Sailing in Baltimore by Jasper Winn

My friend Rob has an infallible recipe for a happy life:

"If you can play guitar, cook an edible meal out of nothing and crew a sailing boat, people will always want you around." As a restaurateur turned guitar toting sea-dog with his own yacht, he probably knows what he's talking about.

Rob also reckons that the south-west coast of Ireland has some of the best sailing grounds in the world - particularly around Roaring Water Bay in West Cork. Scattered across its expanse of water are the Carbery Hundred Islands which the pedantic can count if they walk the hills surrounding the bay. Some of the islands are no more than a knob of rock coated in gorse and bracken and bearded with seaweed; ten or so are big enough to have been inhabited in the past; four or five carry summer populations and in the case of the two largest islands, Sherkin and Cape Clear (the latter more correctly an off-shore island) there are year-round, vibrant communities.

From the earliest days of skin covered currachs to the 16th century pirates seeking shelter, and from the huge mackerel fishing fleets of the turn of last century to today’s flotillas of sailing dinghies and cruising yachts, Roaring Water has favoured the water-borne. And the town of Baltimore at the side of the bay has provided for sailors' needs over the centuries, whether supplying netting lofts and boatyards, or bawdy houses and pubs.

Over the past fifteen years I’ve sailed various boats of differing seaworthiness in the bay and along the coast. I've played a fair bit of guitar at the all night sessions in the island's pubs, too. And even cooked the odd meal along the way; even if no more than a billycan of mussels or a mess of asparagus-like samphire cooked on a driftwood fire. Roaring Water Bay and Baltimore have always seemed to uphold Rob's tripartite dictum for happiness.

It didn't seem too much of a gamble, then, to arrive in the town on a May Saturday, in the hope of picking up a couple of day's sailing. It was a 'soft' day - the rain hanging in the air half-way between a mist and a downpour - when I dumped my kitbag on the quay and my timing was impeccable. Nigel Towse, an old island acquaintance, was running down from the shops with a hank of lanyard in his hands. His beard and hair channeled water off his face. "How'y're doing? Do you want to come aboard? We're just off for a sail."

'Aboard' was his 33' West Cork Long Island Mackerel yawl. As a faithful replica of the bay's 19th century working boats, 'An Run' is a ropes, canvas and solid wood sort of vessel. Her bowsprit carries two foresails, and her large mainsail is gaff rigged, with an upside-down triangle of topsail to fill the gap at the masthead. She's the kind of boat that demands sure knot tying from her crew and an acceptance of salt water sluicing down one’s neck and ending up in one’s boots.

I stuffed my bag in the tiny shelter up forward that held the tea brewing kit and odd sacks and spare sails. A few minutes later I was shinning up the mast to whip a flag halyard to the stays. Nigel was taking 'An Run' out for her 'shakedown' voyage - the first trip of the season. Tradition dictated that important equipment was forgotten and replacements improvised with string and bits of wood. Naturally we were still rigging as we cast off from the harbour wall and set out into the bay.

Richard, a Sherkin Island fisherman, was along on a busman's holiday, demanding "that there'll be no use of the four-letter 'F' word on this boat. Nobody mention 'F,' 'I,'S,' 'H.'" Like Nigel, Richard had a full set of whiskers and yellow oil-skins. By comparison I felt woefully unhirsute and under waterproofed to face the weather beyond the harbour mouth.

En route to the open seas and out first sight of the Fastnet lighthouse, we slewed alongside the Sherkin pontoon and nudged it just long enough to take on Nigel's two lads and a bag of biscuits. Freed from the land and fully crewed, we raised sail.

As an authentic old-style working boat, 'An Run' required authentic old style grit and muscle to sail her. Hoisting the main was a two-man job, cheating the halyards in inch by inch as the boat's outline tightened and slackened in the growing swell. Helming the vessel was like handling a wily horse. One moment demanding a sensitive physicality that eased her down the face of a wave in a sizzle of surf, and the next demanding brute strength to bludgeon her prow into a rising hillock of sloppy green water. And as the wind strengthened- rising from a four to a stiff five or so as we passed the landward beacon - 'An Run' heeled over until her deck sliced through the jostling blocks of water, forcing us up onto the weather rail, feet braced against the coaming.

Actually in the boat, this 45-degree lean didn't seem extreme. But looking ahead we could see 'Shamrock II,' 'An Run's' sister ship, canted over, bottom exposed and thumping off the crests of the waves into the troughs with sickening lurches. It was like watching a mirror image of our own progress.

As we sailed, Nigel gave me the story of the recreation of the two yawls. Both boats had been built in Liam Hegarty's boatyard in Baltimore.

"That's Liam's boat, the 'Shamrock II' and all the details and measurements were taken from an original Long Island boat we found rotting away up a creek. A hundred years old or more." Authenticity for the project had been vouched for in interviews with old seamen from the islands who recalled using fleets of the boats for netting mackerel far out to sea, or for carrying peat blocks and sheep between the islands.

For Nigel his boat was a link with the past, enabling him to sail the old seaways:

"Some of those old sailors were trading in their boats west along to Kerry or up to the harbour in Cork city. And when the ocean liners first sighted land coming across from America, fellas in these boats would sail out to meet them and pick up the Irish mail to bring ashore. You could take one of these boats anywhere, if you knew enough about sailing them."

By now the wind had strengthened across the sea's encircling horizon. It wasn't heavy weather, but was enough to force us to reef. Leaving the two lads wrestling the tiller Nigel, Richard and I pulled in a tuck of heavy, flapping canvas. Tying the reefing points around the roll of canvas and the swinging room was like trying to lace a frisky elephant into a set of16-hole Doc Martens. But the shortened sail eased our speed from crazed to merely thrilling as we turned and ran back into the bay.

We moored off Sherkin Island, and rowed ashore in a leaking punt. A half-mile squelching walk down a rutted lane and we were ducking into the 'Jolly Roger' pub and ordering hot whiskeys. The pirate name was appropriate. In the first 20 years of the17th century, sailors who had been discharged from the British Navy at the end of the hostilities with Spain were reluctant to forego the good life of privateering and plundering they had got used to in Naval warfare. Many stole ships and went into business as pirates. Baltimore, with its plethora of islands and creeks with a maze of escape routes to the open sea, became their European base. The town enlarged to cater for a pirate economy providing victuals, shipwrights and bars, as well as the merchants who would buy the luxuries plundered from the pirates' victims.

Sherkin was a pirate kingdom for a brief period of prosperity, providing beaches for careening ships, a safe landfall and opportunity for carousing. Now a community of 90 people with a large number of 'incomers', the island has retained an air of independence. "Ireland is an island off the coast of Sherkin," first time visitors are invariably told to explain any eccentricity in island life. And for visitors in summer, Sherkin is a paradise. Untouched by herbicides the ditches and tiny fields are a riot of wild flowers, and otters, foxes and numerous species of birds give the air of childhood summers thought lost for ever. Even the island's few cars are quaint, rather than intrusive, rotted by rust and noisy, with boxes for seats and missing doors as if about to collapse in a circus ring as a clown's act.

'The Jolly' is one of two bars on the island, and known for its late night music sessions. The availability of late drinks ("We're not very good on closing time. You'd be listening to the music and you'd forget to look at the clock and so how would anybody know when to call 'time?'") and the excellence of the music are attractions enough to tempt many mainlanders over. And once again seafarers score in Roaring Water Bay. For long after the ferry has made its last trip from the mainland, rowing boats and tenders, or fully sailed yachts will slide into the darkened island harbour, and a scraping of sea boots and crackle of oilskins announce a group over from Baltimore's two sailing schools.

That night in the Jolly Roger, there were two musicians up from Cork city, Catherine and Padraigh, with an arsenal of low-whistles, and pipes, and banjos and guitars. Enough to go round. There were jigs and reels, then songs that everyone knew and sang along with. Strangers were invited to take up a guitar and "give it a lash." Pints of stout lined up along the tables and drained slowly away. "Go on now, play something would you. Somebody give this man a whiskey, encourage him a bit."

It was the early hours of the morning when I walked the third of the island's length to where I was staying. There was the sound of seabirds on the shoreline. Then even darker dark as the road ran through a tunnel of fuschias. The slapping of shrouds against a mast where a cutter lay moored in the inner bay. A voice from the dark, somebody else walking home, giving reassuring greeting.

The next day I bobbed back across a sparkling sea to the mainland. As we passed the channel buoy we saw coming into the harbour an ancient two-master under full sail. This was the 'Ilan.' Built in Baltimore's boatyard 70 years before, she had been sailed to the Falklands and for sixty years been the Falklands Islands' supply boat.

I'd been told that once you've sailed in Baltimore's waters, you always hanker to return. The 'Ilan' had returned. Just as the Long Island Mackerel yawls had returned to sail again.