Sailing can be risky : Ken Gibbs

WELL, HELLO, SAILOR ! 

Our home overlooks a tidal estuary and when we had decided to move from Kent to Cornwall to make the most of this lovely part of the United Kingdom, it was inevitable that I had to find a boat/dinghy to sail on the estuary as the bird life is prolific and if one sits quietly in a boat with sails down, the water birds treat you as one of their own. Here one can study swans, Canada geese, mallard, teal and shelduck not to mention some of the shore waders like the oyster catcher, the curlew and more, like the busy, tiny little turnstones.

One doesn’t spend a lot of money on a dinghy not to use the sails, so one is expected to ‘sail’ periodically to demonstrate that you can keep the sharp end pointing forward, and the mast above water. That’s the theory, anyway.

When sailing, I always preferred to be alone – not just to avoid the embarrassment of running into another dinghy with a crew member on hand to witness it, but I seriously like the silence where I don’t have to concentrate to ‘hear’ what the other person is saying because I am quite deaf.

There was a day when the breeze was fresh and the boat was responding well, and I had tacked a couple of times right across the widest part of the estuary, when I decided to drop the sails and take a rest before returning to the mooring. It always seems to happen at the most inopportune moment but the ropes became twisted and the sail would not ‘drop’, so I had to stand up against the mast to try and release the twisted rope. Just as I managed to release the last twist, a very sharp gust of wind hit the boat, flinging me down on to the very hard seats when I felt something breaking.

If you have ever been in such a situation, you would know that your mind goes into overdrive about how are you going to be able to sail back to the mooring; pick it up and transfer into the tender (that coracle-type-bathtubby-thing) which would get one back to shore. And then how to get to the doctor – would one even be in the village at this time of day ?

What was of interest was that the shock somehow didn’t let me know that there was trouble with my ribs until after I had managed to pick up the mooring and transfer to the tender and made it back to shore where someone took one look at me and said that he’d look after the tender – that I should go straight to the doctor. Which I did.

The doctor looked at the bruise; prodded around a bit and then said that I had broken two ribs and he could do little for me beyond providing some degree of pain relief. As with many prescriptions, one is told what the maximum dose is and not to exceed it – which gave pain relief for about 18 of 24 hours daily.

Sensibly, and to avoid exceeding the dose, I used whisky for the ‘uncovered’ 6 hour period for about 2½ to 3 weeks thereafter, seriously denting the whisky stocks. I was somewhat troubled about which was giving me the most pain – the broken ribs or the whisky hangover. The moral of the story is – don’t break ribs when you are alone in a boat.

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After the double-rib-debacle, I tended to be a bit risk averse but there was the time when I had had a most satisfying, but possibly slightly less demanding sail, that I managed to make it back to the mooring without breaking another rib, so was still in control of matters. As one does when you are not going to be sailing for the next few days, one stows everything tidily so that no passing hurricane can cause any loss or damage, and then comes the interesting transfer from the boat to the tender.

The boat is rather larger than the tender so one has to sit on the edge (gunwale) of the dinghy, swing your legs from dinghy into the tender, then push off from the dinghy and row to shore. Quite simple, but being a bit clumsy, I found my waterproof jacket caught on a rowlock (if this doesn’t mean anything, consult Mr Google who will be able to help), which meant that I couldn’t reach the tender nor could I recover back to the dinghy. In a nutshell, I was tipped down into the water between dinghy and tender. Ooooppppsss !

Happily, I always wore ‘floatation’ (for the uninitiated, this means ‘Life-Jacket’). Even more happily, I was 21st century man in this respect and was wearing an automatic life-jacket which is rather like a soda-stream device which, when it finds itself wet from landing in the water, it goes off with a bang and fills the life jacket with air to keep your head above water. The bang was so loud that people on the shore noticed and saw this as a comic act. Why on earth have a tender if you’re going to swim away from it ?

The spectators on land did absolutely nothing to help me in my distress – as I emerged from the water, everything was full of water so I made very slow progress. The nearest spectator innocently asked me if this was the way I usually dismounted ? I wanted to wring his neck but I was so heavily weighted down that I couldn’t do anything.

I suppose one could call it a spectator sport ?

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