THE TALE OF TUG COBLE FROM STAITHES... (A fictional nautical fellow...)

 The Tale Of Tug Coble From Staithes…

(A fictional nautical fellow...) 

(TRADITIONAL'COBLE' BOAT IN THE FOREGROUND...)

Tug Coble lived near the sea at Staithes, once a thriving fishing port but despite his stern exterior, people would hold him in high esteem. He had played full-back for the local rugby team, being secure at ketching the ball and being able to punt it accurately. Sadly, his sports career was often hampered by dope, as he loved smoking the occasional skiff, often having to lilo amongst the junk in his fishing vessel until he recovered. He secretly called this recreation ‘being on his speed-boat’…

(STAITHES HARBOUR: LOVE IT THERE...)

He launched into song too, often appearing at a gig in the local nightclub, following an evening’s pub-trawl, drifting from one bar to another. What could be in-seiner than that? However, he had frigate out that when pissed to the bilge, he was able to take a bow and perform without fear. When totally drunk and off to the ferries, he would yawl at the top of his voice and barge into folks, before he keeled over and was luggered home by his drinking crew and propelled into his bed fully clothed. Mornings were awful for him, often suffering three shits to the wind…  

His father, the family’s figurehead, had been a collier who had illegally gunned whales down too, though he would never wherry about being caught. The guy had been roped into working on a collier after playing pontoon one evening in Hull but no schooner had he lost all his cash, he had slooped away from the bar and spent the night on a coal-laden boat. He never looked back after that… He could often be seen in the harbour wearing a 10-galleon hat, often canoe-dling with a local woman of disrepute, playing the brigand and always sailing close to the wind…

Tug’s mum cooked everything in a steamer and took the tiller to steer her family clear of troubled waters. She was broad in the beam and had a freighterning disposition, being nicknamed ‘The Destroyer’, but she adored reading Cata Maran’s articles in The Times. She had sailed, nay cruised, through life, often helping out in the ark at a local primary school, despite making the occasional cutter remark to colleagues. She had also a-mast a fortune from selling a raft of stuff on e-Bay but when her husband once booked a holiday on a Norfolk narrow boat, she was unable to walk from one end of it to the other… 

Tug’s part-time girlfriend was a single mum who worked as the local fortune teller, medium and coracle, to whom folks went for advice in a dinghy room at the back of her cottage, where she made gor-gondola cheese with baby marrows, aka corvettes, to an old recipe from Venice. Her child Felucca had been fathered by a submariner from Dresden called Kai Yakbauer and it had been conceived on the starboard side of the deck of a motor torpedo boat. The guy hadn’t even been well mannered enough to tanker for the night of fornication they had enjoyed, intriguingly with their bottoms up. All hands had certainly been on HER deck that night… 

So, she had funnelled her hopes and ambitions from then on but didn’t really want to share a marital pedalo with Tug and she would never go overboard with him. Her own father had walked the plank with his wife, which had permanently shivered her timbers about marriage as an institution, when she was a young girl…

After having his marriage proposal turned down by his girlfriend, Tug’s response was like that of an Arabic Homer Simpson: 

“Dhow…”