Adrian Morgan
CRAFTSMANSHIP
CLASSIC BOAT NOVEMBER 2017^43D
o you worry more about whether the harbour
has wifi than if it has water? Does your crew on
sighting land cry for joy, hold up a phone and
exclaim: “I’ve got three bars” and start thumbing out
texts to friends telling them, presumably, they’re on a
boat and have just managed to get a signal? On leaping
ashore do they enter the nearest internet café, or head for
the shower block (or one of those three bars)? What kind
of cruising person have you become? Have I become?
Two boats, one a modern French production yacht,
the other a 1946 McGruer sloop, provoked some
intriguing comparisons over a three-week holiday in the
Western Isles. In the old days it was the three ‘sh’s (sh*t,
shower, shave) now it’s wifi, water and: “Where’s the
nearest cash machine?”
It proved an amusing insight into the priorities of
modern cruising: two journalists and a photographer,reunited after a decade or so. If we were to write the
story the headline might read, ‘Three Go Cruising in the
Western Isles in Search of 3G’ – oh, and water and diesel,
and occasionally a cash machine, and a shower once a
day, and pontoon berth if at all possible, as she tended to
range around her anchor. Besides, pontoons have water,
and, of course, electricity (and wifi). It meant also not
having to pump up the rubber dinghy which has first to
be dragged like a deflated baby elephant from the depths
of a cockpit locker containing all the ‘essential’
paraphernalia of the modern cruising boat: viz. barbecue,
outboard motor, electric cable, hose-pipe, sundry spares
as well as the usual mooring warps and fenders (with
socks), oars, pump, sail cover, buckets, brushes etc.
How the world of cruising has changed since Sally, my
little Laurent Giles sloop, was launched in 1937. For the
better? In many ways, yes. I cannot conceive of drawing
lines across soggy tidal graphs in an Almanac the size of a
small bible to find height over a bar at 3am when a chart
plotter will give me the information instantly. It is quite
simply safer, and probably more accurate than
extrapolating from secondary ports, adding time
differences and all the other RYA shore-based stuff that’s
okay on a classroom desk under a bank of strip lights but
quite another matter at the tiny chart table of a small
wooden sloop, at an angle, in a big sea, at night. Adlard
Coles, Blondie Hasler and all those hardy, chainsmoking
ex-Naval navigators in the immediate post-war era –
surely the great age of seat-of-the-pants yacht navigation- might have enjoyed it hugely after four years of
dodging E-boats in the Channel, or landing SBS agents
on the rocky shores of Brittany, but not me.
And no hot water on tap for Adlard and chums, as we
had during those days perambulating between Oban and
Tobermory, Colonsay, Staff, Jura and
Islay. What luxury! But it did mean
filling the tanks every two days,
especially when one of the taps was
left dripping (it might have been me).
As an aside, why do modern boats
have wasteful mixer taps when all you need to wash your
teeth is a splash of cold, best delivered by a foot pump.
And why if you have hot water and a shower on board,
the mad rush for the toilet block – to save water?
The second week found the writer as third mate on
the McGruer cruiser-racer competing in West Highland
Week; not 1937, but ten years or so later, although not
much seemed to have changed. Standing headroom, but
then Kelana is 30ft on the waterline, and a lot more
when she wets those wonderful overhangs. Hot water
from a kettle, not a tap; a clinker pram dinghy on the
coachroof, launched or retrieved in minutes using the
main halyard, and mooring buoys not pontoons. Wifi
was welcome at times. But when the light of the paraffin
lamps brought out the warmth of the old mahogany, we
were back in 1946, which is where, secretly, those who
buy modern production boats would all like to be.
Getting over the bar
What kind of cruising person have you become?
“Now it
is wifi,
water and:
‘Where’s
the nearest
cash
machine?’”CHARLOTTE WATTERSCB353 Adrian Morgan.indd 43 26/09/2017 13:08