All I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by

“You’ll get your sea legs soon enough”, Pete said.

I grunted as I scrubbed the decks with a big wet mop. “This is nothing, anyway. When I was in the Navy, we used to go out in the Bay of Biscay and turn off the motors”. His regional English accent somehow made this sound worse. I don’t know which region, it didn’t matter. My brain was shutting down with the effort of not vomiting. “The ship would roll around in the sea for a few days. Everyone got it all out of their systems soon enough. One poor lad…”. His voice trailed away. The picture of a hundred royal Navy recruits throwing up for two days had pushed me over the line. And over the railing.

“Rich? You awright, mate? Rich?”

I was not awright. Not at all, mate. And it wasn’t that I was throwing up over the side. It was that I was throwing up over the side into the Solent. A strait between the south of England and the Isle of Wight! A big one, yes, but hardly the open sea. Sydney Harbour has a bigger swell. We were an hour from port on a four day journey and I was already feeding the fish.

And, by the way, Pete was blind. I was supposed to be his buddy. Right at that moment, I think my eyesight was worse than his. All I could see was green. And all I could hear was his laughter.

The English Channel

In May 2005 I sailed aboard the Lord Nelson, a purpose-built three masted barque* designed to take disabled people to sea. All the gangways and on board facilities were wheelchair-friendly, and there was a lift on the main stairway down below to the wheelchair-capable cabins. There were special medical facilities too. The Jubilee Sailing Trust had two such ships (the other one named Tenacious). People like me paid for their journeys, and while on board we buddied up with a disabled passenger who traveled free, courtesy of the Trust. It seemed like a good idea, and on the whole, everyone appeared to enjoy themselves.

Even me, despite spending the first two days puking my guts out.

*A barque (pron. bark) is a kind of sailing ship which has three, four or even five masts, the first two, three or four of which are “square rigged” with big rectangular sails, and the last of which, called the “mizzen mast” has a big triangular sail like on a regular yacht. This configuration gave the barque a similar speed to a fully rigged ship (square sails on all masts) but with a smaller crew. Its versatility was most popular in the last great days of sail in the 1920s and 1930s.

Lord Nelson at Cherbourg, France

A crew of crusty old sea dogs watched over us as we literally learned the ropes. There were a hell of a lot of ropes, and it was pretty hard to identify what most of them did. One thing that was clear, though, was that it look half the crew pulling on a rope with all their might to get it to do anything at all. And when we were done, the crusty old sea dog would yell out “avast!”, as though that meant anything to any of us. The first few times we all just stood there stupidly, still holding or pulling the rope. Later, someone quietly mentioned that “avast” meant stop. We all then wondered why they didn’t just say so.

There was another obscure nautical term that had held over from the days of our ship’s namesake. We were throwing our backs into pulling another rope, wondering what it was the rope did, when we heard the call “Come up! Come up on that rope!”. We all came up, moving from a heaving crouching position to kind of standing around awkwardly. But we were still holding on, fearful that if we let go, a steel boom might came barreling down the mast and crush us all, or a sail would disappear overboard. “Come up, I said! Come up on that rope!”. Someone at the head of the line worked it out, and passed the word. “Come up” actually meant “stop pulling”. Which sort of sounded like what “avast” meant. Perhaps I was too seasick to appreciate the subtle difference.

I went down below to my bunk. I was right at the bow, the pointy end of the ship, on the top bunk, with Pete, my blind buddy in the bunk below. There was a little porthole by my head and as I willed myself to sleep I saw the sea zipping along outside. It was foggy on the Solent so we were still under power, and hadn’t set the sails. Lying down, I was okay, thank goodness. Later, I woke up and felt better. This trip wasn’t cheap, so I braced myself, and swallowed two ginger capsules which are meant to settle the stomach. I went above and found my way to the open bridge, a deck at the back of the ship where there is a big steering wheel. People welcomed me back to the land of the living and just as I was saying “I feel quite good now”, a great wad of ginger-infused stomach bile exploded out my mouth and nose. Thankfully it went overboard and not all over my fellow passengers (or the lovely teak deck). I felt my nose hairs burn as I made my way back down below.

The next day, we motored across the Channel to Alderney, one of the Channel Islands that are close to France but belong to Britain. I still felt pretty wretched, so I approached the ship’s nurse. I knew from her initial briefing that she was exceptionally zealous and impossibly intense, and thus best avoided, but I hit her up for the hard-core anti sea-sickness drugs. There was some kind of long and detailed lecture about this and that and the side effects and dosages or whatever but I was like a crack-fiend needing a fix. “Yeah, great, ya-huh, got it, just gimme the stuff baby!”.

The Aft Starboard Watch. Pete is in the center of the back row.

Coming in to Alderney and its tiny little harbour, my “watch” was on duty. We were “Aft Starboard”, and there was also a watch for each other corner of the ship. Pete and I were given the important protocol task of flying the Alderney flag off the mizzen mast. You do this when in another country’s port (forgetting for the moment that Alderney is technically part of the UK). Now, remember, Pete is blind. I was in a seasickness-and-drugs induced state, so I can also probably be excused for not perfecting the very fine points of flag-flying etiquette. I was just pleased we managed to tie the flag to the cable, and get it the right way up.

Pete pulled the cable until I barked “avast, me hearty!”. “How’s it look mate?” he asked. I squinted at the tiny square of fabric flapping in the breeze way up there on the mizzen mast. “Pretty ship-shape, I reckon”. “Awright, let’s go ‘av our dinner then”. A fine idea, and I suddenly realised how hungry you get after two days of throwing up.

We were down below eating up, and I was marvelling at Pete’s tactics for eating given that he couldn’t see his plate or anything on it. Suddenly the head sea dog, a woman in her late 50s, barked in the general direction of the Aft Starboard Watch. “Who flew that flag? It’s a disgrace!” Pete turned his face in my direction and I volunteered us as the culprits in this apparent cock-up. “Come up with me”. There were no ropes to stop pulling so I concluded that this command could be taken on face value. I went above with the skipper, who set me straight on the nautical no-no I had committed.

“What was it, mate?”, Pete asked when I came back below for some ice cream. “The stupid flag was like one inch short of the top, and she got in a big tizz about it”, I reported. “I mean, it’s only the size of a tissue and we are about 300 meters offshore. Far out”. Pete shrugged, as if to say he agreed it was dumb but hey, this is the Navy. Even though it wasn’t.

Lord Nelson at anchor in Alderney. The offending flag is on the rear mast. Can you see it?

Alderney was a lovely little place. We went ashore in a rubber ducky and Pete and I took a stroll out of the village and up the hill. It was spring, and the smell of wild garlic filled the fresh air. Pete told me all about his life. He’d been in the Royal Navy, on frigates, seen a fair bit of the world and then left the service for civvy street. He’d been the head chef at a big hotel on the Isle of Wight and then boom, one day he woke up blind. The doctors said it was connected to his diabetes, and while they were working on a cure, it was some way off. Pete’s eyeballs were full of silicon, to preserve them in the event his sight could be recovered one day.

Back down at the bay, we met the rest of Aft Starboard and shared pints of shandy in the sun. I didn’t know if I was meant to drink on the seasickness drugs, and I confided my minor concern in Pete. “Don’t worry about it, mate”, he said with just a trace of scorn. “It’s just a shandy”.

At the end of the day, we took the rubber ducky back to the ship. It looked so graceful in the setting sun, masts and ropes and my ridiculous little flag now proudly at the top of its line. I re-upped on the pills and passed a surprisingly comfortable night, Pete snoring gently below and the faint light of the night coming through my porthole.

It was a beautiful breezy day. We motored out of Alderney en route to the French port of Cherbourg. I looked forward to a great day’s sailing.

When it became clear we weren’t actually going to sail, I asked the nurse what was wrong. “It’s just that we have a couple of severely handicapped people on board”. Are you for real, I thought? Isn’t the whole point of this outfit to show our disabled friends that they can sail a big boat too? That their disability doesn’t hold them, or us, back? I sincerely hoped she hadn’t told that to the two kids she was referring to – a nice couple of lads confined to wheel chairs with, it was true, some pretty challenging issues. But they had specialist minders, and had parked their wheelchairs in the rope line and pulled as best they could until someone told us, in plain English, to stop pulling. The ship was wheelchair accessible and they’d even been up the mast. They were good lads, and keen. So I was pretty bemused by this situation and to be honest, pretty annoyed. Partly for the apparent inconsistency (I don’t want to say “patronising hypocrisy”), but also, I confess, partly out of selfishness. While I did like the underlying buddy idea, I’d shelled out my money to go sailing, not to motor about on the Channel. That’s what the Cross Channel Ferry is for.

Cherbourg appeared over the horizon and we tied up alongside the old buildings in preparation for an overnight stay. By this time I’d realised that the real fun was being had by – and with – the ship’s deck crew, rather than the crusty and frankly pretty self important Captain and “officers”. At the same time I watched the young deck hands picking up two of the women (the able-bodied ones, there wasn’t any icky exploitation going on), I also witnessed the Captain chewing out one of the other “officers”. After making her point, she pretentiously pointed to her epaulettes and said “that’s why I’ve got the stripes”. Sheesh. Keep me away from people like that. Pete agreed when I told him and so we headed ashore to do some shopping. He was convinced that he could get dark chocolate with 75 per cent cocoa. We – or rather I – looked and looked and the best I could find was somewhere in the 50s. “Rich, it’s there mate, it’s got to be”. “Dude, it isn’t”, I replied, witholding the obvious supplementary fact that made me sure I was right and he wasn’t. In the end I persuaded him to settle for the extra dark 50+ stuff. We picked up a bottle of champagne for his girlfriend. “She’s blind, too, mate. Lucky really, no way she’d ‘av me if she could see this face”. He told me that she was actually worried that if his sight returned, he wouldn’t want her. This was the craziest thing Pete had ever heard. “She’s beautiful, and she’s the best thing that ever happened to me”. Pete had some adult kids, and he said they agreed on all counts. He started describing her, and their time together, and thankfully we got back to the ship before this discussion went too far into his plans for the champagne and the following weekend. He had been in the Navy, after all. I wasn’t sure I could handle too much more information!

Back on board it was finally time to climb the masts and get used to being out on the yards, which is the nautical name for the horizontal parts of the masts. A young Belgian guy, totally blind since birth, harnessed up and within about three minutes he was way up at the top of the mast. Impressive. I don’t really like heights very much, though I don’t let it hold me back, and so I was a bit nervous when it was my turn. At the foremast, people were hauling on a rope so one of the guys in his wheelchair could go up the mast. Thankfully everyone knew the commands by now, and he didn’t plummet to his death. I clipped on, climbed up the ratlines (the big rope ladder at the side of the mast), and worked out how to go out and over to reach the first platform, one third of the way up the main mast. So far, so good.

When you reach the first platform, you need climb out underneath it, then haul yourself over the top at the side. It’s a bit nerve wracking the first few times. Those horizontal beams that hold the sails are called “yards”.

I went on up to the second platform, and then up the smallest little rope ladder towards the very top. It’s about 34 meters above sea level. It doesn’t sound very high like that, but it was more than six storeys and higher than the building on the side of the wharf. I certainly felt it was pretty damn high and it was a rush being there.

Looking out to sea past the foremast from (almost) the very top of the main mast. Wouldn’t want to have to change those red light bulbs…

Don’t slip…it’s actually rather a long way down really.

At last it was time to sail. We had a glorious day ahead of us as we squeezed the ship through the narrow channel you see in the photo above. Everyone spread around the ship to do the things they could do. The boys in the wheelchairs were on hauling duty along with everyone who didn’t want to be up the masts. I was out on the yard with a nice South African woman and it was our job to unfurl the huge mainsail.

I’m out at the end at right of frame.

We were wearing harnesses and a short cable connected us to a safety line on the back of the yard. But the ship was moving along and it was quite breezy, so even though the sea itself was calm, I did feel like I needed to hold on. With other people on the footline, it swung and bounced a round a bit. Any time you wanted to get on or off the footline you had to yell out “coming on” or “going off” so everyone could prepare themselves for the change in tension and not accidentally lose their footing. Everything up there was made of steel and even if your harness prevented you falling to your untimely death far below, you could still swing around and whack your head or body on something. The sail itself was very heavy, as we discovered later upon hauling it in.

Team members from another watch leaning over to tie up the sail.

And then we were really sailing. The motor was off, the sails were set, and the ship was gliding through the sea quietly, with no smell of marine diesel, just the fresh sea breeze. It was beautiful. The sky was clear, and blue, and (having re-upped again) I felt great. I thoroughly, wholeheartedly and instantly “got” the romance of a tall ship. On a fine day with following seas, there is nothing better.

I walked around the ship and out onto the bowsprit, the long pointy boom that sticks out the front and holds the triangular sails (called jibs). This, too, seemed wide enough for a wheelchair and I hung myself out and looked back over the ship and up the masts, taking the photograph at the top of this story. Beneath me the bow cut through the waves; above me the sails rippled occasionally and drove us comfortably towards England.

A little later I was on watch again. It was time for a very special treat – steer the ship. Someone told me roughly what to do, which was actually very simple. Stick to a given compass heading (I think it was about 005, or 5 degrees, roughly north). There was a large steering wheel and as I stood behind it, I looked up to the full spread of sail. A big compass sat on a pylon in front of me.

View from the bridge while steering the ship

I didn’t dare admire the sails for long. The ship responded well to movement of the wheel, but I discovered I really needed to pay attention to the compass to keep her on the right heading. Just like driving a car, even a few seconds looking anywhere else but out the front meant drifting off course. Still, this was one of the most fulfilling and enjoyable half hours of my life. The ship rode up gently and then down with the swell. The open steering position meant you felt the wind, heard the waves, smelled the spray. You really were one with the ship, its sails an extension of your arms, huge and powerful and sweeping you along, but quietly, naturally, in peace. I can’t really explain the sense of calm and serenity this brought me. I don’t doubt for a second that it would be a very different story hammering around Cape Horn in the Roaring Forties, decks awash and the rigging shrieking. But on this day, it was unbeatable.

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

John Masefield (1878-1967)

We approached Southampton and the Isle of Wight. It was time to go back up the masts and reel in those magnificent sails. I did this happily but with a little sadness, for it had been all too short. Yet the seasickness and the stupid waste of a clear day between Alderney and Cherbourg only emphasised the beauty of this day. So I didn’t linger long on what might have been, and instead harnessed up and went above.

Yon named me “Captain Whistleblower” for this image. Not quite Horatio Hornblower in a Tricorn, but I like it nonetheless.

Those magnificent sails were rather heavy and we really put some work in to furl them. A wonderfully English fellow was on my yard, showing me what to do. Named Frances, he was the human form of Ratty in the Wind in the Willows. The line was made for this man: “There is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” Perhaps because I was younger than he, perhaps because it was his way, or perhaps because, like me, he’d had a pot full of the “officers” on this ship, he threw in an expletive (the F-word, said only as an Englishman who messes about with boats could say it). “Some say you can tie that under there, but if you ask me that’s no way to tie up a fucking sail”. Twenty meters above the sea was no place to dispute his expertise. I offered my agreement and did the other knots the way he showed me. Later in Southampton, he used the rubber ducky to ram the ship up against the wharf as we were docking. Gunning the outboard and running broadside against Lord Nelson’s hull at full speed really seemed to help him.

There’s always a moment for a quick photo

We were home. I’d spent two days vomiting, I’d scrubbed decks with a mop, I’d cleaned a bathroom while seasick and helped around the ship. I’d done the dog watch in the early hours before dawn, taking temperature and barometer readings every half hour. I’d messed around with the radar set, and guided a great clanging anchor chain into its hole as we prepared to leave Alderney. The ship’s mates had given me some laughs and they’d all scored, too. Pete seemed to have had a great time and thanked me for being his buddy. It was nothing, he was a great guy and a good laugh.

I’d climbed to the top of the mast, set the sails in the wind and brought them back in again. And for a magical half hour, I’d been at one with the ship, the wind and the sea. All I’d asked was a tall ship and something to steer her by, and it was all that I could ask and more.