A dinghy lying alongside a sailing boat. In the dinghy sits a person, an A2P3 respirator on, a sander in hand. Perhaps twenty centimetres above the waterline he is sanding the GRP of the hull. The picture is a familiar one to me from videos of people who spend months – no, years – out in the world aboard their boats.
Yesterday it was me sitting in the dinghy – not somewhere out in the world, but in Kappeln, that pleasant, hard-up little town near the mouth of the Schlei. A mere ten miles from Brodersby. Yesterday, on the first day, the day of departure, I managed, incredibly, to cause my first accident with a sailing boat. The adversary: not another boat but a piling – strictly, a concrete-filled steel pillar about a metre across, standing just past the makeshift bridge at Lindaunis. How I could have overlooked it is still a mystery to me. I certainly didn’t have the situational awareness that sailing always and without exception demands. In the event, thanks to Kathrin’s sharp eye, I managed to bear away at the last moment, and Koraki scraped her belly along the piling on the port side. The pillar’s steel took the gelcoat off, up to four millimetres into the GRP, over an area of some ten by ten centimetres.
A lucky escape? What a way to begin the voyage. A wake-up call? Or, with a few hours’ distance, just one more reminder that sailing is only fifty per cent sailing and fifty per cent the ceaseless upkeep of the boat?
After the collision, once it was clear the damage was a deep graze – nothing a boat like Koraki would take any lasting notice of, but equally nothing you can simply ignore – we sailed gently on down the Schlei, past Arnis with its yard and little ferry, into the harbour at Kappeln, through the bascule bridge at 12:40 and into the town harbour, where I knew the berths were wide enough to work alongside from the dinghy and that Skips, the nearest well-stocked chandlery, was only three hundred metres off.
The small stocks of epoxy and glass-fibre topped up once more, the workshop, only just tidied away, was opened again: sander, acetone, peel-ply, glass-fibre, epoxy, respirator, the good blue masking tape, laminating roller, cups, wooden sticks for measuring and mixing the epoxy. On deck Kathrin keeps the workshop – the glass-fibre mats, the epoxy. She mixes the primer while I’m down in the dinghy, sanding, laminating. On my own it would have been awkward to the point of impossible.
At midday today we moved on to Schleimünde, lying at anchor, and again, out of the dinghy: sanding, priming, painting. We’ve found our rhythm by now. After the work on the hull, it’s a lovely evening. But how could it be otherwise – at anchor, water all around, the sunset in view. Evenings at anchor are seldom forgotten. Tomorrow, first thing, sanding and painting once more from the dinghy.
Even now, a day on, the question remains: what do I make of this accident – and what do I make of myself through it? In sailing, the need for the next step generally arises out of the moment. Something happens – the wind, the weather shifts, something on the boat wants attention – and you react, with luck aptly and with a clear head. And so today we aren’t underway on the Kiel Canal but lying at anchor on the Schlei. The plan for mending the deep graze seems sound to me – and yet, and yet, the first experience of a collision I’ve had with a sailing boat stands as a memory that won’t be shaken: situational awareness, in sailing, is simply always and unconditionally required.
Tomorrow midday, then, we mean to make for Kiel.