‘Simmer dims’
Shetland’s long, light evenings are upon us...
Summer is beautiful here in Shetland. The hills are soft green, with bright marsh marigolds filling every burn. After a winter of grey, the guillemots are smart in their black and white summer plumage, the kittiwakes are in pairs on the cliffs, chittering Arctic terns have made it back from Africa, and there are puffins in the voe, along with otters, seal, porpoises and even whales. The winds are softer, the temperature soars. Best of all, there are the ‘simmer dims’, the lovely long nights, when you get to drift home at eleven, in the last of the wind.
We sailors are desperately hoping to get back to normal this summer. It would be so good to get the bairns’ sailing going, for example. It’s been two years now since there was a line of enthusiastic faces in front of me, with the mostly correctly rigged pink-sailed Picos ready at the pier. They’ll not have forgotten everything they knew – after fifteen minutes of chaotic buzzing around the marina entrance like a fly trying to get through a window pane, then it’ll click back in, and they’ll be whizzing all over the place.
We’re looking at starting again during the holidays (July and the first half of
August, here in Scotland), which might give the chance to do a proper expedition. Bairns love going outside their usual limits, so it would be fun to sail the three miles down to the otherwise inaccessible island of Papa Little, maybe build a fire on the beach and heat a tin of frankfurters, explore a bit and sail home.
Then there are the regattas. Up here the first sailing regatta is at Brae, on the first weekend of July. There’s a race round the island of Linga on Wednesday evening, though it’s actually a gentle drift, because it’s always flat calm for that one. There are races all day on Saturday, with a pause for lunch, and Sunday afternoon is a longer race. After that, the party goes round the west side of Shetland, weekend after weekend. Aith, my home port, incorporating Round Papa Little; Walls, which used to include a Round Foula race, Foula being the island 17 miles offshore to the west, with spectacular seabird cliffs; Skeld, which includes a carnival theme. Scalloway’s the last of the westside regattas, and then, for the really keen racers, there’s a trip around the south of our main island to arrive in Lerwick, on the east coast, in time for the Shetland Interclub.
Numbers? Well, maybe ten yachts ranging in size from a 22ft Pandora up to a Moody 36. Most of them are from Brae, and they work on a fiendishly esoteric handicapping system depending on how each yacht has done in the previous year’s points races. There are a handful of keen dinghies, a Mirror class, and the occasional dipping lug boat – a Vikingstyle double-ender with a square sail which needs to be dropped to tack.
Healthy exercise
There’s no real reason why we can’t hold regattas. Out in the open air, as socially distanced as ten yachts on a short starting line can contrive, is surely considered healthy exercise? You’d have thought the NHS would be cheering us on. We could stay aboard our own boats throughout, and catch up on the news speaking from cockpit to cockpit. As the ultimate sacrifice, we could even bring our own lunches. Yes, our spectacularly good sit-down regatta lunch of soup, beef and tatties, tea and biscuits may have to be sacrificed. I said as much to Philip, my non-sailing spouse, who crews for the Aith regatta, and he made a horrified face. ‘Do all that work,’ he gasped, ‘and not get a lunch to see you through it?’
Thing is, though I managed plenty of sailing last year, I miss my fellow sailors. I miss the cameraderie, and those leisurely conversations that start with ‘I’m not sure about the position of those jib cars’ and end up an hour later with the aforesaid jib cars back almost exactly where they started. I miss the sailing gossip and the outrageous jokes.
Ah well, we’ll see. In the meantime, there is excitement looming: Aith is getting regular visits from a pod of killer whales. So far I haven’t been out when they’ve been around but I reckon it’s just a matter of time before the 6ft-high sail of the bull comes up beside my Karima. So long as he doesn’t mistake me for a seal...