The trick is to see what is there all around you. When the daily building, revising and re-building of little important things (work, the buzzing of a phone, the commute, emails) begin to overstay their welcome in your mind, then sit. I was taught this a long time ago: sit and see everything around you. Remember lifting a shell from its wet soot-sand on a beach when you were little. The salt-taste, the slender bone. See as you once used to see a shell.
Then listen: beneath every sound there is another sound. If you hear a noise, lift it up and listen to what’s beneath. When I was stressed out I used to sit in my flat and listen. Car alarms, and under that, the fussing of pigeons under the eaves. If I concentrated, under that I’d hear the stir and sigh as the heating came on. Then the humble hum of the life of the block: floors creaking, mumbles, footsteps. And by then my heart had slowed down.
I hadn’t really looked or heard anything in days – weeks – when I stepped on to the keelboat. In a weekend (away from the commute and the daily building and rebuilding) we were going to learn the fundamentals of how to sail. It was clear from the off that we would need to see more than we usually did and hear more than we had before.
We needed to point the boat in the direction of the wind before we could set off. ‘Which direction is it?’ asked the instructor. All four of us put our hands up to feel the wind on our skin. The instructor pointed at the water’s surface. ‘Look at the ripples. Smooth parallel lines, coming from over there.’
It took a multi-sensory focus to get things right. Not only to know when and how to move the steer and the two sails, but to know exactly how this might manipulate the rill of the wind to our ends. The ripples on the surface of the sea had to be deciphered. The wind was as much a presence as the water. I couldn’t imagine we would ever succeed in taming it. We set about learning painstakingly the patterns we needed to work in, to get the little boat to speed up or slow down. Mostly we missed and the boat rocked and dashed drunkenly in the wind. Sailing was wordy, too. There’s an ornate lexicon on board: gybe and tell-tales, tack and luff. Clearly, it wasn’t enough to know your port from your starboard.
At the end of the first day (trodding exhausted ashore) we sat down with a map of the Forth. Italicised shipwrecks, mongrel port names. We traced the broken blue line that represented a redundant wartime submarine net, deliberately cut and sunk. The water was littered with the detritus of warfare. We had sailed by Inchmickery, an island of barely 20 metres in length, which has been so occupied, altered and costumed over the years, that it has become almost a mythical creature itself. Its first name (as far back as the language of memory will go) was the Gaelic Innis nam Biocaire – the Isle of the Vicars.
In later manifestations it was a gun enforcement, fortified with concrete and dressed with railings to impress enemies as a war ship. It appeared in Iain Banks’ masterful novel ‘Complicity’, adding an unforgettable atmosphere to a pitiless murder mystery denouement. Now it is aggressively colonised by seagulls. The Forth, that seems a drear grey reach when crossing in a car on a bridge above, was revealed, down below, to be teeming with life and ghosts.
The next day, we dotted under the Forth bridges. We all neglected the boat’s course and stared up as the iconic rust-red rail bridge loomed into the sky. Sailing meant getting close to the world. Every time I stopped to stare at our surroundings – iron, light, sea – the boat would tug at me for attention, and if it wasn’t placated it would suddenly sally dangerously out of control. We all, at one point or another, fell over in slapstick slow-motion, or got hit by the boom.
By the end of day two, I had at last grasped a sense of control over the boat. The feeling came and went. When our work came good, we skimmed across the surface of the sea. A very old human feeling, that thrill of working with the insentient force of water and wind. Hard won. We all sat quiet, arms aching, in the sunlight.
The little structures we build and rebuild, at work, at home, keeping house, caring for our cutlery and dishes – struck me as bloodless stuff when I got home. I sleep deeply and dream of being out on the sea again. Yes, you could say I was hooked.
By Amy Jardine | 12 September 2018