Casting Off (33 page)

‘Sì, Salvatore,’ I said. ‘Emma contentissima.’

Then, all of a sudden, mid-June was upon us and it was a mad rush to get
Panacea
into the water, cleaned, stocked up and ready for the summer’s guests. Like an episode of a home
renovation show, our project was over-budget and over-schedule and it was a race against time to finish. While I soaped, scrubbed and rinsed and polished everything above deck, a process which took
a good four hours and which I had to do five times over to get rid of half a year’s worth of accumulated boatyard dirt and still it wasn’t enough, Daniela and Carlo cleaned and tidied
away below decks and gradually, as tools were packed away, linens and cushions came out of storage and a thick coating of dust was wiped from surfaces, this ugly duckling of a workman’s tool
shed was transformed into a beautiful superyacht swan.

Panacea
was a 24-metre motorsailer, big by sailboat standards but only just qualifying by length as a superyacht. She had four guest cabins that could hold eight guests, with two master
cabins at the back, one in the middle and a twin cabin forward port side. Each cabin had its own shower, aircon and electric flushing toilets. The interior was satin-varnished wood, quite light and
modern compared to a lot of the heavy panelling often found on yachts. She had an indoor saloon and bar area and a large outdoor table with a plush, U-shaped sofa curving around three sides. Guests
also had a huge cushioned sunbathing area between the mast and the coach roof to lounge on and a further sofa on the bow. A week’s charter cost 21, 000 euros – and that was before food,
alcohol, marina fees, fuel, flights and transfers were added in. In total, a group were looking at a bill of about 50, 000 euros for a one-week holiday, depending on where in the world they were
flying in from – and what class they chose to travel.

Spirits were high as we took
Panacea
on her first voyage to Naples to pick up the owners and their son – perhaps a little too high. As the autopilot drove us along at 10 knots
across the Bay of Naples towards the city, Carlo asked me to stay on watch on deck while he went below to clean. Even though he had two cleaners on his staff – the exterior was my territory,
the interior Daniela’s – he liked to dust, wipe and tidy things away himself. Countless times in the past couple of days I had offered to help but he had dismissed me. I suspected his
emerging obsessive compulsiveness was his way of coping with the stress of the charter season beginning.

I stood by the wheel, keeping a lookout for other boats and playing around with the radar, familiarising myself with the instruments, as Imran came out on to the deck carrying a door that had to
be fitted to the bathroom in the crew cabin in the forepeak.

‘Em-ma,’ he said – Italians always pronounce every syllable, so the two ms in my name became separated, and although Imran was Indian he had a semi local accent –
‘You come help me with this door.’

‘I’m on watch, Imran,’ I said. ‘So I can’t leave the helm.’

Fury erupted from him and a stream of Italian expletives followed, some of which I understood because I had learned them over the past few weeks. Fuming, he stamped forward down the deck, opened
the hatch and threw the door down, climbing down the hole after it.

I tried to make amends when he came stomping back.

‘Sorry, Imran,’ I started to say, ‘but Carlo told me to go on watch and—’

‘Is nothing coming,’ he sneered. ‘I don’t want talk you, understand?’ He marched off inside.
What on earth is he so angry about?
I wondered.
Maybe I
made a mistake not leaving the helm – I suppose I could have done for a couple of minutes – but I don’t know the protocol here yet. But still, rehanging a door is a job he can
easily do himself – even I’ve done it. So why is he so cross?

Daniela told me not to worry about it. ‘He is just nervous,’ she said. And once we had arrived in Naples, embarked the owners, transferred them to Salina in the Aeolian islands and
disembarked them after a couple of days without a hitch, Imran hugged me and we were friends again. It was my first taste of the volatile Italian temper – and it was not going to be my
last.

It brought it home to me that this was not another of my sailing jollies but a job, with stressful situations just like any other. Still, I was confident that it couldn’t be as pressurised
as a newspaper newsroom. The sun was shining, I was surrounded by sea and I was on a boat – and being paid. The odd little fight was a small price to pay for all that.

T
he three days with the owners on board passed in a blur. I didn’t really have a clue what I was supposed to be doing so I just did exactly
as I was told, as I was told to do it: Em-ma, take this, give that, pull here, wipe clean, polish those, rinse these.

From what I had gleaned from my research into the industry, the role of a deckhand involved cleaning the outside of the boat, helping with anchoring, mooring and sailing and driving the guests
around in the tender. If it was a big boat with ‘toys’ – jet skis, submersibles, inflatable climbing walls (Google it) – the deckhand had to maintain those, too. Our
‘toys’ consisted of a few sets of snorkelling gear. I did my best with them, keeping the fins together in matching pairs and rinsing and placing them tidily away each day. Cleaning and
polishing was the main part of the job spec for exterior superyacht crew and I was expected to have a chamois leather effectively grafted on to one hand. Only now I was being told that I had more
duties than this – I was to be a waitress.

‘You will serve the people,’ Carlo told me. ‘I will teach you.’

This, I was not happy about. My first job, when I was 17, was waitressing in an Italian restaurant in Nottingham. Bar work I did for years and loved it but waitressing I could not stand –
I’m just too clumsy. It seems so awkward to me to lean over and between people, picking up and putting down dishes, remembering orders, fetching and carrying and trying not to drop hot food
in anyone’s lap. And now I was being made to do it on a moving boat. Doubly clumsy. Naively, I had assumed that Daniela, as the boat’s hostess, would be the waitress. But, no. I was
it.

Some of Carlo’s OCD must have rubbed off on me because I did actually take mild pleasure in setting the table. For the formal evening dinner, I had to cover the table with white linen and
place silver salvers out for each person, stacking the main-course plates and pasta dishes on top, aligning the boat’s name perfectly. There were different glasses for all kinds of wine and
real silver cutlery that I had buffed to a sheen. I was never going to win any superyacht table-dressing awards (yes, they actually do exist and taking first prize is considered the pinnacle of a
stewardess’s career. Imagine. Being praised for your Enchanted Moroccan Evening theme is the thing you covet the most, the next step up after you’ve already won the Best Coffee Service
rosette) – but, with the light from the moon and the candles bouncing off the glass, it did look lovely.

Setting the table is one thing, serving it is another – there are people to factor in. The plates were large and heavy and, with all those candles, salvers and glasses about, as well as
two types of wine and two varieties of water, tricky to place. And there was that aforementioned clumsiness. With the configuration of the sofa and table, if we had eight guests on board I had to
stand on tiptoes and press my hip bones into the wooden back of the seats to balance myself so that I could stretch far enough forward between two sets of guest shoulders to put a whole dressed 5kg
fish on the table. Countless times I dropped knives and forks on to the deck. God knows how I managed to avoid spearing any toes. I could tell which guests had domestic staff at home and which did
not. Those used to being served left everything as it was on the table while I struggled to clear around them, while those who didn’t have maids or butlers automatically stacked their plates
and handed them to me. For that, I was extremely grateful.

My days fell into a routine. I would roll out of bed at 6.45am – well, I say roll, but my bunk in the forepeak cabin that I had to share with Daniela was two metres off the floor, so I had
to swing myself sideways on to a vertical steel ladder while simultaneously ducking so that I didn’t clunk my head on the ceiling. Next I’d use the loo, perching sideways because there
wasn’t enough room in the miniscule bathroom to sit any other way, brush my teeth, dress in my day uniform of grey polo T-shirt and blue shorts and clamber up through the hatch on to the
deck. Tiptoeing barefoot, so as not to wake the guests sleeping beneath me, I’d creep into the kitchen to make a cup of tea and then start sweeping and rinsing away the crumbs from last
night’s dinner from the outdoor seating area and wiping and polishing the aft deck and brightwork. I’d check the angle of the sun in our location that morning and climb, standing
precariously on the back of the sofa, to zip up shades to protect our guests’ eyes. In the saloon I’d unwrap the knives and forks that Daniela had left out on a tray for me (they were
individually wrapped in pieces of kitchen paper because a guest had complained that hearing them chinking against each other in the night in the galley as the boat rocked in the gentle waves had
kept him awake) and, once the first guests had started to come out of their cabins, quickly set the table for breakfast. I couldn’t do it in advance because the summer sun made everything
hot. Breakfast could start at any time from 8am to 11.30am, depending on the guests, but I had to be ready in any case and wait until they were, too. I began to see why it is called ‘waiting
on’.

Breakfast was anything and everything the guests could want: pastries, bread, cereal, toast, hot and cold milk, cheeses, ham, eggs, omelettes, cake, biscuits, fruit, juice, tea, two kinds of
coffee – and anything else they requested was made to order, all coming out of a tiny galley that was about half the size of a domestic kitchen. Our first set of guests, a family of eight
from Central America, ordered scrambled eggs with sausage each morning for their kids. Every time I cleared their breakfast dishes away, the plate was full of little bits of untouched sausage. Why
they didn’t ask for just plain scrambled eggs, I don’t know.

But I quickly learned that the customer does always know best in this industry. If they want to hire a boat and travel through the night and rough seas to another country, even though they all
suffer horrendously from seasickness, then that’s what we’ll do. If, after a few days, they want to make the return journey from that same country because they’ve decided the sea
temperature is too cold for them, then that is fine as well. You want a special kind of ice cream for your teenage daughter’s bedtime drink? Of course, we’ll go ashore at 11pm and trawl
the restaurants until we find it. The wine is not cold enough? We’ll make more ice for you. The wine is too cold? Well, I am very sorry, sir, we will adjust the setting on the fridge. No, of
course I don’t mind you waking me up at 3am because your child wants a bowl of cereal. What kind would he prefer? You would like six Russian girls helicoptering out to your boat, along with
two boxes of condoms (size: large)? Not a problem. You want one more bottle of Cristal? Certainly – I will arrange for it to be brought by speedboat from the mainland. It will be here within
one hour. OK, so the last two incidents weren’t requests made by our guests but I was told that they did happen. Oh, and the delivery price of a solitary bottle of Champagne from Naples to
the island of Capri by speedboat at midnight, in case you are tempted, is a bargain at 1000 euros. We were not just cleaners, cooks, waitresses and boat drivers; we were servants, available 24/7
and ready and willing to do anything our (temporary) masters commanded.

Lunch was more formal than breakfast, with always two or three courses, and there were snacks and drinks between breakfast and lunch and lunch and dinner to be served, too. In one five-day
charter alone I served 185 coffees and five litres of ice cream. Cries of ‘Em-ma! Un caffè! Em-ma! Un gelato!’ followed me around the boat, punctuating my endless stints of
cleaning up after one meal had ended and before the next one began.

There was the ‘sailing’ to fit in as well – motoring really, as
Panacea
weighed 100 tonnes, there was barely any wind and, in any case, we couldn’t hoist the
sails because the sun shades were obstructing them. ‘The sails are there just for looking,’ Carlo told me.
I wish he’d made that clear before I’d accepted his job
offer
, I thought. What had seemed like the dream position of being a professional sailor was morphing into being a cleaner and a waiter, albeit a waiter with a good tan who didn’t have
to wear shoes. I lived on a boat and was surrounded by sea all the time but I missed sailing like crazy. Most of the other boats we saw were motor yachts – those Italians sure do love their
power, and they especially love driving their motorboats really fast while their white-string-bikini-clad wife/girlfriend/hired companion clings to the bow, trying to look nonchalant while in
reality her hair is being whipped into a furious tangle, her skin is being doused every few seconds by salty Mediterranean water and she is clutching on to the cream vinyl cushions for dear life.
There were no cruisers’ Hawaiian shirts here – it was all Hermès or Gucci linen, invariably white and worn unbuttoned over a pair of black Speedos, the better to show off the
mahogany suntan – and the size of the gut.

At least twice a day we moved to a different anchorage or marina. Some of them were so beautiful: in the shallow, turquoise waters of Cabo Pumice, named after the rough, foot-sloughing stones;
just 100 metres or so off the black volcanic beaches of the continuously smoking Stromboli; beneath the dramatic cliffs of Sorrento or Positano. Either the captain or I would drive the guests
ashore in the tender and somehow, in the middle of all that, I’d have to squeeze in washing the salt off the entire boat, showering myself and changing into my evening uniform of blue polo
T-shirt and trousers ready to serve the evening aperitivo drinks and dinner before crashing into bed at midnight, exhausted.