My last day in Norway, so why on earth or sea am I posting a short essay on learning to sail off the coast of Ireland? I might say that I long ago traded my modest skills as a sailor for the joys of sea kayaking, but have not abandoned the wish to move across the water — especially the sea — under sail, possessed of the skills in which Verlyn Klinkenborg is taking such pleasure in this lovely essay about learning by practicing. I could also say, as I have elsewhere in the pages of Reckonings, that I am a longtime admirer of Verlyn Klinkenborg himself, for the grace of his prose, for his gentle essays in the Times, usually under the title, "The Rural Life." Finally, I am simply enjoying a slow day of gathering myself and my belongings to travel home, halfway around the world, after two weeks of sorrow, memory, reunion, companionship and joy among friends in a gifted community to which I shall return.
Charted Waters
New York Times
September 21, 2012
We troop down to the harbor at the once industrial end of town, nautical mousquetaires wearing sea boots and knit caps, salopettes and foul-weather jackets, bundled in life vests with crotch straps and tethers. We pass black boot prints tarred with waste oil and a great heap of wharfish refuse, tangles of long-discarded fishing nets, thick manila hawsers. And then we come to the jetty, a wide concrete ramp leading down to the broad water of Baltimore Harbor in the parish of Rath and the Islands, County Cork, Ireland. Two aluminum skiffs are waiting, rafted together. We climb across to the outer skiff, then we’re off to the sailboats. There is a light breeze. The boats rest on their moorings like half-depleted helium balloons.
And who are we? We are the students at Les Glénans, the venerable nonprofit sailing school founded in Brittany, France, 65 years ago by a group of former Resistance fighters. One is not merely a student at Les Glénans. We are members of a sort of sailing collective, an Internationale without dogma, a league of learners led by volunteer Argonauts. We share kitchen chores, one boat crew at a time, in the disused Baltimore railroad station. We sleep in bunk beds at the former station master’s house. This is how it has always been at Les Glénans, which prizes a sense of volunteerism and community as much as a love of sailing. The school has two bases in Ireland, three in Brittany, one in the South of France and one in Corsica. It offers dozens of courses in small groups — everything from two-day windsurfing classes to a six-week Atlantic crossing. In Baltimore, there were seven of us, divided between two boats with an instructor in each.
At Les Glénans Baltimore, the official language is English, but the off-watch talk is mostly in French, mingled with the smoke of hand-rolled cigarettes. (I am one of two native English speakers. The other, Ruth, is Irish.) When Clément or Löic or Nolwen (Bretons all) lose the English words for, say, “topping lift” or “shackle” or “outhaul,” I find myself supplying them. What they supply is an ineffable calm when the novice at the helm tries to bury the toe rail in les moutons — whitecaps the wind has kicked up in the harbor.
The difference between sailing and practicing sailing is indiscernible. To sail is to practice sailing, and to practice sailing is to be out on the water. We learn to pick up a mooring under sail by picking up a mooring under sail. Heaving-to is how we study heaving-to. We pay special attention to the effects of our maneuvers — what happens to the wind and the way the boat rides as we tack and jibe — so we’ll know what we’re noticing the next time we feel these effects. The instructor is present, really, to translate for the boat, to point out the link between what we do and what we feel. It is the boat itself — a slippery thing called a Glénans 5.7, a cabinless vessel suited for four — that teaches us. Our suspense becomes exhilaration as the week progresses. Qualms vanish like a sky full of clouds, blown out to sea.
Half the fun of learning is watching other people learn, and there is no better place to do this than a sailing course at Les Glénans. For the novices that first morning, the boat is a cat’s cradle of meaningless lines. The rudder is waiting to be pintled to the gudgeons. The sails lie bagged below, the headsail like a month’s dirty laundry, the main like a long, tubular duffel of drugged anacondas. The boom is reluctant to do anything asked of it. Tying a bowline — a knot essential to controlling the headsail — requires a fable worthy of Aesop, involving a rabbit, a hole and a tree. The moral? Tell the tale wrong and you get no knot. We are surrounded by sleeping yachts and overwatched by Dún na Séad Castle, which has been watching the harbor since 1215.
By the second day, 10 hours of sailing later, the novice at the helm luffs up (turns into the wind) at Löic’s command without hesitation, though “luff” was a word unheard of the day before. We prepare to tack — change angles to the wind — and find ourselves in a linguistic tangle. I was taught to say “Helms a-lee!” at the critical moment. Coming from me, that’s about as natural as flinging an arm forward and shouting, “Wagons ho!” while swiveling John Wayne-like in the saddle. It sounds even less commanding in French. So we agree to use, in a thick French accent, a phrase one of the novices has used whenever he’s been at the helm. “Ready to tack?” he asks. “Ready!” we shout. “Weeee TACK!” The boat comes about, bearing away 90 degrees from our previous course. By the third morning, we can pull the 5.7 together in minutes, jib bent on, sheets bowlined and figure-eighted, reefing lines and outhaul rigged, rudder hung. At day’s end, I luff up, having sailed through a maze of moored yachts. We catch our buoy with a boat hook and troop home to make dinner.
One afternoon we indulge in a drill much beloved of sailing instructors. We heave an object overboard — a bucket tied to a boat fender, a tough vinyl tube — and take turns trying to retrieve it. To perform this exercise, we sail past the Lousy Rocks, midharbor; past the leeward, sheep-bearing flanks of Sherkin Island; past Loo Rock; and out into the Atlantic swell just east of Cape Clear Island. It is hard — if preposterous — not to feel somehow Odyssean sailing between the pillared cliffs of the harbor mouth, as if we were “Heroes/Sitting in the dark ship/On the foamless, long-heaving/Violet sea.” We joke about heading to America, but the Frenchmen would run out of smokes before nightfall.
We each take a turn or two catching the castaway fender in mercurial sunlight (harder than it sounds). I look back and the narrow slot of the harbor entrance, only 400 meters wide, has vanished into the rocky crust of the Irish headlands. There is no losing the harbor — a tall, bulbous monument called the Beacon, built in 1849, overlooks the entrance. But from open water there’s something eerie in the way that slender portal to safety hides itself. Wind coming over the low hills will find Baltimore Harbor, but the long-heaving swells of the Atlantic cannot, making it a port of refuge in any storm.
Lying just out of sight, some four miles west-southwest of our current position, is Fastnet Rock, one of the great navigational marks in the waters of the British Isles, often the first landfall for eastbound trans-Atlantic ships. It is also the rounding point in what is now the Rolex Fastnet Race, which takes place in early August and originates off Cowes, in the Solent, the strait between England and the Isle of Wight. In many sailors, the name Fastnet raises thoughts of the legendary storm that demolished the 1979 race, when a deep depression bore down on the fleet like a bowling ball falling on a flotilla of matchsticks. Twenty-four yachts were abandoned and 15 sailors died. As it happens, the first lifesaving boat to answer a Mayday was one launched from Baltimore.
But our day is bright and warm, and to the west, between horizon and headland, the only suggestions of the era we’re in are ourselves. Dún na Séad Castle dates from the early 13th century, while the Franciscan Friary on Sherkin Island was built in 1466. They are latecomers both, for long before them there were kingdoms within kingdoms in this corner of Ireland. The sack of Baltimore by Algerian pirates, in 1631, seems comparatively recent.
One morning, the wind is too high for us to go sailing so we hike above town to the foot of the Beacon. The wind kites hard against us. We stand edgewise into it, holding laminated nautical charts of the harbor, confirming that objects marked “conspic” on the chart are indeed conspicuous. Foam streams in linear drifts from the edge of Spanish Island, where sheep are filing downhill like a stone wall that has come apart. The water in the harbor has gone chalky, shaken by the gale. But in a protected inlet called Eastern Hole Bay, just over the edge of Beacon Point, the sea is clear and luminous if never quite violet — one moment breaking opaline, the next an aqueous sapphire.
Over the centuries, the work has largely gone out of Baltimore harbor. Only two or three commercial fishing boats remain. The harbor is a popular haven for visiting yachts, which anchor in the lee of Sherkin Island and the entrance to Church Strand Bay. On weekends the street Castle End bustles with scuba divers in thick neoprene, chatting in the unheeded rain between dives. The River Ilen, beyond Ringarogy Island, freshens each spring with sea trout and salmon that are caught by anglers well above Skibbereen, the next substantial town toward Cork.
And yet once there were barges and farm carts carrying sea sand dredged from the Ilen to be spread on the fields. It was, they said, a river of sand. The mackerel fishery once filled fish wagons that were hauled away from the Baltimore pier by the Cork, Bandon and South Coast railway. You can read the history of this district in the numbers. In 1841, the population of County Cork was 854,000. In 1961, the year the train stopped coming to Baltimore, it was 330,000, a nadir from which the county has slowly recovered.
Just a few steps away from the Les Glénans base, a dark stone monument has been erected “In Memory Of All The Boys Who Were In Baltimore Industrial School In The Years 1930-1950.” This was the successor to the Baltimore Fisheries School, built in 1886, Ireland’s first, with funds supplied by Angela Burdett-Coutts, Dickens’s friend and one of the great philanthropists of the 19th century. The Fisheries School, as the name suggests, helped boys in an impoverished district learn the trades of fishing and boat building.
At least two noteworthy boats were built in Baltimore, both for Conor O’Brien, a gun runner and rebel to whom the words “haughty,” “prickly” and “puckish” have stuck like barnacles. Under the guidance of a local shipwright named Moynihan, the boys at the Fisheries School built O’Brien’s Saoirse — Gaelic for “freedom” — which he and a hapless, ever-changing crew sailed around the world from 1923 to 1925. It was one of the first small-boat circumnavigations after Joshua Slocum’s great solo voyage some 30 years earlier. O’Brien’s second boat, the Ilen, was a commission for the Falkland Islands Company. He delivered it in person to Port Stanley, 8,000 nautical miles from Baltimore, closing what he called the most enjoyable of all his voyages with the traditional order: “That will do, men.”
I would like to have watched from the Beacon as the Saoirse and the Ilen made sail past Loo Rock and out into the open waters of Baltimore Bay. For that matter, I would like to have watched, from the same vantage, all the boats, large and small, that have entered this harbor across time, pirates not excepted, to see their shapes change, their rigging evolve, and to glimpse their seamanship, which must have been extraordinary.
On that afternoon of catching castaway fenders, our seamanship is just good enough to get us back under the gaze of the Beacon and into the harbor. We make our way past the Lousy Rocks. Around us the village of Baltimore rises in tiers. A music comes over the water, an Irish tune, from the harbor’s terrace of pubs and restaurants, where a band is playing for the weekend crowd. Again, I get to thread the maze of yachts and sail us to our mooring. The boat comes apart quickly — sails folded and bagged, lines coiled, rudder and tiller lashed in the cockpit. And just in time, for there is Nolwen coming with the skiff. We look over the boat one last time and decide that that will do.