Long live yachting
diversity
LIBBY
PURVES
R
oaming the Southampton Boat
Show and wandering onward
to the brokerage yards for
something fi nancially less
challenging, you know what
you’re looking for. A long-
keeled offshore cruiser? A sexy
superlight racer, a cautious
family picnic-boat, a classic? A beamy fl oating caravan
with all mod cons, an unashamed motor-sailer? Maybe
something poised between two of these, a compromise
you will have to learn to love. But sailing this summer
amid a cheerful fl eet of some 21 boats I refl ected that
the choice of sailing companion
is almost as crucial. Yachtsmen
and women come in different
temperamental varieties: even
Maurice Griffi ths tended to fall
out with his wife over the merits
of mud versus deep water.
The distinction between racers
and cruisers is the easy one.
If someone’s regularly haring
round the club buoys, calculating
handicaps with narrow-eyed precision and coveting
engraved silverware, you know where you are.
Similarly, the letters RORC on a cap tell you that this
person is capable of sailing nearly 300 miles to the
Fastnet, tacking within fi ve miles of Sullivan’s bar at
Crookhaven but perversely sailing back again without
putting a foot ashore, let alone ordering a pint and a
crab sandwich. You have been warned.
But among cruising people there are equally
important distinctions. When dating, marrying, or just
buddying-up with a skipper you need to know what
variety they belong to. Not just safe-versus-stupid. There
are wider, subtler distinctions. You can roughly divide
us ‘cruisers’ into several categories.
There are Explorers: never happier than discovering
new harbours and anchorages most people (and a lot ofpilot books) avoid. Their thrill is in sneaking into a
subtle crack in the rocks in West Cork to lean on Goleen
pier for a tide or two, or anchoring underneath a French
lighthouse in a ring of jagged rocks where absolutely
nobody else sane will ever have been. A cruise involving
three marinas and some pleasant days anchored in
Lulworth Cove and Swanage is, to them, a boring failure.
Allied to them are the Achievers. They do not start out
with any idea of a rejuvenating holiday, but quoting
Tennyson’s Ulysses: ‘To strive, to seek, to fi nd, and not
to yield!’ If they set out to round Cape Horn, that is what
they will do (Reader, I married one). If their free time is
more limited it’ll be a lesser ambition but equally
gruelling: possibly a remote
island in the far north of Ireland
or the Hebrides, upwind.
Among the Explorers and
Achievers there may be some
prudent types, but a few will also
be Heavy-Weatherers. These
consider a season ruined if the
wind never rises above Force 6,
and fi nd the sight of an unreefed
mainsail babyish. ‘Hardly worth
going out...’ they grumble. Serious Heavy-Weatherers
will also eschew roller furling, because the height of
their pleasure is achieved on the foredeck, hanking on a
storm jib with spindrift up to their waists. They should
not team up with their opposite numbers: the Ghosters,
whose favourite skill is in coaxing boats to move in a fl at
calm, ideally with enormous asymmetric foresails made
of cobweb and tissue-paper and costing as much as a
car. Ghosters will never fi re up the engine just because
it’s coming up to closing time or the last train home.
There are other types too. We all know the shellback
traditionalist who talks as if he’s in a Patrick O’Brian,
the oyster-eyed pub-crawler, the marina-softy who
won’t go anywhere without pontoons, the meany with a
dread of harbour-dues... name your own. But long live
diversity: there’s no such thing as a typical yachtie.The choice of sailing
companion is almost
as crucial as the
choice of boat
COLUMN