Greek Odyssey Episode 1.
Sunday 18 August 1991: I had a call from Barry in Porto Colom, an ex-sergeant-major from the Royal Green Jackets. He had problems with a 43 foot Taiwanese Trawler named White Pepper due for delivery to Corfu Greece for a Californian client.
Monday: By 14:00, I’d fixed the problems on the delivery captain’s list, but he kept finding more. It was clear he didn’t want to make the delivery; finally, he just walked off the vessel.
Barry asked what I thought of the boat:
“It’s OK, the engines only have 1000 hours on the clock. The electrics are debatable, like any ten-year-old boat. I’ve seen a lot worse”.
“So you’d consider taking it to Greece?”.
“Me! Take this heap of junk to Greece, your joking. Anyway, I haven’t got a Master’s Certificate”.
“I have” replied Barry.
“I thought you were a soldier. Now, it’s Jason and the bloody Argonauts”.
I had no idea how much it cost to deliver a boat, but I tried to get out of it by giving Barry what I thought was an exorbitant price.
Tuesday: At 15:00, Barry phoned and said the owner accepted my price and could I get to Porto Colom to get ready to sail. There was no getting out of it, I packed my grip and said goodbye to Sandy and the children. We agreed we would first head for Menorca, if everything went well we would strike out for Sardinia. I programmed the new Trimble GPS navigational computer and set the first waypoints to Mahon.
Just after midnight, we received a fax from California confirming we were signed on as the new crew. We spent an hour checking equipment, clearing the decks and stowing supplies and loose items. At 01:30, under the star-filled black canopy of a warm August night we slipped our shorelines and passed through the harbour entrance beneath the lighthouse, unseen but for its columnated beam that threw a lazy arc across the lonely open sea. Slowly the coast became a distant line of shimmering light, all that could be heard was the rhythmic thud of the engines and the swish of the sea sliding past the hull. I had no worries now, just a great feeling of adventure.
Wednesday: We stayed up through the dark hours on the fly-bridge, tuned into channel 16 and listened to the chatter of Mallorcan fishermen, occasionally we got a glimpse of their mast lights. Before five, the Eastern sky began to turn pale pink, by six, the sun was up, and the fishermen were on their way home. By ten, we could see Menorca, Nelson’s Mediterranean base during the Napoleonic wars. We pulled up the cabin’s floor panels and checked the engines, took readings from the tanks, calculated the boat’s fuel consumption and estimated we could reach Sardinia with fuel to spare. The boat was doing well, so we set a course East South East, and at a sedate seven knots, we began the 480Km journey to the port of Cagliari. At 19:00, we started two hours on two hours off night watches. I took the first watch so that Barry would get the first dark watch of the evening. The night passed without incident.
Thursday: At 07:00, I took the first-day watch. When Barry relieved me at 13:00, I was exhausted having only catnapped since Tuesday morning. I went to the aft cabin to sleep, but on a small boat there’s no way to avoid the engine noise, and I drifted into semiconsciousness instead of a deep sleep, and that’s the way it was for the rest of the trip.
We encountered very few ships, seeing none during the day and getting only a few distant radar echos in the night. Solitary night watches were spent in the unlit bridge searching the darkness for potential dangers, peering into the dimly lit radar screen or checking the course with the navigational equipment and compass. At one point the GPS spoke, it demanded we turn around and go to its birthplace, Chicago. Initially, I left it to its ramblings but then decided there was no place on the trip for a silicon nostalgic. I carried out a digital lobotomy, and the GPS came back into line, but from then on, every day in a monotone voice, it stubbornly demanded to go home.
Friday: The sun rose directly ahead of us on a mirror calm sea, until it had cleared the horizon it was impossible to see ahead, and the passage of a ship that crossed our bow was seen only on the radar. At 08:00 Sardinia was in view, by 10:00 the mountainous island was slipping past our port bow, and we turned north towards Cagliari. We docked next to a fuel pump where a group of Sardinian fishermen helped us tie up alongside. They were a friendly bunch and using bad Spanish we found we had enough Latin to communicate. The fuel pump was for fishing boats only, but we could order fuel from a station that would deliver it in drums.
Barry assembled a fold-up bike and peddled off to find a bank for some Italian money, and I cooked corned beef hash. He returned with a couple of bottles of red wine, we opened one and had lunch. Barry thought the hash was great, even though the powdered potato was already open and four years past its ‘Used by Date’. I had a mental image of him in a khaki poncho in a rainy field in Northern Ireland happily eating a billy-can of army rations. I fed my lunch to the fishes along with the remaining dried potato. After eating, Barry peddled off again to find the fuel man, returning two hours later ahead of a beat-up pickup truck with the barrels of fuel.
The fuel man shook my hand as if I were a lost relative returned from America, but we had a problem, the fuel pipe was too short to reach the fueling point on the far side of the boat; he dismissed this dilemma with a gesticulation, if we opened the windows we could feed the pipe through the cabin. In the land that cradled Leonardo da Vinci, it was an obvious solution until he started the pump. The worn, cracked pipe convulsed in the confines of the cabin and I imagined the consequences if it split. Frantically I banged on the window shouting to the fuel man to stop the pump, he waved back with a smile. Barry jumped from the boat and pulled the battery lead off the pump. We agreed on a hand signal so the fuel man would stop the pump if the pipe ruptured. After a second delivery and a lot of nervous tension, the boat was fully fueled. By then, it was getting late, so we decided to sleep over and leave in the morning.
Barry suggested I take the bike and have a look at the town and on my return pick up a pizza, it would be a crime to leave Italy without having one. I had a 4 Km dice with death sharing the road with drivers coming into town for Friday night. I rode up a one-way street the wrong way past two police officers who ignored the violation. The town square was full of well dressed Sardinian families celebrating the weekend, generations arm-in-arm chatting in unison in that language that sounded more song than speech. I propped the bike against a wall and entered a bar to sample an Italian beer. The barman instantly recognised me as English, obviously, wearing shorts, socks and shoes wasn’t chic in Cagliari. After the beer, I set off to find a pizza takeaway.
I didn’t understand the menu, so I ordered the pizza by largest diameter and highest price. It was only when I got on the bike that I realised I had a problem carrying the big octagonal box. The return journey was traumatic, again I shared the road with Italian drivers, but now in the dark on a bike with no lights and riding one handed with a pizza under my arm. I stopped several times to change my carrying arm due to cramp. I got back to the docks, hungry from the exercise and not having eaten lunch. In the cabin, I placed the box ceremoniously on the table and removed the lid.
“Oh, no!”.
“What’s wrong?” said Barry “It looks OK to me”.
“Its prawns. I’m allergic to prawns”.
Barry sat at the table.
“Oh, dear, it looks like I’ll be eating alone”.
I had cheese and dried biscuits and a piece of uncontaminated pizza crust. Even Barry’s military conditioned stomach couldn’t cope with the entire contents of the box. Once again, the fish of Cagliari were fed.