe, alert, bored, terrified and once even rather narrow. All of them however consistent with him thinking them gloriously bonkers. He's probably already worried about his involvement in their next project: a novel from Terry set around Loch Ness with flavours of Biggles, Buchan and Ryder Haggard. Oh, a dog's life.

ONE OFF

For Sale – Syndicate share (1/9th or 2/9ths ) in Moody 39 ONE OFF currently based in Croatia. 3 weeks sailing available each year per 1/9th share. Enquiries to syndicate members: Stuart Thompson or John Roe ( see MCA Handbook for contact details).

Stuart and Helen Thompson wish to hear from people who would like to spend a week or two sailing with them on a shared costs basis in the Adriatic this year on “One Off” owned by a syndicate including other MCA members.

It's not often we have a polar bear at our meetings. Sven (it's not his real name) was enormous, mature, fierce and happily very flat with a red lining. On the cow scale (we'll come to that) he ranked about 1.5.

Bob described a trip in a friend's Oyster 66 from the Orwell to Spitzbergen. Turn north, run for 1600 miles and then turn right and, a hundred miles on, Spitzbergen will loom out of the mist. Not the most exciting trip in the world you might think – with the North Sea being about as attractive as the Runcorn one-way system – but it was in the Rolls Royce of yachts and it did involve a diversion to the Faeroes, And there was always Tracy for company. Tracy is a blow-up doll which Bob blew up for us. She turned out to be curvaceous but mercifully small – an oversize Barbie - but it was a first for the MCA. Tracy, Bob told us, was normally kept slightly deflated so that she had a pleasing (to his eye) wrinkled appearance.

The sailing was pretty straightforward as long as you avoided the ice. The weather was generally good, there was a little sun and they easily managed any visibility problems with radar. So the interest was the people, the landscape and the wildlife. The first were pleasant and welcoming, the second was stunning and the third was incredible. Bob's photos of the scenery were some of the best we've seen: snowy mountains, icy wastes and beautiful icebergs. But for me the wildlife stole the show: whales, polar bears, auks aplenty, seals and walruses. The polar bears they saw looked interested in them but only in a culinary kind of way - with a terrifying way of sniffing the air as they scented one of those tastey humans. They carried rifles around with them (Bob's party that is) just in case but, since a bear can run at nearly 40 knots, they'd have had to be quick. My money would have been on the bear in an encounter and I somehow knew that poor planar Sven thought the same.

And of course bears are large. If your only real-life experience has been of one on a glacier mint well you've got to scale it up several hundred times. Walruses too are bigger than you might think. Bob said they were the size of three cows (i.e. 3 on the cow scale). And they seemed to have the general personality of cows with perhaps less of an inclination to move about much. Mind you with those mega-fangs they have, I'd have been loathe to approach one with a milking pail.

The photos and videos of the walruses topped even those of the icy wastes. Sir David Attenborough would have fought to do the voice-over.

They made it to 80 degrees north – the aim of the venture. And somewhere in a lonely hut Tracy met Ingrid (not her real name), an identical sibling owned by a lovelorn Norwegian warden.

Bob gave an outline of a similar voyage to the Antarctic – aiming at 65 degrees south – which looked perhaps even more spectacular. Sadly it ended in tragedy when his friend the owner of the Oyster died after falling into a crevasse. An awful and harrowing experience, they brought back his body.

Touched by sadness, members left replete with Bob's memories of his vastly adventurous trips. Old Angus could be seen later, fingering his MCA tie as he gazed fixedly at a herd of cows, assembling them into walruses in his mind and thinking of what could have been if Elspeth hadn't been so committed to the WI in the summer.

Instead we had plenty of photos of the Niceto on an eventful cruise. Caught alongside in a hurricane on the west coast of the USA she ran aground while running up a river for shelter. Later having run milling machines to Mao's China (with a spell in Columbo for repairs) they loaded 10,000 tons of fraternal rice for Cuba and took it around the Cape to Havana. Heroes all, they were feted by the Cubans and Niall met Raoul Castro – the country's First Mate.

The obvious cargo from Cuba was sugar but it took weeks to find enough and even then it didn't work out too well. By the time it reached its destination the humidity had turned it into a solid lump – like a giant toffee apple. 10 kilotons of that breaks an awful lot of teeth.

In Hong Kong he was promoted to Acting Third Mate and got a room of his own. But by then they had been away from home for 15 months (having signed on for two years) and thoughts were turning to Europe. The skipper was run over by a taxi in Freetown (which must auger badly) and was in plaster from hip to toe but this proved a turning point in the cruise (I'm sure I shouldn't be calling it a cruise) because just then they were ordered to pick up a cargo of iron ore. They did this with great joy and celebration because the destination was Ijmuiden with the real prospect of a ticket home after a quick discharge of the cargo.

All went well, ploughing along at 17 knots, until they reached the Channel when the visibility deteriorated rather quickly as they passed north of the Casquets on 23 September 1961. Keen to make Ijmuiden to unload the cargo to schedule the skipper kept up the speed.

The ship had radar but with none of the modern aids: to get an accurate picture of the course of other vessels you had to make a continuous hand plot from the screen. The Captain and First Mate were on the bridge but the Captain had his plaster-encased leg on the chart table and the Mate couldn't manage the ship, the radar and the plot so they worked directly from the screen.

They became aware of an echo just off the port bow and altered course 20degs to starboard and stopped the engines. The other vessel stayed fine on the port bow. After another bigger turn to starboard and putting the engines full astern the seemingly inevitable happened and the two ships collided. The Sitala, a large French tanker, sliced off around 100 feet of the forward section of the Niceto killing the two people on watch at the bow (including Niall's best friend). The bow section with its iron ore disappeared leaving the Niceto depending upon one of its bulkheads dto stay afloat.

This it did and made slow progress to Weymouth Bay where it was met by Dutch salvage tugs for a long slog to Ijmuiden and discharge of the remaining cargo. There Niall said farewell.

In the inquiry into the accident it became clear that while the Niceto was travelling too fast for the conditions (the skipper lost his ticket) they had made the mistake of not making a drastic and obvious turn to starboard early on in the encounter. Whether this would have helped is debateable because the Sitala seems to have made the dreadful error of turning to port, towards the collision.

Niall heard of the Niceto being involved in another collision some years later when he was working in Hong Kong and managed to have a look around. She was later extended before being scrapped in 1981. Niall hasn't been extended noticeably and certainly hasn't been scrapped. So much so that he had some rather passionate advice for us cruising folk: don't turn towards a collision and use your VHF to contact any big vessels headed your way. Put out a Mayday if all else fails.

Delivered with style and authority and some nicely-judged asides, the talk was accompanied by really good photos of the ships, of the Niceto after the collision and under tow and of the radar plot in those decisive minutes. I propose we invite him back soon. Seconded!