The first name change was a tongue-in-cheek reference to a business venture I was involved in but in the end it did not work out. As it turned out it was for the best but it meant the name had to go. I did not have to look very far for a new one.
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This is Grace, my lovely Black Labrador. She had seen me through separation from my wife, leaving home, living on my own and a host of other stressful events. An unquestioning companion she did whatever she was asked as fast as she could with cheerful willingness, the very definition of Alacrity. The boat had a new name that, with the word "with" preceding it, could also be used as an adjective when the need arose. As predicted, her luck changed with the name change because her crew list increased to two.
I met Tuulia at Southampton University where I was teaching in the December of 2008, about two weeks after Little Grace had been delivered to Coventry. It was not until the following year that a relationship started and as she lives in Finland this was through e-mails, that were work related at first, followed by phone calls and Skype. It was inevitable that during our conversations the subject of sailing would come up. Overall it went like this:
“Have you ever been sailing?” Please say yes, please say yes.
“Yes; I sailed for two weeks, around Corsica” Impressive! This could not be better, someone I really like and she sails!
“I was seasick all the time” oh no; that’s not so good “I was so sick that when they shouted from the deck there were dolphins I could not get up and I missed them; the one thing I really wanted to do was see dolphins”.
“Did you take seasickness tablets?”
“No I didn’t have any and they did not give me any” There’s hope!
“Did you get to do any of the sailing at all”.
“Only tying the fenders on as we came into port” Well that was a start.
“In fact I get sick really easily”. This was followed by examples of all the situations in which sickness had occurred, ranging from a helicopter flight to walking in the foothills of mountains.
I hung on to hope “But you didn’t take tablets on any of these occasions too, right?”
“No”
"So there is a chance they might help if you try sailing again?" Tuulia, now a vet but not at the time she sailed, agreed. What she did not tell me and did not tell me for over two years was that after the Corsica trip she had promised herself, her family and all her friends that she would never go sailing again.
"You know I’ve got a boat?”
“Yes, you mentioned it in Southampton”.
In the following silence I could still hear breathing at the end of the phone so I knew she is still there. Perhaps to break the silence or perhaps to justify feeling so seasick Tuulia continued. “It was really rough”.
“What was?”
“Sailing round the island, the weather was really bad and the sea very rough”. Credit where credit is due; at least she did not abandon ship and stayed on board for two weeks.
“It was so bad at one point that experienced members of the crew told the skipper that we should not go on. When he insisted they nearly refused to leave port”. It gets worse; she has experience of mutinous assembly. I made a mental note to read Mutiny on the Bounty. This need was confirmed by Tuulia’s next comment.
“My colleague and her husband have a boat” that can only be a good thing “a motor boat” not the same thing at all. “She says it’s alright but she insists that they stop where there is a hotel at night as she refuses to sleep on it”.
There was another long silence before I asked “Have you ever been camping?”
The answer in the negative and the preceding conversation left me reflecting on the fact that the distance between Tuulia and I meant that I would be sailing Little Grace with only the real Grace as crew, as I had always envisaged. But the spinners who weave the threads of our lives smiled and spun on and Little Grace's luck held.
