How I got afloat without paying a king’s ransom
ILLUSTRATION CLAUDIA MYATT
AFFORDABLE ADVENTURES
TOM CUNLIFFE
I
’m delighted this month’s Classic Boat is making the point that
affordable classics are out there waiting for good homes.
I grew up on a strict diet of cruising literature, which meant
reading those noble accounts written in the years between the
two World Wars. Much was to be learned from their pages, but
they had an important feature in common. Nobody talked about
money, yet I yearned to know how Peter Pye, Eric Hiscock and
Edward Allcard funded their voyages. Back in those days,
discussing personal finances in public was just not done.
One thing was clear. Buying a boat that my wife and I could live
aboard and which was capable of ocean sailing could set us back as
much as £5,000. It never crossed our minds to contemplate a new
yacht. Such vessels cost a king’s ransom and besides, we had been
raised on tales of Falmouth Quay punts, Looe luggers and
refurbished 1920s yachts. We knew from anecdote that so long as
the planks didn’t drop off, these little ships would be at least as
seaworthy as many more modern craft. Anyway, who in their right
mind would live in a plastic fabrication built in a factory, when
they could surround themselves with varnished mahogany, painted
bulkheads and brass portholes in a yacht designed by a great artist
and put together by world-class craftsmen from timber that was
growing in the forest two hundred years before they were born?And all for a lot less money. Put like that, any smart-ass
bar-room pundits whining about maintenance and smirking, ‘I’d
rather be sailing’, are as irrelevant today as they were then.
In 1976 a Mars Bar cost around 12p. Today, Tesco will sell you
one for 60p, making our boat money swell to £25,000 or so. A
handy inflation calculator available on the internet gave me an
answer of £29,000. Whichever way you look at it, we could buy a
boat that would see us safely round the world and back for under
thirty grand in today’s money. So how did we raise it?
Here’s the secret. Total commitment. House prices were
inflating at a satisfactory rate. If we bought one and paid the
mortgage, we reasoned we could sell it in a couple of years and
acquire our boat with the equity. There were two problems. We
didn’t have jobs and nobody would lend us the money because our
only hope was calculated on a joint income. For that, we had to be
married. Jobs were found in short order, but unless we said, ‘I do,’
our income didn’t stack up. We’d been cohabiting happily for a
number of years and planned to continue the arrangement for the
unforeseeable future, but it wasn’t going to wash with the Building
Societies. So, one brisk spring morning, we signed on the dotted
line and, like others before us, married for money.
Two years later we sold up and went in search of a classic, the