Goodbye Goldenray

 

An odd quirk in the human brain allows us to feel that the things we love are living, even when they are manufactured objects – like boats, for instance. Things that live can also die. I’ve just been reading the writer and sailor, Peter Nichols, mourning the death of his yacht, Toad.

Toad is gone. I know this absolutely as I sit here in the cockpit on what is now becoming rather a nice day. The sun is out, the sea is going down.

Knowing this I look at the boat around me, the teak vent boxes I built on the cabin roof. The stainless-steel guard rail stanchions I installed. The winches, the rigging. The new compass Martin and I hooked up. The slight imperfection beneath the paint on the cabin side that I know is my plug of a hole made by Harry’s useless depth gauge. I look up and down the boat and I cannot see an inch of it that I haven’t remade according to my idea of what would make Toad the best it could be. Now I know that the leak will not get better but worse, that I must get off, save my life and let Toad sink.

I have never thought of Toad as ‘she’ the way that many think of their boats. My brother David liked to call it ‘him’. To me Toad doesn’t have a gender, but it is certainly something far more than the sum of its wood and bits and pieces. With every screw and bolt and pass of a paintbrush that J. and I gave it, this boat made these its own and added something of itself. It has absorbed more love into its fibres than any amount of paint or varnish, until this has become part of the matrix. What Toad is to me now is a thing that was made and that lives from that love.

And I believe Toad loves me back.

So as I sit in the cockpit and look at it with tears pouring down my face, I am careful to keep quiet. I don’t say anything. I’m not going to tell it what is going to happen now.

Sea Change by Peter Nichols.
Published Viking 1997

There was not an accessible inch of Goldenray that I’ve not worked over, repeatedly, and with increasing despair as I realised I didn’t have the skill or the time or the physical strength to keep up with her deterioration. I have felt her as an ache in my arms and a nagging reproach in my head. I have loved her for her generous shape, for her welcome to my family and for the thanks she has returned for every single exhausting day of labour I have given her. Like Peter Nichols with Toad, I have believed that Goldenray loved me back. I think she trusted me.

Goldenray died the day I finally gave up that struggle. After that it was as if we were sitting by her body.  Now I’m writing her obituary.

Goldenray was an old Scottish MFV (motor fishing vessel). We think she was built in the Isle of Skye in about 1946 (the same chronological age as the much more youthful Peter Duck). She was 50’ long, 16’ wide, larch planking on oak frames and probably weighed about 45 tons. Wooden boats of Goldie’s type are estimated to have about 30 years of commercial working life. Somehow, when that was over, she came to the River Deben. Many people have said they can’t remember a time when she wasn’t here.

One set of owners worked on her with love, money and skill as their retirement project. They rebuilt her wheelhouse, installed modern electronic equipment, a good engine and large freshwater tanks. They lavished fine wood fittings in her fore cabin and saloon (formerly her fo’csle and fish hold) and planned to cruise together through the French canals.  Then the husband died and the wife couldn’t bear to be near the boat anymore. Goldenray was sold on as a houseboat, providing cheap accommodation to people in relative penury, those in marital trouble or young couples taking their first steps towards affording a house. People were glad of her for a few years but she wasn’t a permanent home.  

As a houseboat she was static, never leaving the dock where she was moored. The dock was a good place for people but invisibly for Goldenray it was the beginning of her end.

Apart from human love and care the other essential factor which gives a boat ‘life’ is its response to the wind and the waves. When Goldie rose up with each tide, and rocked reminiscently, she felt a different being from the hours she lay asleep, cushioned in the mud.

You might think that it’s just another sentimental projection of our imaginations, a sort of pathetic fallacy. However, it is also true that for wooden boats, the air in the confined space of a dock, is itself confined and thus likely to deposit the spores which cause rot. Fresh water, falling from the sky as rain, is far more harmful to wood than the salt water dashed against the hull and over the decks by the action of the waves. The upperworks, which are the living space, deteriorate much faster than the underwater planking which is pickled by brine and mud.

Goldenray, like an old person confined to bed, began to waste away. Her succeeding owners cleaned and painted her assiduously but by the time Francis bought her in November 2005, she was already considered too structurally unsound to take the risk of going out onto the river.

In our innocence, we didn’t think this mattered. We already had Peter Duck as a sea-going vessel. We wanted Goldie as a family base and she did her best to oblige. Bertie went to sea scouts from her, Francis wrote parts of Strange Days Indeed in her wheelhouse. She appeared as ‘Lowestoft Lass’ in The Lion of Sole Bay and Pebble. Jon Tucker in New Zealand appropriated her name for a fictional family home in Those Sugar Barge Kids. We played games on board, welcomed our friends, enjoyed her quality of self-contained solitude. It was a serious blow when Francis’s back problems meant that she was no longer a comfortable place for him.

We spent less family time on board, though she continued to offer short term refuge to people who needed somewhere to stay before they moved on. Claudia stayed there, Ned stayed there, another friend called Will lived on board for a year, I think. Lesley Walker reminds me she too was there for a few months. Goldenray gave my mother a safe place to sit -- and sometimes attain some peace -- when dementia made the world such a confusing, threatening place

Goldie’s deterioration became more marked and I began to fail to keep pace with her essential maintenance. Most of her appearances in fiction are as a disaster waiting to happen – and increasingly often they did. Her first serious near-sinking took place in 2015.

It’s four in the morning and I can hear the tide running through the gap in the plank which I haven’t been able to plug. It’s okay. The electric dirty water pump which I’ve managed to borrow is just about keeping pace with the inflow. I don’t have any electricity on board but I’ve plugged into a neighbour’s supply. I had thought he was away and broke into his boat with another neighbour's connivance. Then he came back at 1.30 am, found my trespassing cable and unplugged it. Chucked it back at me. Very likely cross. I’d fallen asleep by then on the wheelhouse floor but I woke when the pump went quiet. My brain was slow to work out what had happened and by the time I’d gone on deck my neighbour had gone to bed. I'd never met him and I knew I was already in the wrong but I was desperate so I banged on the side of his cabin until I woke him and then I managed to explain why I needed to use his supply. I don’t know what I’d have done if he hadn’t let me plug back in; I couldn’t keep pace with that quantity of water by hand.

All I need to do now is stay awake and keep checking. Everything has been swamped and soaked up to two and three feet in the cabin. The bunk where I’m lying slopes sideways because the big, empty freshwater tank underneath floated up in the earlier flood and has settled back down at an angle. It’s too heavy for me to move and anyway it’s not a priority. All that matters is that the pump should keep running for as long as the tide is up. In four or five hours’ time the water will be gone again and she'll be safely back down sitting on the mud. It’ll be Monday morning – it is Monday morning – I’ve asked a shipwright to come and assess the problem and then I’ll decide what I need to do next. How bad is this? Will it be give-up time for this poor old boat, Goldenray? I don't want to think about it.

 We didn’t give up then, though increasingly I needed to ignore the advice from people who knew better about the dying days of wooden boats. It was explained to me, frequently and kindly, that utilitarian vessels like Goldenray were built with a finite lifespan, intended to last long enough to recover the outlay and make a profit, but not much more than that. Her original materials and fastenings were likely to have been the cheapest that could be expected to give an economic return within a relatively short period.  In the days when all ships were wood, it was normal for them to be frequently rebuilt, every thirty years or so. Boats like Goldenray, fastened with iron nails (not copper as Peter Duck), grow ‘sick’ as the iron and surrounding wood experience a chemical reaction. Peter Duck has been re-fastened: Goldenray was not. She was too large, too far gone. I was too small, ignorant and tired. The cost was beyond imagination. I shut my ears to talk of chainsaws and changed her hull colour from black to bright, defiant, green.

Against their better judgement the River Deben shipwrights did their best to help, hammering on tingles, fresh plywood, layers of epoxy. ‘I’m not mending your boat, you understand, I’m just trying to keep the rain out for you.’ But the rain wouldn’t be kept out for long. Nor would the river. Goldenray was home to Bertie and his dogs but increasingly, as he lay in his bunk at night, he could hear the water trickling in to the bilge as the tide rose.  Art, the marine electrician, mended her pumps and added more. Solar panels and storage batteries were fitted to reduce the risk of pump failure due to electricity outage. Trickling, flowing, whirring, gushing were reassuring sounds when the tide was up. If the boat fell silent, we knew it meant she would soon begin to fill.

A malicious sinking in 2021 was traumatic. It was as if someone clubbed a nonagenarian. Everybody rallied round to help and we were too angry to give in then. We cleaned Goldenray up with the help of our friend Sally. Bertie replaced his possessions and moved back on board. We bought a de-humidifier and covered the decks in roofing felt but the structural deterioration continued and the rain soon discovered new ways in. I puttied up 2/3 of the accessible area of her hull and painted it sludge grey. I should have completed the task this summer but couldn’t find the energy. Bertie saw another winter approaching. He lay in his bunk listening to the leaks and wondering when a fastening would finally fail, an underwater plank would spring and his home would go down again. I thought about my 70^th birthday and questioned the legacy I was leaving my children.

We gave up. Goldenray died.

I rang the people who would take her away. Francis found the necessary money – funeral directors never come cheap. Then we all worked together – particularly Bertie -- to clear and lighten her so she could float free from the berth where she’d lain for so long and make her final voyage with dignity.

Conditions were perfect on August 3^rd as she left the dock to be towed up river. She was floating as light as Bert could make her, but still wearing her motley of green and grey, marking my own capitulation. I’m sorry Goldie. You thanked me every time I filled your seams, sanded or painted you but I couldn’t do it anymore. Your high straight bow, designed to cut through the wild northern seas, had become too high as I stood in a dinghy on the mud, trying to prop a ladder securely.

There were plenty of people gathered round the dock to see her off but I was just too late. Instead I went immediately to her final destination, a boatyard further up the river. A long as my memory serves I don’t think I will forget how lovely she looked as she came into view. The tug was towing alongside so, from a distance, it looked almost as if she was floating free.

Goldie slipped sweetly into the travel hoist. Slings were fitted underneath her and a powerful engine started. Slowly, inexorably, she was lifted out of the water. For the last time.

Peter Nicols could not tell Toad what was going to happen next. When rescuers arrived in answer to his Mayday, he took a sharp knife below and sliced through the exhaust pipe so the yacht sank faster. He could not abandon her in mid-Atlantic as a semi-submerged hazard to shipping. It was a coup de grace.

I didn’t tell Goldenray either. Once she had left the river there were two large skips waiting, two more on the way and a digger with a claw attachment booked in anticipation. As well as those dread chainsaws.

But that really doesn’t matter because she was already dead. She died when we withdrew her life support. And who wants to know the detail of what happens when a body passes behind the crematorium curtain or is lowered into earth and the final shovelful heaped on top? Goldenray didn’t have the same opportunity as Toad to sink slowly to the ocean depths and become a home for weed and crabs: Goldenray has gone to landfill.

 

 

 

 

https://authorselectric.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-relay-by-julia-jones.html

https://authorselectric.blogspot.com/2015/10/antarctica-from-suffolk-mud-by-julia.html

https://authorselectric.blogspot.com/2018/10/goldenray-and-goldenray-tale-in-two.html