Birvidik

The liveaboard cruising fraternity is cosmopolitan, but hardly diverse; you're most unlikely to see a black, brown or yellow face. What you are most likely to encounter are middle class mores and white faces. Except in the case of the Germans, of course, when you will also be exposed to most of the other distasteful parts of their pendulous, mottled anatomies. It gives the impression of a boat crewed by a pack of albino Shar Pei nudes as painted by Francis Bacon.

Even within this fairly narrow subcategory of humanity, representation is not evenly distributed. Things vary from cruising area to cruising area and from season to season. The Ionian in August, for example, is overwhelmed by a deluge of Italians who swarm into every harbour and anchorage. They manage to cram six boats into a space so small that I wouldn't even attempt to squeeze in an oiled bar of soap, an image that brings tears to the eyes if one thinks about it too much. Having executed this enviable feat of seamanship and three dimensional legerdemain they go below for a quick preen and then pose around on deck with effortless style and élan. All other cruisers retire below, crippled by self doubt, self loathing and a complete collapse of self esteem. The Germans even put some clothes on.

We, however, have been cruising the Sardonic (© K. Saint) Gulf where things are somewhat different. Italians are rare here. The majority of cruisers are German, French and British. Also strongly represented are the Austrians, Swedes and Norwegians. Closely following them are the Aussies, Kiwis, Americans and Canadians. Occasionally popping up are a smattering of Russians, Finns, Swiss, citizens of assorted Baltic states and a very few Danes.

Ah yes, the Danes. There aren't many of them but, by Christ, they punch above their weight. They have an effect that's out of all proportion to their numbers. To put this (possibly surprising) statement into context I will need to digress slightly.

The fact that there are so few Danes cruising is hardly surprising when you look at some details. For a start there are only 5.5 million of them, about the same as Singapore or Slovenia and half the population of Portugal. On top of which, it really is a tiny country. If you take Scandinavia as a whole to comprise Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland and Greenland, it has a total land area of just under 3.5 million square kilometres. That's halfway between India and Australia. Denmark has an area of 43 000 square kilometres, which makes it fractionally bigger than Switzerland and well under half the size of Portugal. And yet until 1400 the whole of Scandinavia as described above was ruled by Denmark, which comprised a tad over 1% of its land area.

Nowadays, though, the Danes are not the stuff of which empires are made, they're far too sensible. If any of their subjects wanted independence from the Danish crown all they had to do was ask nicely. Well, OK, the Swedes had to fight a bit from 1521 to 1553, but not much.

The Danish character, if there is such a thing, appears to be sober sensibleness tempered with a puckish streak. The Progress Party, which became the second largest party in the 1973 general election vowed to slash public spending. Among the ways it proposed doing this was to replace the entire department of defence with an answering machine primed with a recorded message saying "we surrender" in Russian.

However, to drag myself reluctantly back to the point:

A characteristic of the Sardonic Gulf is the almost complete absence of totally secure moorings. Other than around Athens, marinas are about as common as rocking horse shit. Most of the time we have to free anchor or lie stern to a quay with our anchor holding us off from pounding the stern to fragments on the concrete. This is where the Danes come in.

As has been apparent to those of you reading blogs passim, the weather hasn't exactly been over-clement in the Sardonic this season. We've frequently had to take shelter from strong winds by going stern to quays. In each case we hi-tail it to a harbour that should offer reasonable shelter from the forecast wind direction. Once in we choose the best available spot, drop the hook and back up to the quay. Having tied the stern securely to the concrete with as many ropes as we can find (which is a lot on Birvidik) we wind in the anchor chain with the windlass until you can play a top F on it. If we can't get it to do this we untie everything and do it again until we can. We then find more ropes and tie them out from the sides to stop the boat slewing sideways, settle into the cockpit and wait for the weather, and disaster, to strike.

We did this in Ermioni on the North quay, next to a Danish boat. After exchanging pleasantries we settled into the cockpit with a cup of tea. The wind rose steadily on the beam but everything held snug and firm. Once the wind had got up to a nice force 6, forecast to rise to 8, the Danish boat decided it wanted to leave. Why it waited until then is beyond me. "Never mind" I thought, "Viking ancestors and all that - seamanship must be in their genes". Was it buggery.

As they pulled out of their berth the wind, predictably I thought, dragged them sideways across our anchor chain, making a noise like Erik Bloodaxe laying into a bucketful of spanners. Hauling themselves into wind with their windlass they managed to get their anchor partly up. Instead of continuing to motor into wind and lift the anchor completely they then proceeded to motor randomly round the harbour in a state of panic with the anchor hanging down two metres in the water. Unsurprisingly, they managed to snag our anchor chain and drag it halfway across the harbour, lifting our anchor in the process. As we now had nothing to hold us off the quay we slewed sideways and only avoided some serious cosmetic damage by the rapid deployment of our entire stock of fenders.

The etiquette in situations such as this is for the offending boat to lift and untangle the anchors, and then take the other boat's anchor across to its original position and drop it back in place with apologies. What they did was to drop our anchor half the correct distance out and diagonally across the anchor chains of three other boats, then swiftly hack out of the harbour at high speed, resolutely refusing to make eye contact.

We pulled out, relayed the anchor and re-moored.

The next day another Danish boat came in, laid its anchor diagonally across several other anchor chains (including our, obviously) and proceeded to drag them all over the harbour, doing the nautical equivalent of 'knit one, purl one'. We gave up at this point and once we had extricated ourselves moved round to the south quay, which was deserted. We dropped the anchor and veered out 60 metres of chain as the bottom dropped off steeply. We had just moored up and snugged in when our spirits sank. Coming in was yet another Danish boat which proceeded to try and moor up next to us despite there being about 300 metres of unoccupied quay stretching invitingly into the distance.

They dropped about 15 metres of chain in 20 metres of water then expressed astonishment when it failed to bite. So, of course, they blew sideways, T-boned our bow, snagged on our pulpit and lifted our anchor. After we'd helped them untangle they expressed their gratitude by dropping our anchor about five metres from our bow and buggering off. We waited until they were out of the way and walked Birvidik sideways to tie her up alongside to the quay. This way we had no need of an anchor to hold us off and so could view the approach of other boats, even Danish ones, with something approaching equanimity.

Over the summer we've had our anchor lifted by other boats a total of five times; once by a Greek boat, once by a German boat and three times by Danes.

Bloody Danes - I'm sure they're out to get me. I suspect it's a simmering resentment over their being routed by Aethelstan at Eamont in 927 A.D., but holding a grudge for 1027 years is a bit extreme even by Scandinavian standards. Well, it's either that or they're using a pack of rather surrealist heavies in an attempt to collect over 1000 years of unpaid Danegeld. It's got to the stage where I'm half expecting Sandi Toksvig to appear under the boat with scuba gear and a large drill.