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| Kemara leaving Brixham, 2007 |
I was aboard her late July, 2009, when she became mine.
I'd just started two weeks off. I'd caught the train down to Plymouth, a cab to the Torpoint Ferry, stood up top as a bus and ten cars and I were dragged across the skinny, deep Tamar. The sea grape, the sky grapefruit, the warships gold over grey, halogen and tannoy; the broken pubs on the far shore crooning. Devonport docks on a midsummer night: I'd been down a few times already that spring, seen drab Babcock, police launches, dying barges and frigate hangers. But this!
Seaward of the ferry Kemara pitched in her lumpy moorings off the entrance to the ballast pond - a stone pen plunked in the Torpoint mud by a taller sailing age, now one of the Huggins brothers' lairs. Kemara is small, and that evening inconspicuous amongst the big sticks.
I thought I was borrowing her from my brother.
"Never own a boat", my yatch-broking father advised us, "just use other people's." My brother Roger and I inherited Petruska - a darling wooden Drascombe Lugger - when our father died, happily still capable of ignoring his own advice.
Rog and I trailed and sailed her, he more than I. On a voyage from Poole west to see the eclipse, sleeping under an old-sail tent, we finally figured out how to get along with each other. So long as we're aboard, he's Skipper and I'm Gilligan.
He bought Kemara while I was living in Tenerife. She's a Hurley 22, a few years younger than me. She's got the overbuilt strength of early fibreglass, a longish keel, a galley, a toilet, osmosis and real boat lines. I can't stand up down below, but whole families have crossed to the Caribbean in her sisters.
On the delivery trip from Plymouth to Poole with Roger's wife Audrey we discovered water pouring through the rusted-out rudder stock and bodged it up with gauze and Liquid Metal.
A couple of years later off Teignmouth we fried the VHS, listening intent as its rising scream cut out the instant lightening struck a mile to starboard. What electronic necessities survived that leg we drowned off the Start in the deep green overfalls. Kemara has a fine bow and low freeboard. In a short sea she digs into any challenger, leaving her cockpit awash and her insides salt soup.
We've hove to off Dartmouth, out of fuel and out of navigation lights, waiting for dawn and enough flood to get us past the castle. Audrey, Roger and I copper-botted her, and in the process discovered Kemara's rectum: where a prop shaft once ran she suffered the indignity of an disintegrating cork bung, capped by delaminating plywood. It's all glassed up now.
I sailed her solo first in 2007. In 2008 I got up the guts for a coastal jaunt, making it from the Exe to Fowey in two hops, and leaned against the wall at Steamer Quay in Totnes for a tide while I picked up old Canadian friend Graham from the train station. Does that sound boastful? I hope not. The entire trip I was anxious. Being by myself on a boat makes me anxious.
The Torpoint Ferry skinned its lips on the concrete slope. The passenger gate opened before they let the traffic off. Up ramp, bladderwrack, tarmac, duffle bag, into the little town and the Co-Op for food and wine. Downhill, said hello to the disreputable swans occupying the grassy knoll at the corner of Ferry St, along to the ballast pond. I dropped my bags in the entrance the the Mosquito Sailing Club and entered the bar in search of a water taxi driver.
Two pints of Proper Job later I was aboard. I heaved the outboard up the companionway and into it's well then checked the bilges - a packet of green bacon thoughtfully left by Audrey - put beans on the stove and unpacked my brand new chart of the Scilly Islands. And opened a bottle of wine.
Sleeping bag cosy in the cockpit, I gave Roger a call to let him know his boat was fine. "Happy birthday," he said. The day had passed two weeks before, but that was fine. "She's yours."
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