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Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat - Softcover

Stewart, Chris

 
9780307592378: Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307592375 ISBN 13: 9780307592378
Verlag: Crown Publishing Group (NY), 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Three Ways to Capsize a Boat is travel writing at its best, crackling with Chris Stewart’s zest for life, irresistible humor, and unerring lack of foresight.

Chris Stewart had a long and eclectic list of jobs.  From some of the most glamorous careers--he was original drummer in Genesis--to the more offbeat--a sheep shearer and circus performer--he had done it all…or almost all.  So when he is offered the chance to captain a sailboat in the Greek islands one summer, something he had never done before, he jumped at the chance, even though he’d never actually sailed before.
 
So begins the hilarious and wild adventures of Three Ways to Capsize a Boat. From setting the boat on fire not once, but several times in the Aegean Sea to his not-so-grand arrival in Spetses to meet the owners of the boat (who says it isn’t graceful to plow into the docks as a means of coming to a stop?), Stewart quickly catches the sailing bug.

By the end of the summer, as he is facing the dreary prospect of going back to sheep shearing, he jumps at the chance to be part of a crew to follow Viking Leif Eiriksson’s historic journey across the Atlantic Ocean. From coming to terms with the long, cold nights at sea and unchanging cuisine to battling intense seasickness and managing to go to the bathroom during a massive storm (a lot harder than you’d think!), Stewart keeps his good humor, but learns, in the end, that perhaps the best things in life are worth coming ashore for.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Chris Stewart is the author of Driving Over Lemons, which became an international bestseller, along with its sequels, A Parrot in the Pepper Tree and The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society. In an earlier life, Chris was the original drummer in Genesis (he played on the first album), then joined a circus, learned how to shear sheep, went to China to write the Rough Guide, gained a pilot’s license in Los Angeles, and completed a course in French cooking.

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Chapter 1



Teach Yourself Sailing

It was Julie Miller who sent me to sea, one wet autumn afternoon in London’s Wandsworth Road. Now of course you haven’t a clue who Julie Miller is, and indeed why should you . . . but her relevance to this episode and subsequent adventures is that she had a great-aunt called Jane Joyce.

“Chris!” yelled Julie, who was more than a match for the thundering of London traffic. “What a fantastic coincidence. I’ve been longing to see you and there is something I particularly wanted to ask you . . . what was it now? Ah yes, how would you like a job looking after a yacht in the Greek Islands this summer?”

“I’d like that very much,” I replied, without so much as a thought. “As it happens I’m not too busy this summer.” Which was the long and the short of it, for at the tender age of twenty-nine my career as a sheep farmer had just hit the skids. The bank had refused any further loans to nurture the flock that my girlfriend, Ana, and I were tending on rented land in Sussex, and my “prospects” as my mother insisted on calling them, were not looking overly bright.

“Terrific,” said Julie. “That’s a very great relief. My great-aunt Jane has been on at me for weeks to find her a skipper, and I thought of you straightaway.”

Now this, it must be said, was a most peculiar thing for her to think. For I had never been on a boat before in my life, and I knew not the first thing about sailing. But I desperately wanted a job, so it struck me that it might be best to keep minor details like my complete and utter unsuitability for the job to myself.



clearly, the first thing to do was to bone up on boating, in order to conduct myself satisfactorily at the interview. So I bought Teach Yourself Sailing or some such guide and immersed myself in it. It was not, I thought, quite as gripping as a book on such an interesting subject ought to be, and I emerged from it with only the haziest notions of sailing and how it was done. If I had the pictures in front of me, I could tell the difference between a sloop (gaff-rigged or Bermuda), a schooner, a ketch, and a yawl; I had a very vague idea what beating and tacking and running were; I had learned the undesirability of jibing when running; and I could tell you more or less when to reef, or if things cut up really rough, to scandalize.

I did a little work on the vocabulary, too. I discovered that ropes were not actually ropes, but sheets, lines, halyards, warps, painters, stays, or ratlines. The toilet was not the dunny but the heads. Of course, the front wasn’t the front and the back wasn’t the back. . . . Then there was a fid and the bitts and take-alls, there were peaks, luffs, and clews; and if you didn’t feel too good, you could always heave to.

Friends and family were concerned about my cavalier attitude and horribly obvious ignorance. “What if you

tip the old bird into the drink?” they asked. “How would you live with yourself if you were to wreck the boat, or, worse still, drown the lot of them and yourself into the bargain?”

I pointed out the tautology, reassured them that things would turn out for the best, and dialed the number of

my patron-to-be. A pleasingly patrician American voice answered.

“But my dear, I have been simply longing for you to ring. Dear Julie has told me all about you and I simply cannot wait to meet you in the flesh, so to speak. However, things being as they are, I suppose I shall have to. So perhaps next Tuesday evening at eight o’clock would suit you?”

I returned my nose to the sailing book and tested myself one more time on vocabulary—full and by, jibing, reaching, tacking . . . goose wing, veering, backing. Then, got up like a dog’s dinner—I think I even wore a tie—

I rang the bell at two minutes to eight at a very opulent brick apartment block on the intimidatingly elegant south side of Cadogan Square. A tall, slightly stooped octogenarian opened the door. He had thick white hair and a bulbous nose and spoke quietly in a voice that was full of slowness and gentleness.

“Why, you must be Chris.” He offered me his hand, which I shook as firmly as I thought proper for one so frail. “Welcome. Come in. I’m Bob Joyce, but please call me Bob. Jane will be down shortly. In the meantime, perhaps you’d care for a drink.”

“I’ll have a whisky and soda,” I replied. It seemed the right drink for a captain, though I can’t remember ordering the drink by choice on any other occasion.

“Very sensible, too. Ice?”

“Er, yes, please.”

Bob busied himself at the drinks cabinet. I took stock of my surroundings—immense but rather gloomy opulence.

“Yes, you’re right, it is a little on the tenebrous side, but we’ve only taken it for a few months—and at least it’s warm.”

Funny . . . I hadn’t said anything.

“Here, have a seat, Chris. I believe you’re to be our skipper this summer?”

“Yes, that’s right, or, rather, I hope so.”

“Well, I hope so, too, Chris. Cheers. It’s no good talking to me about boats though; I hate the damn things. The boat is my wife’s hobby.”

A rustle of expensive materials, a scent of gardenias, and Jane was down.

“Chris, how good of you to come. I am charmed to meet you. Now, Bobby, have you given our skipper a drink? Yes, good, I see you have. Please sit down.”

Jane was a whirlwind of a woman, getting on for seventy, I supposed, but still quite a beauty, and with an air of ease and power. I fumbled for something nautical to say, but, hell, we didn’t want to get into all that stuff about heads and bitts just yet. Jane was running the show, anyway. Bob sipped his whisky and drummed his fingers on his knee.

Jane poured herself a drink and sat down opposite me, looking at me keenly as she made her assessment.

“Chris, I feel sure we shall get along wonderfully well; your references are impeccable. I won’t even tell you all the glorious things that dear Julie said about you—and Julie is a person whose opinions I take very seriously. Now, I imagine you know all there is to know about sailing, so we needn’t bother ourselves with that . . . ”

At one stroke Jane had removed the rope with which I might have hanged myself, but like an idiot I failed to take advantage of it. My brain was still in sailing mode, and instead of casting about for some subject about which I actually knew something, I was desperately trying to come up with something that would give Jane the impression that I was a nautical sort of a person.

“Is . . . is she a gaffer?” I spluttered.

“I beg your pardon, my dear?”

“I mean the boat, the yacht . . . is she a gaffer?”

“Is she a what?’ Her face took on a rather pained expression.

“A gaffer—you know, gaff-rigged . . . ”

“I haven’t the faintest idea, Chris. Does it matter?”

“No—no, not at all, just curiosity. I’d sort of like to know what manner of boat I’ll be sailing.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll send you the brochure and everything else, all the details, before you come.”

This was a piece of cake, like taking candy from a baby. Bob poured me another whisky while Jane filled me in on my duties. My pay would be fifty pounds a week plus a living allowance. I would collect the boat from...

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Verlag
Crown Publishing Group (NY)
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307592375
ISBN 13 
9780307592378
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
178
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