Many of us sail bigger boats now than we ever dreamed of,
but good seamanship is still required, whatever kit you haveMORE
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http://www.yachtingmonthly.com/podcasts12 http://www.yachtingmonthly.com APRIL 2016
E
aster is upon us again, reminding me of
the fi rst time I crossed the Channel as
skipper of my own boat. My wife and
I set out for Cherbourg from Hamble
on Good Friday in our 22-foot centreboarder,
built in 1932 with a freeboard measured in
inches rather than feet. Her
power unit was a 4hp Stuart
Turner, which, as any old
hand will tell you, was about
as much use as nothing at
all. We knew little, we had
no oilskins, no radio, and
navigation was by dead
reckoning, but we managed
well enough outward bound, making the passage
overnight so as to pick up the lighthouses at
dawn for a fi x.
Coming home was a different matter. A stiff
breeze fi lled in from the north and as we beat
into the ever-rising seas, the centreboard case,
which was open at the top like a dinghy’s, began
to squirt gallons of water into the cabin. Our
dainty brass stirrup pump kept us afl oat but by
the time we fi nally bore away up the Needles
Channel I’d been at the helm for 24 hours
and was in such a state I thought the Bridge
Buoy – black in those days – was a yacht with a
fl ashing light at the masthead. My wife, on her
fi rst passage, had kept me going by passing up
hot water bottles to stuff up my jumper. We had
much to learn.
These days many of us sail bigger yachts than
we ever dreamed of in our youth. Our horizons
broaden in proportion with waterline length
and engine power. It’s a delight, therefore, to
fi nd that people still go cruising in boats with
passage plans revolving around 80 or maybe a
100 miles in 24 hours rather than the 150 many
of us now look to with confi dence.
One of the jobs I perform for Queen and
Country is to be half of a panel of two who
judge the Old Gaffers Association Cape Horn
Trophy. The criteria for this award are loose but
they boil down to exemplary seamanship. The
world today is so full of super-heroes executing
impossibly fast passages in three-legged
machines on foils, that reading well-crafted logs
of simple trips made without fuss in ordinaryboats makes a refreshing change. This year, two
citations stood out.
The runner-up, with ‘special mention in
dispatches’, was Clive Robertson for his
extraordinary athleticism and quick thinking
when a line on an Essex smack slipped its
pin. One thing then led to
another, as we all know too
well that it can. The line
somehow snagged the hatch
boards over the fi sh hold
and fl ipped them up. A baby
was asleep underneath and
tragedy seemed inevitable
until Clive, in defi ance of
Newton’s Laws, somehow grabbed the heavy
boards before they could fall onto the little lad
below. His action probably saved the baby’s life.
Had the trophy been awarded like a military
medal for courage in the fi eld, Clive would
have carried the day. Instead, with overall
seamanship in mind, the award went to
Roy Hart for a cruise to St Malo and back to
Burnham in his 19ft half-decked Memory class
gaffer, Greensleeves. Roy coped with winds
nudging gale force, handled calms and rode
the mighty tides of the St Malo bight with quiet
aplomb. Then he brought his tiny ship home
again up-Channel, past tide-gate after tide-gate,
through the Dover Strait and fi nally across the
Thames Estuary without incident.
Roy describes Greensleeves as boasting ‘two
seven-foot berths, a cooker and sink, a red and
black bucket, plus a good sail wardrobe’. His
log also mentions a number of modifi cations
to the boat’s standard fi t-out, all inexpensive
and executed in a seamanlike manner. The
twin essences of seamanship have always been
self-help and simplicity. You don’t have to be
rich to go to sea for pleasure. Roy has 52 years
of experience, yet his joy is still a pocket-sized
boat, well found and well sailed. Would that I
could have sat at his feet all those years ago. W‘ The twin essences
of seamanship
are self-help
and simplicity’