UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
The Channel
By LEONARD BLUNDEN (Hertford College, Oxford) THERE were three of us in the boat. The skipper was a man of more than seventy, who had been a master mariner for nearly half a century, and whose toughness can surely be equalled by few men of the sea living today. The second-in-command, Joe, was temporarily unemployed, and had- declared himself willing to "go anywhere, do any- thing." And I, the cook, had only a few weeks previously returned to civilisation after six months in hospital. We were an odd assortment, and ours was an unusual voyage. We had left England at the beginning of June in a Bermudan sloop forty feet long, and our destination was Turkey, where we were to hand the vessel over to her new owner. We were, so to speak, the delivery agents, and our job was not essentially different from that of the man who delivers your new car to your doorstep. The difference between our task and his was a matter of degree. We had to sail three thousand miles; our charge was less easily manageable in adverse conditions, and the risk that our job would end in catastrophe was infinitely greater. We had sailed across the Bay of Biscay, raced down the coast of Portugal, and come from Gibraltar to Cape Matapan, the western and eastern extremes of the " European " Mediterranean. Now we were entering the Aegean Sea, on the last lap of our journey. We were already beginning to congratulate ourselves on having avoided any serious danger —on two occasions large ships had nearly run us down, but the gods had been on our side—and were making ourselves the wildest, most irrational promises. It was now the first week of August. Given an extension of the luck we had so far enjoyed; we could look forward to genuine Turkish baths for August Bank Holiday, less than one week away in England. We would shave off our beards; we would spend long hours over strong black coffee, looking back wistfully on a memorable voyage; we would write home and say what fun it had all been; we would, in all probability, be just a little surfeited with those million different views of sea and sky painted on a canvas three thousand miles long, and would turn to the delights of Asia Minor. But we had not reckoned with the channel.
Between us and Izmir, our destination on the Turkish coast, lay more than two hundred miles of water, infested with islands and providing one of the trickiest and most dangerous navigational tasks in the world. Our way across the archipelago lay through the Siphnos channel, which, by reason of the relation between our position on the chart and the peculiar combination of weather conditions, was our only gateway to the eastern Aegean and Turkish waters. The channel narrows to a width of six miles (which is very little when you are in a sailing boat), and when the northerly wind is especially strong, as it was for us, a powerful current rushes through the channel from the Dardanelles. According to the pilot-book the current can be as much as seven knots, and this, of course, would have carried us backwards. However, there was nothing for it but to try to reach the channel and sail through it, preferably in the right direction. We tacked. We made twenty miles on the port tack. We tacked again, to the north-west. The seas were mounting. Our boat tumbled about. One uncommonly heavy sea sub- merged her from stem to stern, and Joe, who was lying asleep on his bunk, shot upright with a pitiful yell as a thick sheet of icy water descended through the skylight, soaking him to the skin. The bilges overflowed through the floor-boards into the cabin and galley, and the linoleum became dangerously slippery. To the smell of paraffin from the stove was added a powerful smell of chemicals from the bilge-water, a smell which found its way into every corner of the boat below deck, and saturated the cushions on our bunks. Even the food failed to escape, with perhaps the exception of some old potatoes which competed with a rich aroma of their own. But by now we had all developed a taste for paraffin in one form or another; paraffin soup, paraffin savoury dumplings and paraffin mixed grill were particular favourites. We tried to pump the bilges clean to relieve the strain on our olfactory nerves, but the pump was jammed with grit.
The wind was continuously heading us away from the channel, and it looked as though we were in for a bad time. There was one compensation. Not the least satisfying aspect of our first meeting with the Aegean was purely aesthetic. The characteristic features of tragedy were not confined to our boat, but extended on all sides as far as the eye could see, and doubtless further: not even the most gifted stage-designer, working on the scenery for a production of The Tempest, could have excelled the deft artistry of Nature in this case. The very name of the sea is classically associated with disaster, for Aegea, queen of the Amazons, perished here, and Aegeus, the father of Theseus, drowned himself in these turbulent waters. The islands are mostly high, some attaining four thousand feet. Many of them (again according to the pilot-book, in whose accuracy we had implicit trust) are of volcanic origin; a few are composed of gleaming white marble, and all, as you view them through the omnipresent half-light which seems to be indigenous to this wild southernmost tip of Europe, are grimly striking in appearance. Some are mere masses of rock, with rugged and irregular coasts, around which the dark sea barked and roared at us.
Our main difficulty was that this crazy pattern of islands produced a rather unpleasant effect on the weather. At short intervals we found the wind coming down on us from the slopes of valleys near the coasts, making the sea very nasty indeed. We were thrown about like a cockle-shell, and on the second day in the Aegean we were faced with other difficulties. The sails began to take on a decidedly ragged appearance, and the ropes connecting the wheel to the tiller were fraying from hard wear. If these ropes perished completely we should have no easy means of steering, and would be in a bit of a mess. The odds against our reaching the channel began to lengthen.
The heavy swell was throwing the boat about more violently than ever on the third day. Our speed was never more than half a knot, as the boat repeatedly plunged into the convulsive sea and bobbed up again in almost the same place. It was at about this time that we decided to change our plan. It was clear that our chances of reaching the channel and then beating out and across to the Turkish coast were pretty remote. We had already spent three days in unrelenting (and wholly unsuccessful) battle with the elements, and it might well continue thus for three weeks. Neither the boat, whose gee was rapidly cracking up, nor our supplies of food and water would survive much longer. The water in the tanks was so low that it was impossible to pump it up when the boat was listing to starboard; we had no bread, and the emergency life-boat biscuits were finished. Our only hope was to abandon the idea of going to Izmir direct and try to reach Piraeus, the port of Athens, where we could take a second breath, repair the boat, replenish our stores, and then proceed by the usual route taken by steamers plying between Greece and Turkey.
We reached Piraeus safely. The wind, which had denied our boat access to the Siphnos channel, had no objection to our sailing 'up the gulf towards the port, and actually helped us along, so that we arrived there within twelve hours after a truly exhilarating run. After we had recounted our struggle with the weather to the astonished Greek port-officials, they told us that the channel was strewn with loose unexploded mines, and was a certain death-trap to any ship attempting to pass through it.
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