The Start

On August 19th I got rid of the carpenters, near ten o’clock in the evening, and spent the better part of the night in clearing overboard the mess they had left behind them. A good deal of the mess they had, after the manner of carpenters, built into the boat, and I shall not be able to get rid of it until during the winter I undo much of the work they did. Much of the work they were supposed to do they had not done, but I had suffered enough from them, and learnt that they were prepared to work for another two years on the boat if I should allow them. If only to save her from them I had to put to sea. The inside of the boat was unpainted, except that I had slapped a single coat over the cabin walls and cupboards, doing one side first and, when that was dry, shifting all the litter across the cabin and painting the other side. An incredible amount remained to be done. But it was already very late for cruising in these parts, and the last of the yachts that had left Riga for summer voyages had returned for the winter before ever we left that little harbour in the lake. So, though locks did not work, though there were no fastenings to the forehatch and none to the companionway, though forecastle and kitchen were still raw unpainted wood, though cleats were lying about not yet fastened into the decks, though we had only half a dozen blocks worthy of the name, the rest being the clumsiest makeshifts, we knew that if we did not start at once we should not start till next year. We three looked her all over and decided to get away anyhow and finish things up on the voyage.

I slept in Racundra that night, as I had done for the last two weeks, but for the first time slept in a cabin not half full of shavings and carpenters’ tools. At 5:30 in the morning of August 20th I jumped overboard for the last time in the Stint See and swam round Racundra as usual while porridge was cooking on the Primus. An hour later the Ancient Mariner came on board, followed presently by the Cook. The wind was N.W., and we were able to slip with it out of the little harbour and reach the whole way down the lake to the entrance to the Mühlgraben, which connects the lake with the Dvina River. There was not much wind, and we had time to screw in the cleats for the staysail sheets before we had any tacking to do. All three sails were setting abominably, as we had no battens for them, the builder having failed us. I had decided to make the trip to Reval without them, knowing that I could there get them properly made.

The entrance to the Mühlgraben is narrow, and in tacking through it, Racundra refused to stay and ran her centreboard into the mud. We got off, however, by pulling the board up a few inches, after which there were no more shallows, and we crawled very slowly from side to side between the canal wharves and the balks on the other side which cage a sea of floating timbers. A British steamship, the Baltabor, was loading in the Mühlgraben, and Captain Whalley, who has known Racundra from her birth, since he visited her in the builder’s shed, was on the bridge as we struggled by. The Ancient and I had agreed that two leads were unnecessary, and had therefore each left his own lead at home, so I hailed Whalley as we passed and begged the loan of a five-pounder. Racundra went on, zigzagging obstinately through the narrow canal, while I tumbled into the dinghy and dropped back and hung on to Baltabor’s ladder while the lead was found and lowered away to me. We should often have been in a sore pickle without it.

I thought we should probably be all day getting through the Customs at the far end of Mühlgraben, and therefore asked Captain Whalley to luncheon on the Racundra; and he, who accepted, must afterwards have had the blackest thoughts of me, for, as it turned out, we were held up for only half an hour, and decided to work on to the Winter Harbour at the mouth of the Dvina, hoping to make our peace with Whalley when we should meet him in Reval, where the Baltabor was to call.

The Customs House at Mühlgraben is a little yellow wooden building, with flowers in the window and a wicket-gate in a wooden paling on the quay. It stands at the corner where the Red Dvina joins the Mühlgraben, and we let go anchor off it, on the windward side of the channel. I hurriedly discarded my disreputables and put on creased trousers and newly pipe-clayed shoes, in order to make up as far as I could for the “un-yachty” appearance of Racundra, a trait of hers which is normally our joy, but is likely to increase the difficulty of dealing with officials. Racundra lay there, a regular little ship, “a proper contrabandist,” as she has been described, looking, with her ochre topsides and sharp stern, exactly like any one of a hundred Baltic smugglers, while her “owner and master” paddled himself ashore in the very neatest of new varnished dinghies, looking as idly rich as he was in reality busy and poor. It was ten o’clock precisely, and as I had given this time in arranging yesterday with the Chief Customs Office in Riga, I felt our punctuality as a sort of moral pipe-clay and, papers in hand, tapped at the door of the little yellow house with a most satisfactory confidence. I found there a charming young man who talked English and gave me a certificate of clearance without any fuss. He rang up the dock police on the telephone. A harbour policeman, together with a Customs officer from the town, had arrived as the clock was striking, and, everybody being delighted by his own and everybody else’s punctuality (the rarest of all things in Eastern Europe), and this being the first occasion on which a foreign-going yacht had been cleared here, passports were stamped in two minutes, another certificate added to the first, after which all three officials left the little wooden house with me, to visit Racundra and, by drinking vodka on board, to fulfil the last formalities.

When they saw my dinghy swinging like a nutshell below the lofty wooden landing-stage, they refused emphatically to travel in her, wrongly thinking that she could carry only one. They took a boat of their own, and I rowed off as hard as I could and got a bottle of vodka open and mugs on the cabin table before they arrived. We gave them bread and butter, ham and vodka, and they gave us good wishes and the completest freedom from the red tape in which, had they chosen, they could have tangled us as spiders tangle flies. Twenty minutes after our first arrival, they were pushing off again and we were free, our papers stamped, Racundra cleared for foreign parts and already, as it were, abroad.

Elated by this, we gave only half a thought to Whalley. There was still so much to do on board. More cleats to be fixed, backstays rigged, brass bollards substituted for the sharp edged rubbish with which she had been disfigured, and we were all for pressing on down to the river mouth, to the Winter Harbour, where we could lie in peace, finish our work and be ready to slip out into the Gulf the moment the wind should favour us.

We beat out into the broad Dvina River. There was very little current to help us, though I remember early in the spring the current was so strong that sailing upstream in the Frida, a little trading cutter, against a local smack, the race was decided by the fact that the other boat passed us stern first, going backwards, while we were just able to hold our ground, and that in a good wind with the water foaming under the bows of both boats. On this occasion we were not so fortunate, and while we were wearily beating down the river we were passed with the utmost ease by a little racing sloop from Riga, sailed by a friend of ours, “the cavalry sailor,” a young man who had often amused us during the summer by his habit of coming aboard straight from his barracks and wearing high boots and spurs when on his boat. He went by at what seemed to be a great speed, and turned into the Bolderaa, a tributary of the Dvina, after hailing us and wishing us luck. “He wouldn’t pass us like that if we were at sea in anything of a wind,” said the Ancient, and we were glad to be comforted, for it is not pleasant to be passed even by a racing boat.

There was plenty of shipping in the Dvina and several coasters were lying at anchor near the mouth of the river, evidently thinking that the northerly wind was not done with us yet. The sight of them confirmed us in our intention of stopping in the Winter Harbour for long enough to get things shipshape, and at ten minutes to two Racundra, after raising our spirits by showing what she could do with the wind behind her, when we put the helm up to run back into the harbour, was swinging to her anchor in a good berth near the red railway bridge.

There were clouds in the N.W. after luncheon, but we had a few hours of warm sunshine, and, while we worked on the boat, the Cook went ashore. She said that after seeing what we could do with in the way of luncheon she was afraid she had not enough provisions. We told her that there was a time-honoured rule of the sea: “If grub runs out, eat the Cook.” She went ashore in the dinghy with little hope, as it was Sunday, but came back with eggs, black currants, radishes, an extra hunk of cheese and some more potatoes, to find Racundra really looking more like herself, with backstays rigged, boards for the sidelights fixed to the shrouds, the compass screwed in its place, gimbals set for the Primus stove, and the cabin-lamp rescrewed on the case of the centreboard chain (which runs up through the cabin roof) in a position where it could no longer split the ceiling by excessive fervour.

But while she had been away the weather had grown worse. Dark enamel clouds in long banks were drifting up; the wind, still against us, was increasing, and rain was visibly on its way towards us. A Dane and a German had joined the anchored coasters in the river, and we were ready to accept their judgment and spend one more night before putting to sea. The Cook started the Primus. The Ancient and I went on with our work on deck, but, nervous for my new sails, I broke off to put the covers on the main and mizzen, unshackled the staysail sheets, and stuffed the rolled up staysail into a canvas kit-bag. I had just finished as the first drops fell. The wind suddenly grew really strong. Racundra snubbed at her chain once: only once, for we were letting out more chain before she could do it again. And then came rain, rainbows, lightning, thunder and squalls all together, and we were glad to close the companion hatch behind us and settle down to a meal in the cabin, and then to smoke and look at charts and be glad we had not started. It grew dark, and through the cabin windows we could see the lights of the coasters and the foreigners heaving violently in the swell that came in from the river mouth.

The dinghy lay astern, fast by her painter to one of the newly fixed cleats. “Would she be stolen?” I asked, remembering the loss of a mainsail in Lahepe Bay and the many tales the Ancient had told me of such lamentable happenings. “It is better here than in the Mühlgraben,” said he. “Now, if we had stayed there we should ’a had to put a watch on her all night.” He went on to tell a story of a German captain who put his head out of the deckhouse in answer to a call out of the dark, and found a man in a boat alongside, holding up the end of a rope. “ ‘Good rope, sir,’ says the man, ‘and going cheap. I don’t rightly know myself how much there is of it, but for so much, I’ll sell you the coil.’ The captain looks at the rope and sees that it was right enough. He takes that rope on board, the man in the boat passing it in to him hand-over-hand. There was a big coil, and he paid for it and turned in. In the morning he calls the mate and tells him what a bargain he had made in the night. ‘As good rope,’ says he, ‘as ever I brought with me from Hamburg. Why,’ says he, with one foot on the cabin floor and the sleep dropping from his eyes, ‘it might be the same rope and for a quarter the price.’ And indeed it was the same rope, for them thieves in the Mühlgraben, they had just taken the end of the rope off the foredeck and brought it along aft outside and sold it in on board again, and everybody in the Mühlgraben was telling that story afterwards, everybody but one man, and that was the Dutchy captain who had made such a wonderful bargain.”