A good book takes Tom back to the Marseilles of 40 years
ago and the fisherman who took him on as a deck handMORE
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http://www.yachtingmonthly.com/podcasts12 http://www.yachtingmonthly.com MARCH 2016
O
ne of my fi rst jobs was at a sailing
school near Marseilles. As the blazing,
Mistral-swept summer gave way to
more pleasant conditions, the place
shut down leaving me with no plans, so I rode
the motorbike down the coast to see what I
could fi nd. Fortune sent me
to the little port of Carro
where I secured a
fair hearing from a
fi sherman with the local
name of Marius.
Marius seemed built of
granite; powerful shoulders,
beret, the universal blue
overalls of France and the shambling gait of the
seaman. He smelt of Pastis and fi sh. As it turned
out, his lad had left for pastures new and so,
after sizing me up, he took me on.
I can see Marius’ boat now as clearly as I did
in the Mediterranean sun of my youth. Wooden,
of course, as they all were then, she was a classic
example of the plumb-bowed, work-stained,
double-ended open craft that graced every
harbour from Gibraltar to the Peloponnese.
Amidships, a rickety box covered her two-
cylinder Baudouin, which started manually and
ran so slowly it seemed to fi re in time with its
owner’s heartbeat. Although reliable, it suffered
what those of us bred in gentler times might
consider the drawback of having no gearbox.
Marius had a different perspective.
‘Gearboxes?’ he spat in the bilge with a Gallic
shrug. ‘Nothing but trouble.’
Looking back over the years, gearboxes have
caused me as much grief as engines and I
understand that he had a point. To make good
the shortfall, the motor was hooked up directly
to the propeller. If the Baudouin ran, so did we.
When it was shut down, we carried our way until
we stopped. It was tricky approaching a net buoy
in a seaway, but Marius was a master-craftsman
and he rarely missed.
Our days began by sculling out in a rough old
punt to the boat, moored in the centre of the
port. Marius would scramble aboard, unbutton
his overall and relieve his personal hydraulic
issues into the bilge. Then he’d wind up the
motor without comment, I’d sling the mooringbuoy miles away from the propeller, and off we
went at a surprising rate of knots. Fishing was
largely a matter of hauling bottom nets we’d laid
the day before. Anything marketable was tossed
into the pound. Starfi sh were lobbed back, but
undersized crabs received harsher treatment.
I don’t know what he had
against them, but Marius
kept a 2lb hammer handy
by the thole pin. Its sole
purpose was to smash
crabs on the gunwale
before he shovelled the
messy remains after the
smirking starfi sh. Not to
everyone’s taste, maybe, but he knew more than
I did and no doubt he had his reasons.
I moved on to a different life and although
I sometimes wondered what would happen to
a man like Marius when he grew too frail to
start his engine and haul a net, I didn’t dwell
on the subject until I fell in with the author
and journalist Sebastian Smith outside a pub
in Falmouth more than forty years later. The
meeting spurred me to look for his books and
I particularly enjoyed Southern Winds, which
describes a Mediterranean cruise in a Contessa- The tale is constructed around the named
winds of that sea of gales, in the context of
his own voyage and those of others back to
Odysseus. It’s a great read, but what caught
my eye was a paragraph about a fi sherman in
Carro. The pêcheur talks to Smith of an older
man who had long ago lent him nets so he
could get started. The man had later been lost
overboard while hauling in open water. His
name was Marius.
So Marius never did grow too old to fi sh.
Rediscovering him after a lifetime reminded
me that while the sea we sail is vast, the human
element can be surprisingly tight-knit. Sebastian
and I had never met before, yet Marius brought
us closer together. May he rest in peace. W
‘ Looking back,
gearboxes have
caused me as much
grief as engines’