Nicholas Tracy reflects on his years aboard the Harfang and its home on the Chebogue River
One sunny afternoon a few years ago, my attention was attracted to a light aircraft making a lazy circle over my little sloop moored in Nova Scotia's Chebogue river. At the time I did not think much about it, having the usual list of tasks to do. But looking back, I can see that that moment had a special significance. Early in the following year, my youngest daughter sent me a calendar with an aerial photograph showing the twisting channel of the Chebogue River between banks of eel grass and spruce-covered islets, with my Harfang and a line of other boats in the sun. Apparently I had dropped down the companionway ladder into the cabin a moment before the photograph was taken, so I am not in the picture, but it is a treasured possession.
The islet just downstream is a sanctuary for cormorants that stand in the branches of the trees, stretching their wings to dry. The Chebogue is also home to a large colony of Great Blue herons, which stand immobile in the shallows waiting for fish or frog to come too near. Marsh hawks beat the sky, and nature's talons extend to the human residents: on the flats are wooden blinds built by generations of duck hunters. In the years I have kept Harfang on the Chebogue, some faces have changed as old friends died, and younger people have appeared. Gone is the Greek chorus of old men who made up for poor eyesight and hearing aids by describing to each other what was happening on the river, but others of the old guard remain, with their memories of 50 years ago. Pontoons, slipway and a club house have been added, but the character of the place is little changed.
The river, and my small yacht, have sunk deeply into my psyche. "Believe me, my young friend," exclaimed Ratty to the Mole in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, "there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats." Built for me in 1969, the 7-metre, series-built Westerly sloop has taken on a strong personality. For two summers I lived onboard with my wife and baby, sailing in the English Channel and Irish Sea from the port of London, where she is still registered, around to Lancaster in the northwest of England. By that summer afternoon 35 years later in the Chebogue River, the berth I had made for the youngest crew member had been cleared away. But the hardwood and brass fittings of the chart table and galley remained, with a fiddle to hold securely a broad-based Rodney ship's decanter that had been a wedding present. Once it had held French cognac purchased from the chandler on the quay at Cherbourg, but it was now filled with Nova Scotia rum. The original four berths had been consolidated to provide more comfortable accommodation for a couple looking back on the prime of life.
The latest addition is a small cast-iron stove that provided older joints with cozy warmth when anchored in one of the many coves and estuaries east and north of Yarmouth. Designing the combustion chamber, mountings, heat shields, and Charley Noble (sailor's jargon for the stovepipe) to draw off the smoke, even when winds were swirling around the cabin top, had been the work of a year of experimentation and discussion with experts, but the cost had been minimal because most of the parts were salvage.
On one memorable occasion more than 30 years ago, Harfang had been becalmed in a fog off the Casquets Rock in the Channel Islands, around which all the shipping of northern Europe turns when heading to the Mediterranean or returning home. That episode had led to an engine being fitted, a rugged two-stroke, single-cylinder Stuart Turner built in 1946 but designed in the 1930s using Victorian engineering. It has served remarkably well, but there has been a great deal of "messing about" to keep it running smoothly.
Ratty did not need navigation gear on his river, but he would have loved it. Over the years the instruments have changed, and each time the task of the navigator has become easier. I wonder whether that is a good thing? Thirty years ago, navigation of a small vessel required the development of special skills that helped the navigator create a plot from several far-from-perfect sources of information. It called for mental agility. In the beginning was dead reckoning, using estimates of time and distance, which we measured with a Walker towed log line. That instrument, now relegated to my museum, has an impellor that is spun by motion through the water, but that is easily fouled by drifting seaweed. In the first years, I also used a radio direction finder to take bearings on shore beacons, swinging the aerial until a null point was found where the carrier signal from the beacon could not be heard, to plot my courses to France and Ireland, and once, in desperation, hoping to avoid destruction in a heavy gale off the rocky coast of North Cornwall. That equipment was also relegated to my museum when the Canadian Department of Transport decommissioned the radio beacons around the coast of Nova Scotia, and Harfang was given a Loran and a radar to deal with the fogs that were so much a part of sailing in these waters. Loran, which has now been all but replaced by the more accurate Global Positioning System, requires only that the navigator enter the coordinates of his or her destination, and then follow directions.
Hull, rigging, sails, fittings, and equipment all need constant attention in a boat - but in the sunshine, when moored in one of Nova Scotia's most beautiful rivers, such work is a pleasure as well as a challenge.
Harfang has hardly been to sea this year. In June, torrential rain delayed launching and found its way into the magneto on the Stuart Turner engine. Identifying the problem, and fixing it, took several prime weeks. Work on the engine in the cramped conditions of a small boat is increasingly difficult as age adds a dignity to my movements. When the magneto was dried out, the points were set too wide open. Speculation is that the increased resistance was enough to prevent the spark plug firing when inside the cylinder and under pressure, although there was a good spark when the plug was removed from the engine. None of this would have bothered Ratty: "Nothing seems really to matter, that's the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don't; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else; or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you've done it, there's always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you'd much better not." Had Ratty been going to sea in his boat he would have had to be serious about his maintenance work, but I take his point.
Finally, in August, there were three good days in which we sailed 10 miles along the coast, passing through Schooner Passage - one of Nova Scotia's tide races - into Lobster Bay, Jones Anchorage and Hog Island Channel, to anchor at Muises Point. Dinner at the end of a day at sea always becomes a feast: "'There's cold chicken inside it,' replied the Rat briefly."
The next day we worked a leisurely way back to Wedgeport in the Tusket River, coming up the sea reach in one long tack against the tide that cancelled out any leeway, allowing us to make the entrance to the little harbour without any exertion on our part. In the third morning, we again breasted the tide to return to sea, where the flood took us rapidly back through Schooner Passage, across the bay, around Reef Island, and up the Chebogue River to recover our mooring.
The weather was perfect all the way. Fifteen years ago, we had made the same voyage through Schooner Passage in a dense fog. As a check on my dead reckoning, we strained our ears to listen for the wail of fog horns. While a triumph of navigation, that experience had been a powerful stimulus for the acquisition of a radar. But recently, perhaps due to the effects of global warming, there has been so little summer fog in southwestern Nova Scotia waters that the radar is hardly needed.
The summer idyll of the August cruise gave way to September, with hurricanes passing to seaward drawing moderate to strong winds into their vortex. We set out for a sail yesterday, but by the time we got to Town Point, halfway down the river, I had to furl the jib and put a reef into the main. By the time we were approaching Crawleys Island in the mouth of the estuary, it had become evident we were not going to sea. Crawley's sound was full of whitecaps turned up by the "strong breeze" from the northwest, rated as a Force 6 on Admiral Beaufort's scale, 22 to 27 nautical miles per hour. Motoring back upriver against wind and ebb tide was not an option. So I took a chance and anchored in the small lee provided by Perry's Island north of Crawleys, where there were no breakers, although there was a cross sea from the wind coming around both sides of the island. Fortunately, the anchor gripped immediately in sand and mud, and we lay for three hours near a green spar buoy west of the narrows. As the tide fell, the shoals were exposed and provided us with better shelter. In brilliant sunshine, we found places out of the wind that sang in the rigging, and beat the flags.
When the tide began to ease, and the wind dropped to about 20 knots, small aluminum boats with outboard engines sped by in a flurry of foam, bringing clam diggers to the exposed flats. Giving them a cheerful wave, we managed to get the anchor up - itself a triumph of teamwork - and motored very slowly against the wind upriver, avoiding grounding by good luck. We were safe moored in time to have dinner, and the day ended with a stiff row ashore at sunset against wind and the flooding tide.
Today the wind remains fresh, and I am staying by the fire to write. It is in the news that the state of California is suing six carmakers for costs associated with their cars' greenhouse gas emissions. It has made me think about the contrast between the high horsepower consumer world that has had such an impact on our weather that it has even reduced the fog along the Atlantic coast, and my pleasure in pottering around "my" river and along "my" well-known coast in a small vessel propelled largely by sail, and incapable of defying wind and tide. If I have a motto it is "slow down and enjoy the detail." It is a necessary condition of sailing in a small boat that care be taken to work with wind and tide, recognizing nature's sovereignty. Perhaps Ratty is right that "the Wide World" beyond the riverbank and seacoast is "something that doesn't matter, either to you or me." The heavy, but graceful, flight of the heron, the bent figures of the clam diggers, the skill needed to cast anchor, and to get it up again, in a strong wind and tide, the skill needed to chose the anchorage and the experience to know when wind and sea are too much for safety, the friends who give you a cheerful wave as they pass in their boats, cooking dinner on a kerosene stove in the cabin at the end of the day, all these are the glories of an existence that leaves the tiniest of footprints on nature.