Rumproast Ahoy! What I Did On My Holidays (With Free Open Thread): Part II

As promised in my post from a week or so ago, here’s the second instalment of my account of one of the busiest months of July I’ve had in a long time.

When Ms. YAFB and I returned from our Sweden trip, it was hard to contain our schadenfreude at the final big-time breaking of the Murdoch/tapping everyone in the world to sell papers story, which had been bubbling under for a few years. The rest of the news wasn’t so hot, not least with the “US debt crisis” kerfuffle seemingly no nearer resolution and people running round with their hair on fire all over the blogosphere, so it was no great hardship to gather our breath and after just a few days head off for a further enforced furlough from contact with the outside world—another cruise on the T.S. Royalist, which some of you may remember from an older post of mine.

Unlike the ultra-scenic start to that previous cruise, from the top of Neptune’s Staircase at Fort William, this year we were to embark from Greenock, just across the Clyde from where we live. This year, vessels from the Tall Ships Races, including Royalist,  were laying up in Greenock for a week before continuing on the next leg of their progress round the British Isles. This event is a vastly popular festival of sail, so we headed across to join the 70,000 or so that packed the dockside to view the wide range of ships on display.

All tricked out in bunting. they were crammed into the dock, a veritable cat’s cradle of rigging and canvas.

Despite the name, not all the ships that take part in the Tall Ships Races are square-riggers, and not all are large. One in particular caught our eye because its wooden hull was finished more sumptuously than any piece of furniture we’ve ever owned. The fenders were even clad in velvet to ward off scratches to the glassy varnish!

It took a few moments and a little reading to realize we were standing next to a small exhibit from more recent British history.

Edward Heath may not have been a great prime minister, but at least he has one lasting claim to fame, and good taste in yachts.

The scene was very different a few days later when we joined the Royalist. Almost all the ships were gone, and the dock was more or less deserted.

I was a little late arriving, and the full-time crew were already sending the new intake “up and over”—guiding them in a climb up to the first platform on the mast and down the other side, so people could get some experience and gauge how they felt aloft. After a very sad and unfortunate fatal accident a year or so ago, safety measures aboard the ship have been tightened up a lot. Before, we only wore waistbelts as harnesses, and only clipped on for the final climb up the rope ladder to the first platform. Now we were all rigged out in modified parachute harnesses with a long strop/short strop clip arrangement, meaning that at no time while aloft is anyone unattached to the rigging. It’s more awkward, but definitely feels safer, though you tend to look like a refugee from a bondage nightclub as you hang around on deck.

My earlier Royalist post touched on the fact that life below deck was a little spartan, to say the least. To give some idea of what the accommodation is like with 30 or so adults on board a 100-foot ship designed 40 years ago for Sea Cadets whose dimensions were presumably more modest than the youth of today, here’s the mess deck where we ate, and where many of us slept like sardines in three tiers of bunks. My own berth is at the end of the corridor on the left, marked with a red star. It’s right next to the engine room, so I always bring heavy-duty earplugs, as the generator runs all night. It’s also right next to the male heads, so there’s little to encourage one to grab a lie-in while 20-odd guys hit the can in the morning—if I go again, I’m taking nose plugs, too.

Given all this—and the fact that any time you cram a lot of people into a confined space with next to no sleep, you’re going to feel like you’ve joined a floating encounter group—it’s a relief to head up top and enjoy the fresh air and relative spaciousness. In contrast to our previous cruise, we got some excellent sailing weather early in our trip, with winds of force 6 or 7 the norm.

It’s great fun when she heels right over on a tack, with the sea sometimes flowing through the runnels along the edges of the decks. Not so much fun for the galley staff below as they try to prepare meals for us in these conditions. Every few hours between mealtimes we have a tea break, the beverage being served in a gigantic teapot, poured and own milk and sugar added on deck. In a force 7 with the ship at nearing 45 degrees, this is easier said and done, and sometimes resembled a scene from Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, with a race to get the sugar into whatever tea had managed to find its way into your mug before the wind blew it all off the spoon.

And tacks we had aplently. On one stretch up the narrow Kyles of Bute in the upper Clyde, near possibly my favorite local place name, Buttock Point (I’ve long had it in mind to write a crime thriller about smuggling on the Clyde coast, if only as an excuse to include the line “The smugglers tried to escape by sea, sir, but we held them at Buttock Point”), we managed 20 tacks in two hours. Here’s the plot of this part of the voyage—we were traveling northwest.

Twenty tacks in two hours may not sound much to modern yachties, but with a tyro crew and all that’s involved in bracing the sails round, a tack every six minutes or so on a square-rigger gets quite hectic.

On previous cruises, I’ve really enjoyed the chance to flee the hurly-burly of the decks and clamber up the rigging. This year I got to be a full-on yardsman, meaning you’re the first to go up the mast in the morning to unfurl the sails and last to come down having stowed them at night, and on call to do whatever else needs to be done to the sails in the mean time. Here I’m giving the fore course sail (the lowest one) a sound thrashing to get all the air out so that it stows more neatly.

In case you’re wondering what the view’s like from up there, I took a camera with me to record the scene. This is looking down at the anchor deck at the bow. I’d just shouted “Smile below!” to the folks watching us, hence the hanging jaws on a couple of them.

For one reason or another I’d never been up to the topgallant sail (the smallest topmost one). This year changed all that, and it was pretty spectacular up there. If I go again, I’ll take a camera up there, too.

The weather and time constraints meant that the furthest we traveled on this cruise was Campbeltown, but any disappointment at not having another chance to visit some of the Western Isles was tempered by the superb sailing we enjoyed.

Between the sunny weather we had for part of our Sweden trip and the weatherbeating we took on board ship, I finally returned home sporting a tan from the neck up that makes me look like I’ve been to the Bahamas; below the neck, you don’t want to know. I also brought back with me a neatly cracked rib—ironically, not from any of my swinging from the rigging, but from bashing it on the tie rail that runs down the side of the bowsprit. Maybe it’s my karma for all those pork loins.

We wondered how our cat Gus was doing. He’d been overjoyed to see us when we came back from Sweden, accepting the whirlwind nature of our brief return with apparent stoicism.

But the scene that greeted us when we finally threw our luggage in the door and prepared to rest up a little was one of disaster. The little rotter had evidently raided my beer stash.

So now it’s back to old clothes and porridge, and a continuing effort to catch up with what’s been happening in the world while we were away (oh joy!). If you want to talk about any of that or continue to bring me up to speed with anything I might have missed, now’s your chance.

Posted by YAFB on 08/06/11 at 10:02 AM • Permalink

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