I was becoming increasingly concerned at the lack of progress on the boat. Barry Burke, who is the second most charming man in Ireland (the most charming man in Ireland, and the nicest, is Dr. Eamonn Lydon, of Oranmore, County Galway), would, whenever I would come to him, perplexed about the boat’s progress, place a fatherly hand on my shoulder and say, “Now, Stuart, your boat is the most important boat being built in this yard, because of what she has to do, and you just can’t rush a boat like that.”
Everything else seemed to be moving along on time, however. One day a few weeks before, the area engineer for Lucas, the electrical equipment people, had turned up at the yard unexpectedly and said he had heard from Hydromarine, the engine people, that I needed a second, larger alternator. He said that Lucas would be happy to provide it and any technical advice I needed, and now the engine had arrived, the big alternator bolted into place.
Now came the passage to Lymington on Irish Mist II, and it proved to be all that the Golden Apple delivery had not. We slipped our moorings at Crosshaven in the early evening on Friday, May 31: Archie O’Leary, the owner; Pat Donovan, a Crosshaven publican and regular winch grinder and cook on Mist; Peter Walsh, a Cork gynecologist (just in case); and a student who was studying yacht design in Southampton, to whom I shall refer as The Kid.
We were soon close reaching in a steady Force six, gusting seven, as darkness closed. In these conditions, watches were being kept in pairs, and Archie put me with him, obviously anxious about my lack of experience.
I had made a point, from the beginning, of communicating to the people I sailed with that I was new to larger boats, because I did not want anybody to overestimate my skills, but lately, this was beginning to become a problem. By the time we sailed on Mist I had some twelve hundred miles of offshore experience and had taken an extensive course in coastal navigation, plus about ten days of practical instruction, a week of that on Creidne, a larger boat than Irish Mist. This was probably more than your average weekend yachtsman would do in two whole seasons, and I could now do, competently, just about anything that needed doing on a boat, barring mechanical and electrical repairs, for which I showed little talent. Certainly, there were things I didn’t know how to do on specific boats; I had never worked with slab reefing, for instance, which Mist had, but it was simply a matter of becoming familiar with a particular boat’s equipment.
I had also discovered two marked advantages which I possessed, both quite accidental and unlearned, but advantages nevertheless. I didn’t get seasick, apart from an occasional queasiness, and I was not frightened on boats.
I felt, and still feel, a kind of apprehension before beginning a passage — in the earliest days this had been partly a fear of being seasick, or, perhaps, a fear of being frightened, but I was not subject to the kind of demoralizing, even paralyzing fright that I had sometimes seen in others on a boat. Even now, while we were sailing to windward in the biggest winds and heaviest seas I had yet experienced, I felt nothing but excitement and exhilaration. If Archie hadn’t been on deck with me I think I would have been singing or shouting at the top of my lungs into the wind.
Mist bucked into the seas, sending the occasional wave racing down her flush decks to hit us full in the face like a bathtub of water. For some reason, this struck me as funny, and I laughed a lot. I think Archie thought I was hysterical. The two hours of our watch passed very quickly, broken only by the passing of a large, brightly lit ship, probably the Cork — Swansea car ferry, the Inisfallen, which flashed “K” (“I wish to communicate with you”) at us. We had our hands full in this weather, but after looking up what “K” meant, The Kid answered her, with what signal I’m not sure. I think she just wanted to know if we were all right in the heavy seas; it was nice of her to worry.
Below, Irish Mist was, at times, as wet as it was on deck. The main hatch leaked a lot when a wave raked the decks, pouring water into the lower, leeward bunk, rendering it unusable. There was a spacious galley but no handholds, these being judged by Ron Holland as weighing too much, and we had a tendency to ricochet about the main cabin when trying to move around. (When Ron Holland dies and goes to hell, his punishment should be to spend eternity inside one of his own designs with no handholds, sailing to windward in about a Force seven.) If you could stay wedged into a bunk long enough to get the leecloth tied, then you could sleep in reasonable comfort, though. The boat contained the forementioned galley, two lower and two upper berths in the main cabin, a single and a double berth in an after area, and a chart table right aft, where the navigator could, in theory, speak to the helmsman through a small hatch. The rules require certain comforts on a racing yacht, but still it was quite a spartan interior, which Ron thought to be a new high in luxury. (Ron was once quoted by a yachting magazine as saying that all he required for the interior of a racing yacht were facilities for lying down and boiling water. He denies this. I believe the magazine.)
I had a look at the course plotted by The Kid, who was navigating us, and wondered aloud if he were allowing for tidal stream, leeway, and surface drift. He saw no point in bothering with these, and as a result, we ended up twenty degrees below our proper course, had to put in an unnecessary tack, and sailed fifty miles farther than necessary to reach Hugh Town, St. Mary’s, in the Scilly Isles, our first stop.
I was greatly taken with Hugh Town. We were met by the customs/immigration official and advised about anchorages. At one point he asked Archie, “If you’re an Irish ship, why aren’t you flying the Irish ensign?” Archie had a ready and truthful answer.
“My designer thinks flagstaffs weigh too much.”
We visited the local pubs for a few pints and walked through the village, a very pretty one. I resolved to get back here again, maybe single-handed. That would be a good trial for Golden Harp. It was about a twenty-four-hour sail from Crosshaven (on the proper course) over open water, without too much shipping about, and it seemed a very pleasant port in which to spend a couple of days.
We had had a bit of excitement coming into the port, when the gearbox seemed not to be working. When we were ready to drop sails the engine started readily but seemed not to be going into gear. In Hugh Town we discovered that the propeller had fallen off, and Archie decided to sail directly on to Lymington without another stop, since getting in and out of ports would be awkward without the engine.
We weighed anchor early the next morning and began a fast passage, reaching and running down the Channel, sometimes flying a spinnaker. By midnight we were past Start Point and headed for Portland Bill and its infamous tidal race. The Kid, for reasons I never understood, had plotted our course inside the race, saying something about it being on the rhumb line to the Needles. I had long since given up talking with him about the navigation. The Kid was very good indeed on sailing the boat, nearly as good, I think, as he believed himself to be, but I had grown very weary of the patronizing advice he had been constantly giving, and he and I were not getting along very well.