Atlantic Britain: The Story of the Sea a Man and a Ship. Adam Nicolson

foot, to deal with the Atlantic, particularly as the swells came unbroken on to the west coast of Ireland. No bigger because that would become difficult with just the two of us. It needed a meaty engine as well as good new sails to get out of problems. It shouldn’t be one of those elegant New England yachts with long counter sterns and overhanging bows -sleek, leggy supermodels - because they were not made for the big seas that would be our world. She would have to be strong, beamy, and secure. She might not be the fastest, but we could live with that.

      We looked for weeks. We toured the harbours and boatyards of England. We scoured the magazines and had sessions on the Internet. There were phone conversations with boat owners in California and Maine. Something for a while looked right in Bergen. But everything had its flaws. Perhaps I didn’t entirely know what I wanted in the way of a boat. George walked me round marinas. Did I like the look of that kind of thing? Or that? Was that too flash? Or that too slick? Too big? Too small? Too fat? Too thin? Too little headroom below? Too ugly? Too pretentious? Too sharky? Too cute?

      We had by now reached the middle of November. Time was running on and the boat, the right boat, still wasn’t showing up. Then, late one evening, George rang me from his mobile. ‘I’m on her,’ he said.

      ‘Why are you whispering?’

      ‘I’ve crept aboard. I’ve found the hatch open. There’s no one here and I’m sitting below and this is the boat. I think this is the one.’

      I was down there the next morning at dawn, to a marina at Lymington on the Solent. Plastic decks, hi-tech rigs, and long sleek windows like the lenses of wrap-around shades spread around me in aprons of money. But over on a far pontoon, sticking up amid the aluminium, I saw a pair of wooden masts. George was poking around at the base of one of them. There she was. She lay in her skimpy little pontoon berth like a duchess in a supermarket, scarcely deigning to consider the indignity of her surroundings. Immensely wooden, larch planks on oak frames, superbly fat around the middle, with volumes of room below, enough berths to sleep eight, the perfect candidate, a substance in her big rounded stem and stern. She was descended, via a good few cream cakes, from the sailing lifeboats of nineteenth-century Norway, designed by the great naval architect Colin Archer - his parents were Scottish - to be safe in a storm. Her forebears had been built to wait offshore in the North Sea and, as bad weather struck, to take fishing boats in tow and claw off a lee shore, holding them like a gaggle of ducklings behind them. She was the kind of boat Erskine Childers used to run guns to the IRA in the Irish Civil War - her innards stripped out below and filled with a glittering pool of rifles. She was as strong as you like and only fourteen years old, built as an apprentice piece in a yard at Heiligenhafen on the Baltic. Here was the boat for the ocean margin. She exuded certainty. She would look after us. She was the one. She was one of us.

      Staring down at her I couldn’t quite believe such a thing might ever be mine. Such a ship! It was as if I had given birth to a cow. I negotiated a mortgage with Barclays Marine Finance, offered two-thirds of the asking price, subject to sea trial and survey, and it was accepted.

      Early in December, I drove down in the dawn to a freezing Lymington. The wind was gusting up to thirty knots, a Force 7. With the ship broker, all courtesy, all smoothing of every path, and an employee of the owner who had been out on the boat before, we edged into the winter sea. We soon had all four sails up - a genoa, a staysail, the mainsail, and the mizzen - and she went, steadily, rather like a drawing room afloat, no huge speed, but so homely, with such a big calm motion, sailing at six or seven knots or so in the Solent, kettle on the gimballed cooker, that there were smiles all round.

      The boat needed setting up properly. The shrouds, the big stays for the mast, were not in the right place and as a result the mainmast leaned forward slightly. The sheetleads and blocks were all wrong. The main-sheet arrangement was a chaos. The sails were both too small and too loose, and she was underpowered.

      For all that, there was something there, the sense of what might be. The yacht that windy morning felt like a capsule of possibilities. A boat is not a destination, nor a conclusion, as a house or a piece of land might be, but a means to reach conclusions and destinations that otherwise you could only dream of. Everything that hangs in the air above a boat is open-ended. She knows no horizons. For her, anyway, every prospect is an invitation and every casting-off an absorption in where she might go. A boat is all beginnings, and something about that boat that morning felt as if she wanted to go, to head out there and get out there, to sail out into the sea for which she had been made.

      There was a moment when George and I both lay down on our backs on the foredeck, looking up at the mast and headsails while the big girl rumbled along beneath us in the wind. That was also a beginning, as if we were astronauts lined up on the pad.

      Later, in the pub at Lymington, George allowed himself to talk about what we might do, where we might go, what the year might mean. A mission, he called it, and was clearly touched by it, by the things we would see, the whales surfacing at night, the phosphorescence running off the bow, the early mornings, the harbours after storms.

      All that open-endedness requires the very opposite from the boat itself. The boat needed to be closed. The Atlantic shore is the realm of possibilities, but if this boat was to thrive there she needed to sharpen up. George had already shown a photograph of her in her current state to a boatbuilder in Cornwall - her short masts, leaning forward, her baggy, tiny sails, her unachieved condition. ‘Oh, look at her,’ the Cornish-man had said, ‘broken wings.’ If she was to be released into her Atlantic life, she had to be redeemed and to do that we would have to take her down-Channel to the Cornish yard. And, despite the superstitions, give her a new name. She was called Irene May when I bought her, after the mother of the previous owner, but that couldn’t stay. George’s own mother, Bar, understanding these things, and seeing a picture of her, thought she might be renamed the Auk, because her big round body and her slightly stumpy wings reminded her of the way the auks - the razorbills and guillemots and puffins - all exist so bravely and buoyantly in their gale-swept oceanic world. The auk is the bird of the ocean and it was as the Auk that we finally took her to sea.

      Negotiations over the price and conditions of the sale had run on - there had been problems with the masts - and it was early February by the time she was released to go. A hundred and fifty miles of the winter sea, a huge lump of sea life taken in at a gulp. George had driven up from Cornwall to Lymington and spent the night on her. I drove down in another dawn. Anxious excitement, a boat we didn’t know, big south-south-westerlies coming across the Channel. A long hike in February, hard on the wind, with certainly no other yacht at sea, one of us as green as they come, the other at least a little rusty. Getting things ready in the early dark, eggs and bacon down below, saying we would just go out into the Solent to start with, just to test the gear, to see how the newly fixed rigging would perform, not entirely certain that the engine was in the greatest of shapes. But knowing, somehow, that there was a big draw out there - that invitation westwards, down the Channel.

      I was fingers and thumbs. I scarcely knew a knot that was any good. I hadn’t yet grasped that running a boat involved sweat and physical engagement. It doesn’t happen while sipping a glass of white wine. We reattached the big genoa in the morning to the forestay while the wind flogged and snatched at it. I made a mess of it three times before George stepped in. We fuelled up. The man operating the pump said, ‘So you’re the fellow who bought dear old Irene May She’s built like a horse, isn’t she?’

      Was that good? Was a horse what you wanted? I’d no idea.

      We left eventually in the early afternoon. The marvellous abandonment of leaving. The wind still coming in sharply up the Channel as we headed out under the motor. Sick with apprehension and strangeness. The tide just short of the Needles was kicking up into little pinnacles. I would have been swamped or capsized in any dinghy, but the Auk slapped through it all, the sunshine off the milky water, the headlands stepping away to the southwest. We hauled up the mainsail and set the genoa in what had by then turned into big heaving seas, the bow plunging in as the Auk took each new one. George went below, leaving me at the wheel. Two things happened at once: the full whack of a bigger-than-average wave came all the way back to the cockpit, a freezing, drenching, dense, heavy shower that left me with a face aching like a mouth