ship’s log 1. n. book in which a skipper records the details of a voyage, such as her speed and course, the exact time her engine broke, any significant reductions in the number of individuals aboard while under way, and whether or not she was accompanied by her vessel when she arrived.
Okay so yesterday I was posting about how ‘I’m letting be’ all my feelings of loss or whatever and how I have shifted my focus. Well this is going to be tested over the next couple of days so I thought I would give you a little taster of what is coming up, a ‘trailer’ of coming attractions if you like. It is a bit of a long story but I will try my best to paint a true picture of the significance of all of this to me in a short enough version that the zzz’s won’t have taken over too soon.
I have this boat. It is called the Missie named after my paternal grandmother (whose real name was Martha). All good so far. It was my dad’s boat and I kind of inherited it because it was me over the years who used it most, other than my mum and dad. As I write this I feel a bit like Tony Blair in 1998 when he said he could feel the ‘hands of history’ on his shoulders. Over the years this boat has come to contain (and frequently spill out) the hapless adventures of a family not exactly genetically endowed with aquatic or nautical prowess. I notice with amusement the first log my dad has recorded in the humorous ‘Ship’s Log’ I brought him back from a trip to Texas one year reads “LAUNCHED BOAT. DEAD CALM & SUNNY. ASSISTED BY PENNY, R &A. MIRACLE – ALL WENT WELL ”
The Missie has borne witness to the portmanteau tale of a family through their experiences of parenting, patriarchy, childhood, sibling rivalry, political unrest, empty nesting, minor tragedy, feminism, satire, divorce, grand parenting, single parenting, same sex relationships, heartbreak, bereavement and now the very real possibility of rebirthing. All of this has been played out against the swilling of gallons of cups of tea from flasks, the bumping of jetties and frozen, rain lashed hands desperately trying to tie knots into flapping canopies. Several oars, fishing tackle and even anchors have been last seen heading due south as the westerly winds blew across the lough that constantly tempted us with its beauty and its squall. We did eventually learn the benefit of making sure the anchor was attached at the boat end before launching it off into the murky gloom of Lough Erne but only after a Harry Houdini type extraction from all the other ropes and knots on board.
Some of the happiest times of my life have been played out in that boat and some of the most frustrating. My mother is so lucky she wasn’t deliberately pitched overboard when my completely stressed out father was in ‘approaching jetty’ mode and she started getting out the flasks or, and this was every time, asked “Should you not be a little over to the left?”. Once she, me, his three grandchildren, dog and picnic baskets had disembarked my dad would take about an hour and several cigarettes to get out of approaching jetty mode and into a more cheery postmortem of the days events.
Over these adventure filled years I have come to realise that I was brought up in a family where everything was not just for life but for the life of everyone who comes after you as well as I think about the age of the Missie (and even that tent in my photo yesterday is still used by me). Here is a picture of when my dad first got it back in 1979 ( It was actually built by a relative of ours – that side of the family clearly had the required gene pool) and of course the first thing that had to be done was paint it from green to blue as my mum is very superstitious and green is a very unlucky colour – could only be in Ireland but that is another post.
Here is one taken about twelve years later with my son and his two cousins in ‘dry dock’ at home at mum and dad’s.
Often when my children were young I would get a bit frustrated that I couldn’t get out in the boat as much as I would like and I used to imagine that when my son was older (how sexist of me) he and I would have some more adventures of our own. Well little did I know then that some fifteen years later my perfect boating buddy would turn out to be my girlfriend and then more recently my youngest daughter.
For those of you not too familiar with boating and all it entails I would like to describe to you a little of why we, as two women boating out on the Lough, was and still is today a little unusual in my part of the world. Firstly it requires a real physical strength. That boat is particularly heavy – my dad always said it was built for the sea rather than the inland freshwater lakes we boat on. Getting it on and off a trailer, even when in the water is no mean feat and always requires someone strong in the water to guide, pull and eventually wrench the bally thing into position. Someone else is required then also to be in the cabin driving the engine to steer it up and onto the trailer as best as possible when taking it out of the water and to drive to the hopefully nearby jetty when launching it.
Unhitching it, securing it with breeze blocks and bricks and hosing down as soon as it comes out of the water are also all pretty heavy duty tasks as are taking off the spare engine and battery, petrol tanks etc. Don’t even get me started on the main engine. If the overwintering of the battery and newly purged fuel lines aren’t enough to make sure the engine starts at the beginning of the season it is enough to drive you to drink. Many hours of stressful pondering about what could be wrong and how we would even go about getting it repaired have been spent with me even visualising how I could surreptitiously pull the bungs out and sink the damn thing and that was just in the days leading up to ‘going up to the boat’.
In my dad’s time it was planned like a military operation. In the early years he had the company of his brother and some of their old army pals. As the years wore on he was reduced to enduring mostly his wife and his daughters with all their attendant children as his passengers and fellow ‘clowns’ as he was apt to call us (usually when approaching jetties). He loved it really as did we especially on the one day in the year when the sun shone and the children could swim in the black tyre tubes we used as swimming rings, their heads bobbing up and down in squeals of delight.
Fast forward to today and I no longer have that girlfriend with all her strength and enthusiasm, her biting wit when some poor man (there was ALWAYS one) would come over and ask us if we needed any help. She challenged us all in our assumptions and not only about boats and women’s capabilities but also in our familial tendency to stress out about things that hadn’t actually happened (and invariably never did). My father was one of the most negative men you could meet and worried sick that the wind would blow up like never before just as we were going out or that the fiercest wasp ever seen in County Fermanagh would come for him just at the critical moment ( you guessed, approaching a jetty).
She was a complete ruse to my dad’s fussing and his sometimes completely sexist outlook and he grew to love her as we all did particularly as she was so bloody strong and capable. Our family had never seen anything like it. (Well the closest thing before that in terms of boating ability was my sister’s husband and later son but they live in the Channel Islands and weren’t here that often and almost never now). She even built the jetty in the top photo above. The funniest part was she didn’t even like boats although her dad had been a sailor.
So to my test that started my post (wakey, wakey). Last year, in the wake of my father’s death and my breakup the boat began to represent to me another embodiment of my loss. How on earth would I ever be able to keep it, manage it or indeed enjoy it ever again? My children are all adults now leading their own lives and my brother who lives in N.I. doesn’t have the time or inclination really for boating. Recorded in that same Ship’s Log is an entry, quite recent, after my attempt to teach him some basic berthing methods. “There is no future” it records.
In the early part of the summer last year I went up and spent a very lonely night in the cabin on my own and as much as it was a beautiful day when I woke up out on the water I felt completely and utterly alone and in despair. It felt like what had once brought me so much joy was now a burden I didn’t have the strength to endure. Physically I had a back injury and this just seemed to add to the silliness of a single woman owning such a ‘hard work hobby’.
Then last year in Northern Ireland we had the hardest winter in over 100 years. For the first time the Missie wasn’t taken out of the water and stowed under canopy for the winter. I just wasn’t able to get it done and so when my daughter and I went up to have a look at it in February I was half expecting it to be if not completely sunk then at least full of water and not without cracks or some such damage. What we found was something else. A bit like the DeLorean DMC-12 Sports car with its fibreglass underbody it just seems to go on forever. The only water that had got in was through the leaking window and other than that it looked pretty much as it had when we last saw it in the previous summer…
February 2011
Which brings me finally to what I am doing over the next few days. My daughter who is at Vet School is home tonight and we have arranged to have the window repaired which in turn means the boat needs taken out of the water and driven to the boatyard before it closes at 5.30pm tomorrow. She is going to help me and between us we are going to try to accomplish this ourselves. I can already feel the tension rising inside me as I list off all the things in my head I need to remember a) to bring (pump for trailer tyres, new fuel line we bought and have never used, the cabin seats we brought home in Feb to dry, the small stepladders etc. etc) and b) to do (pump up trailer tyres, oil and check the ratchet, grease the trailer hub, get fuel including oil). I’m half scared to death.
My thinking in all of this is that if I can get the window repaired the necessity to take the boat out of the water every winter will be lessened. If it managed to survive that winter then I’m guessing it will survive a few more just the same. But the test is not whether or not we achieve all of that. The test for me is whether I can, as before stated, accept that this is how this aspect of my life now is. That the person I thought was my perfect boating buddy has gone and that instead of the loss I can still feel the love, the beauty of what is. An old boat with a cabin full of memories, lots of them funny and a new generation (my daughter) who will probably write her own version of what boating with her mum entailed when the hands of time lend her space to reflect.
I’m going to try and record our adventure by photo – watch this space, binoculars at the ready. Or as we used to say out in the boat while passing another “Stand by for wash!” It was a signal to grab hold of everything not tied down. We’ll see in a few days what is left in the wake.
A Design For Life 