CLIVE. GAMMON
Going about my sporting occasions a couple of weeks ago, I had to travel to Cork on the 'Innisfallen' car ferry. I had some misgivings
_ because of previous, summertime journeys on this vessel. But this, after all, was midwinter. It was bound to be at least half-empty: there couldn't be the wretched overcrowding, the two-hour-long queueing for meals that char- acterised high-season trips. In any case, there was no other way of getting my car there.
The 'Innisfallen' is a new, German-built boat which started operating in 1967. Two years later the Musak was still pumping out `There's No Business Like Show Business' in German because no one had bothered to change the tapes, and that wasn't the only problem. Serious mechanical troubles beset her. She had to be returned to the Bremen shipyard for refitting. To any experienced traveller it was clear she had been built for speed and little else. To take one of the ordinary, numbered cabins was to sign on for a sleepless night, as gross vibration and purgatorial groaning came near to shaking you out of your bunk.
There is quieter, but limited, accommoda- tion on the boat deck; and on this winter trip I thought I could be sure of some. I'd forgotten that it is seemingly next to im- possible to reserve these cabins and suites. With scarcely more than half-a-dozen cars aboard, the purser coolly informed me that it was all taken up, but that I could go on his 'waiting list'. You can do two things at this point and the other is to play hell. I took the latter course and got my cabin. Later I spoke to a stewardess who innocently revealed that the best accommodation was not allocated until fifteen minutes before sailing in case 'the management wanted to travel'. This sounded more likely than another explana- tion I was once given, that one suite was similarly reserved for the Lady Mayoress of Cork. I'm glad I'm not a shareholder in the British and Irish Steam Packet Company Ltd.
Oh, yes, and while I'm on the subject, the food aboard is as nasty as ever. Nobody expects haute cuisine on a car ferry, but the normal heartburn that results from what they serve on the 'Innisfallen' is made sharper in my case by the recollection of a fulsome piece in the Times Saturday review praising the meal the writer had aboard her. Since then I have never given the slightest weight to the Good Food judgments of the Times.
I didn't mean to go on as long about the shortcomings of this wretched craft. It's just that travelling for sport, when you have to transport golf or ski or fishing or shooting equipment, is difficult enough as it is. The one virtue of the Innisfallen' is that you can leave all your stuff in the car and if this is to be negated by a miserable start and finish to your holiday trip then you might just as well travel another way and hire a car at the far end. The airlines do make one concession to the travelling sportsman, by the way. They will haul excess-weight skis, golf clubs or fishing tackle at a special low rate.
Taking sporting equipment by air is natur- ally a highly suspicious action these days. Only twice, though, has my bundle of fishing rods been taken for weaponry: once at Cairo airport (later on that trip, the Egyp- tian navy arrested me for proceeding to sea without naval permission after I had hired some scruffy old Arab scow to take me out for a couple of hours' fishing on the Red Sea); and once on a BEA flight from the Shet- lands to Aberdeen. The BEA girl apologised more prettily than the Egyptian.
Since the hi-jack troubles, though, most airlines won't allow you to take even a single rod as hand baggage. Previously, cabin crews would find a place aft for a rod but now it has to go into the hold, and there's no guarantee that some cack-handed unloader won't break a tip or crush rings. Protective metal tubes only add to your weight problem and in any case they take only one rod normally.
The solution I have found to this is to use a length of plastic drainpipe which will take several rods and can be sealed up at the ends.
Rail travel with sporting gear is fine except on a Saturday (soccer hooligans), a Sunday (long cross-country diversions while they work on the main line), after 6 p.m. (staff loses interest) and at any time on the Southern Region.
But the best way of all is by cab in Lon- don. Sadly, the whole journey cannot be undertaken this way. But in the short trip between stations or to the air terminal, the eager and sympathetic conversation about fishing or shooting, and the previous care to load your gear without damage, is heart- warming. I don't know why this should be, but it happens 90 per cent of the time. I'm sure the sight of the tackle stirs some deep, atavistic response in the city-bound breasts of these amiable men,
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