The French yacht

This story dates back to earlier times in La Gomera. It was brought to mind by… Well, let's tell the story first.

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During a brief pause, I turned to the beefy young local in swim shorts behind me. 'Why exactly are we pulling this?'

He shrugged, grinning. Pulling on a long rope that stretches from the beach into the sea is fun. There was resistance but nothing obvious out there to cause it.

'Vale, vamos!' – Right, let's go! A young man with blonde curly hair and an accent definitely not Spanish conveyed a reassuring sense of purpose. He was standing to one side rather than pulling on the rope, a sure sign of leadership. We began to heave again, about a dozen of us working more-or-less in unison.

Higher up the beach behind us a sailing yacht sat forlornly propped on piles of old rubber tyres, leaning sideways as though recalling southerly wind in better days. Something like 10 metres in length, it was the kind of craft in which intrepid pensioners sail single-handed around the globe or weekenders take the kids for a spin off the Isle of Wight.

It belonged, I already knew, to two young French lads, one of whom was the curly-haired overseer of the rope team. His name was Michel. His friend Jean-Paul was smaller, darker and more typically Gallic, with a narrow nose and a wry grin. We first encountered them a few days earlier walking around their stranded yacht like two toddlers wondering what was wrong with Mum.

'Qué pasó?', what happened, we asked them with Gomeran directness.

Michel responded in English. They had sailed into San Sebastián harbour the previous evening and moored to a buoy in the harbour. After rowing ashore in their dinghy to buy provisions and have supper, they returned to their boat and eventually went to bed.

'It was very windy last night, you know?' Michel said. Yes, we'd heard it. Winds can get very gusty in the complex weather systems that drift here from across the Atlantic. Michel had woken in the early morning sensing unexpected movement, poked his head outside and found they were being blown towards the beach, towing the mooring buoy behind them. It had come loose from the sea bed.

'We only had a couple of minutes to do anything. I tried to start the engine but the battery was flat.'

'It's buggered,' contributed Jean-Paul helpfully.

They had borrowed the yacht from Michel's father, who should have been here on the beach to see what happens when you let two young men sail unsupervised from Sète and head off into adventure. Jean-Paul was on a rest break from his day job as a waiter and night job as the drummer in a rock band. I'm not sure what Michel's job was, but I suspect it was more of an occupation than a job. They were on a let's-see-what-happens holiday, they told us. On their way to the Canaries they had called into a port somewhere on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Hmm.

The boat was damaged by its unintended encounter with the beach but not too seriously. Its traditional timber hull had sprung a plank but they had now managed to bang it back into place and squeeze in enough filler to keep out the sea, they hoped, while they sailed around the south coast of La Gomera to the port of Santiago, where there was a boatyard with a crane and experts to effect a more reliable repair.

First, however, they had to get the thing back into the sea. Which is why we were all pulling on this rope. Within a few minutes the objective was revealed: our rope was attached to a thicker and tougher one which we now hauled onto the sand. A hawser, the kind of rope they use for mooring ferries to wharfside bollards.

At the far end of this hawser, out in the bay, was an ugly but utilitarian vessel that transported people and equipment to a settlement of dubious repute (in those days) just around the coast.

The two French lads, with their support team of rope pullers and an increasing number of others, attached the hawser to a cat's cradle of ropes wrapped around the hull of their boat and, in due course, the sturdy vessel in the bay tugged it down the beach and into the waves. It floated, bobbing apparently happily, while the boys rowed out to it in their dinghy and climbed aboard.

We met them again a couple of days later, arriving back on the beach in the dinghy. The yacht was moored out in the bay, still healthily upright.

'How did it go? Boat repaired?'

'No,' Michel said. 'They didn't really want to know about it.'

'Didn't want to lift your boat out of the water?'

'Well, no…' Michel said, oddly reticent. 'I think they didn't like us very much.'

'Questions, questions…' amplified Jean-Paul.

'And they wanted the money first, before they'd do anything.'

'Huge amount,' said Jean-Paul. 'Ridiculous. We haven't got that much! Not in cash. We'd have had to…'

He paused. His friend Michel had placed a foot heavily on his toes.

They left the following day, heading back to France with fingers crossed that the deviant plank wouldn't ping out of place again. We know they made it because they arrived back in San Sebastián two years later in the same craft and - incredible this, but true - once again managed to get it shipwrecked on the same beach, in much the same way.

Whatever it was that brought them here, it wasn't just a holiday and, even more surely, they weren't very good at it.

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Visiting yachts no longer moor in the open bay, San Sebastián now has a sheltered marina with its own crane and facilities. The photo above is from the era of this story.

The coastal settlement of dubious repute I mentioned has transformed itself into a highly respectable (and expensive) retreat for clients seeking tranquility, healthy food, restorative massages and optional trips to town on a sleek motor launch.

Two recent events brought this memory back to the surface. One was the arrival of a large number of visitors, mostly young and fit, who had committed to setting off from La Gomera to row across the Atlantic to Antigua. Like Columbus, but without the sails, they faced a journey of around 3,000 miles. Since 2003 this has been an annual fixture in which somewhere around 30 boats take part with crews from one to five rowers. They're not just ordinary rowing boats, of course, but chunky little vessels with small cabins and helpful electronics. So far they've proved unsinkable, which is comforting for the mums and dads fearfully following their mad offspring.

The other event, reported in the local newsletters, was the interception by the marine Guardia Civil of a motor vessel heading past the Canary Islands. A smart, modern semi-rigid craft, it had a cabin in which the police found two men and 2,500 kilos of cocaine. It was packaged in 86 bundles which the guys hadn't even bothered to try and conceal, probably intending to transfer them at sea to smaller boats for delivery to European ports. There is a well known 'Atlantic Route' for the transport of drugs from the Americas and the Caribbean. However, as far as I'm aware La Gomera plays no active role in that, and our two young seafarers were certainly not part of any large-scale organisation.