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http://www.yachtingmonthly.com/podcastsA rift exists between those who long to sail north and
those who look south, but there’s still hope, says Libby14 http://www.yachtingmonthly.com MAY 2016
N
orth or South, that is the question:
whether ’tis nobler in the yachtsman
to seek the sleet and icebergs of
outrageous Northlands, or to bare
arms upon a sea of sunshine and by exposing,
tan them? When cruise planning starts for
each season, we are all
indecisive Hamlets. Or,
if not, Montagues and
Capulets, forever locked
in tribal argument about
which way to point.
For us whose climatic
destiny is mainly in the temperate oceanic
islands of Great Britain and Eire, in periods
when there is time for more than a mere
Channel or North Sea crossing in your life there
is always that question: Which way to sail?
You can go north – Norway, Orkney,
Shetland, Faeroes, Iceland, Greenland, over
to Newfoundland where the great whales
play. Or you can head south across Biscay
for Mediterranean shores. Or bounce off the
warmer Atlantic islands down the trade-wind
route to subtropical paradise. If you are really
extreme, like my roaming husband, you might
sail all the way south, cursing your way down
the Brazilian coast as he does in his book One
Wild Song, in order to get freezing cold again in
Patagonia and pretend it’s the beloved North.
But mainly – you may have guessed this – our
decisions are joint, and our views divide. His
heart is northern, indeed positively Nordic.
He pickles his own herrings, for heaven’s
sake; makes elegantly symmetrical woodpiles,
watches Scandi-Noir gloomy murder mysteries,
and feels utterly at home in a deadweight oiled
sweater with symbolic reindeer on it.
My heart, on the other hand, yearns for ‘a
beaker full of the warm south, full of the true,
the blushful Hippocrene’. I want to swim off
the boat to a white sand beach, under cascading
bougainvillea; I want olive groves and shady
cafés, watermelons and grapes warm from the
sun. I do not want pickled herring. My ideal
sailing outfi t is a swimsuit and something fl oaty
to keep the sunburn off. I consider adverse
weather in hot climates to be somehow less
alarming, the wind less heavy because less cold,the rain refreshing rather than coming at you like
a million tiny spears. Ice in the rigging fails to
excite me with its romance, but fl ying fi sh do.
Well, I may overstate a bit; we can each to
some extent appreciate one another’s tastes,
and I did grow up enthusiastically studying
Norse sagas and getting
excited about Wagner. A
Hurtigruten voyage up
the Norwegian coast saw
me very happily hanging
out for hours on the
bridge while the captain
explained which rock formations around us were
actually trolls frozen by witches a thousand years
ago. I do see the point of northern romance. And
in return, my husband acknowledges that there
is something highly agreeable about drifting
around somewhere east of Marmaris.
The difference is that as battered old veteran
sailors we are each aware of how it is when
you are on your own boat. He knows that the
South can be sticky and dispiriting as you plod
along concrete quays and shop in corrugated-
iron markets, that cockroaches come aboard in
every cardboard box, fl ies breed in the galley; he
knows that Mediterranean winds are curiously
annoying, all that Meltemi-Sirocco stuff, and that
the south of France is full of unbearable poseurs.
He knows that in the tropics it’ll be pitch dark
from 1800 to 0600 and you will use up a lot of
paraffi n just to read a book. Unless you sit in
some mosquito-ridden shoreside bar watching
gap year kids pretend to be Ernest Hemingway.
I admit all this. And yes, he admits in return
that it is not amusing to be freezing cold amid
bare rocks with the Met Offi ce cosily predicting
Force 11 and ‘phenomenal’ seas across Viking,
Fair Isle, Faeroes and SE Iceland.
But still, his heart yearns north, mine south.
Possibly the answer is to pack in all this work
nonsense and sail all year – south for winter,
north for summer. We’ll think about it. W‘ His heart is northern.
My heart yearns for
the warm south’