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Spike Marlin
A few years ago now, in the days when there was still fish in the sea, the skipper used to run a column for good old Yachting Monthly called Looking Around. I took up the slack for him now and again, because with him bein' a yachtmaster an' all, sometimes he just missed the point about seafaring. But he steers good and straight even though he's a bit of a toff, so when he embarked on the job of editing a new magazine and the bosses at Monthly said he had to give up his column, I wrote his piece for him. I knew he'd soon be back, and he was. It wasn't more than a few spring tides before the whole shooting match was bilged, and he blew back in on the next westerly gale. But what can you expect from a bunch of businessmen messing about in salt water, eh?
Them as recall my literary efforts might be rushing forrard to let go their moorings already, but catch a turn lads. The skipper says I'll be more animated in another watch or two, so look out here for some action. Meantime, I'll just have to quid the old baccy into me weather cheek and slip you a piece of advice now an' again, so here goes ...
January/February 2001
Lovely June afternoon, it was, and me still a nipper. Not a sprat's breath of air. An hour before high water and half a watch till closing time. My Dad and Uncle Albert decided to have me pull 'em ashore from the old smack for a pint while they waited for the ebb. I fetches up at the steps by the Throttled Ferret and they shambles off to the bar. I stick a couple of turns of the painter round a handy ring, give it a half hitch for the Queen, then go looking for crabs. No weight on the line, see. No need for the extra hitch, I thought.
An hour or two later, I hears the Old Man cussin' and I looks up and there's the punt, well on its merry way downriver. The ebb's set in, the breeze is risin', and of course, my 'round turn and a hopeful' wasn't a bit of good once she started tuggin'. Uncle Albert slings me in the drink and I gets a free swimming lesson. Back on board, Dad lays into me with the ship's cat just to make sure I don't forget what he's bawling in my ear,
'A rope's either made fast, or it ain't, boy. Never use half a hitch. It might be alright now, but you'll forget about it and as sure as God made little fishes, next time you look, you'll be wishin' you hadn't been born, just like you are now.'
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March already, lads, and the skipper says I’ve got to service my site page. The only services I knows anything about are the ones the vicar puts out Sundays, an’ them as we claps on our shrouds at fitting-out time.
Any of you shiners who’ve missed out on the old ways won’t know that on a gennleman’s yacht, a service is winding a long length of tarred marlin round the splices on the wire shrouds to stop ‘em rusting. Keeps the sea out if you parcels that all up with oiled sailcloth first. We uses a tiny hardwood mallet with a groove in it to heave the turns up tight. Smells like springtime when that tar comes oozin’ out.
When I was a nipper on Uncle Albert’s smack, the old tightfist wouldn’t brass up for proper marlin, so we served that riggin’ with spunyarn then painted it up with linseed oil an’ lamp black. One winter, Dad comes back from the Solent races with a big ball of the real stuff in his kit bag. Told Uncle Albert we’d catch more sprats with that in our shrouds ‘cos the fishes’d know we was a class act. Uncle Albert said we’d do better sellin’ it down at the Throttled Ferret, but Dad had me whack it on anyway. We never caught no extra fishes though. Wust season I ever knew. Just goes to show that even sprats ain’t impressed by swank…
Anyway, when it came time for scrubbin’ off the bottom there weren’t no room on the piles at the village, so Dad says,
‘Tides is makin’, Albert. Why don’t we run her up on the dyke, lead the throat halyard to that tree in old Giles’s field and heave her down? We can do one side, then turn her at high water an’ hoe off the other before supper.’
‘That’ll do us,’ sez Albert. ‘An’ it’ll keep you out of the boozer as well.’
So we runs the old girl up on top of the flood an’ slews her onto the little beach. Dad unhooks the bottom block of the halyard from the gaff, hitches on a heavy length of hemp an’ hands it to me to secure to that old oak. They sends me ashore ‘cos someone’s goin’ to get wet, an’ guess who?
When the tide starts ebbin’, back I goes with the fall of the halyard and heaves away ‘til the smack’s lyin’ snug on her bilge. I makes all fast on a low branch and dumps the fall on the grass. We gets her scrubbed off an’ Uncle Albert makes a pot of tea. Then she starts pickin’ herself up.
‘Off you go, Spike,’ he sez. ‘Let off that halyard.’ So I nips
ashore,
an’ that’s when I saw things weren’t quite right. One of Giles’s
heifers had been havin’ a fine lunch off of our halyard. Must have had a
hundred foot or more down her gullet. She’d found the bitter end on the grass
an’ munched on, but she’d come up short at the belay. Didn’t know quite
what to do next, like.’
Dad hops over the wall then, an’ starts heaving on the rope. After a bit of mooin’ and gruntin’, it starts slidin’ out of her craw. Well, he yanks on, nice and steady, an’ away that comes, foot by foot, all slimy an’ green an’ smelly. When he’s got the lot, he eases off the belay, the boat pops upright and Uncle Albert drags the line inboard. He had somethin’ to say, I can tell you.
As soon as we’re over the bulwarks, Dad lays into me,
‘Boy,’ he pants, in between stripping my backside with his belt, ‘Just you remember always to make up your ends ashore and bring the coil back aboard. Only lubbers leaves ropes lying around in fields – or on docks for all that.’
So that’s my second ‘thought for the month’. Tidy ends. An’ don’t you forget the message. You might have to ship out with Uncle Albert and Dad one of these rainy days; or even the skipper, which is worse…
April 2001
I was in the tap room of the Jolly Roger the other night contemplating my pension when in shamble three young fellers, all cock-a-hoop on account of winnin' the first race of the season. One of them must have been the navigator, cos he was rattling on about how he’d punched in some of these new-fangled waypoints to keep them off the Old Gobbler Shoal. I wondered how the boys would have managed without their box of electrickery, so I supped up my Bosun’s Pride and wandered across.
‘Buy an old sailor a pint,’ I said to the pilot, ‘And I’ll let you in on a secret.’
He did, so I told him.
‘My Uncle Albert wasn’t much for charts,’ I began, ‘but he was the sharpest navigator around when it came to racing. Used to go down to the Solent every Spring, and if he couldn’t find a berth on one of the big yachts, he’d sign on with some young gennelman and look after his dayboat.
‘One year, I was playing truant – I was only a nipper mind – and my uncle took me along to learn the rules on a 5.5 metre he was sailing. The gent was glad of a lad to clean his white yachting shoes. June soon came, and the Round the Island Race. We starts west-about at breakfast time and it wasn’t long before the heavy brigade were strung out ahead of us. By the time we’re on the way home, the young toff’s getting nervous cos Uncle Albert hasn’t looked at the chart once. If you don’t know about the East Solent, there’s a ‘uge shoal sticks out off the Island shore. Ryde Sand, it’s called. Tide’s generally foul when you get there and boats creep in close to crawl out of the stream. It ain’t marked at all well, and it’s easy enough to get yourself stuck. Our owner hadn’t done the race before and he’s getting nervous. In the end, he fronts up to Uncle Albert, all pink and cross.
‘"If you won’t look at the chart, Figgins, then I’ll jolly well have to myself!"
‘Uncle didn’t have one, so he couldn’t. Didn’t hold with ‘em, see, but the owner scrabbles one out of a bag and it blows straight over the side. Uncle Albert didn’t turn a hair.
‘"Don’t you worry, Sir," he says, "Ryde Sand’ll be clearly marked by the time we gets there, same as every year." And he carries on steering up to weather, puffin’ his nasty old pipe.
‘Twenty minutes later I saw what he meant. There’s ten yachts aground all round the edge of the sand, all bigger than us, skippers red-faced, owners and their parties trying to look like nothing’s happened.. We leaves ‘em all to port, floats clear round and wins our class.
‘"That’s the trouble with gennelmen, Son," Uncle Albert said to me as we was puttin’ on the sail cover, "They got too much book learnin’ to trust their common sense."
‘Then he gave me a sixpence, which made a change from six of the best from his old blanket strap…’
May 2001
Here I am, lads, late again with my column.
I blame the skipper. He’s fitting out halfway through the season this year, muttering about having a clean bottom all summer. Dream on, is what I say, now that we’re not allowed to paint honest poison onto our boats any more. I left him last night in the Tumbling Sailor raving about so-called European courts and the human rights of barnacles.
Anyway, he’s had me working on the mast, and that peak halyard is a long-'un by any standards. Not as long as the mainsheet on the North Sea smack where I served my time as a nipper, though. My old skipper reminds me of Cunliffe in one way. He was too mean ever to cut a rope.
So there we were, hacking across towards Holland in summertime with a fine breeze on the beam and nothing to do till we reached the Terschelling grounds. The old hands turned in, piling up kip credit, but me and the other apprentice were daft enough to like being at sea, so we volunteered to keep the watch.
I twirled the spokes like a proper sailorman while Charlie settled down aft to some fancy ropework. He’d been listening to his granddad and before long he’d worked up a six-tuck ‘ocean plait’ mat from a fine length of manila, just like you see in them fancy chandleries in yachting ports. We ran trick and trick through the night and called the old-timers when we came onto soundings at dawn. We should have shaken ‘em earlier, though, ‘cos by the time they shambled up rubbing their eyes we were in amongst the oyster fleet. The tide was setting us down athwart the hawse of a big Grimsbyman. I had the helm hard up, but she wasn’t answering.
‘Ease the main!’ bawled the skipper, desperately trying to bear away.
The mate threw off the smart new sheet, his pride and joy, then his face crumpled as Charlie’s tiddly mat fetched up all standing in the quarterblock. He whipped out his knife and slashed that sheet with tears in his eyes. We slipped past the trawler so close I could smell their breakfast – kippers it was – but me and Charlie had Brasso soup instead of a run ashore when we pulled into the Hook a week later.
Summer 2001
See below for stop press, Shipmates!
High summer, lads. Time to pull on my sea boots. For some reason I can't understand, the skipper has decided to head out for North Africa. I'm sending you this message from Southern Portingale and already its hotter than Grandma's bread oven. I just hope he keeps us all out of jail if we ever get there, but whatever happens he says it takes too long to upload my yarn via his mobile phone so I'm going to be off the air 'til we get back to Blighty - if we ever do.
Frankly, it curdles my cringles to think I'm reduced to cyberspace and voda-wotsit. Uncle Albert never had problems like this, and he had far more sense than to stuff himself at the wrong end of the Port-and-Cheese trades in August, which is what's going to happen to us...
Keep the course while I'm away, and however bad you think things are, at least you're not melting in your wellies like I am.
STOP PRESS!!!!! We made it back from them foreign places and we're rip-roaring up-Channel now, lads, with a rare old westerly. We came up across Biscay sharpish and we've been cruising in France for a bit, taking photos for the latest edition of the skipper's 'Shell Pilot', or at least he has. I've been investigating the properties of Pastis and that Calvados stuff. Not so bad for a man as some say it is... He says we'll be home in time for me to catch up with my duties on the site for September. All I can say is, it'll be a treat to sleep ashore and get out of this murky old focsle. See you down the Pickled Pirate next week!
Autumn 2001
Ahoy, shipmates! Good to be back in an honest pub after cruising round all them continental bars and suchlike this summer. The old cutter’s anchored pretty snug down in the creek, but as I ran out the cable, my Uncle Albert’s ghost seemed to whisper in my ear,
‘Always make sure your bitter ends are secure, Nipper.’
I used to think he was fussy, but life has taught me different.
A year or two back, me and the skipper went racing in the Solent. The rest of the hands weren’t proper pros like me, they were toffs mostly, but there was one ancient feller shuffling round the foredeck who seemed a bit sharper than the rest. The start was a shambles – on the Squadron line, too. Disgraceful. Hardly a breath of air. The committee could have postponed it, or we should have kedged on the line, but away we all went, west on the ebb, mostly sideways, barging and shoving and shouting. The crack boats worked round into Gurnard Bay and kedged in the shallows, but the skipper and his mates reckoned they could sail the course, so we kept right on drifting. Then the wind dropped completely and they saw they’d have to anchor or end up somewhere off the planet.
‘Take a sounding, Spike,’ demands the skipper. I swings the lead, and it’s 80 feet deep. We’re sliding along merrily in three knots of tide, so he orders the foredeck man to let go the bower and 40 fathoms of chain. Away goes his smart new CQR with a fine splash, and the cable roars after it making a racket like a skittle alley on a Saturday night. Somehow, the old boy screws down the windlass brake at 40 fathoms, but you could hear the hook singing as it dragged over the rocks.
‘Let go the last five fathoms!’ bawls the skipper. The chap eases the brake, only this time the chain rips out so fast that he can’t snub it off before the final links spin over the gypsy. Everything goes quiet as a fat length of three-strand comes snaking up the chain pipe.
‘No worries there,’ I’m thinking to myself – all fast at the bitter end, you see? Then there’s a sort of splintering sound and the rest of the rope shoots over the bow with a rusty ringbolt still attached where it had ripped out of the keelson. The skipper looks like he’s lost a sixpence and found a farthing.
The winchman winks at me and turns to the afterguard,
‘Didn’t you want it, then?’ he says…
Winter 2001
Something I’ve noticed about yachtsmen – especially them with one of those newfangled Yachtmaster tickets – is that they always gets smart about knots. Mind you, they only knows half a dozen, so they ain’t got many to choose from. But they’ll always tell you it must be this or it has to be that. Usually it’s a bowline, and as often as not that’ll be tied like they was boy scouts on a Sunday-school outing rather than sailors on the job.
I’ve seen so many queer lash-ups in my time that I’m not so keen on laying down the law, especially when it comes to securing a mooring on a samson post. There’s more than one way to skin that cat, but I favours what my Dad taught me. Tugboat hitch he called it, but it ain’t in that RYA syllabus, so you see yacht crews clove-hitching their springs round winch barrels and all sorts of other tricks they must have picked up on the farm.
My Uncle Albert had a bad experience with knots early in the war, when the Navy was roundin’ up a few longshoremen for the old Grey Funnel Line. They decides to check out whether him and some of his mates were any use on a boat, so they takes ‘em to sea in an old MFV and puts them through their paces. About one o’clock on a nasty night they picks up an old mooring in the Swale. Uncle Albert’s on the foredeck in the sleet and the gale and he’s not best pleased. When he’s made all fast, he shambles aft to the wheelhouse hoping for a tot, but instead, the toff in charge demands to hear how he’s secured the mooring.
‘Was it a round turn and two half-hitches,’ asks his Highness, ‘or a cow hitch. Or did you belay it on the bitts?’
Uncle Albert’s peeved at being cold and wet, and even more peeved that this pen-pusher doesn’t trust his ropework, so he just turns away.
‘Come on, man!’ rants the skipper, ‘What did you use?’
‘Snowball hitch,’ replies Uncle Albert, taking a spit out the window. ‘Comes undone when the sun shines…’
Summer 2002
Last night I was settled down by the fire in the Jolly Sailor when I overheard a couple of lads reading a magazine article about a yacht being knocked over down in the Bay of Biscay in a bit of a summer blow. It all sounded like melodrama to me, and I’d heard something similar from a different crowd last month. Seems that nowadays yachts does nothin’ else but get swamped, or burn to the waterline, or some such disaster. When I was a nipper we had more laughs and less horrors. I s’pose we kept quiet about the real nasties, like seamen ought to. Also, in a queer sort of way, boats were more fragile…
Instead of gettin’ himself capsized, my Uncle Albert once told my Dad about his owner’s yacht being so rotten that when the mate threw on the Highfield lever for the running backstay, the force opened up the top strake like a pillar box slot. Uncle was able to enjoy a fine view of the passing shipping from his bunk.
‘That’s nothing’, father retorted. ‘What about poor Fred painting his topsides? Laying on that enamel lovely he was, dragging that brush good and hard. Trouble was, his planking was so rotten that when he got to the chainplates where the fresh water had been lying, he pressed on too rough and his brush went clean through. Wrecked Fred’s day. He drank a bottle of gin clean off.’
If you think that was bad,’ says Uncle, ‘Remember Fingers McCrumlish? He once told me he’d steamed through the Pentland Firth in a destroyer loggin’ fifteen knots and going backwards — that was how hard the tide was running. But the best of it was that an old dear who fancied him brought him a great big fresh-cooked apple pie to that clapped-out smack he lived on. The pie was so wide he couldn’t squeeze it down the companionway and he wasn’t going to cut it, so he hops into his punt, cool as you like, levers off a plank opposite the galley and pops that pie straight in between the frames.’
I never knew which of them was the bigger liar, but if I have to listen to tall stories, I’d rather they weren’t all about doom and destruction…
Buy me a pint, boys, and I might tell you another!
Double-check your plot
Ahoy there Shipmates! The skipper's been keeping me too busy to write my column properly, and now his lady wife says I've got to be 'let go' unless I slip you lads a tip every month without fail. I'd miss all the searoom I get out in cyberspace, so here goes:
If you're plotting one of these new-fangled GPS fixes on your good old paper chart, do it by Latitude and Longitude first, then find yourself a handy waypoint and plot the little devil as a range and bearing from that as well. So long as the two plots match up, you've got it right. If they're so much as a cable's length* adrift though, you'd better double-check, Sonny, because as sure as the new moon turns the weather, you've got something adrift!
Keep her head up till next month, lads...
*Webmaster's note: 1 cable = 200 yards. I suppose it could also be expressed in metres, but Spike won't have anything to do with foreign intervention)
Clearing the weevils out of your noodles
You might think this is an obscure bit of sealore and I suppose if you sail in Britain, it is. I don't remember Uncle Albert having any grief from weevils back on the old smack. But for those who sail the High Seas and have to buy their victuals down in the tropics.... that's a fish of a different smell. Weevils are only tiny insects, but they get into your rice, your noodles, your pasta (only if you eat foreign stuff like that, of course) and they munch their way along nicely until you cook them and serve them up to the charter guests. By then they're usually good and dead - can't stand the boiling water see? - but they get stuck between ladies' teeth and cause despondency.
It's no good trying to pick them out of the dry goods, because they burrow deeper and hide. Here's a tip I picked up from the cook on an Island schooner down in Barbados when I was a nipper. Get your cooking water boiling and have a wide, flattish container handy with three inches or so of cold water in it. When you're ready to cook the rice, dump it into the cold water first. The weevils will come floating up for air. They don't stay on the surface long 'cos they can't swim well and they drown. Once they've coughed it, they sink again and they've won. Your job is to scoop them in while they're still kicking. Works a treat and if you're squeamish, you can even return the little chaps to the jungle rather than tossing them over the side. Can't say as I've ever bothered, but there are some would call me old-fashioned...