a mile off, I poured myself a slug of whisky. Two hundreds yards from the beacon I needed another. I fed the boat into the race with the engine growling underfoot.
Bloody maniac. What you doing? Cocksure bastard. Trying to kill us? Proving something? Watch it, boyo. Bloody watch it
.
The current wrenched at the rudder and the short steep waves did their best to climb on board over the bows. The beacon shot past the wheelhouse like a lamppost on a motorway, no sooner seen than overtaken. The boat was being poured down the gradient of the Sound; all I had to do was keep it pointed roughly in the right direction while the sea gathered us up and tossed us out at the other end.
The whole dizzying business took a minute at the most; and the water beyond the Sound was almost as impressively mysterious as the water in it. Shielded by steep headlands on either side, it was as still and black as a monastery fishpond. It deserved lily pads and dragonflies and the occasional bursting bubble released by a rootling carp. Its broodily calm surface was gritted with raindrops. On a ledge of rock on the Calf of Man side, five gray seals squatted on their hunkers. Sleek, big-eyed, lugubriously mustached, they had the air of a cabinet of Edwardian politicians as drawn by Max Beerbohm. When I shut off the engine, I could hear them making rude parliamentary noises.
I had meant to skip the Isle of Man and head straight on for Wales. It was getting late in the year, and I was running out of time and weather. But Calf Sound and the pool under Spanish Head made me stop, just long enough to take stock of the pleasure I’d had in that queer place. I nursed the boat through an easy sea round to the fishing harbor of port St. Mary on the southeast of the island, where I tied up to the quay and grounded with the tide. Next morning a gale was blowing and even the fishing fleet was weatherbound, huddled together in the lee of the outer breakwater as the sea feathered and plumed over the esplanade. For two weeks, whenever there was a lull in the wind the fog came down, and whenever the fog lifted the wind blew up. Stranded (if not quite like Crusoe) on the island, I had to make the most of the little world of Man.
Once, twice, three times. The aircraft was quartering the entire sea. Every twenty minutes or so I saw it flying westto Ireland, then east back to Wales, and coming nearer all the time. On this run it was heading straight for
Gosfield Maid
, its black shadow racing across the sea like the track of a submerged whale. It was a big RAF Nimrod, with a kind of glass conservatory up in the front. As it came over, its engines drummed in my back teeth and made the water crackle. It banked and encircled me with a stockade of solid noise, flying so low that I could see faces in its windows, but couldn’t make out their expressions. I stood in the cockpit and waved as cheerily as I could.
I’m innocent. I’m just enjoying the freedom of high-seas navigation
. No one waved back. The huge gray wings tilted again and the plane went on toward Ireland; but the self-contained peace of the boat on the water had been shattered like an expensive vase, and I mourned its loss.
The castellated stone hotel on the hill above Port St. Mary smelled of empty rooms, of stale vegetables and disinfectant, like a boarding school closed for the holidays with only Matron and a couple of bachelor masters in residence. The tourist season had gone badly. The people from the industrial cities of northern England who had used to come to the Isle of Man in swarming boatloads every year were now going to places with a more reliable ration of sunshine, like Ibiza and Majorca and the Costa del Sol; and the locals had the hotel bar more or less to themselves. There were the local butcher, the local dentist, in a threadbare crested blazer, a smallholder and a lobster-and-scallop fisherman, freshly tanned from his own holiday in the Canary Islands. These men all appeared to be somehow
Bloody maniac. What you doing? Cocksure bastard. Trying to kill us? Proving something? Watch it, boyo. Bloody watch it
.
The current wrenched at the rudder and the short steep waves did their best to climb on board over the bows. The beacon shot past the wheelhouse like a lamppost on a motorway, no sooner seen than overtaken. The boat was being poured down the gradient of the Sound; all I had to do was keep it pointed roughly in the right direction while the sea gathered us up and tossed us out at the other end.
The whole dizzying business took a minute at the most; and the water beyond the Sound was almost as impressively mysterious as the water in it. Shielded by steep headlands on either side, it was as still and black as a monastery fishpond. It deserved lily pads and dragonflies and the occasional bursting bubble released by a rootling carp. Its broodily calm surface was gritted with raindrops. On a ledge of rock on the Calf of Man side, five gray seals squatted on their hunkers. Sleek, big-eyed, lugubriously mustached, they had the air of a cabinet of Edwardian politicians as drawn by Max Beerbohm. When I shut off the engine, I could hear them making rude parliamentary noises.
I had meant to skip the Isle of Man and head straight on for Wales. It was getting late in the year, and I was running out of time and weather. But Calf Sound and the pool under Spanish Head made me stop, just long enough to take stock of the pleasure I’d had in that queer place. I nursed the boat through an easy sea round to the fishing harbor of port St. Mary on the southeast of the island, where I tied up to the quay and grounded with the tide. Next morning a gale was blowing and even the fishing fleet was weatherbound, huddled together in the lee of the outer breakwater as the sea feathered and plumed over the esplanade. For two weeks, whenever there was a lull in the wind the fog came down, and whenever the fog lifted the wind blew up. Stranded (if not quite like Crusoe) on the island, I had to make the most of the little world of Man.
Once, twice, three times. The aircraft was quartering the entire sea. Every twenty minutes or so I saw it flying westto Ireland, then east back to Wales, and coming nearer all the time. On this run it was heading straight for
Gosfield Maid
, its black shadow racing across the sea like the track of a submerged whale. It was a big RAF Nimrod, with a kind of glass conservatory up in the front. As it came over, its engines drummed in my back teeth and made the water crackle. It banked and encircled me with a stockade of solid noise, flying so low that I could see faces in its windows, but couldn’t make out their expressions. I stood in the cockpit and waved as cheerily as I could.
I’m innocent. I’m just enjoying the freedom of high-seas navigation
. No one waved back. The huge gray wings tilted again and the plane went on toward Ireland; but the self-contained peace of the boat on the water had been shattered like an expensive vase, and I mourned its loss.
The castellated stone hotel on the hill above Port St. Mary smelled of empty rooms, of stale vegetables and disinfectant, like a boarding school closed for the holidays with only Matron and a couple of bachelor masters in residence. The tourist season had gone badly. The people from the industrial cities of northern England who had used to come to the Isle of Man in swarming boatloads every year were now going to places with a more reliable ration of sunshine, like Ibiza and Majorca and the Costa del Sol; and the locals had the hotel bar more or less to themselves. There were the local butcher, the local dentist, in a threadbare crested blazer, a smallholder and a lobster-and-scallop fisherman, freshly tanned from his own holiday in the Canary Islands. These men all appeared to be somehow
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