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http://www.yachtingmonthly.com/podcastsFor the sporadic sailor, as very many of us are, setting out
to sea again fills us with nerves, though few admit it...NOVEMBER 2015 http://www.yachtingmonthly.com 9R
eading these columns, a few of you
may have the impression of some
leathery old salt, rarely ashore,
twinkling across the foredeck
with brine in her hair, her mind constantly
on yachting life and habits. But think that
through, about almost any of us, and it is as
much of a dream as any nautical fantasy.
I have always worked,
and had children and other
duties; holidays are limited.
Sometimes in recent years
Wild Song has been far
away, on some stage of Paul’s
great voyage to Cape Horn.
Our home mooring is a
long way from our actual
home. Sometimes my annual
lust for the sea has had to be
slaked by a Tall Ships race
instead of a cruising yacht,
and topped up with dinghy moments.
I write, I remember, I refl ect; but for long,
long months of the year, like many of us who
love this magazine, I am not on a boat at all.
So there’s the business of re-familiarisation,
for those of us who live this way, either as
co-owners or as crew. It is an odd business,
getting used to a boat again, and never more
so than this last summer when, due to a
house-move and associated chaos and a Tall
Ships race, nearly a whole year passed without
my setting foot on board my own co-owned
Wild Song. And it felt very odd.
First day out, 36 hours across the shipping
lanes to the rocky Brittany coast, two-on
two-off, fl opping out in full harness and
oilies. Disorienting, slightly alarming; old
instincts about dodging shipping and hasty
reefi ng awoke sluggishly one by one. Two new
instruments in the nav station had unfamiliar
buttons and screens. New fender stowage had
been devised with a new capacity to get things
caught on it.
We cruised on, in horrid dark drizzly
Breton weather and fog, and gradually it all
fell into place: the sounds and warnings and
knockings and lurchings came to be routine,
my personal manoeuvring in and out of thequarterberth tunnel got nimbler, stowed items
fell more readily under my hand, the lunge for
a mooring buoy got neater, the memory of how
to adjust the windvane by touch returned.
But too soon the main cruise was over, with
just a few weekends to come before another
winter set in.
This is not untypical of many yachties. But
the elephant in the room
is not unhandiness or
unfamiliar instruments and
kit. It is nerves.
No point denying it: each
year, for the fi rst few times
or in threatening weather, I
am petrifi ed every time we
leave harbour. Can’t sleep,
stomach churns, uneasy at
every level, keep thinking
what’s the point?
Come on: who else is
going to admit to that? But I think it would
be helpful if we more intermittent sailors did
admit it – we may be spouses, old friends, or
former crew re-recruited when a skipper’s kids
leave home.
We ought to admit that in this cushioned,
cappuccino age it’s alarming to be far out
on the uncertain sea in little boats, with a
rockbound coast to leeward and a big Atlantic
swell from the threatening west. It’s not wrong
to be nervous and it’s not rare either.
Years ago my son, only 17, was setting out on
the Tall Ships Race 2000 from Halifax, Nova
Scotia, to Amsterdam: four weeks on a strange
ship. He nearly backed out, but a friend and
former naval offi cer, a Falklands War captain,
sat on his bunk with him and delivered a great,
rarely spoken truth. ‘In the whole history of
seafaring, the night before a passage, nobody
has ever really felt like going. Not really... But
once you drop the warps tomorrow, everything
will be fi ne’. And so it was. W‘ In this cushioned,
cappuccino age
it’s alarming to
be far out onto
the uncertain sea
in little boats’