Christmas at sea

I've just returned from 4 days sailing round the Whitsunday islands to celebrate the birth of baby Jesus, granted not your typical Christmas with snow, Turkey and a very large hangover but a very agreeable place to be none the less. The boat (modelled by my lovely assistant Guy) was called Chloe! Lovely boat, crap name. From the look on Guy's face it would appear as if he was expecting an 80 ft beast called "War Machine" complete with fully functioning cannons. Alas it was not to be. In boating terms we were sailing around in the motoring equivalent of a Robin Reliant. I was forever looking for the 3rd wheel but Guy assures me that boats do not have wheels, they have things called sails, rudders, props and ropes. The latter I found the be very confusing. There is a lot of them and one of them in particular took an immediate disliking to my hand. We were performing a maneuver called "tacking". For those of you with a limited knowledge of the Ocean this is simply a change of direction, moving from one course to another, resulting in the wind being on the opposite side of the sail. Now this all sounds very simple and in theory it is. The reality on the other hand is somewhat different. Before our first "tack" Guy started shouting things like "ready about". Not knowing what this actually meant sent me into a state of utter confusion and complete chaos. Not wanting to let Guy down I started flicking levers and grabbing ropes pretending I knew what I was doing. As we came about for our first tack the wind caught the other side of the sail and sent the boom (big long thing in the middle of the boat) crashing from one side to the other, taking the ropes with it, which were unfortunately being gripped very tightly by my hands. I immediately understood that the idea of all these lever things is to stop the rope running freely during this rather violent manouver and no, you cannot stop them by just using your hands. If you try to do this the result is that most of the warm, soft flesh is ripped from your fingers and distributed along the length of the rope. After the screaming had died down we had successfully changed direction and I had lost 2 pints of blood. If we kept up this pace by the end of our 6th tack I would be nothing but an empty sack of skin with stumpy little arms. However, pleased with my reasonable performance and confident that I would get the hang of this I went down below to raid the fridge for lots of beer and ice, numbing the incredible burning sensation coarsing through my entire left hand. Chloe, for all her lovelyness was quickly becoming the "War Machine" Guy so wanted.

Now, this little boat was very enjoyable indeed (Dom, you would love this thing) and there seems to be 2 schools of thought about how it should be controlled. Guy would approach our destination with the wind behind him (wether this was a nautical procedure of wether he was practicing bush craft for stalking pray I am yet to determine), the boat would be slowed gradually, controlled beautifully and would come to rest perfectly wherever he so desired. My attempts would have it at full speed until the last possible moment when I would violently change direction sending the boat crashing backwards into a wall, rock or sea turtle at least 5m from where we were supposed to land. Im just happy that we paid our insurance! Again you can see from the look on Guys face that he regards my driving to be irresponsible and he even went so far as to tell me that I was a "liability at sea". Not to be too downhearted, I responded be telling Guy that the facial quirks he has developed and displays whenever he gets confused makes him look as if he has mild autism! To fellow boaters I think we looked rather unusual, an out of control dinghy bouncing all over the rocks with one of the passengers twitching and counting cocktail sticks.

This is where we spent xmas day. On the beach, in the sun with a beer. Nice.



Happy New Year all.