The Building of Racundra

Houses are but badly built boats so firmly aground that you cannot think of moving them. They are definitely inferior things, belonging to the vegetable not the animal world, rooted and stationary, incapable of gay transition. I admit, doubtfully, as exceptions, snail-shells and caravans. The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting-place.

It is for that reason, perhaps, that, when it comes, the desire to build a boat is one of those that cannot be resisted. It begins as a little cloud on a serene horizon. It ends by covering the whole sky, so that you can think of nothing else. You must build to regain your freedom. And always you comfort yourself with the thought that yours will be the perfect boat, the boat that you may search the harbours of the world for and not find.

That is the story of Racundra. Years of planning went into her before ever a line was drawn on paper. She was to be a cruising boat that one man could manage if need be, but on which three could live comfortably. She was to have writing-table and bookcase, a place for a typewriter, broad bunks where a man might lay him down and rest without braising knee and elbow with each unconsidered movement. She was to carry her dinghy on deck to avoid that troublesome business of towing, which has brought so many good dinghies to their latter end. She should not be fast, but she should be fit to keep the sea when other little boats were scuttling for shelter. In fact, she was to be the boat that every man would wish who likes to move from port to port⁠—a little ship in which, in temperate climates, a man might live from year’s end to year’s end.

Then came friendship with a designer, the best designer in the Baltic, whose racing boats carried away prize after prize in the old days before the war, whose little cruisers put to sea when steamers stayed in port. And after that Racundra began to exist on paper. There were the lines of that stout nose of hers, of that stern, like the sterns of the Norwegian pilot cutters. On paper, I could sit at the writing-table a full yard square, in the cabin where (the measurements proved it) I could stand up and walk about with unbruised head. On paper was that little cockpit where one man, sitting alone, could control the little ship as she made her steady way over the waters. Then came the sail-plan, after how many alterations; a snug rig; you could reach the end of the mizzen boom from the deck and there was no bowsprit. The size of the mizzen was such that you could keep the sea and keep up to the wind with mizzen and foresail alone. The balance of the sails was such (again on paper) that if you wished you could sail under mainsail only, or under main and mizzen, so that you could take down your staysail before coming into port and so have a clear deck for playing with warps and anchor chain. Racundra, on paper, grew in virtue daily.

It had come to such a pass that I woke from dreams at night sitting in that paper cockpit, with a paper tiller under my arm, steering a paper ship across uncharted seas. Racundra had to be built. There was no escape. But my friend the designer, Otto Eggers, lived in Reval, and since the war had had no yard, or he would have built her himself, since the two years of paper boat-building had made him share my madness. But there was no help for it. He could not build. I had to build somewhere else, and, since I was to be in Riga, came to terms with a Riga builder.

I pass over as briefly as I may the wretched story of the building and the hundred journeys over the ice to the little shed in which Racundra slowly turned from dream into reality. She was to have been finished in April. She was promised to me on May 1st, May 15th, May 20th and at short intervals thenceforward. She was launched, a mere hull, on July 28th. I went for the hundred and first time to the yard and found Racundra in the water. The Lettish workmen by trickery got the builder and me close together, planted us suddenly on a wooden bench which they had decked with beanflowers stolen from a neighbouring garden and lifted us, full of mutual hatred, shoulder high. The ship was launched. Yes, but the summer was over, and there had been whole weeks when Racundra had not progressed at all while the builder and his men did other work. He promised then that she should be ready to put to sea on August 3rd. She was not. On August 5th I went to the yard and took away the boat unfinished. Not a sail was setting properly. There were no cleats fixed. The centreboard was half up, half down and firmly stuck. But, under power and sails, somehow or other, I got the ship away and took her round to the lake, had her out on the Yacht Club slip, removed the centreboard, had a new one built, re-launched her, and just over a fortnight later turned the carpenters out of her and put to sea.

But there is no use in reminding myself now of those miserable angry months of waiting, in remembering the lacquer that was not put on, the ungalvanized nails that I had laboriously to remove from the cabin work and replace with brass screws. The hull of Racundra was right enough, and, by the time we had finished with her, we had put right the lesser matters that were wrong. Fools build and wise men buy. Well, I shall never build again, and in all probability shall never have money enough to buy. Nor shall I have need. For Racundra turned out to be all that I had hoped. We took her to sea in the Baltic autumn; we had her at sea when big steamers reported damage from the heavy weather, and never for a minute did she show the smallest sign of disquiet. Weather that was good enough for us was good enough for her, and, when the Equinox flung her home with a last flick of his mighty tail, she sailed through the rollers on the bar and up the troubled Dvina, demure, serene, neat, as if she were returning from a day’s trip in June.

For those who are interested in such things, there is a detailed description of Racundra at the end of this book. Here it is enough to say that she is a centreboard ketch just under thirty feet long with a small auxiliary motor. It is a five-horsepower motor, but, possibly on account of my inexperience, it seemed to need forty horsepower to start it, for which reason I did not use it at all during the voyage.