Catamarans

they don't tack

image: wikipedia commons

My father owned a Flying Dutchman, a 6-metre wooden dinghy designed in 1951. He sailed it on Lake Geneva. The “FD,” as it said on the sail, was a skittish, refined, expensive little thing, the last of the wooden boats before glass-reinforced plastic happened. My dad taught me sailing, and by way of character-building had me sit on the downwind side as the slender craft listed. To my child’s eyes the boat was vertical above me, and the opaque lake water at my back close enough for me to dip an elbow in. I was terrified. I did go to sailing school, even got an official French certificate and have never lost the skill. Not much skill: I have a knack for getting just good enough at things (skiing, sailing) to get by in most circumstances, no better. In skiing, this translated to never being able to do anything remotely smoothly but making it home in any weather. In sailing, it meant coming close to last in most regattas, because I had no idea how to fettle a rented dinghy, but not losing the deposit.

Which is why when Hans, a German acquaintance of my mother’s, asked me in a Milan bar whether I wanted to go sailing on his brand-new Tornado catamaran on Lake Como, I said yes. Hans was a habitual drunk. He was tall, fleshy and pale, and loved Italy the way people who come from buttoned-up countries do, i.e., mistaking it for a free-and easy place. He was oddly disconnected from his own body. One night, apparently spent in the company of two prostitutes, he had enthusiastically taken a running jump at a hotel bed and gouged his thigh on a metal corner. He was blind drunk and felt no pain. The girls took him to hospital, where he was stitched up. He did not follow instructions, failed to renew the bandage, and smelled so bad from gangrene after a few days that his colleagues brought him back to hospital, where junior doctors gathered round to see the wound as a novelty. He was proud of all this and told everyone.

We set off on a cold, blustery morning from Milan to the lake. During the trip, he explained that he had bought the Tornado on a whim, had no idea how to sail it, and was looking forward to his first outing on the water. It was too late for me to back out, so we continued to the small marina. No one was on the water. Hans insisted on having a caffè corretto (coffee rectified with grappa) at the harbor bar, and two old guys asked us what we were planning. Hans proudly told them he was going on his first Tornado ride with me. The guys looked at me gravely. The Tornado, a seven-meter Olympic Class cat from the 1970s, is still the fastest boat in its category. It has an unreasonable amount of sail area, two slender, sharp hulls, and accelerates in gusts like a sports car.

We walked down to the marina. Alpine lakes have funny, changeable weather. The wind is channeled by the steep slopes and can only blow up or down the lake, often violently. The little harbor was in a sheltered cove in only a mild breeze, but I could see the dark, short chop on the lake further out. We unpacked the sails and raised them. Hans, powered by the grappa in the corretto, was following orders enthusiastically, all the while bellowing the word Tor-nah-doh like a large toddler. We got underway, and I was glad for the couple of hundred quiet meters for us to get our bearings on the boat. Hans sat rather awkwardly on the stretched canvas of the cat. It was then I noticed he had cut his hand on a sharp wire. The main sail was spattered with blood, and he was spraying drops everywhere around him on the white canvas. I asked whether he wanted to go back, and only then did he notice the cut. He shook his head and pointed into the lake.

When we rounded the cape on the upwind side, I knew we were in trouble; the wind went straight up to force 5, and the Tornado leapt forward. The noise of wind and water was suddenly thundering, and the boat lifted on one hull. Hans was screaming with joy: Faster! Faster! I asked him to go over to the upwind hull for balance, but he seemed rooted to the spot, smiling broadly and reclining in the middle of the boat with his arms around the boom to steady himself when the boat tilted. It is hard to judge distances across water, and I suddenly realised we only had a few seconds to tack to avoid the rocks on the other side. I shouted to Hans we were going to turn and go back, and he suddenly seemed deflated, even a little worried.

I tried to explain that we had to jibe and he clearly had no idea what I was talking about. Catamarans don’t tack into the wind easily. They get stuck facing the wind, going backwards with the sails flapping. A jibe is a riskier maneuver than a tack, because the boom swings from side to side and will brain you if you don’t see it coming and duck. All of this needed explaining, so to gain time I turned the cat into the wind. I explained the jibe to Hans who was back in the highest of spirits, spurred by the thunderous flapping of the sails, which he echoed as a bellowed pata-pata-pata at the top of his voice. He listened intently with an odd relaxed smile on his long, pale face smeared with blood from his hand. We were slowly going backwards close to the far shore.

On my instructions he pulled the jib to one side and I pulled the rudder to the other, and we turned, slowly at first, then jibed with a snap. Foolishly, neither of us was wearing a lifejacket, and I worried that if Hans went overboard hit by the boom he would drown before I could do anything. Hans ignored my instructions and kept his head high, yet amazingly caught the swinging boom with his large hand as it swept past and looked at me proudly, as if he’d caught a baseball on the fly. We made it back to the harbor in less than a minute, with the Tornado fairly flying in the chop. Hans was quiet by now, tired by all the noise and no longer sustained by the booze. We stowed his boat. He polished off another corretto, bandaged his hand from the bar’s first-aid kit, and we drove home in silence.

A few days later, I went to the bar where the adventure had been hatched and found him with his back to the counter, a circle of friends around him at safe distance from his flailing arms. He was retelling the heroic exploit and bellowing pata-pata-pata on repeat, interspersed with helpless laughter. The story was now entirely his. He did not even recognize me.