Coasting (eBook)

COASTING

The Marriner having left the vast Ocean, and brought his Ship into Soundings near the Land, amongst Tides or Streams, his Art now must be laid aside, and Pilottage taken in hand, the nearer the Land the greater the Danger, therefore your care ought to be the more.

Being in Tides-ways, narrow Channels, Rocks and Sands, I hope the ingenious Mariner will not take it amiss in recommending this to your care, your Tides, Courses, Soundings, and the goodness of your Compasses.

Captain Greenville Collins, Great Britain's Coasting Pilot, 1693

All morning the sea has been gray with rain under a sky so low that the masts of the boat have seemed to puncture the soft banks of cloud overhead. The water is listless, with just enough wind to make the wavelets peak and dribble dully down their fronts. Sails hang in loose bundles from their spars as the boat trudges on under engine, dragging its wake behind it like a long skirt.

The engine, the engine. Its thump and clatter, all mixed up with the smell of diesel oil and the continuous slight motion of the sea, is so regular and monotonous that you keep on hearing voices in it. Sometimes, when the revs are low, there's a man under the boards reciting poems that you vaguely remember in a resonant bass. Sometimes the noise rises to the bright nonsense of a cocktail party in the flat downstairs. At present, though, you're stuck with your usual cruising companion at sixteen hundred revs, an indignant old fool grumbling in the cellar.

Where'd I put it? Can't remember. Gerroff, you, blast and damn you. Where'd I put it? Can't remember. Sodding thingummy. Where'd I put it? Can't remember.

Way out in front, England shows as a dark smear between the sea and the sky like the track of a grubby finger across a windowpane--a distant, northern land. We're crossing into the cold fifties of latitude, as far from the warm middle of the world as Labrador at one end of it and the Falklands at the other. The light is frugal, watery, and it always falls aslant, even in high summer. The sun, when it manages to find a break in the cloud, fills the land with shadows. It's no wonder that England, seen from the sea, looks so withdrawn, preoccupied and inward--a gloomy house, all its shutters drawn, its eaves dripping, its fringe of garden posted against trespassers.

All the pilot books warn one of the dangers of an English landfall. The Admiralty Pilot cautions all those who sail up from the south: 'Fogs, bad weather and the long nights of winter frequently render it impossible to obtain a position . . . under such circumstances the course steered, the log, lead and nature of bottom are the seaman's only guides.' The first signs of England aren't very encouraging either:

The edge of soundings may generally be recognised in fine weather by the numerous ripplings in its vicinity, and in boisterous weather by a turbulent sea and by the sudden alteration in the colour of the water from dark blue to a disturbed green.

The sea is never still. Even when it's calm, the tides sweep at speed along the English coast, racing round headlands and throwing up acres of churning white water--water so violent and unnavigable that even big cargo boats have been lost in these rapids and overfalls.

There are ledges of submerged rock designed to rip your floor out from under you, hidden shoals of gluey mud, and such a lacework of sandbars and narrow channels that even Her Majesty's chartmakers get into a helpless tangle about what is properly England and what is properly Ocean. This serpentine and tricky coast is ringed around with devices to scare ships off, back into the deep water where they're safe....