Portrait of a Mad Delivery Skipper

Sailing With the Indefatigable Peter Haward

Genevieve Jacobs May 26   ∙   Guest post

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Besides being a regular Loose Cannon contributor, the author is a longtime professor of Psychology and Communications. She landed in Vermont in 1987 after a decade of cruising under sail. This is an excerpt from her forthcoming book tentatively entitled “Jenny: A Night Sea Journey.” At one time, Lloyd underwriters regarded her subject, the late Peter Haward of SeaFerries, as the number one delivery skipper in the world.

It’s Force 7, 8 imminent, downwind wing and wing—toward the channel into Liverpool with a Taiwanese-type ketch. Peter Haward is on the foredeck, skeletal in his yellow oilies, a spooky apparition lit by the decklights in the blowing mist. Expletive and his arms go akimbo. He’s lost the halyard, having just dropped one of the jibs to give us a bit more control. It’s sailed up to the top.

He lurches back like a spider on some invisible web and says, “Well well… bosun’s chair is in the lazarette, do be good and fetch it, will you?”

I say, “What? Wait. I mean, it’s not that important, in fact, we don’t even need it. We’ll be in port by morning, at this rate anyway? Maybe it’s not a good idea to go up the mast right now?”

(What I mean is: I myself am NOT going up the mast right now!)

He turned to me with a quizzical expression. That pause. Then: “Oh yes, yes. Quite. But you see, this is between me and my error.” With his accent, it sounds like he’s saying it’s between him and his era. His era, the children of the World Wars.

So, against my own feeble judgement I’m winding him up the mast as we careen crazily at about seven knots with following seas and a wallowing hull and a clumsy motorised self steering doing it’s best, in poor visibility of driving rain (did you know fog has mass?), and I imagine he’s getting quite a bruising, but he’s so determined. I think of the word “indefatigable” and how British it is.

Way up tippety top, a mere suggestion of snapping and billowing yellow, he snags the shackle with a shout of triumph and I let him down as quickly/slowly as possible, taking into account the yawing and accelerations so that he doesn’t get flung out to sea or wrapped so hard on the rigging that any of his old ribs might snap.

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We’re finally back in the cockpit and the halyard is snug, and he says he really just doesn’t sleep well if things aren’t Bristol, but he’s going to turn in now, wake him for the 4 a.m. BBC.

At end of the dogwatch I give him a shout, he rolls out his bunk in actual pajamas (which are white with red stripes and a little tasseled sleeping cap. Yes, really.) Takes notes as he tunes in, peering at the chart under a red light.

Comes up on deck for a quick look round, and I muster up my little courage to say, “You know, Peter. I’m thinking that was incredibly stupid of me to, like, collude with you going up the mast like that. I just have to tell you, I’ll be glad when we make port tomorrow because I won’t be party to any such foolishness again. Respectfully. ”

He laughs and says “Oh WELL. You know, we won the wars, on sheer bloody-mindedness. You Americans. My goodness. Grapes in my granola…Hahahah.” His laughter is like a soft cascade of bells at vesper. Always kindly. You can’t stay mad at a man like that.

How We Met

I’ve landed a job making sandwiches for the yacht crews at Cowes IOW race week. In exchange for a sweet little flowery attic room and board, I rise early to begin filling orders in the galley kitchen of the Old Solent Inn, thanks to Lindy Chisnell who took me under her wing.

Each boat in the race has a list of the things that the crew is hankering for that day, and I assemble them one by one, layering the tomatoes, lettuce, various meats and cheeses and fillings and relishes, all on thick fresh bread rolls, wrapping them in wax paper, labeling each one by crew and boat names to be picked up near to noon by someone with a launch.

One day, another guest at the Inn tells me her marital woes as I work, and she even weeps a bit, so I hand her a napkin, some of her tears wet the bread even so. She says how remarkable it is that someone so young as me could bring this out of her. I just listened, that’s all. I wonder if life has to become so complicated and if there’s any avoiding that.

‘I Need To Act Younger’

“You just go mucking about in the low tide on your free time, that’s no way to be young and carefree! I’m sending you to the Royal Yacht Club Ball, Prince Charles will be there! My old friend from London is looking for a companion, we’ll dress you up! It will be fun!”

Her old friend is a very fussy fellow who should remain a bachelor and order his eggs just so, but he’s game to go, so I surrender and Lindy orders her daughters to go gather honeysuckle from the garden and pulls out a Greek sort of drapey off-the-left-shoulder dress for me, the girls all gasp and simultaneously critically assess ( a thing girls excel at doing), and the only problem is my big, big feet. I have no shoes to suit.

Lindy gets on the horn and calls around to everyone on the Isle of Wight trying to find a suitable pair of slippers for size 10 gunboats but comes up empty handed which makes me feel a bit more of a freak as the girls continue to drape me with sweet smelling honeysuckle in my hair and we decide I will just have to go barefoot and take tiny little steps. Ha!

Well, my Prince never shows up after all, and my date is dismayed that I roll my own cigarettes (blue packet, Gauloise that smell like burning galoshes) sooo, that’s out.

So, then Lindy, never one to be deterred, next day announces, “You’re going to the Pirate party on the Golden Hinde!” and dresses me in a red wrap top and a long black billowing skirt. It’s okay that I’m barefoot for this occasion.

On the Golden Hinde, everyone is drinking heavily and getting way too much into the pirate role for my taste, so as the last launch is leaving at 10 p.m. I leap from the deck to the launch, landing—in a swirl of skirts—very luckily, by some instinctive impulse, on the broad gunnel, to great astonishment, not least of which is my own. Panic makes your brain stupid but your feet smart. Trust your feet.

The next day, last day of the race week, as I finish wrapping up the lunches, Lindy busts in all excited to say she’s had a messenger from the harbor: Peter Haward, the captain of the replica of Sir Frances Drake’s famous vessel, requests an interview. Whatever that means. So I go. I have no other plans or actually even the money left to leave the island, though I haven’t told anyone as much.

The launch driver is staunch and still traumatized by my earlier performance, so I try to make a little conversation. I say “Lister? 12?” He is stock-still impressed. All he says is “yes!” but it is very satisfying for both of us. It was easy. I would know that sound anywhere, because it’s the same as my father’s Dutch steel sloop had long ago. Lug, lug, lug. Once you know it, you know it. Once you’ve bled it, you know it. Workhorse.

I’m curious about this fabled “Peter Haward, captain of the Golden Hinde replica,” which he has brought from Japan enroute to its historical homeport of Poole. Someone whispered that he had brought the famous J-Boat Shamrock across the Atlantic, and someone else had whispered of yet another feat…Everyone is lined up on deck as if for inspection, and I feel as if I’ve walked onto a bizarre movie set. Most of the bedraggled crew have volunteered at various ports of call along the way.

There is one paid crew member, a stout young fellow named Clive from Devon. He knows the boat pretty well and stands next to me to whisper a few tips about what we are doing standing here on deck in the drizzle like this. He says “Peter likes to meet everyone and see who has deserted since last call.”

So, I am a little surprised by the sight of an elderly man, stooping, very thin and tall and gangly, emerging from the bridge deck. Sort of a mix of Errol Flynn and Ebenezer Scrooge, with a retinue of the engineer and the cook, he walks up and down with his head nodding and hands behind back, an occasional handshake, chatting amiably in an absent minded way.

When he comes to me he says “Ah! The Flying Pirate! I’d like to hire you for this next final leg, if you’re willing. A few days to Poole. Clive will show you the ropes.”

Well, sure. It beats swimming. I whisper to Clive “I don’t know ANYTHING about square riggers!? What everything is called!” He says, “Don’t worry about it, neither does Peter! He’ll just point vaguely and say to grab that little line there or that bigger one!”

Cowes to Poole

We get appropriately hung up in irons off the Needles, unable to beat to windward in a calm, and drift around haplessly like a ghostly galleon, but eventually we make our way on. No drama until the big hullabaloo ballyhoo Whoopty-Do-Daw Day when Clive and I must endeavor to earn our biscuits by climbing up the top and making dockside under sail. That’s fine, because it’s calm and really all just for show, the engineer has the engine running quietly below decks, as the band plays and the people three deep on the quayside await this historic return.

Before we came into the harbor, Clive went down on a plank along side to scrub away the salt and brine and make the hull shine with buckets of fresh water. He’s very game. The rest of us motley crew untangle festoons of little flags and burgees to fly from the stays and shrouds, which might have spelled disaster or victory or captives aboard or beware quarantine, rabid rodents. Who knew? Nobody. It was purely decor.

We hear the brass band playing and Peter gives us the signal and we scramble up the ratlines and begin, topsails first, furling as fast as we can, making it smart and snappy as if we had done this all our lives, descending to the next and the next, scrambling to the foremast to repeat the feat, but WTF!

Our feet and hands and hips and anything bodily in contact with the rigging and wet foredeck tingle as electric shocks animate us, like cats on a hot tin roof, with every footafall.

We scuttle and hop and scurry trying to find relief on the wet rigging and decks. Everything we touch is electrified. We look at each other with scurvy eyeballs wide on the yards that we leave a little wee bit sloppy under the circus dances and scrambling to decks hoping for relief but there is none as our hair stands on end, and I think it’s a good thing I’m getting paid for this. If I survive it.

There’s a short somewhere in the electrical system, we dance a weird modern choreograph, but then the engine cuts out, the current stops, we puppets stop hopping. Thank God!

But then we have to ghost into the dock gliding just under the remaining sail.

Peter acts as if it is all to be expected, as if to plan. Waving a thin hand and smiling generously. Clive and I start giggling almost uncontrollably. This could’ve been such a disaster. Yet we pulled it off! The people cheer and clap, children hoisted on their fathers shoulders, babbies all goggle eyed, because they alone understand our weird dance on deck, and the women wiping their eyes with little kerchiefs! The band plays, brass.

‘Neriad of Menai’

I’m very pleased and honored to collect my pay next day, and Peter says, “I don’t suppose you’re available to help me out with another delivery, are you, perhaps?” Well, why not. My pay is barely enough to get me back to London—and then what? I’m not ready to use up my Freddy Laker Discount Airlines return ticket to Miami just yet.

It’s a Taiwanese ketch, Neriad of Menai, lots of carved wooden trim, and we need to get it to Liverpool within three weeks. My first task is to take out all the sails from the hold, flake, inspect, and rig them, ditto the running rigging, and then go get provisions and prepare some breakfast for Peter.

I get what we’d call granola in the states, but he calls it oats, and if it’s cooked, it’s called porridge, which sounds very unappealing to me. Like something you’d eat as a punishment if you were an orphan in a Dickens novel. If anything slightly crunchy textured is added, it’s called Meusli. Swiss knife of possibilities right there.

For a little diversion, I put green and purple grapes into it with a bit of cream and some brown sugar. Peter is astonished by this. A strange reaction, I thought. He giggles every time he spoons up a grape, it’s as if he’d never met the fruit before. He talks to himself, very amused. I wonder if he’s daft. He wonders if I am. No, check that: He’s quite sure that I am. But he’s willing to indulge me. He says “Raisins would not be unexpected. But grapes!” He chuckles as he eats.

The boat seems a little neglected but not too bad, more sort of a day sailing neglect than anything pathological. I ask Peter how he got into this business. He is evidently the original.

He says he had come home from The War and he and his best friend wondered what they should do next. Sailing sounded appealing.

So, they put an ad in the newspaper offering to ferry anyone’s vessel from anywhere to anywhere. He claimed they had little to no experience but were fairly confident they could pull it off. So, their first assignment for a delivery was “rather a large boat, a ship, actually, but not officially.” Whatever that means.

“We jolly well got it down the river and out to sea and headed in the general direction of our destination and when we saw we’d arrived at the next outlet, we had no idea how we’d get up the channel. Fog, tides and so forth. I got on the radio and wouldn’t you know, they sent out a pilot who brought us in quite neatly. Nobody ever knew. After that we studied up and the rest, well…”

We were supposed to depart the river in the morning. But as I slept in the foc’sle, to the eerie tunes of the wind in the rigging, and the ships bell rang 3 a.m., Peter called out to wake me, “I’ve been listening to the weather report. It’ll only be worse tomorrow. So, let’s go now.”

Right? It’ll only be worse out there tomorrow, so let’s go out there now. Get ahead of it.

I will never forget this philosophical pronouncement coming as it did in a howling gale up a raging tidal river in Poole. Every single cell in my slumbering body wanted only to snuggle deeper in my mildewed coverlet. But no. We must go. Now. So we did.

Crisis of Faith

We are passing by The Beaks. The wind has abated to chilly and brisk, and the sun is bright, and the tide is against us now. Peter says, “What say we get a bit of a lift from the iron main?” and goes to turn on the engine but the key snaps in the ignition. Soon there is the smell of smoke and burning insulation from the depths of the bilge aft. He is a little disconcerted, but we sort it all out. We make a run up the bay under sail for Torquay, where he recalls there’s a decent mechanic.

I have noticed that he has a great many scars and scabs and even some fresh injuries to his bald pate from banging his head on things. He doesn’t seem to notice when he does, which tells me that he’s used to concussions.

I’m having a guilty little crisis of faith, here. I’m happy to get into Torbay and search my memory for anyone I’ve met in the vicinity and seize upon Rob and Rindy who do live luckily nearby and do luckily dream of sail, so with Peter’s permission I’m taking the opportunity to invite them to join us for the rest of the delivery.

Barometric ToothAche

Things are much smoother internally for me, having more crew aboard, and now I see the best of Peter’s eternally serene and positively indulgent attitude towards life’s vicissitudes. I learn that apparently, a hot cup of tea is pretty much all you need, and sometimes you wait and a solution, or a pilot appears, and sometimes a dastardly thing goes wrong, but you can still just look and figure it out.

If there’s a fire in the engine room, put it out. If the key snaps in the ignition, just sail. If the weather report is atrocious, get out ahead of it. I start to think there’s some wisdom here for me to remember. In the darkest moments, be of good faith. Providence usually has some kind of sop for you.

But as we round the passage into the Irish Sea and up towards Liverpool’s maw, my jaw starts to throb. I feel as if there is a drumbeat of doom in my cheekbone, growing deeper and louder as the day goes on. The sun shines, the boat is sailing fine, healthy seas abeam, but the feeling of doom throbs with every pulse of my heart. It doesn’t fade away, it just grows more intense until I’m sort of lopsided in my face.

Peter, who habitually seems rather oblivious to the world around him, says, “Oh dear. What’s happening to your face?” I say “ummm. I guess I have a toothache. It’s fine.” He says, “Oh must check the baro!” He’s all excited as if I’ve just told him he won the lottery. He ducks down below and comes back up beaming. “Yes! You’re ahead of the weather! We’ll make excellent time! 12 hours ahead of expected, I imagine!”

This isn’t exactly, “here’s a clove to put in your tooth,” or “try some Panadol,” but it does weirdly cheer me up a little. Like, sure…I’ll take one for the team? He says, “You’re off watch now, go to sleep, while you can. Before it gets much worse. You’ll take the night watch, Rob you’ll step in for her. It’ll be worse later.”

I do sleep a few hours. Someone else makes supper for everyone else, and, when I rise, the wind is howling and the boat is lunging along, fully dark and hissing. Rob is on watch but the motorized self steering is doing the work. The wind is abaft and we’re a little overpowered (in my opinion, which i keep to myself, mostly because I can’t make my mouth work, what with the pain and swelling in my jaw, which I hold in my hand as if that would help.) And, anyway, not like anybody asks me what i think.

So, I go into the cockpit submissively and sit huddled on the windward bench, taking wave after wave cold Irish salt down my neck. Watching the horizon for ships and the compass for our course, my hand glued to my cheek. Rob slips gratefully below shedding his yellow wellies and foul weather gear as he goes.

And then Peter pops up brightly. He says, “Oh dear. Painful? So sorry. Well, you’re on the helm now. Something’s gone wrong with the self steering. Hmph. Never did trust that thing.”

So, now I stand watch in the cockpit with both feet braced far against the combings (these Taiwanese things are WAY too beamy) on an overlarge stainless steel wheel, the compass card jumping like mexican beans in the oversize binnacle, barely able to wedge my feet for leverage, concentrating hard to keep the yaw and the broach under control, wanting less sail up.

We are surfing a bit and I feel the steerage slipping at times as we exceed hull speed and there’s some bickering going on between the tides and the wind causing havoc, hard to judge and it’s such a dark night and now on top of it a wicked dense foggy slam of slabs of goo in the air and I have to keep wrenching my head around to check the oncoming seas and try to anticipate what’s ahead and what’s behind and steer the boat most easily through the surf and surge.

That’s when Peter comes up for a look around and says, “Oh splendid steering, much better than that machine could do. What say we shorten sail now?” I emphatically nod YES. I start to give over the wheel to go up on deck to do the handling but he says “Now now, you’re doing such a good job at the helm, I’ll do the sails,” and goes forward and drops a jib but loses the halyard. Thus, I find myself hoisting him up the top. And he says:

“It’s between me and my error.”

As if he had to settle something. Rob comes up all bleary eyed and asks what’s going on? Peter says, “Oh jolly good, just in time to take over. And fancy that, the self steering is working again! Ha! Wonders!”