Early Days in the Mediterranean

Pray that the road is long.

That the summer mornings are many, when,

with such pleasure, with such joy

you will enter ports seen for the first time

From Ithaca by Cavafy – the old poet of Alexandria

 

 

A short and personal history of sailing Roulette down to Greece and the beginnings of flotilla sailing.

 

In 1975 I was sitting writing a postgrad thesis in Woburn Sands in Buckinghamshire, about as far as you can get from the sea in England, when I started getting a craving for something practical, something to do with my hands, something like sailing a boat. I had no money and not a lot of sailing experience, but out of that mysterious nether region around Woburn Sands the idea of sailing a yacht to Greece implanted itself in my brain. It had to be Greece because

 

1.      I had never been there.

2.      I had read the Odyssey.

3.      It seemed a suitable distance away, not too far but far enough.

 

I started buying yachting magazines and cutting out relevant articles, I borrowed books from the library and bought a load more on sailing, navigation, cruises near and far, and I devoured it all with an appetite that had deserted my academic research into the history of science. I pinned a map of the Mediterranean on the wall and memorised it. I collected all those old Practical Boat Owner booklets on production yachts in the UK and spent hours looking at the photographs and line drawings and worse, the suggested second hand prices. I had around £800 of hard earned money, well I had £800 with my partner Bridgit, but she wasn’t too keen on the idea of sailing an £800 yacht to Greece. She knew more about yachts and sailing than I did so she had good cause to be concerned.

 

I went to look at a number of yachts within the budget. I saw a 30 foot ferro-cement boat the owner, with some humour, had named Roc. I saw things ashore that would never float. I saw some lifeboat conversions that would never float and never sail. Eventually I found Roulette in Dyers Boatyard on the Itchen in Southampton. Tucked under Cobden Bridge, it had a few boats that went sailing and a lot of boats in various stages of rebuilding that would forever be in various stages. Jim Curry, a diminutive Anglo-Chinese guy my own age who owned Roulette and needed the money to get his new 21 foot Van de Stadt GRP Pandora in the water, probably thought I was another lost dreamer when I asked him if he thought it could get to the Med. He knew a lot more about boat construction and repair than I did, so I accepted his muffled ‘yes’. I bought it after haggling Jim down to £750 and promises of help to get it ready for the impending trip.

 

Roulette was a chine plywood boat built in 1953 or ’54 under the Junior Offshore Group Rule. She was nominally 20 foot long with around 6½ foot beam and a longish fin keel. I never did find out who designed her and the closest I came to the builder was a shouted conversation with him on a 35 foot classic that swooped by in the Solent one day.

 

I built that boat. Amazed she’s still afloat.

I’m going to the Mediterranean.

You’re joking.

 

He looked worried. She was never the prettiest boat except to me. Single chine boats just aren’t pretty and in the 50’s mode of small yachts she had a reverse sheer and the cabin sides extended right out to the hull so there was at least sitting headroom down below. It was fitted with a 4 hp Stuart Turner two stroke that I later learnt first saw service pumping petrol on a petrol tanker in the war and had later been more or less marinised. It was to be an erratic runner. The rig on Roulette was probably off something like a Dragon, a three quarter rig with roller reefing on the main and a range of threadbare sails including a couple of cotton sails.

 

I worked away at her through the winter and in the spring got a job at Haynes (?) Cough Mixture Factory to get money together. At a time when there was little work around I’m ashamed to say I spun a story about not coping with a teaching job, my subsequent nervous breakdown and my desire for a low level humdrum job checking off ingredients for the cough mixture. I almost had the managers in tears and they weren’t impressed when I left after four months to sail for France. In the meantime Bridgit had decided she would come and moved down from the wilds of Buckinghamshire to the various pleasures of Southampton. By this time I had sheathed the bottom with nylon cloth and epoxy paint and fixed anything I could.

 

Weekends were spent sailing around the Solent and by now my theoretical knowledge was melding with my practical skills. Or so I thought. Our navigation equipment consisted of a grid-bearing compass, a lead-line and some charts, most of which were stamped NOT FOR NAVIGATION. I had swung the compass in the Solent and before we left carried out last remedial work like rebuilding the Stuart Turner yet again and installing a new tiller bracket on the rudder. This last was going to cause me a lot of problems.

 

We left Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight in mid-August headed for St Malo. It was ambitious but I figured we needed to make up time. On the first night and for the subsequent 36 hours I was seasick. I lay like a bit of washed-out flotsam on the cabin sole while Bridgit steered. I was pathetic. Eventually Bridgit told me to pull myself together and take the helm. She was exhausted. I pulled myself into the cockpit, retched a few times over the side, and then was miraculously restored. Sort of. I blamed the lamb curry on the first night out, but really I knew that I needed to find some sort of steel inside to pursue this adventure. After another 24 hours none of the expected rocks or islands in the approaches to St Malo had appeared and I began to get a bit worried. During the evening a French destroyer hove to near us in worsening weather and asked us if we were alright. The sailors along the rail didn’t look too comfortable as the destroyer wallowed in the swell and I realised that the conditions were pretty rough for a small yacht like Roulette.

 

We are OK.

Are you sure? I will report you to Lloyds.

Can you give us a position?

Hold on one minute.

 

The position we were given put us in the western approaches to the Channel and at least 30 degrees off course. Suddenly it hit me. My lovely new mild steel tiller bracket was about 10 inches from the compass. I moved the compass and it’s bracket to the other end of the cockpit and hoped we could now make for St Malo in more or less the right direction.

 

 

Roulette in Greece

The next day we encountered fog and calms. As we drifted I reckoned we must be near Les Trois Freres and suddenly there they were right in front of us. As we were sucked by the tide towards the rocks I struggled to start the engine. No way that Stuart Turner was going to co-operate when it was an emergency. I told Bridgit to pump up the dinghy and launch it with the panic bag in it while I kept trying to start the engine. Silently the tide sucked us onto the rocks and right between them and out the other side. Not even a bump. And not a word between the two of us. Before we got to St Malo after five days and four nights, with a bit of a detour to the western end of the Channel, there was thunder and lightening and navigation by ear. I asked a fisherman in the approaches to St Malo where it was and with a Gallic shrug and total nonchalance he pointed to some buildings in the morning haze.

The idea of going to St Malo was to carry on through the Brittany Canals to St Nazaire and then head out for the Gironde. 1976 was one of the hottest and driest summers in Europe. The canals had been closed to conserve water and even that didn’t help the fish. At Dinan the canal was afloat with dead and dying fish. We left Roulette in Dinan and hitch-hiked back to London to work for the winter.

 

The following April we returned to Roulette. In the winter I had worked at odd jobs. Night shift in MacVities biscuit factory in Harlesdon. Filing in the new Inland Revenue Office for Hampstead. The old office had been torched by a disgruntled customer and most of the files were charred. And as a temp accountant looking for 1½ million that had been lost in the Far East. I knew nothing about accounting but had randomly ticked boxes on a multiple choice questionnaire by the temp agency and bingo, I was earning good money in the city. After the near disastrous Channel crossing I invested in a hand-bearing compass and a few charts of the Med and H M Denham’s pilots for Italy and Greece. Now we were equipped and ready to go.

 

 

That April in 1977 it rained and even snowed as Roulette moved through the canals to the Loire and out around Biscay. We coasted down Biscay from St Nazaire to Ile de Noirmoutier, Port Joinville, St Gilles, St Martin de Re, La Rochelle and through the shifting sandbanks around the Gironde to Royan. Apart from drying out on our side a few times, rebuilding the engine again and re-stitching sails, it went smoothly for early season Biscay cruising. At Bordeaux we entered the Canal Lateral a Garonne and pottered through the spring landscape. We could feel it getting warmer and the Med called with promises of rays and Lotus eating. After paddling the boat out of nearly every lock on the Canal Lateral a Garonne and Canal du Midi (the Stuart Turner would never start when it was hot), we reached the Mediterranean and the start of the really big adventure.

 

While we learnt our craft and became more competent at sailing Roulette, it was evident that the authorities were a bit worried by this tiny yacht venturing into the Mediterranean. A few times the authorities asked us not to set out and from St Tropez to Corsica we were shadowed for much of the first night by a French navy cutter. From the little spiral bound notebook that was our log I see our top speed was around 3 knots and at times we were doing 1-2 knots. Speed was estimated by looking at the wake of the boat and we got pretty good at it so at times we would guess speed at ¼ knot increments. For the navy cutter it must have been frustrating to hold station at 2 or 3 knots, but they did for all of the calm first night at sea.

The second night en route nearly gave me a heart attack. Dolphins had been sounding around the boat all night when at midnight one of the dolphins started getting louder and louder. When the sperm whale surfaced twenty or thirty foot away my voice went up two octaves as I tried to call Bridgit. By the time she woke and joined me in the cockpit the whale had moved on towards Corsica and I felt silly. Scared but silly because the whale was three times the length of Roulette  and that glistening black mountain and it’s heavy breathing had looked like it could sink the boat without even noticing.

 

Corsica was granite capped in snow and by now Bridgit and I had things pretty sorted. There was excitement. We couldn’t get into St Florent under sail or power when the wind howled out of the gulf and so we spent a night tucked under a headland. We were greeted like heroes when we coasted into St Florent the next day. We pottered around Cap Corse and onto Elba and down the Italian coast.

 

The log mentions several hangovers courtesy of Italian fishermen who disliked large yachts but rather liked the diminutive Roulette. In Camerota south of the Bay of Naples we waited out a sirocco and were befriended by Alfio (left) and the crew on his sword-fishing boat. Every morning there was a fish on the deck and every lunchtime we ate with them. On a couple of nights we went out to lay the long drift nets and returned with the corpses of valuable swordfish. Alfio and his crew were from Sicily and amazed we had sailed from England in Roulette.

You come to Messina. We fit a diesel engine in your boat. This engine no good.

I don’t have much money.

No problem. You come Messina. We fit engine.

There were only two yachts in Camerota. The other was a GRP folkboat owned by Tomasio and his Swedish girlfriend Helen. They insisted we leave with them for the Liparis and then insisted on towing us when the wind fell light. We cruised in company around the Liparis and it was over dinner in Lipari that Tomasio explained why they had been so diligent.

Your friend Alfio told us that if we didn’t look after you, tow you because your engine doesn’t work very well, make sure you were alright, he would find us and …. Tomasio drew his finger across his throat.

They are all mafiosa you know, those fishermen. I was scared.

 

Bridgit & Helen on Roulette in Milazzo, Sicily.

I was embarrassed. Tomasio was so worried that when he returned to Rome he drove all the way to Crotone to make sure we had arrived safely. No worries. In Crotone it blew a gale from the south and the local hoods helped us to take Roulette across to the other side of the harbour. When I asked how much one of them laughed.

Don’t worry. He will pay extra.

He pointed to the large motorboat they had also helped to safety.

 

It was in Crotone that I realised just how small Roulette looked. As we were leaving some friends on a Swiss yacht took some pictures and when they gave them to us in Greece I realised that when I stood in the cockpit the coamings only came halfway up my calves. When you sat in the cockpit you could trail your hand in the water. By the time we got to Greece I was happy with the way we could handle Roulette in bad weather but also conscious of just how small she was.

 

In Greece we sailed around for a bit and then returned to Corfu where we had befriended a kiwi who was working with Flotilla Sailing Club. One of the fleets of Jaguar 27’s was skippered by Martin Evans and his sister Sue. Over the season a number of Jaguar 22’s were tacked onto the original fleet and Martin was having problems looking after the slower Jag 22’s as well as the rest of the fleet. I don’t recall exactly how it came about but Martin employed Bridgit and I to shepherd the Jag 22’s around for two or three flotillas. We were paid around £100 a week (for the two of us) and that was my first introduction to flotilla sailing. I couldn’t believe you got paid to do this stuff.

Roulette refit Levkas, Greece

 

We returned to England in the winter with the promise of a job from old Tom Keen who owned FSC. At the London Boatshow in 1978 I met him again and he seemed to have trouble remembering who I was and the job offer. At the time Nigel Wadlow was operations manager and he took me aside and introduced me to John Kaye. John was about to set up his own flotilla operation in the Saronic. We talked and he asked me to come around to his house in Fulham the next evening to see if we got on. In the living room there was an old Victorian chess set which I remarked on.

 

Do you a play?

A bit.

So choose whether you are black or white.

 

Halfway through the game I realised I would beat him and I had to make the agonising decision of whether to win or loose. I decided I would win and in the silence afterwards decided I’d kissed the job goodbye. John decided he would give it to me and then asked me what sort of company car I’d like while I organised the boats. For a poor ex-academic and boat-bum who had been surviving on rice and pasta in the Med it took some getting used to.

What about my Lancia Beta?

I looked at the little blue sports car out the window and decided I could get to like this job.

 

CPT Sailing in Greece

Becomes Falcon, becomes Sovereign, becomes Sun World, becomes Neilsen.

 John and his partner Richard Perry ran a company called CPT Travel that had done very well organising skiing packages. The flotilla side would give them a summer operation and I was supposed to be in charge. The first thing we had to get was some sailing boats so we went to see Chris Freer who was building a 30 footer called the Europa 3000. John and Richard (who was large and not the most agile) were thrown around in the trial sail on the Solent and probably more because of the weather than anything else, decided against the Europa. Meanwhile John Charnley who had a small bareboat company with Sabre 27’s had found a boat called the Cobra 850. It was built at Waterlooville where the owner, John Lockwood, commonly called Goldilocks because of the amount of gold he had hanging off him, could turn the boats out a good price. The Cobras were designed by David Feltham who also designed the Mirages used by some other fleets. All and all he was responsible for a fair chunk of the early designs used by flotillas.

John Charnley, who could sell fridges to Eskimos, had few problems convincing John that the Cobra 850’s were ideal for the job. The initial order was for nine Cobras for CPT and three for John Charnley’s Greeksail. They would all be trucked down to Brindisi and from there we would sail across to Greece and the Saronic. Greeksail was based in Poros and we were to be based in Spetsai where John Kaye knew the local Mr Fixit, Takis of Takis Tours aka the King of Spetsai as he liked to title himself.

I zoomed around the country exercising my new found power buying multiples of all the stuff you need to equip a charter yacht. I bought dinghies, sleeping bags, cutlery and crockery, lifejackets and flares, reels of rope and enough chain to sink a Cobra 850.

 

To be continued … sometime

And a bit more 

Flotilla Sailing

A short and somewhat personal history of flotilla sailing

Flotilla sailing started in Greece in the 1970’s and has proved enduringly popular ever since. A lot of nonsense and a sort of snobbery revolves around the idea of flotilla sailing. Comments like 'it is just like ducklings following the mother duck', 'I want to get away from it all not together with other boats', and 'it's just a package holiday afloat' are often attached by a few charterers or more usually would-be charterers to flotilla holidays. In practice none of it is like this and those who go on flotilla holidays often return again. Nor is it solely a matter of sailing experience. Often experienced sailors who own a yacht at home choose to take the flotilla option for the social side with a bit of one-design racing on the side.

Since those early days flotilla sailing has expanded to other Mediterranean countries and overseas to Thailand and to the Caribbean. Thirty years on a lot has changed. The boats are bigger and more luxuriously equipped. In the first few years it may come as a surprise to some that only the lead boat had a VHF radio. Otherwise communication was by flag from the lead boat and if anyone went missing you had to chase after them, desperately trying to attract their attention, and then shepherd them back to where they were supposed to be going. In 1978 in the Saronic I lost half the flotilla during a thunderstorm when rain reduced the visibility to a 100 metres or so for an hour. It took all afternoon to find the lost boats which had been scattered all over the Argolic Gulf.

Getting spares and equipment out to the boats today is a streamlined operation and companies keep large stocks of spares for their fleets. In the early days we asked customers coming out to bring spares through with their hand luggage. Newcomers would wander through the airport with hatches, engine spares, sails, even an anchor on one occasion, and pile them up in front of the rep who was organising the bus transfer to the flotilla base. We in turn would ply them with bad wine and as much metaxa as they could drink for all their trouble.

 

In the beginning

Flotilla Sailing started with Eric Richardson who put together the Yacht Cruising Association (YCA) in 1974. He bought a fleet of Snapdragon 24’s and got them down to Greece for the 1974 season. Somewhere along the line he came up with the idea of a lead boat with a skipper, hostess and engineer on board which sailed around a more or less pre-determined itinerary with the other boats. Essentially the concept has remained the same since Eric Richardson’s moment of inspiration.

YCA pretty much had things to themselves until in 1976 an entrepreneur who had made his money with battery chicken farms decided to start up a flotilla in the Ionian. Tom Keen wanted to involve his three sons in the leisure business and somehow hit on the idea of flotilla sailing. He set us Flotilla Sailing Club (FSC) and his boat of choice was the Jaguar 27. He arranged for the first fleet to be delivered to the Ionian in 1976 and his inspired choice for the first skipper and hostess was brother and sister team Martin and Sue Evans who had sailed down from Suffolk to Greece in a converted lifeboat.

Around the same time Tony Nielsen was setting up Mediterranean Charter Services in the Northern Sporades with Maxi 95’s. Nielsen can pretty much be credited with introducing the owner leaseback system. Through his company owners put a deposit on the boats and income earned from them paid off the balance so that the boat became the outright property of the investor at the end of the termed period. Unfortunately the company went bust after five or so years and most of the owners had problems getting their boats back.

 

CPT Cruising in Greece

In 1977 I arrived in Greece from the UK in Roulette, a 20 foot ply boat built in 1950’s. With me was Bridgit, my girlfriend, and an empty kitty. At the time we living on something like £2.50 a day and when the chance of work with FSC came up, we jumped at it. Martin and Sue Evans had some Jaguar 22’s in their fleet and these could not keep up with the Jaguar 27’s. Our job was to look after this mini-fleet and a bit of cleaning and repair work on turn-around days. Our combined wage was around £100 a week, a fortune. At the end of the season Tom Keen suggested I run a new fleet of Jaguar 27’s he was buying – we would meet at the London Boat Show to sort things out.

At the Boat Show I was poached by a company that was setting up a new flotilla operation. Crawford Perry Travel ran a skiing operation and had decided to start up a summer sailing programme: CPT Cruising in Greece. I was taken on to help buy the boats, equip them, and get them down to Greece.  More by luck than sound judgement we bought Cobra 850's built in Waterlooville, the equipment to go on them and had them trucked to Brindisi. Here crew, largely from British Airways, sailed them across to the Spetses in the Saronic where we were to be based. I had never been there before.

In 1978 there was little to nothing in the way of back-up. Half of the boats were not registered with the Greek authorities and we ran them illegally. Repairs were rudimentary: an alternator bracket made up of angle iron, sail repairs with tape, epoxy resin and glassfibre tape for patching and holding things together, engine repairs on the fly. When we lost a mast it was replaced with the one off the lead boat and we motored everywhere until a new one was shipped out. There were no real chandlers to buy equipment from and most of the engineering work we did ourselves. Communications with London were from the local telephone exchange or by Telex from Spetsai. Somehow it all worked and for the second year there was an 80% return rate.

There were a few interesting episodes in that first year. We had a Frenchman and his girlfriend who disappeared in the early hours of the morning. I put out a call to the Port Police to impound the boat wherever it turned up, though I eventually found him moored under the Port Police office in Spetses – they hadn’t noticed. I took the boat around to our base, took the keys away and against my better judgement let him stay on board. He hot-wired the boat and disappeared again, although when we caught up with him (he hadn’t gone far) I made sure he was off the boat which by now had been scraped and bashed all along the topsides. We had a Canadian Admiral who kept getting lost and at one point I got to him only just in time to stop him running the boat up on the rocks. On Hydra I had to get a couple of heavy drinking lads out of jail for lewd behaviour - the police weren’t specific which was probably just as well.

 

By the end of 1978 we were running nearly 20 boats and for 1979 we planned to move half the boats to Levkas in the Ionian. In the winter of 1978-79 I had bought a Cobra 850 and sailed it down in company with another Cobra for the fleet. It was a bit of a wild ride at times with a couple of bad gales on the way, but eventually we arrived at Spetsai, loaded down with spares, in time to get the fleet together for delivery to the Ionian.

 Cobra 850's in the Argolic Gulf

1980’s and the boom years

By 1979 fleets had multiplied in areas all around Greece. YCA had fleets in the Ionian, Saronic and Northern Sporades and had introduced one of the first fleets to Turkey. Mirage Holidays had several fleets in the Saronic. FSC had fleets throughout the Ionian and Seascape had upped the stakes by introducing fleets of Sadler 32’s with Moody 40’s as lead boats in the Ionian. Tony Nielsen had resurfaced with a fleet of Maxi 95’s and bigger in Turkey. Some companies lasted a few seasons and some endured and survive today, though often under a different name.