TOM CUNLIFFE

TOM CUNLIFFE A MAN YOU WON’T MEET EVERY DAY

A wooden boat is the passport to meeting miraculous souls

ILLUSTRATION CLAUDIA MYATT

Out of respect for advancing years and the diminishing time I can set aside for scraping, caulking and painting, I sold my last wooden boat a while ago. Now, I sail a carefully chosen American bermudan cutter constructed out of GRP. She ticks every box for Roz and me, but we still yearn for the spiritual experience of living in an artefact carved from the forest, powered by hemp and flax grown in the fields and fastened by metals mined in the deep places of the earth. These things are tangible, but what we miss most of all is the less definable human element of traditional seafaring. When I sit down to write this column, I often start by thinking about a particular boat, then find my mind wandering to the people who bring her to life. A boat on her own can be full of interest, but for the total experience we must meet the people who sail her. An outstanding feature of classic craft is that they attract the sort of characters you don’t meet every day.

Looking back over the years of voyaging, I realise I’ve been surrounded by colourful personalities entirely because of the boat I was operating at the time. If I turn up at Paimpol to enjoy the Sea Shanty festival in my current yacht the music won’t have changed much, but the boat won’t make friends like the old ones did. Sail in with a Galway hooker, a Yorkshire coble, a Dutch fishing botter or an Essex smack, however, and you’ve a ticket to a different world. People of the sea seem to burst out from under tidal stones to crowd around such vessels. The drinks flow, yarns are spun, home-made music sings and, in the words of Rudyard Kipling, “the wildest tales are true.”

All my wooden boats had this effect, but it probably peaked during the 15 years following 1982 when Roz, Hannah and I had the 1911 cutter Hirta. Back then nobody took special notice of a 35-tonne pilot cutter. The only ones anybody had heard of were those made famous by HW Tilman. The surviving examples still at sea were all unrestored but that didn’t stop them making some impressive passages. When we showed up at Douarnenez in 1986 for the first of the great French festivals, we’d just returned from the Caribbean following an outbound voyage taking in Norway, Greenland, Newfoundland and the United Sates. Our allotted berth for this and the magnificent 1988 event which followed was alongside the tidal wall in the old harbour of Rosmeur. We rafted up to Baroque, Peggy and

Madcap, all veterans of many a competitive beat down the Bristol Channel in search of business in days so long ago that people still imagined cavalry could charge machine guns.

The next raft to seaward of ours was Galway Hookers, with such memorable names as Con McCann’s Connacht and Johnny Healion’s Morning Star sporting fiddlers, a piper and Paddy Barry on guitar and vocals. When the rafts came together after the bars shut, the songs and the laughter were full throttle.

One person who stands out from those rare old times is the late Yvon le Corre, marine artist of Brittany, writer and extraordinary sailor who died two years ago. I first became aware of Yvon as the man who designed and painted the posters for those early events. Just as Toulouse Lautrec’s depictions of 19th-century Paris are seen as fine art, Yvon’s for the Breton regattas must go the same way. When I visited him in his home in the half-timbered streets of old Tréguier later that summer and found him surrounded by the trappings of a true Bohemian, I realised I was in the presence of someone special, but it is as a sailor that I shall remember him.

Some time previously, he had lost his first major vessel, an Essex smack which he single-handed around the seven seas and finally said goodbye to in Scotland. He’d salvaged the dinghy and the mast, I recall, and had somehow transported them back to Tréguier where he installed the boat in the entrance lobby of another medieval house that backed onto the one where I met him in the late 1980s. The house was home to Azou, an old friend, and there he unrolled his bedding, sleeping in the boat downstairs while life went on around him. In due course their son was born and the 1988 poster had a painting of a little boy with a model boat under his arm gazing seawards at an armada of classic working craft. A Google search for ‘Le Chasse Marée Douarnenez 88’ will take you to see it. The boy is Yvon and Azou’s lad and the boat is a model of Eliboubane¸ the ‘chaloupe sardinière’ which I’ll tell you about.

In 1981, Le Corre approached Francois Vivier, a marine architect known for his accurate generation of traditionally inspired designs. He wanted a north Breton open sardine boat, lug rigged with a schooner configuration and no concessions to modern ‘improvements’. What he got was the definitive French lugger, 10m (33ft) long, 3m (10ft) wide, displacing 6½ tonnes. Originally crewed by seven fishermen, Le Corre sailed her shorthanded, engineless, and often alone, coping somehow with the powerful, highly demanding rig and driving her hard on some remarkable voyages. My sharpest memory of the boat with her ‘over-plumb’ bow and black tarred sides is entering the Tréguier River in 1988 after the festival. I had visited her briefly in Douarnenez to make my number with Yvon and we’d left on the same tide, both bound for points north and east. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that a big pilot cutter with a keen crew would have sailed a short-handed 35-footer under the horizon after a hundred miles or so, but that’s not how it was. We’d lost sight of Eliboubane overnight and were coming into the Tréguier River with the dawn. The western approaches are a wasteland of drying rocks and shoals with a couple of islands. The main road in makes a dog-leg detour safely around these hazards, adding three well-marked miles or so to the trip. As we hardened up close-hauled to enter the river proper with the impossible piles of rock close to starboard, my mate pointed to the inside island. Above it, two mastheads were sailing along, bobbing slightly to the scend. We were just bearing away into the buoyed channel when the lugger popped out from behind the boulders, hauled her sheets and proceeded upstream in company. There was, of course, no GPS in those days and I have to say that, as a hardened rock-hopper, trained in the knock-’em’-dead school of examining Yachtmaster Instructors, I wouldn’t have tried my luck in there in broad daylight, let alone in the grey before sunrise. I had never been so impressed with a piece of pilotage and I still haven’t. It was surreal. As he drew alongside, sailing home with both his near-black lugs drawing sweetly, he was drinking a mug of coffee and enjoying a morning smoke. We spent a day or two with Yvon in the town, anchored in deep water, rowing up to the landing. Our paths didn’t cross again until, after 25 years, he came aboard another boat to catch up, once again in Tréguier. I asked what had become of Eliboubane and this is what he told me: He’d sailed the seas in the lugger as he always intended, going down to the Cabo Verde islands where he had made friends with the local fishing communities. He managed the long thrash home, then, having no further use for his boat, he’d reluctantly decided to let her go. He advertised her for sale at a knock-down price, hoping for a buyer who would see her for the magnificent creature she was. There were no takers, so he offered her to his local commune for nothing on the understanding that they would keep her up and use her for the general good. Again, nobody stirred. Saddened, he thought for a while, then he remembered the fishermen of the Cabo Verdes, so poor that many could not afford a decent vessel. He pointed her bow back to the islands where he had been befriended far from home as a sailor among sailors, and he gave them his boat.

A man you won’t meet every day.