Home sweet home

It's been very cold on the boat. I have a woodburner and an Eberspacher diesel heater but it's too clammy for me right now. Since I live half on and half off The Promise, I've decided to take a trip back to Plymouth town, catch up with a few old mates, see my designer chappie and warm up. It's not as bad here as further east but winters and me aren't best mates. I'm a sunny sort, comes from my ancient Gascon genes I'm told but who knows; perhaps it's age and desire for comfort. Early in the refit I found myself a "room" in a converted ship container. Fine in the summer, cool, a tad noisy in the rain but the previous tenant had made quite a nice home in it, and for one room, albeit made of alloy and steel, cosy. As the boat dried out, and once amenities had been restored, ie the galley fired into life, existence took on some semblance of normality, or what passes for it living in a tin can at the back of a shipyard somewhere in France.

Now, two years in, replanked, new laminated floors, hanging knees and breast hooks, refastened and caulked, The Promise is more like her old self. Bearing in mind she'd been rammed, sunk and towed slowly as a submersible filled with air bags to somewhere she didn't know. I'm waiting for spring before the paint goes on anywhere as I'd taken the time to have every inch scraped off and scrutineered. Any suspect soft spot was exposed, dug out, refilled or replaced. We hammer tested the whole hull and checked hull moisture and density but found her old oak fine and hard; this due to over half a century in salt water. Right now she's as bare as a baby's bum and actually pretty smart in her natural wood finish. Pretty but impractical; The Promise will be once again primed with Blake's best universal aluminium primer and coated over and over till we get to a decent top coat which may be something other than black. Don't get me wrong; I'm not going soft and I haven't seen any lifestyle decorating programs on the telly, but I'm allowed to change and might paint her... grey!

Thoughts from abroad - Winter 1963

The freezing temperatures before Christmas 1962 lasted until March. England shivered; we went tobogganing. The school was predictably shut but those of us that lived beyond the village made the most of being cut off. The steep fields behind the road were designed for slalom and anything which presented little resistance was commandeered for sledging; tin trays; corrugated roofing; and for the alpinists, custom made toboggans of tarry timber planed smooth in my father's workshop. The creek froze; not like the Thames, but enough to make an expedition to the other side a real proposition. Like Scott and Shackleton in woollen mittens and pom-pom hats, we set out in a small plywood dinghy and rowed this way and that, cracking and forcing the fragile frost sheet. I was nine years old; my cousin not much older but we were happy and brave as boys were, that lived and played on the water.

Cornwall was beginning to be touched by the sixties. Beatle-mania was growing and for those with TV, the BBC News, following the Big Freeze, was about the Profumo affair; whoever he was. The news in our road was the imminent move to the old farm at Tregarth. My father had plans for a boat yard, one bigger than the small beach where we lived. Apart from dinghies, he had built his first big boat in the garage next to the house, launching her down the road on someone else's slipway. The opportunity for more space came up and through that winter my Dad steadily renovated the small cob cottage: pulling down walls that separated the dark rooms, replacing the box stairways with open steps and adding extra beams to the precarious ceilings. At six foot five; he could only ever stand between the beams and was forever cracking his head on the low doorways.

The cluster of cow sheds with its orchard and marshes was a new world. The ground ran upwards to a bank in front of the cottage which protected the farm yard from spring tides, especially if driven by strong easterlies. Although the road ended on the beach, a well worn track ran on, past the building, hugging the edge of the orchard wall to a spring called crow well. Salt marshes extended out from the well but its waters were always sweet and fresh. We were warned NOT to dirty the waters for the family who lived in the house boat and whose only source of water it was. The orchard was our own kingdom, my brother and I, a place of camps and castles. Old boat hulls were left there to fall apart, an ancient car with leather seats spewing hemp rusted there, and a jungle of pittosporum grew thickly before being cut and bagged for market. Apples and sloes, hawthorn and dog rose gave fruit and the streams were full of elvers and tiny crabs. When the tide crept over the course grasses I leaned to swim and sail in a place known simply as the creek.

S.R. Treliven 2013

Time to re-launch

About two years ago, my pilot cutter, The Promise, was rammed and almost sunk by a Spanish Trawler about ten miles off the coat of southern Brittany, while on passage to the Morbihan. There were four of us on board: my permanent crew of two and American traveller, Thomas Edson Colt. We were lucky. They came out of a fog bank and we were in the way, motoring gently south with fishing lines out and lazing on the warm deck. The Promise took a broadsides which stove in her starboard fore quarter, splitting her old oak topsides and fracturing timbers that were growing when Nelson was at Trafalgar. I thought we'd had it and seeing my sextant under water, ordered abandon ship. We launched the life raft onto a rolling swell and I watched as my compliment swam to the orange shell and wriggled like seals into the bucking interior. I punched the epirb and joined them, thrashing across the open water as my home for three years disappeared behind me.

But she didn't. Disappear that is. She held her own; somehow The Promise didn't sink. She wallowed well down but stopped short of that awful plunge that a sailor dreads. Two other trawlers were on the scene by now and with much shouting and gesturing, The Promise was taken in tow and was eventually beached somewhere on the Scorf at Lorient. We were picked up, not by our Spanish assailant but by a Breton who typically waved any idea of disaster aside, supplied strong drink to revive, fish stew and warm clothes.

I'll slowly recount the next two years over the coming months but suffice to say; a great deal of channel hopping ensued, I ended up living in a first floor container conversion in the yard appointed to restore my ship. I was on the spot, more or less, working alongside the men who would rebuild The Promise.

When I wasn't pestering them, I was able to take up my writing once more. You may recall, one of the reasons I was in Brittany in the first place, was to research a novel. Sounds pretentious I know but my book is partly set there and involves some cross channel adventuring in the 17th century. I was there to retrace the route of my characters, gain valuable experience of conditions, history and undertake a perilous journey in a small boat.

That's my story so far and that's the story I will tell; so if your sitting comfortably...?