cooled down. I never got to the bottom of this. The owner’s
manual suggested removing the spark plug and replacing it with
a cold one, but the solution was less than ideal when negotiating
weekend traffic in the entrance to the Hamble River, so I planned
my use of engine around a maximum anticipated run of 15
minutes. This conferred a contingency allowance and, in those
days of chronic disappointment with engines, it didn’t seem a
bad compromise – until I came to sell the boat.
I hadn’t given her the annual paint job generally afforded to
wooden craft so she was looking a touch down at heel, but, with
foolish optimism, I hoisted my plaque hoping to recoup what I
had unwisely paid for her.
For three months, nothing happened at all and the yacht
continued to deteriorate. Then the call came. Oh, Happy Day!
A gentleman had been looking her over in the yard at the top of
the Hamble River and was ready to make a sensible offer,
subject to a trial sail.
The following Sunday I went to the boat early to smarten her
up a bit. The gent brought a pleasant northerly breeze with him
and we dropped down to the Solent before lunch under sail.
We cruised around happily until about four o’clock when
the offer was made and accepted. Cock-a-hoop, I set course for
the river but, as the beacons drew closer, I began to sense
impending doom.
In the north wind I must either beat all the way up the river or
try my luck with the Stuart Turner. My buyer wasn’t going to be
impressed if it stopped, but the traffic was as dense as it usually
is around that time. I had begun a first short board, dodging the
ranks of motoring yachts as dense as the M1, when my man
suggested starting the engine. Ah well, I thought, it hadn’t run all
day so it was lovely and cool. If I took it easy, perhaps it would
make it up to the Jolly Sailor. In any case, I couldn’t really argue.
The two-stroke fired at the second throw of the crank. The
handle flipped off nicely and away we went, ‘put-putting’
up-river in the queue. All continued well until, with a further
mile or two still to go, it packed up. I knew it wouldn’t restart,
so I nipped forward, hoisted main and jib in short order and got
under way again. We were crossing the river on port tack, I
recall, when a large yacht under power came thundering up from
seawards. The helmsman was wrapped around his girlfriend and
the first he saw of me was when his towering stem climbed
aboard my boat in way of the backstay. As the mast came down
in three pieces I couldn’t help noticing my buyer putting his
cheque book back in his pocket.
‘Let’s meet again when the boat is repaired,’ he said kindly.
That, of course, took longer than a weekend and he wanted to
go sailing. The following Saturday he called on me with a bottle
of whisky and the hard word.
He’d found a GRP Westerly Nomad which he felt would
probably suit him better and she had the added advantage of
being ready for sea right now. He was a nice man. The scotch
was Grant’s ‘Stand Fast’ and, despite the unhappy memory, I’ve
had a taste for it ever since.
A month later the boat was re-rigged and back on the
market, but no one came out of the broker’s den looking
for me until the next season when a man with a wooden leg
made me a silly offer.
I cut my losses, accepted, and learned a tough lesson about
market forces. Just because I’d been daft enough to pay top
dollar didn’t make it the right price.I
t is said that the two best days for a boat owner are when
he buys and when he sells. This might be cynical, but there
is no doubting the joy of ‘day one’ and the relief when an
honest buyer stumps up the funds, freeing you to move
on after a long wait.
Deciding on an asking price for a one-off wooden boat makes
a marked contrast with the lot of non-Classic Boat readers who
own production yachts. These fortunate sailors have no
problems at all. Stick her on the market at a few quid less than
the others, and whether she sells or not becomes largely a matter
of where she is, how clean her lockers are and the owner’s
willingness to talk turkey about offers. Even then, twelve months
‘from ad to sale’ isn’t unusual. Mr Right still has to walk up to
the broker’s desk and be grabbed before he changes his mind.
With older boats, settling for a figure is highly subjective.
Even when this seems right, years can drag by and I’ve known
unfortunates who’ve turned grey waiting for the phone to ring.
I learned a lot about buying and selling from my first boat.
Lesson one was not to shell out for the first vessel you see. I
ignored this and listened to the sales pitch of a man I knew with
a 22ft (6.7m) centreboarder on the market. She was designed by
Westmacott and built by Woodnutts on the Isle of Wight around- She was sweet in her way, but she wasn’t what I needed.
With £1,000 of Lloyds Bank’s cash to spend in 1971, I ought to
have been poking around the creeks for a nice pocket cruiser, but
I was seduced by the pedigree of what was really little more than
an X-boat with a lid on. I bought her anyway and I paid too
much. Under her slinky cabin trunk she boasted full crawling
headroom, berths for two, a galley in a drawer and a finely
tailored bucket for slops and other more intimate functions. She
sailed quite well with her original bermudan rig, but her
auxiliary power was a standing joke. Lurking under the cockpit
was a one-cylinder Stuart Turner two-stroke petrol engine. This
wretched device featured a refugee from the Devil’s scrapyard
known as a ‘Dynastart’. These were fitted to many early motor
cars including the famous Bull-nosed Morris, and all I can say is
I hope they worked better than mine. As the name implied, these
contraptions contained the essentials of a starter motor and a
dynamo. The two use the same innards to create opposite results,
depending on whether you want it to push out power to charge
batteries with the engine turning the windings, or suck in battery
power from a standing start to whip the engine over. Once the
main unit fires up, the brute remains engaged, unlike a starter
motor, and becomes a dynamo. Mine charged the tiny battery
after a fashion, but I could never persuade it to perform its other
function. That was left to brute force and a heavy starting handle.
Because two-stoke motors don’t have the compression issues
of four-strokes they are relatively light to hand start. The
trouble with mine was that while it could generally be bullied
into life with much swearing, the cranking handle occasionally
failed to disengage from the dogs on the shaft. When the engine
burst into life, it whirled round like a windmill on steroids,
threatening to fly off at terminal velocity and smash through
either the deck-head, my groin, or the teak bottom planking so
carefully fashioned by Mr Woodnutt. The only realistic way of
stopping the pantomime was to turn off the fuel, hide in the
minuscule fo’c’s’le, and wait.
Even if I were spared this promise of violence, the motor had
a further dirty trick up its sleeve. It would run like a beauty for
20 minutes or so, then stop and refuse further service until it had