Our Three-Legged Love Affair With Planet Earth

Cruising on a Nimble Piver Tri, a Little Girl Learns the Ropes

Genevieve Jacobs Aug 21   ∙   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 back inVermont in 1987 after a decade of voyaging under sail. She is writing a memoir tentatively entitled “Jenny: A Night Sea Journey” and has just launched her own Substack entitled Sea Stories.

“Erm, mind the paint,” the yachtie calls down to our motley crew as my sister Janet does her valiant best to keep pushing our trimaran off, bounce by bounce, all along their glistening hull, the tide sweeping us willy-nilly up the Hamble river to our new berth at the Royal Air Force Yacht Club. I imagine what the proper yachtsman sees from his bird’s eye view besides my buxom sister’s 18-year-old bosom.

The three hulls of our 30-foot Nimble Piver trimaran were a rare sight in this Year of Our Lord 1965. I remember sitting in my mother’s lap, bundled in a puffy orange kapok vest, snug as a bug in a rug, my father at the tiller, pipe clenched in his teeth, my three teen sisters and two teen brothers all deployed on deck with fenders, having been issued a general command “Fend off everything!” including bridges, other boats and docks, as the case may be.

Given our inexperience, this required all hands on deck. The boat was sloop-rigged with a small outboard motor and an inflatable dinghy trailing astern, into which my father had hurled our small black and white dog who skittered yappy circles around the perimeter of his rubber pen.

My father raised his pipe in salute to the other captain, as if this is all to be expected, just as my tallest brother dashed across the deck from his station on the starboard bow and managed to keep our port shroud from snagging on the yacht’s shipped anchor. The Brit called out, “cheerio!” as we leave the yacht astern, unscratched.

I went to bed in the V-berth of the main hull, nestled in crinkling sailbags, reunited with Guinness the disgraced dog who has punctured the dinghy, causing my father to bellow a curse and give us all a lesson in how to patch a rubber dinghy. Here in the night, the sound of clinking halyards and trickling water on the plywood hull was music to my ears.

My fo’c’sle forecastle has two little windows just my size. I hadn’t been allowed out on deck when lunging along under full sail on our way down from Maldon, and I was thrilled with my little porthole views between the hulls, the waves cleaving into diamond drops like they belonged in the Queen’s crown.

It was good fun being tossed about in the soft sailbags, a dance and a jig, while frothing green water splashed right over the glass! It’s too bouncy to look at my picture books so I was content to roll with the song and dance of the sea through the two eyes of Triffid’s fo’c’sle. I felt like Dr. Who in his spaceship.

But there in the night at our new berth, the RAF YC, all was peaceful including the voices of my mother and father chatting softly on deck, sounding very pleased and happy, my father says, “We’ve got a fine crew shaping up, dear.” Mother said, “Yes, we’ve arrived, all in one piece. But for the love of God, must you shout so much, Captain Bligh!”

Daddy chuckles and the water chuckles as the boat rocks me gently to sleep.

In the first light of dawn, my mother leaned in whispering: “Jenny, wake up, come look, quick!” I joined her in the cockpit to see an arc of a perfect rainbow glowing against pink and gray skies, the silver masts like a fairy forest bobbing up and down all around us.

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“God’s promise,” she said. Promise of what? I wonder. “To deliver us, protect and keep us, come what may.” Oh, I’d rather hoped for a hot-cross bun, a sweety or a chocolate. “Promise me you’ll always remember this, Jenny?”

And I do. And I do!

Daddy took me on his knee as he swirls the tea leaves in his mug. “What do you see?” He gazed into the cup and swirls again. “Hmmmm. I’m not sure…it’s slowly coming into view.” I peered into the cup and only see tea leaves, but I look harder as he reported that he sees a very good little girl helping her daddy to fix up the boat at the yard today. I saw it clearly now! Indeed, that must be me!

Guinness and I had followed in his muddy boot prints through a bewildering smell world of moss, kerosene, seaweed, epoxy, paint, varnish, old rotting timbers, fresh cut sawdust, rusting metals, mildewed canvas, et cetera. You have to watch your step and clamber over a lot of exciting terrain. Everywhere on the ground little tubs of screws and bolts and nuts and buckets of splotchy rags and various disagreeable goopy stuffs half filled with rain and all sorts of intriguing boat building trash.

The sounds of hammering and sawing and ladders and sanding were all around, and glimpses of grownups legs or arms here and there, but it’s hard to see whole people anywhere as the hulls of boats and timber ways loom and bulge overhead, obscuring the view. I was careful to identify my fathers tracks so that I don’t lose him in the boaty wilderness of round bellied vessels all propped up like a library for wooden balloons.

He was up and down and in and out and climbing through hatches and I think that must be why our boat is called a “Nimble” as in, “Jack, be nimble jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick”.

Our boat was named Triffid, a three legged monster from outer space! If it was a little monstrous, it was the friendly kind, I have firmly decided. I knew all about outer space as a devotee of Dr. Who on the telly, my favorite program.

My favorite music was the Beatles, and I knew all the words of all their songs from my sister’s transistor radio. I belted them out whenever grown-ups weren’t talking nearby (mustn’t interrupt) along with my favorite hymn: “Early in the moooooorning our souls shall riiiiiiise to theeee!”

I was learning to make myself useful. I became well schooled in the arts of sorting “small stuff” into tin coffee cans, old tobacco cans, plastic jugs. Fetching on demand: shackles, goosenecks, hinges, nuts, bolts, screws, nails, padeyes, cotter pins, turnbuckles. Wrench or spanner meant the same thing—or crescent. Then there was needle nose pliers and gizmo. A gizmo could be any one of these things but usually meant “give me the whole tool box in a hurry.”

I learned a few words I must never say out loud, but it’s okay to say in my head if I’m really cross about something. I could count up to five, but more than that was just a handful. I learned how to bail a bilge, disentangle spaghetti, flake a line, coil lines into loops, and even how to tie a square knot and make an S with a half hitch around a cleat.

I get the hang of wielding and cleaning paintbrushes, lids, paint stick stirring and hanging rags to dry. Which is merely a euphemism given the almost constant rain and drizzle of London.

One day Daddy brought me along with him to meet a real adventurer who wanted to sell his boat. We have to climb down a long slimy ladder on the seawall to the deck of a sturdy old wooden boat that didn’t rock or roll at all, not like Triffid or the dinghies. It was very dark down below, and the man made an impression on me with his equally dark air. He told stories about sailing through ice and snow as my father kept talking about looking for a boat suitable for a transatlantic.

As the men talked and smoked, the tide came in. Quite literally inside. I dabbled my toes in water seeping up over the floorboards. But Mr. Jones was unperturbed, taking us up on deck to man the oars, which, in this case, were used as sticks to heave ho mightily, back and forth, against the barnacled seawall, until with a sucking sound the hull cames unstuck from the muck, and we all started to rise with the tide.

The bilge pump kicks into a burring roar. My father says our goodbyes, and they shake hands, “We’ll stick with our Triffid, thanks all the same!” I shake Mr. Jones hand, too. It’s a very thin, very strong and crinkly hand. It feels like the barnacles. He says, “Pleased to meet another good sailor, Jenny. You may call me Tristan, if ever we meet again.”

I was up in the apple tree visiting with my squiddel in the back garden, when mother came out with a new friend. The two of them admired the roses, “the nicest bushes on all of Priory Close,” said Mrs. Doll.

I perked up hearing my name as mother said, “You’ll have your hands full with Jenny. She’s awfully good but she does pull a vanishing act. She only just finished her tea and she’s disappeared again! I’m so glad you can help mind her! She might be in the closet under the landing stair. Or under the kitchen table. Or possibly up in this tree?”

They both looked up slyly, and we burst out laughing.

Mrs. Doll was wonderful, taking me out in my stroller on long walks to the shops, and I hopped out to swap my spot for her parcels. I also loved Mrs. Coughlin, who can’t easily get out of her big comfy chair in the dark living room next to her warm stove, which has a rich smell and a ruby golden fire.

Our favorite book was “Struwwelpeter,” and we had a lot of engaging discussions as to which children were the naughtiest and why. We told each other stories. She always seemed to know what happened next in the fairy tales I told her, so I started making up new endings to surprise her. She taught me how to make a fan out of folding a towel. This was handy because it got rather hot snuggled up next to her stove with our books and rather too cold any distance away from her ample lap.

One day I heard my father and brothers admiring a car, whilstling and envious. “Look at those whitewalls!” What’s a whitewall tire? I asked.

I decide to grant them their heart’s desire. While mother is in bed napping, I go out to the garage in our little house on Priory Close and select a nice can of white paint, a clean brush, and tackle my father’s tires. They look very handsome, all white and sharp in contrast to the shiny black car. I didn’t splatter hardly at all.

When I needed to clean up, as good workmen do, I took my mother’s monogrammed guest towels and cleaned up my stick and brush with the turps and pop the paint lid down dutifully. I hung the rags to dry back on the rack in the guest bathroom.

Another day, I decided to sell books just like the street across from the Palace by the river. I set up a stall with a tablecloth at the end of our lane where the most people walk by, and I brought out lots of grownup books from our house (they have no pictures) and to my delight I earned a few pennies for sweeties and enjoyed some good conversations, but one of my customers asked to meet my mother, so I walk them back to our house and my first business enterprise folded just like that. It wouldn’t be the last.

One fine day, I had my first close encounter with an English bobby, complete with his badge and helmet and nightstick. He had to get on his hands and knees on the sidewalk to look in our door. I invited him in, but he was too big. We had just finished furnishing our little home in the hedge with a striped rug, a painting and a small table and a teaset—all borrowed from my friend Gareth’s house.

His parents called the police about a burglary, but the clever Bobby had somehow figured out where to find the guilty party.

We went on a long camping trip in Ireland on bikes with a tent and a little campstove.

My mother pedals our bike fast as we try to get away from the gnats. You cannot get away from gnats. We follow the gypsy trail and camp wherever they do. I kiss the Blarney Stone, and we sit through many plays where the actors and actresses talk endlessly and never change costumes or the scenery or sing anything.

I liked the musicals at the movies in London so much more. My sisters were constantly seeing Leprechauns, but I could never swivel my head fast enough to catch sight of one, try as I might.

We sailed Triffid across the Channel and hopped along the coasts of France and Germany and the Netherlands—more camping as my brother has brought his pickup truck over on the ferry, and we often split up to camp or sail or sightsee. One rainy night we parked the truck on a hilly street in the rain, and there were snails covering the hood, just sliming along slowly and happily.

We went into the cafe and eat heaping bowls of cooked snails, which I find a little odd. I sit on my father’s knee while we all use straight pins to pick the snails out of their little shells. “Daddy. This one’s got his BUTT stuck!” I didn’t know why people were always laughing at me.

There was a tiny village where, to my delight, all the canal boats and barges and windmills and bridges were just my size: miniature! But the tulips were normal size and seemed like gigantic crowds of glory here.

Camping on a gypsy trail in Spain, I took a walk and stood with my thumb stuck in my mouth to watch two ladies in swirling skirts and scarves stand in the woods holding up a blanket, behind which another woman was changing her clothes:

A polka dot skirt flies over the blanket and drapes softly there like a living thing taking a little rest, followed by a lacy white blouse and then a peacock scarf with fringes! It’s desperately exciting. Much better than those long-winded Irish plays.

I wandered on down to a pebble beach where I popped golden seaweed with lots of other children who are gathering it for their supper. Further up the trail, I sat down with two boys who have a guitar and a pup tent and a fire, and they sang me songs. I fed each one a single raisin from my little red box and asked them to play another, please.

When my box of raisins is all doled out, I remebered thinking it’s time to go back to our tent with the daddy long legs spiders crawling overhead. My sisters came flying down the path through the woods and grabbed me, scolding that mother thought I’d been kidnapped. I was indignant. I knew perfectly well where I was the whole time. So did several dozen travelers who had pointed in many different directions which sent them on a wild goose chase,” a silly goose chase.

After a bumpy passage, Mum was mad at daddy and the weather, so she took me and two sisters ashore in the dinghy and drove us in a car for an outing. We spent all day ashore. We picked strawberries in a field and went into a big shop where there are vast quantities of blue and white china things.

She bought a big box of it, including a very sweet little lamp, which is shaped like a figure-eight and has a blue drawing of a a barge boat sailing on a canal, with trees and windmills across a flat meadow: This will be for you someday, Jenny, when we have our own house again in Vermont.

I’m pleased and flattered, but I’m a little leery of lamps, in general. She says this one will never electrocute me like “that Brass lamp” did to my sister Janet’s hand. “This is Delft!” I think that sounds like there’s an elf in it, and that’s promising. I trust elves. Mostly.

We got back to the dinghy, and mother loaded us up with all the china and the boxes of strawberries, I sat in the bow as usual, and mother’s at the stern with the seagull outboard, and my two sisters were climbing in when something went sideways and everyone—except me—tipped into the water. I just hung on and watched the whole spectacle, calm as a clam.

Strawberries float everywhere on the tide, but the china sinks straightaway. My sisters and mother are drenched but manage to climb back into the dinghy with lots of huffing and puffing and wiggling and fuss. Worst of all, mummy is weeping. My sisters are crying and gasping. I’ve never seen my mother cry before, not really cry.

She had lost some of her Delft China and the car keys. Provisions for Davy Jones’ locker. I scooped up a few of the strawberries bobbling around within reach and made an apron of my jersey for them. Mum looked at me, sitting solidly and stony faced in the bow of the dinghy with strawberries in my lap and started to giggle. “You look just like one of the gargoyles on the cathedral! Good job, Jenny! Good job staying put while everything else goes to hell!”

One day we anchored on a pebbly riverbank, and everyone went ashore except for my sister Janet and me. She was busy doing the dishes in the galley. I wriggled out of my stinky bulky lifejacket and went to inspect the shiny new stanchions, a beautiful coppery color, sticking up all along the toerails.

They are “lifelines, to keep anyone from falling overboard.” Yet somehow I found myself clinging to one with both hands as I dangled over the side, up to my knees in water. So, daddy was wrong about that. Janet paused in her scrubbing down below because she thought she heard a mouse: “A tiny, meek little voice asking politely, ‘help?’ as if she weren’t sure she wanted any.”

One day we stood on the deck of a massive ocean liner called The United States. Mummy, my three sisters, and one of my brothers waved goodbye to England. Daddy and another brother stood on the cement dock far below, and he said, “See you back in the States! Bon voyage!”

They were to sail Triffid to Gibraltar while we took the big ship across. Hedda Hunter, who had long blonde hair like a Welsh princess was with them, as well as Herb Gardner, who sported a braided captain’s hat and apparently a pocket full of sweeties to share with all of us anytime we see him.

We were well out to sea, a gray sea, with no land in sight, and nothing but a vast rolling carpet of whitecaps when my sisters and I walked out to the aft deck with a blue balloon on a string that someone had blown up for me. I watched the wake churn out behind us, making a white road in the gray sea that just goes on and on until it’s a mere line where the sky meets the ocean. “Let the balloon go to England now, Jenny! We’re never going back.”

I let the string go and watch the balloon until it vanishes. I wonder what the word “never” means.

Postscript

In Gibraltar, my father’s Transatlantic dream met a sad and unexpected end. Under brisk sail in the busy harbor of Gibraltar, Triffid suffered a collision with a fishing boat, rendering our brave space monster into “matchsticks and smithereens.” Nobody was injured, thankfully.

Triffid was a total loss, my father reported, but his dreams were not. He’d bought Triffid in May 1965 from David Bullar for 5,000 pounds, and he sold her remains for a song in Gibraltar in September 1967.

By the time everybody got resettled in our Vermont farmhouse, he had already ordered plans for Triffid II, a 25-foot Piver Mariner trimaran, one with folding wings, which we would build in our barn. And he was already planning our routes north from Lake Champlain to Gaspe!