Learning the Ropes on a Sailing Trip to Marseille
It’ll take more than rum to make a sailor out of me
You don’t say no
Not to this. When someone offers you a sailing trip to France’s legendary Côte d’Azur, you’d have to be some sort of frothing lunatic to refuse.
Or someone afraid of the sea.
But it sits there at the edge of town, capricious as a cat, barely breathing in turquoise slumber one day, raging in drooling strings of white foam the next.
It’s that horizon. That sharp line where the world drops away, leaving behind only sky and mystery. It’s irresistible. To a certain kind of man, nothing will ever be as perfect as the nothing that hides just beyond sight.
Work can wait. The house, which has stood for over a hundred years, will stand a few days more. Weather won’t wait. The wind won’t wait. Now or never.
This kind of thing used to happen to Josep Pla all the time. He’d be sitting at his desk in Cadaques, and some colorful character would offer him a ride in a sailboat, to smuggle contraband to France or rendezvous with a submarine.
And as every literary type knows, fiction is writing reality.
I’m no sailor
No city in England is further from the sea than Coventry, where I was born. Among the crumbling warehouses and silent glowering factories of my childhood, regattas were in short supply.
For us, the sea was a place we went every few years, to some wind-scoured coastal resort like Skegness or Blackpool, or on a ferry over the Irish Sea.
Once, we took a week-long school trip to live on a narrowboat and travel along the canals of the Midlands.
We slept in narrow bunks, snoozing through boring lessons on the Industrial Revolution, and watched a shaggy sheepdog leave a pale sausage of pink dung on the towpath that my best friend, propelled by some instinct for masochistic comedy or that same lure of the abyss the horizon gives us, immediately put his bare hand directly into when he abruptly fell overboard.
Ben’s childhood was different.
He grew up in Boston and learned to sail among the fog and whitecaps of New England. He’s worked on those lobster fishing boats they keep making TV shows about, the one where tangled lines whip people overboard into a frothing cauldron of frozen sea.
We met when I paid him to plaster the walls of my living room.
He’s a wiry man with a permanent three days growth of beard, a shaved head, and two daughters far too young for a guy his age. All shadows are opposites in their way, the negative image with its colors flipped. He’s the black sheep of his family, fallen some considerable distance from a WASP-y upbringing to end up where so many wild and woolly strays seem to collect.
I’m the opposite. I had to rise some considerable distance to reach this high.
I’m lucky I’m a straight man because I have terrible taste in men. I can’t resist a guy with a story, a working-class intellectual. Ben talks about entropy while he plasters walls and quotes Chekhov while mixing cement. It doesn’t take much to turn my head these days.
Ben knows how to sail. I know how to drink, how to write, and how to season the truth with fiction so that gold glints among the shit.
What more do you need for three days at sea?
Oh, right. An offshore wind, a leaking red can of diesel, and a couple of dark brown liters of Cuban rum.
A perfect day for sailing
I was still yawning as I boarded the train to Narbonne. Twenty minutes later, Ben was picking me up in the battered car he rents from a friend, one wing mirror sheared off, the air conditioning frozen, the window stuck closed. I sat in the passenger seat with my knees around my ears and my clinking bag between my feet while his adorable kids made mild fun of my appalling French.
We dropped the girls off at school and headed to Gruissan. Prems, the boat that would be our home for the next three days, chugged out of the harbor on her leaking engine, slipping between the tumbled rocks that marked the gateway to the Mediterranean.
And then, we were at sea.
The wind stripped every cloud from the sky. The sun bounced back from the water in ten thousand scattered stars. Ben scurried across the deck like a spider, pulling on ropes and cranking winches, a many-limbed organist in a swaying church manipulating stops and pipes to make the music of God ring out.
Under instruction, I pulled hard on a rope to raise the front sail (a Genoa, apparently).
“Stop!” Ben yelled, the wild wind clutching at his words as he held the gathered sail in both hands.
He just had it repaired for the trip, and it ripped immediately.
Sailing is like space travel. If you didn’t bring it with you, it doesn’t exist. Maybe that’s the point. Out in the restless blue, you can rely only on yourself and what a ten-meter sailboat can carry.
We had a repair kit. And we spent the next two hours sewing up the sail, taking it in turns to wrap a leather strap with a steel disc in the palm around our right hands, then pushing the thick needle through the canvas sail and patching the rip.
It felt like something Phoenician traders would do, sailing up and down this coast to sell purple dye to easily-impressed tribes and snooty Roman patricians. Trying, no doubt, as we did, to avoid forcing the needle, with all the weight we could summon, into a thigh or a testicle as we sat with the sail in our laps.
Mixed results on that score.
Finally, Ben hoisted the sail, patched with thread dyed with blood. By some strange miracle, the stitches held, the sail filled with wind, and the boat
Took
Off.
Port Camargue
By road, it’s 133 km from Gruissan to Port Camargue. By water, less distance, but much slower.
But in a boat, speed is relative.
“7.8 knots! She’s flying! She’s never gone this fast!”
Ben stood on the deck, one hand on the groaning steel of the mast for balance, dark sunglasses hiding eyes that shone with some salt-edged joy known only to sailors and sun-drunk lifeboat cannibals.
For reference, I can go faster than that on my bike.
But out there in the restless waves, it doesn’t feel that way.
With the engine off, all you hear is the roar of the wind and the restless hiss of the boat slicing through waves that slap against the hull.
“Boats have a hull speed,” Ben told me, salivating with visible pleasure. “No matter what you give them, they only go so fast. We are right at the limit here.”
And we stayed at that limit for twelve hours, all the way to Port Camargue.
French cowboys ride the range here. White horses wild as waves thunder along the windy beaches.
Ben, keeping a closer eye on the finances of our trip than the weather, decided not to dock in the port where they charge you to spend the night.
Instead, we rested at anchor just off of a beach strafed by spotlights, the water reflecting the pale ghost of a Ferris wheel, some sea creature dragged onto land and blown up to gigantic proportions to give vacationing families something to do.
The sun sank. Scattered rays came through the thin bleached French flag hanging from the back of Prems.
Tranquility. Beauty. Calm sea, low light. Barely a breath of wind. Laughter from nearby boats, accompanied by the inviting clink of bottle against glass.
Everything you want from a Mediterranean sailing trip.
And there I was, laptop balanced on my knees, taking the occasional photo of the sunset while I hammered out some bullshit article for a client who deserves worse.
Everything must be paid for, in money or time or attention or blood.
When work was finally done, the sun was almost fully submerged, and the tin lid screamed on the first bottle of rum as I whipped it open and raised a glass to God for making me so unexpectedly unstoppable.
The storm
Things had become unaccountably fuzzy as I made my way to bed. It wasn’t even that late. Then again, if you drew markings on the rum bottle to mark time like a water clock, it was about four in the morning.
Prems is not a cruise liner. Our beds in the cabin were just a few feet apart, two middle-age men snoring and belching and farting the alcohol out of our decaying systems in dangerous proximity to one another. The Royal Navy, according to Churchill, had three traditions: rum, sodomy, and the lash.
One out of three ain’t bad.
Unconsciousness took me quick. And it held me until some wild hour of the morning.
“Fuck,” I heard Ben say.
The wind was howling. That’s not a metaphor. I’m not being cute with language the way I usually am. It sounded like five hundred wolves were sat on the deck, doing Celine Dion impressions while the boat span on its anchor chain, circling wildly around the only thing that held us in place.
Ben sprang out of bed, leaping onto the deck to contend with the wind and the waves.
I thought about it.
For one, I wasn’t completely sure it wasn’t just a bad dream.
For another, I had just had an entire day of being reminded of the absolute fuck-all enormity of what I know about sailing.
And for a third, I had already attained that gritty depth of hangover where death starts to seem like a welcome embrace.
I pulled the blanket over my head and readied to meet Poseidon. May he and all his scavenging cephalopods greet me as a friend.
At least it’s been a life worth losing.
