star ship enterprise

to reach the futtock shrouds - I decide that there are times when a man's reach is daft to even think of exceeding his grasp. Some of life's headier experiences are best left to the textbooks. I am stranded 65ft above a tilting deck, somewhere between the Canary Islands, a prey to vertigo, vain ambition and sheer blue funk. The efforts of able seaman Lars to prise me from the rigging are finally clinched by a shipmate whose promise, that he will be able to mock up a photograph of me looking confident in the crow's-nest, floats faintly up from the deck through acres of cracking canvas.

Permission to climb, under supervision, to the lowest of a series of crow's-nests is one of the diversions by which a voyage with the Lili Marleen offers at least a taste of the working reality of life aboard a tall ship. A three-masted barquentine, 249ft long, and carrying 13,000 sq ft of sail, she's a flight of fancy,

a combination of nineteenth-century windjammer and four-star luxury hotel.

As such it would be easy to cast her simply as a yo-heave-ho experience. Simply to be aboard such an exquisitely pretty ship might be adventure enough, but the Lili is for real: dream boat yes, theme boat no. Getting her going under full sail, exacting work for her German-trained crew, makes a spectacle for her 50 passengers far more gripping than that provided by any of the floating lookalikes whose sails are merely cosmetic. As Herr Kapitan points out, getting from A to B is not important: ''Seeing the movement of the ship under sail is the whole point.''

When it comes to tall ship know-how, Germany rules the waves. Captain Immo von Schnurbein and his officers all hold a master's or commanding officer's ticket from the German navy's training sailing ship, the Gorch Fock. The Lili is their baby, like her namesake of the song, a romantic fling. But from their first dinner aboard, when waitress Michaela hints pretty strongly that walking the plank will be too good for anyone failing to restrain his or her wineglass in a rising swell, it is clear that they run a tight ship.

If the unthinkable happens and the Lili sinks, take a letter from a loved one overboard, advises the first mate. Pondering runny ink, I realise that this piece of advice carries the comforting assumption that we will make it to the lifeboats. Lashing yourself to fellow survivors and singing rousing choruses also, apparently, helps.

Lashing? Once upon a time, as a diligent Girl Guide, I could tie a mean reef knot. We Bluebirds had Knotting and Lashing ever to hand or, could it, in those innocent days, even have been Whipping and Lashing? Luckily for those of us who have forgotten what it takes, third mate Karl Bareuther turns out to be an international star on the nautical knotters' circuit. His cockscombing and eye-splicing, his baggywrinkles and monkey's fists, his grommets and Turk's heads decorate every available inch of the well-dressed Lil.

Karl has an old sailor's diddy bag full of fids and files and fenders, a bosun's pipe on a lanyard, an old marlin spike. Lulled by December temperatures nudging towards the eighties, I find something very soothing in sitting on the deck of a windjammer tying sheepshanks and sheetbends to instructions on the lines of: ''Ze liddle duck dive into ze pond; er geht round ze tree and back into ze pond . . .''

It is soon time for the serious business of eating. With the Lili's punctual meals, we are into hotel territory. Dinners are five-course, gourmet marathons, eaten in a walnut-panelled dining room hung with hefty nineteenth-century oil paintings. Among the smoked fish and curried chicken, buffet lunches on the palaverdeck include a Canadian speciality, potatoes cooked in seawater and served with a fiery pepper sauce. Just as well that we are becalmed for a lot of the voyage by unseasonal southerlies.

The bar never closes. Even the moon lies on its back in these latitudes, looking as if it's had a few. But on the first evening, the fact that the monster bunch of bananas over the bar appears to be hanging horizontal to the deck has less to do with the Captain's welcome aboard cocktails than with the force five wind that speeds us on our way. One by one we slink from the dining room, leaving the smirking crew with a clear run at the ''herbfoam soup'' and grouper fillet.

Sleeping it all off is a pleasure in cabins fitted with thick carpets, nifty brass bits and ferociously hot showers. Mine has a jolly seascape above the bunk. The ship's art collection is a hobby of its hands-on owner, Peter Deilmann. Every detail of the Lili's day speaks of loving attention; wherever you look, brasses are being polished to within an inch of their lives, decks swabbed, ropes coiled.

Written schedules suggest punctual attendance: at the third mate's tour of the bridge or the bosun's tour of the decks, Ralf's tour of the bar or Lars's dreaded ''climbing of the toppmast''. Loudspeakered messages announce clewings up, haulings down, whales to the port side, sunset to starboard. Every now and then an insignificant dot of land intrudes on the idyll and we are played ashore and onto a waiting coach by Martin, he of the accordion and toe-tapping co-respondent shoes.

The Lili, who spends her summers in the Mediterranean, covers two Canaries itineraries from October to March. The more easterly voyage calls in at Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. Having joined ship at Las Palmas, we make our first port of call St Sebastian on La Gomera, the smallest and greenest of the western group of islands.

La Gomera is where Columbus said farewell to the known world, filling a flask with water from the old Customs House well with which to baptise America. We pick our way around the island's sawtoothed mountain rim like an ant navigating a broken cup. Sinister gaps in the road barriers reveal views as nervewracking as any from the toppmast: a few beehives, banana groves and whitewashed villages huddled hundreds of feet below at the foot of plunging verticals. I would like to return to La Gomera without the coach. It may be only 16 miles across but contains enough stunning volcanic scenery for weeks of walking. There seems to be nobody about. Plenty have emigrated to Venezuela and Cuba, abandoning their old potato terraces to the goats. The rest are all sitting under their vines, celebrating the nouveau vintage that makes you suspect it was not only the trade winds that caused Columbus to make

his excuses and leave this otherwise delightful island.

Several families have gathered at the forested national park, La Garajonay, making play with guitars, buckets of wine and bowls of thick cornmeal stew. The forest of huge tree heathers and laurels at their backs is protected as a rare survival from before the Ice Age. The fading light picks out clumps of orange toadstools among gnarled black roots; against the violently serrated skyline, it all looks eerie as a Hansel and Gretel stage set.

Canarian plants, hundreds of them indigenous to the islands, are, for me, one of the chief lures ashore; you can find Benettons and overcrowded beaches nearer home.

In 1799 the German naturalist Baron Alexander Von Humboldt fell to his knees on first sighing the Orotava Valley on Tenerife, to thank God for its botanical bounty. Today the valley is covered by a fungus rash of little houses, many of them the homes of the island's 300,000-odd wintering Brits.

Here and there survivors put their heads above the parapet: dragon trees like outsize loo brushes lurk in park flowerbeds, poinsettias and bougainvillaea rampage through hedges; the Botanical Gardens at Orotava are lavish with unfamiliar greenery: fat succulents, palms, trees with warty, toadlike bark hung with orchids and 30ft cheese plants.

Ptolemy drew the prime meridian, the line of zero-degree longitude that is now safely settled in Greenwich, through the Canaries. I know this because, in the ship's small library I have been enchanted to discover Dava Sobel's Longitude. The story of the hunt to discover a means by which mariners could tell their ship's position between the invisible lines that run from pole to pole is surely the perfect read for the deck of a graceful barquentine, somewhere among the Fortunate Isles.

Alas that my friend's photographs, when they arrive, should bring me down to earth with such a bump. I may not have made it to the futtock shroud but at least they offer another nautical phrase to bandy about: I have plenty of bottom.

factfile

A week's cruise in the Canaries on Lili Marleen, from October 25 to March 7, costs from #1369, including return flights from London, all meals, transfers and insurance. Flights from Scotland are available on request at a supplement. Peter Deilmann River and Ocean Cruises, Suite 404, Albany House, 324/326 Regent Street, London W1R 5AA. Tel 0171 436 2931; Fax 0171 436 2607. Juliet Clough travelled to London and back courtesy of GNER (0345 484950) and ScotRail's Caledonian Sleepers (0345 550033)