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EVERY MONTH DICK RECORDS
A PODCAST OF HIS COLUMN
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http://www.yachtingmonthly.com/podcasts16 http://www.yachtingmonthly.com MARCH 2016
M
y mother died recently and I now
know why ships are called shes.
I suddenly feel as though I’ve been
left to swim for it, even though I’ve
been old enough to fend for myself for some 40-
odd years. A ship is a she because they are like
mothers. They shelter you,
they feed you, they carry you
through the rough and tumble
of life until you can sail solo.
One of my earliest memories
is of Ma using her own coat to
protect my pre-school nape
from a summer thunderstorm
as Father rowed us ashore
from his barge-yacht, Curlew. A little later, while
Pa’s 20ft Snapdragon was stranded on a shoal in
the Thames Estuary, Mother carried me across
an oozy stretch peppered with sharp oyster
shells, her own feet negotiating the cruel shards.
When our pet pooch Rosy, a fat old beagle,
became an HOB (Hound Over Board) and was
paddling pathetically round and round in a
whirlpool caused by the buttress of the bridge
we were shooting, it was Ma she licked fi rst in
gratitude for her deliverance.
When I started sailing my own dayboats, she
once turned up at my home and was horrifi ed to
notice that the forefi nger on my right hand had
ballooned into a digit like that of a tree-frog. I
had chewed off a cuticle and while sanding down
my International 18, Phantom, I had infected
the wound. Ma, a former Red Cross nurse,
ordered me to visit hospital immediately which
I considered an over-reaction until I arrived,
fresh off the commuter train, in the casualty
department of St Bartholemew’s Hospital in
the City of London.
‘Who do you think you are, Dr Kildare?’ the
nurse asked as I explained that I had been
lancing the wound myself. It was taken very
seriously, as Mother predicted, and I was
immediately rushed to an operating theatre.
Aboard my fi rst cruising boat, the 26ft
Bermudian cutter, Almita, Ma made sure there
was a decent fi rst aid kit. She checked the lines
of my second, Powder Monkey, a 30ft Alan
Buchanan Yeoman Junior, and pronounced
them suitable for seaworthy passage.She expressed concern about the fi ve-and-
a-half foot draught of my third yacht, Minstrel
Boy, a Contessa 32, and she wasn’t wrong,
because it meant I had to keep her three-
quarters of a mile off the shoreline of our local
reach of the Thames to fi nd water deep enough
for an all-tide swinging
mooring. ‘You be careful in
that dinghy,’ she would say.
Somebody once said that
we all become photographs
and recently, as I sorted
through ours, I could see that
Ma didn’t really like sailing.
There she was wrapped up in
her sheepskin waistcoat, large baggy trousers
tucked into woollen socks and a headscarf
tied over her hair. The sunglasses were more a
symbol of optimism than a necessity and it was
Pa who was smiling, not her. But she would
suffer the chill winds and the estuary seas
because her husband loved it. My sister and I,
trussed up in lifejackets, simply assumed that
we were enjoying it. Much later on, I realised
that I actually was.
Yet for all her antipathy to yachting, Ma was
a very useful crew, alert to potential hazards
afl oat. Before they were married, one rough day
in the estuary, it was Mother who fi rst spotted
a buoy in the way of Father’s deeply-reefed
dayboat and shoved the helm over just in time.
She also held sailors in high regard. Once,
when walking along the esplanade at Burnham-
on-Crouch with her retired father-in-law,
Captain Richard Stephens Durham OBE, who
had been a Cape Horner as a boy, a bustling
yachtsman pushed past, jolting his arm.
Ma turned to the old shellback and told him,
‘You should have a notice hanging round your
neck saying “This is a real sailor”.’
These days I sail a 26ft gaff cutter, but
I will never forget my fi rst ship. Nancy Isabel
Durham, rest in peace. W‘ She would suffer
the estuary seas
because her
husband loved it’
Why are ships female? Because they are like mothers,
sheltering us and carrying us through the storms of life