Trivial Pursuits.

Reflections on a life in sailing.

I admit to having a slightly peculiar mental practice , that when i’m working physically hard at a repetitive job my mind goes off on a bit of a wander : this last couple of weeks iv’e been hacking out and then carrying out, bucket load by bucket load, some 8 cubic meters of heavy clay and stones – so iv’e been doing lots of odd thinking.

The story I keep going back to is something I once read but was then confirmed by hearing it in person by the person concerned. Those of you that follow my blog will know that I was a climber before taking to sailing and that I started my sailing life in the Menai straits. At that time in my life one of my sailing friends was the son of of a well know climber – one of the late Joe Brown’s mates. The written story and what he later said to me is that he regretted what a waste of time it had been – in climbing that is.

It might be the somewhat negative frame of mind that I find myself in after a series of admittedly minor strokes but there are times now when I feel the same way about my sailing life – it’s not the first time either as there were times, when I would have been described as a racing yachtsman, when I thought the same thing myself. As I remember it now, that thought came about as a spontaneous reaction to having to go into the yacht club bar with the owner and crew that I sailed with in those days : the odd thing at the time being that it was the boat owner himself who somehow recognized how uncomfortable I was and just how much I disliked being there.

That was easy enough to fix as I largely gave up that kind of competitive club sailing and totally distanced myself from that kind of boozy and macho/confident crowd. At the time I wondered why my attitude had changed so much and I figured, at the time, that I had grown up a bit due to my time as an ICU nurse – that my life had become a bit more serious and that I had very little in common with them.

I almost gave up sailing right there and then to concentrate on my career but was then taken on as crew medic and assistant rigger in an old also ran of a Maxi yacht : For a while I thought of it as some kind of notable achievement although nowadays i’m more likely to say ‘so what’. What I briefly thought was somewhat important – at least within the narrow confines of sailing itself – had zero importance outside it’s own small world.

For a while after the Whitbread race, years in fact, I tried to get my career back on track although my attempts weren’t that effective and I never fitted in with the corporate and management driven world of healthcare : doing the job was one thing but swallowing the cool-aid was something entirely alien by then. Unfortunately for me, despite that I had a difficult and engaging bob as a senior specialist nurse, I also needed a total escape from it all – in fact I needed a total escape from most people most of the time and where that took me was having a little sailing boat all of my own.

My best years in sailing weren’t stomping through the Southern ocean in a big old maxi yacht and certainly not my time as a professional skipper cum taxi driver cum social worker for idiots on holiday. Rather they were the days when I had ‘horizon fever’ on my little cat ketch so I was out there where the little Liberty should never have really been – out in mid channel or parked somewhere up a muddy tidal creek all on my lonesome.

After all-but leaving sailing back in the late 90’s I came back to it largely due to the work of blogger/film maker Dylan Winter who at that time was making videos about his long voyage around the UK in what even he called a crap boat. I followed him through to his second boat – in my opinion his best one (Hunter Minstrel) but gave up when he essentially gave up sailing and bought a Westerly Centaur instead. The time of his blog and films coincided with my time of being a sailing based blogger, although in my case a written blog – me never really making it as a successful videographer.

My original grand idea with the Liberty was to do what Dylan was doing with his, similar, Minstrel, in my case though I made a couple of false starts and then took the slightly radical step of taking the boat offshore and fetched up in northern Brittany for one trip and then my NHS retirement cruise in 2019. Having done that I never particularly liked the idea of the long flog along the really uninteresting south and south east coast (UK) just to get to the next interesting part which would have been the creeks and rivers around the Thames estuary : in short a kind of Maurice Griffiths tour.

It’s clear to me that I changed a lot as a sailor, especially during the latter years when I was writing about it nearly all of the time that I wasn’t actually doing it. My blog mostly confirmed what I knew, or at least what i’d been told by previous skippers during my ocean racing days ; that I didn’t really have the right temperament for being a racing sailor but then my new and scant knowledge of personality psychology also told me that. In that respect I found that I was a lot more a Maurice Griffiths kind of sailor than say a Chay Blyth kind of sailor.

An idea I never fully explored in blog form was that I thought that i’d been born at least 50 years too late in terms of my life as a leisure sailor : a fanciful idea absolutely but there have been times where I thought that my Corinthian approach and independent attitude might have worked out much better with older wooden boats that needed a bit of work to sail and keep. Iv’e often said that big engines and fibreglass hulls made us all lazy sailors : luckily, as a racing sailor I learnt to sail in all conditions where today most cruising sailors often never sail unless conditions are perfect.

If there’s been a downside to the whole thing it is that I seem to have come out as a rather cynical puppy but maybe that would have happened anyway. My cynical view is that boats have obviously become larger and more luxurious toys and their owners seem to be both more wealthy and yet more afraid to actually go to sea – even with all the kit and toys on board. Sailing has obviously changed out of all recognition from the time that I even started to do it – and I think a long time before.

I sometimes feel that the blog has been the best outcome of my sailing life as writing about it, and whatever else takes my fancy, has made me think a lot more clearly especially when it comes to writing about the sailing characters I have covered over the years. My late mother often commented that she didn’t follow much of the boat related stuff but liked to know what I was thinking about when my posts were about things not sailing related – her other complaint was always that I didn’t write enough about my partner’s life.

Anyway……I could waffle on but chose not to.

I think that’s pretty well it for my sailing life, one boat went today (as I write), one is now for sale via Ebay and I suspect the last one will be before the end of the year. What that means for the blog is that i’m not in a position to write new, sailing based, material so it might be the end of the blog at the same time . I’ll give it a few months to decide either way and in the meantime you get to hear me trying to be blob the blogging builder. When I first came to write this post I thought I might try and explain why some aspects of a sailing life have had a larger or more important effect outside sailing – perhaps the best way of showing that is the increase in my physical technical skills as a kind of backyard boatbuilder.

Given my previous habits I’d like to embed a music video as an outro and I keep thinking of a one liner to sum up the blog with but for now this will have to do…..

Ladies and Gentlemen, Elvis has left the building….so long and thanks for all the fish.

Postscript, several weeks later.

I wrote the piece and then had to revise it several times but was still at the point where I was more likely to delete it and leave it alone until I could find something more genuine to say : one thing I feel I should have said is that I started with the theme of leisure sailing as being a trivial pursuit and maybe in some way it is – both trivial and hedonistic. My opposite view is that going about on the sea is never trivial – especially when it’s played out in places like the southern ocean.

I tried and failed to find the words (in myself) but then I remembered the short passage from a novel that I once read out to a crew at the end of a difficult ocean voyage. For those readers that recognize it it’s the valedictory passage from Joseph Conrad’s novel ‘The Nigger of the Narcissus’ – if the title offends your sensibilities then you’re in the wrong place.

“A gone shipmate, like any other man, is gone for ever; and I never met one of them again. But at times the spring-flood of memory sets with force up the dark River of the Nine Bends.  Then on the waters of the forlorn stream drifts a ship–a shadowy ship manned by a crew of Shades.  They pass and make a sign, in a shadowy hail.  Haven’t we, together and upon the immortal sea, wrung out a meaning from our sinful lives?“

Conrad, The Narcissus