The Detonators by Donald Hamilton

Author:Donald Hamilton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan

18

It was an overcast night, but the moon was lurking behind the thin clouds. We didn’t make very good progress across the Northwest Providence Channel because the lady was a sailing nut and didn’t believe the internal combustion engine was here to stay. Personally, in those light winds, I’d simply have fired up the diesel again—she’d turned it off after we’d cleared the buoy and set the sails—but she wasn’t having any of that. Instead she wanted more canvas. Well, Dacron.

I hadn’t paid much attention to just what sails had come with the boat, figuring I’d first master the basic threesome of mainsail, forestaysail, and jib; and probably, aided and abetted by the two-cylinder Yanmar, they’d do everything I needed done. Now we scrabbled around in the forepeak and found a couple of storm sails and a spinnaker—thank God the wind was in the wrong direction for that monstrous kite—and finally, hooray, a jib almost twice the size of the one already up. That one she called a jib topsail and didn’t think much of. This beautiful new discovery was a Genoa jib, affectionately known as Jenny.

Next, working under the spreader lights with darkness all around us, steering by autopilot with Spindrift pitching gently in the slow swells of the channel, we had to haul the big sail onto the foredeck and crawl out onto the precarious bowsprit—my job—to slide the smaller jib, flapping wildly, out of the slot of the roller-furling apparatus and slide in its giant replacement instead. Also flapping wildly, despite the light airs. It took half an hour to get the big sail up and organized to Mrs. Williston’s satisfaction; and she thought I was a pretty piss-poor sailor not to have worked out the proper locations for the strings and pulleys—excuse me, lines and blocks—ahead of time.

Finally we had to tidy up the foredeck and bring down the little forestaysail and furl it neatly again, because, she said after careful study, it was too small to pull worth a damn under these conditions and it disturbed the wind for Jenny. Then back to the cockpit, where she turned out the blinding decklights and disengaged the Tiller Master. Taking the helm herself, she had me crank in a bit on this winch and ease that sheet a touch—it took fifteen minutes more before she pronounced herself satisfied with all adjustments.

It’s the great sailboat fallacy, as far as I’m concerned. It’s a pleasant way of getting around on the water, it’s nice and quiet, and the wind is free although the sails damn well aren’t; but fast it isn’t, so why not just relax and glide along at three knots instead of beating your brains out to make three and a quarter? Hell, if this dame really wanted an extra knot or two, all she had to do was turn the Yanmar key instead of working my tail off.

Then I decided that this was the wrong attitude. After all, it was a useful educational experience for me,

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