74 CLASSIC BOAT SEPTEMBER 2016
It was meant to be a gentle tow to the Sugarloaf,
but then the skipper opened the rum...
ILLUSTRATION CLAUDIA MYATT
DRAG RIDE TO RIO
TOM CUNLIFFE
U
nless you’re lucky enough to have served a seven-year
apprenticeship, lessons about wooden boats tend to
arrive in bursts. One of these came my way after I’d
sailed my Norwegian gaff cutter down to South
America and taken a job running a yacht sixty miles beyond Rio de
Janeiro. A local waterman was hired to lay a mooring for my boat
while I was away with the boss. The mooring appeared to be fine
and the longshoreman proudly indicated a mighty chain with an
eye on the end. There was only one problem. The boat would be
totally exposed to the southwest. I didn’t like that a bit, but was
earnestly assured that it never, ever, blew from that direction.
It did, of course. The very next week I returned at midnight in
the yacht to find a gale blowing in. My boat was pitching bows
under in the four-foot seas and riding suspiciously low in the water.
After securing the yacht I scrambled aboard. The mooring chain
hadn’t nearly enough scope and the boat was trying to lift the
concrete block with her offset bow roller. This had placed an unfair
load on the sixty-year-old oak stem which had split down to the
waterline. The hood ends were looking shaky and water was
coming aboard in quantity. I attached a long, heavy rope to the
chain. Waiting for my moment, I flipped the loop off the Samson
post and out of the open-topped roller, then surged away twenty
fathoms of the rope. I led this through the meaty bow fairlead
sensibly placed by the Scandinavian builders directly on the
covering board and the day, or rather the night, was saved. No
longer forced down by the mooring and that brutal chain, the
buoyant bows lifted sweetly to the seas. I pumped her out and, as
dawn broke, inspected the damage.
It was not a pretty sight. A yard job for certain, but which
one? The nearest were back in Rio where I had no knowledge of
who was going to rip me off. In any case, I could not possibly
sail her there in that state and the engine had not worked
for months. Things were feeling bleak when, as so often
happens, the hour sent the man.
Back in Rio earlier in the year I’d fallen in with two Greeks.
Aristotle was a specialist in rum drinking and Zorba-style dancing
who had something to do with shipyards. Nico was a man of
puzzling means cruising aboard a 70-foot wooden ketch. At
forty-something with a big boat to look after and what seemed aburning urge to ‘do some business’, I think he liked my happy-go-
lucky lifestyle, so we’d chummed up. I never saw any business done
as we met up in various anchorages, but I was tickled by the
constantly changing scene aboard Typhoon. He was a superb
seaman and sailed his massive vessel singlehanded, but he enjoyed
his food and was always on the lookout for a cook. The boat gave
the impression that a good refit might be time well spent, yet
women were attracted by the romantic figure living alone in
decaying splendour as he sailed the tropic seas. The thing was, they
never lasted more than a week or two.
“What puts them off, Nico?” I asked him after a notably
toothsome South African girl had packed her bags and hopped it.
“The trouble with these women, Tomás,” he replied, “is that
they just won’t do it the Greek way.”
I wondered whether this might refer to the galley or to
something more sinister and decided not to ask.
Late in the morning following the storm that nearly sank my
boat, I was sitting under my awning wondering what to do. I’d
contacted the boss and been granted a few days leave, but I’d made
no inroads into solving my problem. Morale was as low as it was
going to get short of violent death, when Typhoon came chugging
round the headland to anchor alongside me. Nico buzzed across in
his battered inflatable and surveyed the damage.
“No problema,” he announced. “I’ll call Aristotle in Rio and
he’ll fix it all up with one of his yards in Niteroi across the Bay.
Come over and let’s have some lunch.”
“How’s the catering situation?”
His face lit up. “I have a local girl. Cheap. Great bean chef.”
The new cook was only marginally less decorative than the
woman from Johannesburg, but the Feijoada she served up was at
best rough-and-ready. I didn’t care. Nico was doing well over his
SSB with Aristotle.
“It’s all sorted,” he announced. “I’ll tow you to Niteroi in the
morning. The yard will be waiting. They know what to do.”
The yard’s address went under the promising name of the Island
of Conception and I snoozed off that night with an easier mind.
When I crept on deck at 0200, as a chap does, a shemozzle seemed
to have broken out on Typhoon. The cook appeared in the cockpit
shaking her fist while delivering a stream of unintelligible