T
he Irish Sea is in a fury: however
many assaults it makes on the
shoreline, Anglesey refuses to
budge. Wave after wave of white
horses charge into Trearddur
Bay, exploding on black rocks
and vapourising into a fog
of spindrift which peppers
the windows of the clifftop home before being
wiped clean by driving rain until the next stampede.
Behind the weeping panes sits Dr Roger Chisholm,
smartly dressed in a blue and white checked shirt,
well-pressed denims and polished leather deck
shoes, his open, intelligent face beaming with a
reflective smile as he recounts yarns of derring-do.
This could be any retired sailor looking back on a
lifetime of adventure but in Roger’s case, his repose
is catered for not by an armchair, but a wheelchair,
and his room is on the top floor of an end-of-life
care home.
‘Help yourself,’ he says, lifting a punnet of red
grapes towards me as we sit listening to the winter
storm whistling ominously through the UPVC
window frames.
‘That noise reminds me of the one gale which
caught me out in 50 years of sailing,’ he says,
closing the bedroom door to shut out the
cacophony of bustling nurses and their charges.
Roger Chisholm is 66. At the age of 27 he was
diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, the disease which
affects the nervous system and spinal cord. Yet he
spent 40 years battling the symptoms. He swam
80 lengths of his local pool twice a week; while he
could still drive, he refused to fit the blue disabled
badge he was entitled to; when he could no longer
drive, he cycled the 30 minutes to and from work
every day and he refused a walking stick until he
could no longer stand without one.
Throughout his active life as a climber and a sailor,
he kept looking up. As the former, he scaled the
Austrian alps, trekked around Annapurna in the
Himalayas and hiked through Waziristan in Central
Asia. As the latter, he cruised to St Kilda, the Lofoten
Islands and Norway.
Having contained the disease, and, looking forward
to cruising his beloved Hebrides in his retirement,
Roger, a former consultant radiologist from Salford
Royal Hospital, was next diagnosed with a malignant
brain tumour. Following chemotherapy and surgery,
he was told his time was limited: maybe a year,
maybe a month.
So, with sailing, climbing and hiking forever
off limits, Roger instead set about writing his
autobiography, Don’t Look Down, An Adventurous
Life with MS (Scotland Street Press, £19.99).
And that is how we came to be talking about
his first gale.
‘It wasn’t just blowing, it was screaming. Screaming
at you like you’ve got no right at all to be where you
are, out on a boat at night, on a lee shore 200 miles
from home, on an estuary even more dangerous
than the open sea. And the sea itself was raging
too, with waves even higher than the mast.’
Roger and three others were aboard a Van de
Stadt-designed Harmony 31, on a delivery trip
from Kiel to Harwich.
Two of the crew were in their bunks suffering
seasickness; leaving Roger and his pal to take three-
hour watches under storm jib and trysail, to weather
Texel lighthouse against a north-westerly gale.
‘The Elbe estuary is a dangerous place at the best
of times, with a tide that runs at 4 knots on the ebb
across Scharhorn Riff, sandbanks on one side and
one of the world’s busiest sea lanes on the other. We
knew that survival depended on being able to steerRoger was not
prevented from
taking the helm
of Martha Maria
by MSKeeping as fit as
possible helped
Roger to explore
even the remote
parts of TromsøSailing brings an
intensity to life and
is never boring
CRUISING LIFE