The beauty of
a well-stowed boat
LIBBY
PURVES
D
id you see The Mercy in the
cinema? Of course you did. Every
sailor knows the story of poor
Donald Crowhurst in the Sunday
Times Golden Globe Race to be
the fi rst singlehander to circle
the world non-stop. Crowhurst
was the least prepared: a weekend
sailor who followed his dream and hoped to promote his
business by building the trimaran Teignmouth Electron,
in theory likely to be the fastest boat.
The awful thing is that he knew even before the
start that it wasn’t ready, but had staked his house
and business on it and hooked up with a disastrously
overenthusiastic press offi cer. Knowing how it ended,
in deception and despair, the fi lm
becomes almost unbearable to
watch: this was a family man, much
loved, a kind of innocent. As for his
wife, those of us married to frequent
long-distance singlehanders can
only shiver in sympathy.
Most fi lms about sailing
romanticise it, majoring on shots of the helmsman
on deck, steering through big seas, narrowing his eyes
at the horizon or heroically up the mast saving the day.
The Mercy doesn’t do that. The helmsman does climb
the mast, only to fail to reconnect the buoyancy unit in
a swaying, fi ddly, hopeless manoeuvre of a kind all too
familiar to anyone who has tried to fi x an awkward thing
in a big sea. But much of the fi lming is below decks, and
here, the watching yachtsman or woman can only cringe.
You see the lurching, unstowed cabin of the
unprepared boat, the tangle of wires hanging out waiting
for reconnection. You hear the hollow thunk of water
against a mistrusted hull, imagine the rattle of dislodged
screws and pins in the bilge, wince as he struggles. It isone of Colin Firth’s best performances, capturing
the scrambling of a competent but overwhelmed
man against hopeless odds. And the boat’s state,
lovingly reconstructed, is frankly enough to make
anyone shudder at the thought of the new season.
But if it does one thing for the rest of us weekend
sailors, with those early shots of a chaotic interior, it will
remind us that almost nothing is more important than
secure, organised, familiar, intelligent stowage. A place
for everything – equipment, spares, clothes, books, tins,
bottles, fi rst aid, mugs – all screwed down or in lockers
with catches that work or safe behind fi ddles; bookshelf
bars secured with their pins so they don’t jolt out and set
Reed’s Almanac fl ying violently across the cabin into the
sink (it got quite soggy). Few things are more redolent
of reassurance, calm and optimism
than a really good sea stow.
Few of us will suffer a knockdown,
let alone a roll, since few are Southern
Ocean sailors. But all of us will hit
lumps of unpredictable water and
huffs of impertinent unexpected
wind, and in a good boat there should
be nothing fl ying or sliding about below. The fi rst useful
thing I ever did on my fi rst ever night passage was to roll
out of my bunk somewhere on the way to Barra and fi nd,
by the light of a wildly swinging lantern, a bit of lashing
to secure a chart drawer which kept slithering out and
banging. I was certainly not yet fi t to handle a heavy sail
in the conditions, or to make anything more complicated
than a cup of tea, but when I crawled back behind my
leecloth and saw the chart drawer straining against the
line, secure and silent, I felt like Horatio Hornblower.
So if you want to get your children or guests to feel
really important, put them in charge of the sea stow.
And lavish them with praise if they achieve that lovely
thing – a quiet boat.‘Nothing is more
important than
secure stowage’
COLUMN