Juggler's Logbook

"I'm hungry for a teacake... and a waitresses smile!"

"Juggler" is a Halcyon 23 sailing boat. The following is a logbook of her summer cruise from Bristol to somewhere West.

The log is currently (August, 2000) updated daily using a Psion series 5 handheld computer and an Ericsson SH888 mobile phone which has an infra-red modem.

I drink coffee as the sun rises over Hillsborough Head, to the East. Two dogs bark, one goes "Rugh, rugh, rugh, rugh", the other goes "Hgur, hgur, hgur, hgur". I sit on the bucket and laugh to myself at them. The cabin is open to the sunshine which drives out the clamminess from rainy days and sweaty nights.

One night I awoke in the early hours, about 2 am, and, popped my head out of the forehatch to check the dinghy was secured. When the tide leaves it knocks the dinghy around for a few minutes just when the surge breaks onto the sand at that point. Anyway as I peered over the side I heard a wolf-whistle! Only my shoulders were visible so I wasn't being overly careless. Can a girl get no peace, anywhere?

The white surf boils at the base of Hillsborough Head, just outside the harbour. High cumulous clouds move swiftly towards the East. What really put me off sailing today was a description in the weather forecast of a "frontal trough" followed by a "frontal wave" passing over the area. I don't know exactly what they are but I know I'd rather cling to the safe harbour with anything but ideal conditions outside.
One of the min reasons I have been lucky in my sailing experiences is that time has never been pressing. Many sailors try to rush back to work on the Monday, for instance, heading out in force 5 and force 6 forecast winds. The way I see it is a force 5 can easily turn into a force 7, whereas a force 3 or 4 rarely does. There is a big difference between a fresh wind coming off the shore and fresh wind in the open sea. The shore makes for smooth seas and sailing is very pleasant with offshore breezes, fast and without the danger of being blown ashore.

I need to use a laundry, clothes rapidly get grubby and clammy when the dinghy is used to get ashore several times a day. When seawater dries it leaves a salt deposit which is hydroscopic (absorbs water). At night things feel damp after they have been dry during the day. My sleeping quilt feels unpleasant after all that muggy weather, I have woken several times with rain coming into the open hatch straight onto my bed. At least with this fresher weather I shall feel less clammy.

Later I shall go to the cafe' on the corner which I have been to twice and found friendly staff, good coffee (decaffeinated) and a view of Ilfracombe crazy golf course. So many cafe's are poky and smothered with signs advertising fish 'n' chips and today's special grilled whatever. Families file in to consume the specials which are nothing special. The sand makes one hungry though.
The "Red Petticoa" (which has the end 't' missing but no-one cares) has the same music loudly playing every day. This consists of a barrel organ sound playing "Who do you think you are kidding Mr Hitler?" (the theme from Dad's Army) and other "favourites". The owner resolutely glares out through thick black eyebrows towards a bin across the road which is overflowing with chip wrappers. The music brings 'em in and turfs 'em out, no-one can stand more than 5 minutes of it. Apart from the owner who simply knows it works.

Charts, pencil and dividers lay on the bunk opposite. The old (1973) chart makes the sea look hostile being printed without colours. The new chart has green land yellow beaches and blue sea which makes it all look like a summer holiday's jaunt! The way information is presented affects ones perception of the situation. Colour printing certainly makes me feel less uneasy about putting out to sea. That is good in that the old discourse of shipwrecks, fathoms, squids and mermaids is subverted in favour of a clearly presented chart for yachts. Decisions are made on the basis of relevant, updated, information and facts rather than semi-legends, which crowd the older chart like barnacles on a rock. The major difference is what is left out on the new chart. Any wrecks with depths over them of more than the largest yachts draught, are omitted and left clear pretty blue. Just the pertinent depths are written in metres and interspersed with seabed characteristics (Wd for weed; Rk for rock; Oz for ooze; Sh for shells and so on).
A wreck with 11 fathoms over it, at the very least (A fathom is 6 feet), 5 miles North-East of Hartland Point is to be honest, history.
There are thousands of wrecks scattered around the coast all with probably tragic circumstances. I wonder what a road map would look like if it included all the right-offs of vehicles over the history of motoring! They would be crowded around crossroads and steep hills with bends at the bottom. They would also be concentrated at the borders of towns and cities because that is where most traffic is. In the same way that shipwrecks are clustered around bays and harbours.

The Oldenburg, a ferry running between Ilfracombe and Lundy Island, wallows slowly, gently, against the pier. Brown squeaking Herring Gull young are now displaced by holidaymakers around the edge of the harbour. Looking at life mediated by the seashore. I will put on a little foundation to cover my hardened features (of a life of leisure) and make my way to "my cafe'" now. I'm hungry for a teacake and a waitresses smile!

A class embarrassment caused by "Cream Teas" exists in the word "scone". Whether one says scon or scown is widely argued. The family nearby confronted it with an East Midlands accent, Son, "What's a cream tea?". Mum, "It's a cup of tea with a scown". The word scurried around briefly in the cafe terrace corner, like the eddy of an August gust, and the conversation moved onto doughnuts.

A good answer would be that a cream tea is something one can buy in a plastic box, from the freezer food department of Sainsbury's, thus avoiding the scon/scown chicane altogether. Admittedly the scone debate existed entirely inside my head, but I'm sure I felt a tug at the social fabric as the word was uttered.

Seven crazy golfer's fresh from a game settle chattily into the Street Cafe' terrace, happy like adolescents. A red First bus is jammed with a white, Laundry Textile Rentals van, momentarily, beside the terrace, it's 11 am, the top of the morning. A promotion trailer with a wrap-around photograph of Lundy Island stays shut. It informs me that I can surf the web to Lundy, at, http://www.lundy.co.uk. As my cousin David said before I set off on Juggler, "why go on a real voyage if you can do it virtually?".
As Jacques Derrida has indicated, binary oppositions are organised in a hierarchy, one superior to the other. The virtual Lundy/voyage is dependent upon the actual Lundy/voyage as a referent. If I plunged into Baudrillard's sea of signifiers without reference to actual events, what could I write? So far the criteria for what to put down here is wholly my own responses, such as fear, tears, giggles (and a fascination with the medium of the web).

Or put simply, "One's reach should exceed one's grasp". Robert Browning.

De-centred writing, that is publishing each page as it is written, does blur the boundary between the virtual voyage and the actual voyage. usually I am out of sight and out of mind for my friends and family. Putting up a daily log on the web has the effect of enmeshing those other lives with my own fortunes. Somewhere in Cambridgeshire, my mother and father, somewhat anxiously, look into the "live" arena of an online logbook. No news is a cause of worry whereas stories of snagged anchors and water ingress are equally nerve wracking. The virtual is not insubstantial by any means. The actual passage is lived, albeit with a time lag, in the present. Throughout the day thoughts about my progress intrude immanently within the lives of others in a way that a postcard and telephone call would not. The difference would be in the event of a long period of no news from myself, the narrative itself would require some sort of action from concerned readers, as participants in the narrative. The story would have to be picked up and redirected by the readers in an attempt to cause a favourable outcome..
In reality of course the story might end in a torn abruptness, untouched by onlookers, in the affray of disaster. Imagine the hole that would make in participants lives, not virtual at all. That is not to say I take risks in order to feel something real and to force others to see me as real. Rather, I resist calls to come away from the border, where I find an emerging sense of authentic self, as if from an undersea volcanic fault.

This is the real risk we live under. It is the urge to retreat from the emerging self at the boundary of ones own lived experience. To say enough is enough and let it all start to set hard and consolidate into a form of jaded adulthood.
"I'm much too fast to take that test." (David Bowie)