I went to the early September DCA rally on Coniston for more reasons than just plain sailing. I’d recently returned from a holiday in Falmouth. Earlier I’d been on the Broads for a week and I’d also attended 4 DCA rallies, mostly in the south-west, so it was a struggle to justify this one to my perplexed family. However I didn’t have to face the work of trailing and launching Black Jack David because I had been offered the loan of a boat on Coniston, and this was a special attraction. It was an ultra-fast, ultra-light sailing machine of the sort that I’d sometimes seen whizzing past me but had never before tried. I was motivated by that level of excitement which only comes in the presence of a certain amount of apprehension on the part of someone who had only recently returned to the water after 20 years’ absence.

The boat belonged to the last surviving Amazon Pirate. DCA members with a knowledge of children’s literature will know who I mean, though they may be surprised to learn that some fictional characters are based on real people. I arrived on Saturday 6th somewhat earlier than expected, to a lively wind and the promise of rain. The Amazon Pirate was sceptical.

“One young man was very confident and told me he knew all about these boats. He fell in backwards.” The laugh that accompanied this story would be hard to describe. “It will be raining by noon, but by tomorrow the wind will be lighter and the rain will have gone.” I knew better than to press my case too hard; no Amazon would allow her boat to pass into strange hands of which she was not entirely confident, and I was something of a latecomer as allies go. We managed a compromise and agreed to find the DCA rally. My plan was to create a situation where my hostess could not reasonably refuse me a sail, knowing that though a pirate, she was not of the black-hearted kind. Wet and windy at the Coniston Boating Centre, few of the DCA were ready to depart and those that might be persuaded had rigged their smallest sails and donned heavy oilskins. Hitching a ride was not an attractive proposition, so to save face, we agreed that we really ought to drive over to the other side of the lake to inspect Quickasaflash “just to make sure she’s all right for tomorrow.”

The boat had not been used since July and though secret and well-secured had once suffered at the hands of vandals. The only way to check her lakeworthiness was to hoist the sail and rig her for sailing. Attaching the boom to the gooseneck was difficult as several vital components were near seized but we managed. By some strange chance my lifejacket had accompanied me on the arduous journey through the subterranean culvert beneath the road that was the only means of land access to the secret launching place. With the boat rigged and all necessaries at hand, I could not decently be refused a sail. And then, as I caught a keen appraising glance from the Amazon Pirate, I realised that far from succeeding in manipulating her, I had been caught in a situation of my own making and that both my courage and my judgement were in the process of being subjected to a shrewd assessment. I was to be allowed to depart. A feeling of panic rose as I realised that the designers of this machine had included no allowance for reefing. Complicated control lines led to various parts of the sail and the blocks of the centre main-sheet were fixed directly to the boom. The old trick of trapping the sail bag in the rolled-up sail might work for the kicking strap, but not for the centre main as well. I thought about taking the sail around the mast a couple of times, but then I noticed that it was fully battened. Reefing was not an option. As to capsize, I would have to take my chance. To make matters worse, we were on a lee shore; on one side a long promontory, on the other, a barbed wire fence stretched far into the lake. The word ‘embayed’ crept into my mind.

There comes a time when the only course is to cease deliberation and act. I allowed myself one last quick check of the boat, then pushed, shoved and jumped. Judging the dagger board and the depth as best I could, I passed safely by the Scilla of barbed wire. As I bore away and adjusted the sheet, I felt a sensation of acceleration that I have never before experienced under sail and had only glimpsed second hand and from a distance when I had watched wind surfers. By now I was wet through from the rain and the launch, but did not care. I started to sing; it was lucky that I was far from other ears more sensitive than mine. As I shot past Cariad I shouted a quick hullo before disappearing into the rain. “Who is this madman?” asked the startled expressions aboard the Wayfarer.

I arrived at the Coniston Boating Centre, sailing up the lake faster even than when I had taken Black Jack David the same route in a force 6. I tried a dummy run at landing to assess how quickly the way would be taken off by coming into the wind, then on the second time round came up and leapt out near the just-launched Water Mouse. I was distracted for a moment by a tall lean bespectacled figure who was jumping up and down and waving his umbrella at me.

“What is that boat?” he cried. “Where can I get one..?”

“It’s a Splash,” I replied, and on cue Quickasaflash, who had been dancing about on the end of the painter that I held like a puppy on a lead, demonstrated the word by capsizing loudly in the knee-deep water. It was at that point that I became aware of another figure on the beach.

Any ship’s captain who arrives to find his owner waiting for him in such circumstances may well feel apprehensive, but to my relief there was no talk of keel-hauling. Instead, we fried our bacon in her camper van. I made a very foolish remark about how much everyone else was reefed, hoping that a few “tame galoots” or “barbecued billygoats’ would be forthcoming. The Amazon Pirate’s response confounded me — she was thinking of coming out herself as she hadn’t taken Quickasaflash on the water for at least a month. It was no part of my plan to entice a near octogenarian onto the water on such a day in such a boat, even if she could sail it ten times more proficiently than me. However, I was being teased, and we set out after lunch in our respective conveyances, with some faint hope of my catching up with the now departed fleet. As I passed the secret launch site, the fleet was nowhere to be seen and I had some thoughts of sailing on to Peel Island. But wet through myself I decided that enough was enough. We recovered Quickasaflash, and after I had put on dry clothes, repaired to the pub.

The next day was sunny with a fine steady wind. Unfortunately, I had not yet learned when to leave well alone, and seeing a sailing surf-board in the back garden, I naively enquired about it. It turned out to be a relic of the Amazon Pirate’s days when she had gleaned a living by hiring such craft out to overconfident French Legionnaires in Corsica. Before I knew where I was, I was being given a course of instruction in wind-surfing on the front lawn. Having at one time concluded that no force on earth would tempt me onto ‘one of those things’ I was beginning to feel seriously alarmed. Luckily it was lunch time, which gave me space to collect my thoughts and explain to my hostess that two entirely new experiences in the same weekend might just be one too many. Although she was clearly disappointed, this seemed to convince her that at any rate I knew my own limitations, and I was allowed to take the keys to the padlocks and chains securing Quickasaflash so as to launch and sail her by myself. I launched at around 4.00 o’clock. The wind had veered slightly since the previous day, and it was a fine reach down the lake towards Peel Island. As I passed Torver Common where the gusts sweep down over the bare hillside, I found that with my growing confidence and knowledge, I could cope well enough. The best tactic seemed to be to raise the dagger board and bear away in the strongest squalls, planing off at high velocity, then to make up ground to windward in the intermediate gusts before resuming my course to await whatever the Old Man would throw at me next. I left this challenging part of the lake and came creaming up to Peel island in a steady wind, and yet an uneasy thought arose from nowhere that the Old Man had not quite finished with me. As I passed the island, I was beset by one last tremendous gust. Unluckily, I had too much plate down, and although I let go the sail and rounded up into the wind, these instinctive keelboat tactics did not work.

They say that at such moments your life passes before your eyes in the snap of two fingers. On this occasion, it began with an ironic chorus, chanting the DCA motto “capsize is not an option.” This was followed by the thought “Oh I do so hate it when this happens,” which was immediately displaced by a lightning recollection of the description given me by the Amazon Pirate the previous evening of Donald Campbell’s demise, which she had witnessed at first hand. This would be about the deepest part of the lake. What if she inverted..? There was no-one else about. Imitating the boat’s name, I straddled the side as she was going over, placing one foot lightly on the dagger board just by the hull, and started jerking at the gunwales with my hands to free the mast and sail from the water. As she came back, I hopped smartly back in again so as to avoid going back over the other way, and discovered to my delight that I was only wet to the top of my thighs. I planed away with the self-bailer working overtime; the whole episode must have taken under a minute.

I could not see the fleet anywhere at the foot of the lake, so I decided to land on Peel Island. The water was very high, and much of the rock that would normally be visible around the secret harbours was hidden, and in this wind I could not risk someone else’s boat by attempting to enter either of them. Instead, I went for the landing place facing the mainland, knowing that with this amount of water and a shallow boat, all but the worst of the rocks would be well covered. I rounded up into the wind, discovering that the whole beach was covered to an unknown depth as the water was right up to the vertical rock face. I only had the tiny sloping path to land on, so completely becalmed in the lee of the island, I gently waggled the tiller a few times using the raised rudder to scull my way in.

I spent ten happy minutes revisiting the island. As I stood looking down at ‘my’ boat, another craft hove into sight, making the passage between the island and mainland. It was a yawl rigged lugger with three bright red terylene sails and a gleaming white mock-clinker fibreglass hull. I recognised the type instantly, it was a Dinky-winky-cockle-shrimpy-cornish-winkle-bass-boat. “The idiots,” I thought. “They’ll pile up on the rocks.” My first instinct was to shout and warn them, but it was too late. Then I recalled the high level of the lake and that such boats often have centreboards rather than keels. Besides, they looked as if they knew what they were doing and since they carried no burgee that was known to me, I decided not to start bellowing across the lake. Once I had seen them safely pass, I took my leave of the island.

I now felt that I had finally begun to master the art of sailing Quickasaflash, and started to use the toe-straps properly as the best means to control the boat, overcoming my fear of a sudden lull and a ducking by maintaining a high level of alertness. This was becoming the most exhilarating sail of my life as I darted to and fro about the lake for the sheer pleasure of it. Then I miscalculated and hit the dead patch that usually hangs about off Fir Island. The yawl proved that its skipper did know what he was doing by staying inshore where the wind was. A demon was in me and I could not allow myself to be passed, so taking advantage of a sudden gust, I headed straight for where I knew the wind would be, which took me onto a collision course with the yawl. With my sail between me and them, they must have thought I hadn’t seen them, and as I hardened up in the nick of time, I peered under the sail to see two very startled faces. I realised that I had turned into a combination of Mr Toad and the Hullabaloos.

“I’m just looking for the wind,” I shouted apologetically. “We don’t mind,” they shouted back. “What is that boat?” “It’s a Splash,” I yelled back as I took off on the plane once more.

I tore up the lake to the Boating Centre, but by now all the DCA crew had departed. I was heading towards home when a thought struck me of a promise I had made. I altered course back up the lake for Bank Ground farm, crossing the bows of the bemused yawl as I did so. In the distance by the boat sheds I could see real clinker-built dinghies. As I charged up to the beach, their skippers and crew left what they were doing to come and watch the impending disaster, and maybe to pick up the pieces afterwards. To disappoint them, I yanked up the plate and spun round a few yards off shore.

“Are you Tideways?” I yelled. “Yes,” came the astonished reply. “Well Aidan de la Mare sends his apologies.” “We know about that. But what is that boat?” “It’s a Splash. Bye bye.”