When you’re taking on water, throwing in the sponge
can sometimes be the wisest action
ILLUSTRATION CLAUDIA MYATT
PUMPING IRON
TOM CUNLIFFE
T
hese days as I put to sea in my modern classic
Mason 44, I feel I’m leading a sheltered life.
Unless she decides – for whatever
obscure reason governs her
plastic soul – to syphon in a quick
bilge-full through one of her many
pumps, she sails dry, top and bottom.
Life hasn’t always been like this.
When I retired at 35 from my job as
an examiner at the Cowes National Sailing
Centre in 1983, Ros and I sold our home on
the Isle of Wight and invested the equity in
Hirta, a 1911 Bristol Channel pilot cutter
lying in Tarbert, Loch Fyne. We took delivery
early in the year with the idea of sailing her down
to the island to fit her out for ocean voyaging. Although
she had been yachting since 1920 when the Barry pilots sold her
to a civil engineer who passed her on to various members of the
nobility, she was fortunate in not having been modernised. She was
still lit by oil navigation lights, her mast and boom were original
and her mainsail was heavy flax canvas. My predecessor in title
was a west-coast Scot with a distinguished war record at sea and
a successful career in the distilling industry. He was a yachtsman
of impeccable credentials and, having owned the boat since the
1950s, there was little he didn’t know about her habits.
“You’ll find that she makes a drop of water when sailing,”
he said in a matter-of-fact way as he waved us off from Tarbert.
“It’ll not be too much...” he added as a reassuring afterthought.
With this benediction ringing in our ears, we stood out into the
teeth of a fresh southwesterly, destination Cowes 550 miles away.
On board with me were my wife Ros, our four-year-old daughter
Hannah, a retired bank manager called Dick who helped out with
offshore instructing at the sailing centre, a young chap from North
Wales who wanted the experience, and Butterfly Dave. Dave was
my age, fit, willing and able. He had acquired his name while living
in a cave on Madeira making insect brooches for ladies prepared to
part with the money.We’d discussed a depressing forecast of
Force 6 headwinds with rain and decided
that, since none of us had time on our side
other than Hannah, we’d go for it. After all,
we were sailing a 51-foot pilot cutter. If this
blow put us off, what would we be like in
the Greenland Sea?
Beating down Kilbrannan Sound was a
“good news, bad news” scenario. The good
news was that the boat balanced beautifully
and pointed up surprisingly well. The bad
was that she was leaking like a drain. It
came as no shock to find the decks let the
stuff in, but it was the ingress through the
bottom, the topsides or both that was
disheartening. We pumped her out every hour as we
thrashed onwards and noted that it took between five and ten
minutes before the old village pump in the corner of the cockpit
sucked air.
“She’s dried out. She’ll soon plim up,” I announced
optimistically. But she didn’t. All you could say was that it didn’t
get any worse. My surveyor had declared the boat “sound and
staunch”, so after a while, with matters not deteriorating further,
his remarks did begin to infuse a loose sort of confidence.
As the sound opened up at the south end of Arran, we were on
port tack hacking ever onwards with a fair stream under us for the
tidal gate of the North Channel between Kintyre and Ireland.
Morale on deck was taking a hammering from the fact that our
Welshman had succumbed to seasickness and was not at all happy
about it. Dave and I were making the best of a bad job, but Dick,
the old storm warrior from many a tough Channel race,
was muttering about Campbeltown for the
night over on the Scottish shore. Our
spirits took a further hit when
Hannah appeared in the