Life Through Another's Eyes
Quest
Jack and Hannah Ormerod and Lucia, Delphine & Fin
Wed 21 Dec 2016 12:58
When we came into Falmouth Harbour to deliver our new crew to a posh hotel for the last nights of their stay, we dropped Quest’s hook into the ground. We knew too it was supposed to get windy in the coming days. These Christmas winds in Antigua, we’ve recently learned, are ramped up by the first proper cold in the US. It’s snowing in New York and the bottom of that same system blows itself through the leeward Caribbean islands like the Gods are whistling. It’s time to seek shelter. After patting ourselves on the back that we'd made it back to Falmouth (hubris mistake no.1), we decided to go deeper into the bay toward the mangrove beds. Unfortunately mangroves mean murky water. It isn’t possible to pick out the sandy holes like when you anchor by the beach. Oh dear. Our German grey anchor just wasn’t happy and we dragged backwards like Quest was trying out for the Moonwalk. We pulled the anchor up and tried again. No change. We were going backwards as if Quest was still wearing that one sparkly, white glove. We pulled up our anchor again. This time the windlass slipped and strained on the chain. We scratched our heads worriedly. Was the windlass about to break again? After inching the chain painfully up, the anchor finally appeared and we looked down at it, stunned. ‘What is that?’ This time the anchor wasn’t alone. A huge piece of coral about the size of the anchor itself had become neatly stuck to it. Completely entwined. We were both shocked and slightly impressed at the sight. Indeed, the prospect of separating these two heavy objects seemed more unlikely than separating a pair of intimately-acquainted hounds. Our new crew came to the bow and had a look. ‘Whoa.’ The girls came and stared. Delphine was particularly entranced by our new addition to Quest. ‘Are we going to keep it?’ she asked like this was no bad thing. Suddenly the sound of a dinghy came revving towards us. ‘In ALL my years,’ a Southern United States accent rang out belonging to a elderly man holding a hammer and a chisel, ‘I’ve never seen anything so perfectly stuck.’ Very kindly but rather less helpfully, he tried to crack the piece of coral down the middle. ‘I’ve got a sledgehammer,’ he boomed up towards us, ‘I can try that if y’all like.’ Now at this moment, it strikes me that our lives must seem very strange. Not bad strange. But not eating cookies round the hearth and playing scrabble either. A broken anchor. Again. Well, not broken but unusable so for all intents and purposes, broken to us. Again. We looked around for plan B. Closer to the super yachts, a red buoy sat empty. We went over in a convoy; Quest, her anchor, her anchor’s new best friend and the helpful man in his dinghy now with his sledgehammer and his wife. Note: he wasn’t going to use his wife as the sledgehammer. He had an actual sledgehammer. And a wife. Success tying to the buoy! And then, as soon as we'd secured ourselves, our Cap went into overdrive. The sledgehammer was proving fruitless. Instead, we lowered Edna down, put our engine into place and Jack went off with a piece of rope. Me, the girls and our new crew stared at him go. ‘What’s he doing?’ one of the crew asked. ‘Good question.’ ‘Take the rope!’ came from the bow. The Cap had tied his line to the bottom of the anchor. We took the end of it and he shot back to Quest like he had a small fire smouldering in the seat of his pants. He took the line and wrapped it round Quest's overworked windlass. ‘Winch handle,’ he called, surgeon-like. Once delivered, he began winching the rope like he was amputating a limb. ‘I do believe he’s tryin' to turn the anchor upside down,’ the man murmured to his wife. Not his sledgehammer. ‘Brilliant,’ breathed one of our new crew. Sure enough, the anchor pivoted up and up. Then in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, the coral, which was so wedged on to within an inch of its life, rolled off as smoothly as butter. The Cap removed the rope from the windlass and stood looking down. He couldn’t have looked more relieved if the fire in his pants had been extinguished. ‘Ok,’ he said, ‘what’s for lunch?’ And our strange life rolled on. Love from Quest and her crew xx P.S. You think anyone took a photo of the coral? The poor coral who is now heartbroken and making a fresh start in a new neighbourhood? You think… Instead I got some of Delph trying to brush her Caribbean hair….A less dramatic if similarly prickly event...     |