A fine day, little wind, a flowing tide – ideal for taking Blue Mistress up the River Tamar to Cotehele – a long-held ambition.
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I have sailed on the Tamar once before, (you’ve guessed it – over fifty years ago), but this will be the first time I have navigated it alone – (in my current incarnation as older man).
I am watching the Udder Rock buoy further up the coast. The tide is taking us inshore and I head further out to sea to stay to the seaward of it.
This is the third day of this trip, finally a day of wind, sea and sail. The cloud cover is still low, clinging to the tops of the cliffs. There are no other boats visible and, despite being close to the shore. I can see no one on the coast path.
The early mist had given the harbour a silent, closed feel.
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The early morning sunshine doesn’t last and we are soon back to a windless, blue-grey, engine-powered day.
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Wherever you are, the wider world is never far away. I spy Grace with her magnificent Cornish flag leaving the Maritime Museum pontoons. I admire her lines and recognise a smaller version of Ceres, my grandfather’s Westcountry trading ketch mentioned extensively in earlier posts in this blog.
The weather is benign – so benign there is no wind and no sun either. The sea is glassy, the colours bluish grey, the sky and seas almost matching, the horizon sometimes clear, sometimes vague.
The engine gives a comfortable 5 knots, the distance is approximately 40 nm, I have six hours of fair tide. Time to reflect, time to look around.
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There are gannets, diving, resting, flying.
It has taken a while to get used to people saying “What? By yourself?” as in “I took the boat down to Falmouth and returned to Plymouth via Fowey? It was a quick three-day trip.” “What? By yourself?”
How do you explain it? To the uninitiated it invites the disapproval of
Despite all of them I succeeded – as do many, many others in far more challenging circumstances.
It has taken many years sailing to be able to say with confidence “I do it like this. I know it is possible to do it like that but I have chosen to do it like this. Yes, the most knowledgeable of intellectuals, the most graceful of athletes, the most creative of artists, the grandest of grandees, they all know better than me. But not quite. Individually they know certain areas of my life better than me and combined they know many areas of my life better than me but the whole of my life belongs to me and I choose to live it like this. I will listen to them but I will make up my own mind whether it is useful for me or not. There’s no side to it, no competition, I respect their point of view but I am taking responsibility for me so I can give back what I learn as I go along.”
Time and money – (not enough of either), have meant that it has taken not months but years to bring Blue Mistress to her current standard – a standard that makes me comfortable in taking trips along the South Devon and South Cornwall coastline.
‘Single-handed’ means thinking things through long before they are needed. The layout of the boat, its contents and every maneuver that may or may not be made has been gone through in your head, maybe on paper, certainly on a computer, and books and videos and charts and tables studied, with the intention that all this be absorbed into experience.
Even then mistakes will be made – some of them very memorable with solutions needed in a breath-taking hurry, but mostly things will go right. Very few of the latter are memorable because what is going on outside the boat is as interesting as what is going on inside. Have you ever seen a coastline from the sea? The Devon and Cornish coasts are particularly stunning. (And, yes, there are plenty of other stunning coastlines too).
I like aloneness but enjoy company. A week ago we took my London-based, four-year-old grandson for his first trip. Enthusiasm on all sides. What’s not to like?
And every trip, every voyage is different.
I took few photos on the Falmouth trip but I will make a short storyboard next post. In the meantime, here is Blue Mistress in Fowey on the last day of September 2014 with the morning mist rising. As I say, what’s not to like?
(Image taken by Bill Whateley)
It’s no good talking about the three most of this or the three best of that because they change – with age, with health, with mood, with time. But I can think of a number of songs I have liked and still do and I can bring three to the fore right now.
At school, aged 16 or so, I heard down a long bleak corridor, a man with a deepish, sonorous voice singing about a woman called ‘Suzanne’ – singing in a way I had never heard anyone sing before. A fellow pupil who was always ahead of the game when it came to music had bought yet another new LP. With him around, we were always moving on – listening to Elvis and forgetting Cliff Richard, finding the Rolling Stones and knocking the Beatles; Dylan and Baez were in there too. The great debates of school – which group/singer do you like the best? Tenuous friendships could be won or lost with the answer.
Anyway, Leonard Cohen was the man for me then and has remained so for all of fifty years. His lyrics hint at a world out there that I never quite entered – well, perhaps a little, but only a little. He has carried me forward and given thought and pleasure in equal quantities. He is still out there singing.
Coincidentally, his current partner, Anjani, sings another song that is with me right now – hers is one of the current batch of CDs that are in favour in this house. The song is, appropriately, ‘Thanks for the Dance’. Just before we left the South Island of New Zealand in April, we spent an enjoyable night with friends in Richmond. During the evening, a DVD of Anjani singing this song was on the screen. It reminds me of our time in New Zealand, of the friends we made and remade and beyond that it reminds me of Leonard Cohen towards whom I guess the song was aimed.
The third is not a single song but a series of songs that always get to me – the songs of exile. It doesn’t particularly matter where the singer comes from, it’s that yearning for home that grabs me. The Irish have the edge on these – the ‘Mountains of Mourne’ is a particular favourite. From Cornwall, it’s ‘Lamorna’ that makes me pause and remember, but it could equally be ‘Little Lize’ and ‘Camborne Hill’ or even ‘Trelawney’ itself. Paradoxically, the inner sadness that these songs bring tends to revive the spirit – or perhaps renew it. Like tears – the feeling is better afterwards – a catharsis – maybe all music has a large cathartic element.
Mendelssohn wrote that you can’t put music into words, not because it is vague but because it is too precise for words. Maybe we all need the music.
The grass here is sparse. It is not the lush green grass of a farmer’s field nor the tight tidy grass of a football pitch. No, this grass is short and stiff and twisted by the weather, the ground around it full of stones. Despite the odds against it, it grows on this small headland, facing the Atlantic Ocean and the prevailing south westerly gales – gales full of salt air and storm-tossed water. And when the wind stops blowing and the rain stops raining, the sun shines equally fiercely, parching it dry as a bone. Standing here we stand on an apparently unpromising bare patch of ground, but . . .
I came here first as a child on my father’s shoulders. We would climb the narrow path from the valley where we lived, one step at a time, no room for a stumble. On our left side, the higher we rose the steeper the slope, till it fell away altogether to become a vertical cliff dropping to the rocks below. On our right, rocky outcrops allowed little room to lean inwards.
We would reach the headland, him slightly out of breath, me exhilarated by the ride. The view was what we had come to see. Behind us, we could look down to our home in the valley and follow the lane inland until it was lost in deep woods – woods that led our eyes up to the solid church tower marking a village several miles away.
South to our left, we admired a coastline with row upon row of sea-hewn rocks stretching out into the surf. Depending on the weather and the tide, they could be lines of sharp, bare, reptiles teeth, or, in a storm, ragged fangs beneath a constant whirl of spume, broken water flying in the wind.
Straight ahead to the west beyond the horizon was Newfoundland – or so my Dad said. What I saw was sea and the horizon and the sky and “see the ship, Bill?” – occasionally the whole ship on that distant line, more often the smudge of a funnel. This was not a place where ships came close to the shore. It was a wreckers’ coast, where, in the nineteenth century, many sailing ships came to grief. There is a wreck immediately below this headland. I have never been sure of its name but there is an official record of a wreck that may fit: on 29th March 1878, St George, a schooner out of Looe carrying copper ore to Swansea “was lost in a NE force 9 gale accompanied by heavy snow, the crew saving themselves in their own boat after the vessel drove ashore on the rocks near Morwenstowe at 4 am.” The official record continues sparingly: “This schooner was wrecked during a snow storm at Morwenstowe, happily all on board were saved.” – surely an understatement.
If I seem to be talking about the past, I am also talking about the present. This is as much about now as then. The headland, the valley, the cliffs and the rocks are still there. That horizon also remains but now heralds a wider world beyond. My memories of my father and everyone else I have climbed the path with are still there. And those intense moments shared by the crew on that snow-laden night in 1878 still hang in the air. They survived. But there are many others who didn’t and whose spirits still inhabit this coast. They have never left.
And there’s more – another level to this place, a level not grounded in the past but very much delving into the future. Glancing north, we look down into a grey pebbly bay, the very bay where the St George came ashore. Our headland forms the southern end of this bay, the cliffs that back it rising high over where we are standing. If we lift our eyes, we can just see, peering over the cliff edge to our right, the white lips of two giant dishes, two of the many aerials of a large and reputedly vital communications tracking station. Wide and deep are the search capabilities therein. Its satellites span vast tracks of the planet. We are not allowed to know what goes on there. But whether or not we do ever discover what does go on, the fact of its presence and the products of its endeavours will surely affect us and our children and their children. Technology, including the technology I am using here, inevitably governs our future. It has been a long time since I could tell myself this point of land was unspoiled by man.
This place I am writing about, where past and future meet, is Steeple Point.
This is my source. This is Cornwall. This is where I was born.
Beyond Steeple Point 