Graffiti artist…

Are you a yachtsman or a sailor…..and does it matter ?

Me….i’m a graffiti artist (according to Stephen Fry).

And I really like coffee : https://www.buymeacoffee.com/steve1gunns

Nowadays , when I am asked what I do I don’t say retired nurse and backyard boatbuilder and I certainly don’t claim to be a writer ; instead I quite happily refer to myself as a graffiti artist – as in comedian Stephen Fry’ slightly bitchy definition of ‘bloggers’. Although I write, using actual words and some days even syntax and grammar I do recognize that there’s more than just a difference in scale between being an actual published writer of books and what I am which is more like being a newspaper or magazine journalist – except ever so slightly more original – on a good day.

Most days I kind-of bounce along the bottom of the gene pool known as ‘writers’ although having seen and read what often passes for journalism then maybe i’m not completely one of the ‘pond life’ that now make a life in newsprint or worse in mainstream media TV…..those people have so much to account for over their mis-handling of the last 2 years. Anyway, today I want to do something different to what I usually do and that is a two part post starting with the strangest question that I have been asked while being actually upright and sober in a boatyard and it was this “so, are you a sailor or a yachtsman” ……for most of my sailing career I had no idea what my interlocutor was talking about and couldn’t even begin to guess what the ‘right’ answer might be. Today though when street journalists go around asking people the question “what is a woman” and most people on the street either can’t or won’t answer that simple question I do feel that i’m on firmer ground.

You might have a bit of fun trying to define what a yachtsman is or what a sailor is and whether even there is any difference so I guess that I am first going to have to explain what it was that I was doing that day in the boatyard and a bit about the old fella who asked the question. For the short version of the answer I only found out what I was in 1990 but i’ll also need to explain how I found out so here goes with the context of the question first.

The where , when and how of this is that I had left home and job in flat Lincolnshire to go and seek my fortune in north Wales , partially because there was a chance of a job in the university there and partially that I wanted to spend a lot more time in the mountains than the monotonously dull flat fens where I grew up…..the irony of being a wannabee mountaineer growing up in Lincolnshire isn’t lost on me.

As it happens I didn’t get the job but by an unusual circumstance I was taken on to be a temporary laborer in a boatyard there : the original deal was to be there for a few weeks while we knocked down some old wooden boatsheds….we did the job in a couple of days once we worked out that we could tear all of it’s wooden posts and beams out by wrapping the 50 ton capacity winch wire around it and letting that do it. One bonfire later and there was just a small pile of roofing iron to have hauled away. I should have been there for just a few weeks but instead I stayed and worked there for 3 years – in fact until the industry went into a slump and collapsed in the late 1970’s.

I was in the yard one day when a local sailor invited me out for a sail in his 17 foot half decked Hilbre Island one design , I was pretty well hooked on day/sail one and within a few weeks I was regularly crewing on a half ton class racing yacht at first in the Menai straits and then the Irish sea. For some reason , don’t ask me why , I joined one of the local yacht clubs and I know now that was perhaps a big mistake because I was instantly ‘in the wrong place’ – I say perhaps and maybe because it wasn’t a mistake to learn that ; just a mistake to be there.

Then one day in the yard I happened to be talking to the elderly surveyor who had surveyed the old Folkboat that I bought : Wilf, that was his name, occasionally told me stories about his time as a young ‘hand’ aboard the big racing yachts that he had worked on during the summer regatta season – this must have been pre-war and the kind of thing that he was talking about would have been the ‘J’ class yachts and similar. It was Wilf that stopped me with this odd question that I certainly didn’t get at the time – “are you a sailor or a yachtsman” – and which I forgot about for several years because the yard went bust and I became a nurse.

Funnily enough it was my nurse training or at least one of our more liberal/left-leaning lecturers who gave me the first hint of a sniff about that question although for several years I had a slightly Tolkien-esque response which was that perhaps I was more like a mariner.

You might have a bit of fun, I did, with kicking around the questions “what is a sailor’ and “what is a yachtsman” and even “what is a mariner” : but it’s a bit like today’s ultra stupid question “what is a woman” which is either ultra-simple – just base it on the chromosomes (xx) or incredibly difficult if you have been brainwashed to think (wrong word) that woman is some kind of social construct and not mere biological fact. I’m on ‘team simple’ by the way and say that we don’t need any method of definition sexual differentiation other than the strictly biological ……gender expression is a completely separate can of worms.

Unfortunately when we come to sailors, mariners and yachtsmen we are entirely in the world of social constructs of class and aspiration. I for one have always sailed but have mostly sailed yachts, even my tiny little Liberty might have been called a yacht although today i’m not sure that my even smaller Pathfinder. So, is it just about size…..as my girlfriend might ask ?. As I say I used to think of myself as a mariner because I went about my business on the sea and for a while I was kind-of regarded as a professional/commercial sailor and I think that it was the late John Chittenden (Whitbread skipper) who once said that working mariners and professional sailors weren’t regarded as yachtsmen because they weren’t and couldn’t be ‘gentlemen’……you might be qualified to drive 50.000 tons of ship and be able to surf a yacht down 50 waves in the southern ocean but you couldn’t be classed as a gentleman/yachtsman.

I expect that many of my non English readers will now be wondering what odd turn my blogging has taken but it is that yachting, rather than mere sailing, was always seen as a middle class affair and yacht clubs had the same queasy sense of class that golf clubs did – mere ‘sailing’ clubs were more egalitarian. In those days it was still the case that women and dogs weren’t allowed in the bars of many yacht clubs and that a prospective new member could be excluded as not being ‘one of us’. I almost feel that I need to apologize for English middle class pretensions except that I wasn’t comfortable in most of those places or with the kind of people that frequented them. As it happens many of that kind of yacht club have had to close their doors and the ones that survive have either had to become much more business like and commercial in their outlook or go the other way and become more egalitarian .

I have always rather liked Oscar Wilde’s dictum that he didn’t want to be a part of any club that would have him so…..

One summers evening in 1990 the boat that I had been crewing on for the previous few months in that version of the then Whitbread race sailed up Southampton water and docked in Ocean village – there was a fair amount of hoo-harr with added TV cameras and we were briefly famous….15 minutes of fame as is said. Once all of the initial excitement of finishing the race was over what most of the crew really wanted was something decent to eat and a couple of beers so for some strange reason we wandered over to the Whitbread finishing line host yacht club – I think simply because it was the nearest bar to the boat. The culmination of this story is that we were denied entry to that yacht club not because we were now temporarily famous yachtsmen but because we were seen as being ‘not one of us’ – the only Whitbread boat crews being admitted were either skippers and navigators or the all female crew of Maiden who at that moment were still at sea.

I thus discovered that we were definitely roughy-toughy hairy arsed hero maxi sailors but definitely not yachtsmen : so instead of polite drinkies at the bar with the blazer and tie wearing ‘commode’ we walked across the road to the nearest pub, where we were most welcome and then wandered down the high street for fish and chips. One other thing comes to mind and that is what we also really wanted was a shower and the place that once again happily helped us out was the Seaman’s mission which at that time had it’s place almost next door to Ocean village.

I thought I would finish this post with some thoughts about yachtsmen (rather than sailors) today, so here goes.

Today, I know that the main reason that I don’t feel comfortable in a club setting is simply that it’s a social setting, albeit a strangely limited, conforming yet socially competitive one , and I am simply asocial so i’m just not interested or engaged in any way. Secondly, and as I said above, that I used to find the views and attitudes expressed distressingly conformal : I had another of Oscar Wilde’s quotes in mind but I had to go and look for this one just in case it was credited to someone else, anyway here it is.

“Conformity is the last refuge of the unimaginitive”

Now, this is a purely personal opinion but it seems to me that every modern cruising boat, touted by it’s designer and builder as ‘radical’ somehow is just the same as every other modern cruising yacht : honestly, without their badges I really can’t tell any difference between them. To me they seem a bit like modern cars – just so much industrial ‘product’ where the only difference is the color – we don’t even get that with modern yachts because most of them are white.

For me it goes further because it seems sometimes that not only are the boats all basically the same, and not very good, but that their owners also seem to have come off the end of the same production line, look the same, sound the same and dress with exactly the same manufacturers labels : unremarkably uniform people wearing uniform and all sailing the same dull white industrial product. I once had to go into a marina on the south coast where there was a pontoon of boats that were exactly the same even down to the same lines and fenders – I honestly don’t think that it was a bad dream, a kind of modern nightmare perhaps like some modern B roll yachting zombie apocalypse.

I should perhaps close this up and go get on with something useful like having more coffee. Maybe out there somewhere is someone scribbling away at a doctoral thesis along the lines of one of those ‘useless’ degree courses – social science and womens/gender studies come to mind – and maybe one day the social mores of middle aged, middle class white blokes who sail yachts and prop up the bars of yacht clubs will be the subject of intense study. Perhaps not because I think that the kind of people that the original question referred to are a generation that is simply disappearing with age.

I once said that I thought ‘yachting’ was dead – to be more precise about what I was thinking it was that it’s close cousin ‘leisure sailing’ had a physical birth and a spiritual death all on the same day in 1969 when Westerly launched the mediocrity that was touted as the ‘Gentleman’s Yacht’ : that was the Westerly Centaur in case you are wondering. On that day and after that day it was all downhill, yachts became just so much industrial product like cars, fridges and caravans , art, beauty and excellence went out out of the window and I would suggest that something happened to yachtsmen at the same time. The best way to get at that would be to think along the lines of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘last man’ who’s only concern and interest was comfort and safety.

That kind-of brings me onto another subject so I think I will leave that one for the follow up piece.

Best wishes Y’awl.

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