Page 72 - Masthead - Salcombe Yacht Club 2019 Yearbook

70 SYC Stories
‘SALCOMBE BOY’ EXCERPT
The Edinburgh Castle, Eddy, as she was affectionately known, was a very happy ship and I was up for doing another couple of trips, but John said he wanted to be back in Salcombe for Christmas, so home we went.
I didn’t go to East Portlemouth for Christmas but stayed with Jeff and Lil in their small cottage, 5 Market Street, in Salcombe. In fact, I didn’t go back to East Portlemouth very much after I had left home. It seemed so dull and uninteresting, never a party going on, unlike
5 Market Street, where the party never stopped. Jeff was either working or partying. That was the life for me.
Between Christmas and New Year, a shipyard at Brixham called Uphams, contacted Jeff with a brand new wooden Twister to go from Brixham to Gourock on the Clyde, just down from Glasgow. A Twister is a wooden sloop, about 28 ft, a well-built sea-going yacht that could take a lot of weather. Jeff agreed to take her up first thing in the New Year, but a few days before New Year, he was suddenly laid up with a stomach virus. Most unlike Jeff who never suffered from anything except hangovers. Too much Courvoisier over Christmas!
‘You can take her, Scratch, if you want.’ ‘You reckon I can, Jeff?’
‘Yes, sure, you’ll be all right, you and John. You’re the skipper, remember, John’s the mate.’
Jeff was always very keen that a ship should have only one skipper.
‘High pressure to the north, east, south easterlies setting in; you’ll fly up there like a greyhound.’
I felt both apprehension and excitement. I was a little over nineteen now and I was to be trusted with a brand new yacht, to
be delivered in mid-winter, through some of the most treacherous waters in northern Europe; the Western Approaches, Land’s End, up through the Irish Sea and a ‘starb’d hand into the Clyde’, as Jeff put it. Simple!
Lil told Jeff he was daft for letting us do this. ‘They’re both too young,’ she said. But Jeff knew we were well capable. He said he had often brought the Thames spritsail barges back from London to Essex whenever the skipper was ‘under the weather’.
Lil made up a mountain of sandwiches for the first day or two out. The trip would take us around four days, Jeff reckoned. We also took the usual delivery grub with us; tea, sugar, long life milk, a few tins of Fray Bentos stew, some tins of peas and potatoes, staple diet on Scott’s Yacht and Delivery Service. No one could cook, so we just hashed it all up into one big pan every evening. Delivery Stew we called it!
Ernie drove John and I over to Brixham. The Twister was on a
NO ONE COULD COOK, SO WE JUST HASHED IT ALL UP INTO ONE BIG PAN EVERY EVENING. DELIVERY STEW WE CALLED IT!
mooring off the yard and old man Upham took us out in a launch. He did ask where Scotty was and we told him he was ill and that we were going to run her up to Glasgow. He didn’t seem too concerned and trusted Jeff’s judgement. The designer of the Twister was a fellow called Kim Holman and he was there as well. John and I climbed aboard and within a few minutes had the feel of her. She was a little beauty, everything brand new. I did not use the engine at all but sailed her off the mooring.
The wind was well in the east-northeast, not too strong, about
a five. We bore away out of Brixham and rounded Berry Head and then down for the Start, the Lizard and the Irish Sea. The wind
was kind to us the whole trip and as we rounded Lands End in the dark, it seemed to follow us around, letting a little more into the east south-east. If this held, it would give us a broad reach right up through the Irish Sea. The wind did hold in that quarter and up into the Irish Sea we went. Unlike Jeff, I kept a course line on the chart using only dead reckoning and our favourite piece of navigational equipment of the day, a handheld Seafix Direction Finder, a brilliant bit of kit, often used by Jeff. A couple of fixes and you knew exactly where you were.
Forty hours out of Brixham and we were up off the Smalls and the Hats and Barrels, south-west tip of Wales. It brought back memories of the Panorama earlier that year. No fog this time, but a fair old sea running because of the Spring Tide. As we sailed further north, the next light we picked up was the Isle of Man. We sailed quite close to Peel on the west side of the island. We were tempted to go ashore but didn’t want to lose this good wind, so on we pressed and entered the Clyde four days out of Brixham. We sailed past Largs on our starboard hand, going like an express train, wind and tide right