Unwise Choices.

Iv’e become very good at making unwise or hasty choices and/or poor decisions. The two spectacularly bad ones in recent years were first, when I let my Hunter Liberty go for almost nothing and the buyer still stiffed me on the price, The second really bad decision was selling the boat that I built. It wasn’t right when I finished it but it had the potential to be a lot more right if i’d just toughed it out and done the work. That I built it so that it could live at home on it’s own trailer never really worked out but once again that could have been dealt with. I really don’t understand now why I sold the little Liberty ; for sure it needed a total refit after breaking the mizzen off Berry Head in Devon but again that could all have been dealt with and had I kept it I might still be voyaging. Anyway ; that’s my story – many regrets.

There’s a wonderful character in one of Iain Rankin’s detective inspector Rebus series that decides to start smoking at near retirement age despite being a pathologist whose daily life is taken up with dissecting human bodies in often grisly post mortem examinations. From memory that was professor Sandy and in one episode he was seen to be flopping a piece of human liver from hand to hand and being surprised at how healthy it looked given that it’s former owner was dead and a dead alcoholic at that : I think he was found dead due to a house fire and the writer describes the body as well cooked meat if a bit charred around the edges.

Professor Sandy, in Rankin’s book, takes up smoking, which he knows to be a clinically poor and dangerous choice because, as he says “ nothing has killed me yet “. Well, I used to know an excellent cardiac surgeon that drank as though alcohol was going out of fashion and smoked like a train – if I needed to find him between cases he was usually to be found outside the main hospital entrance having a quick fag before he had to scrub up again.

I’m at the stage in life that I could equally say that none of the stupid things iv’e done so far have killed me yet but hey : watch this space. I think i’m also at the stage where i’m deciding between two unsafe choices, one to do with sailing and the sea while the second is all about wheels ; specifically two wheels with a gurt big noisy engine slung between them – to wit a motorcycle.

Choice one :

My brief moment of epiphany this week was when I was out walking on a nicely cool morning and I realized that what I wanted in my life again is a boat. I know the kind of boat I would like, not to the point of being model specific but definitely a small and simple sailing boat that would be capable of undertaking coastal and inshore passages while also being large enough to live on board for short periods – that means having a cabin space large enough for two people to not be climbing over each other all the time.

Our man Dylan Winter, whose videos iv’e been re watching again recently said that it’s a typical kind of sailors trap to be thinking about the ideal or perfect boat. In his example he bought almost the worst boat he could find that was just within his budget and he sailed it around the English south coast and east coast for around 5 years until he could afford something a little larger and a lot better when it came to the life aboard and it’s capability as a sailor. Funnily enough, when I came back to sailing some 15 years ago I found that I had made the same choice of boat that he had : both of us bought slightly different versions of the 22 foot Hunter Liberty/Minstrel hull.

My old Hunter Liberty dried out at a place called Place : 22 feet and maybe a ton and a quarter with nothing aboard.

I once read an essay about boats and sailing which said that a boat of around 23 feet in length was almost the perfect size for the kind of sailing that the essayist was writing about ; my memory has it that he was talking about inshore and coastal sailing on England’s east coast. It was the kind of thing that the late Maurice Griffiths might have said when he was a young and extremely poor yachtsman in the 1920’s and early 30’s although in one of his earliest books he often talked about the ideal yacht for the young fella starting out as being a 5 Tonner which in my book means about 25 feet which is now quite a big boat in my view.

My partner says that it’s typical of me that I pushed the little Liberty beyond what it was rated for : under EU boat regulations the little Liberty/Minstrel is only regarded as a boat suitable for inshore and sheltered water. I sailed mine across the English channel 4 times and one time I got caught out in near gale conditions in a blizzard at the leeward end of Lyme bay ; I once described that as the nearest iv’e been to full on Southern Ocean conditions without actually being in the big chilly bin (Southern Ocean).

I almost certainly don’t have the endurance for the more Corinthian things that I used to do in sailing- such as getting caught out in a blizzard and enduring a long period of intense cold seasickness in a brisk wind against tide in the channel but maybe I wouldn’t even want to do that and maybe, maybe as in maybe, I might just be smart enough an old sailor to not attempt things like that. The boat itself felt entirely capable though.

Choice Two.

More actually dangerous – at least statistically – is to buy a motorcycle and what I would really like to do is book-end my life as a Biker with the same brand of Bike that I started out with as a teenager back in the 1970’s. That was a very poor example of a Royal Enfield ; a model known as the Turbo Twin ; a 250cc 2 stroke with a Villiers engine. What I would choose now is one of the modern (Indian) Enfields of 650 cc which back in the day would have been thought of as a big boys toy or at least a real man’s motorcycle my first ever ride was a backie (pillion) on a rough BSA 650 which impressed the merry hell out of me.

That little Enfield scared the pants off me at 18 as I expect a 650 cc Royal Enfield Shotgun or Bear today and that’s with some 40 years more experience of bikes and several years with a full driving licence. The big problem now is that I have occasionally poor balance and I doubt that I would have the strength to wheel a 650 cc anything around the yard.

A very smart looking restored Turbo Twin up for auction ; I didn’t even dare look up it’s eventual sale price.

Life isn’t about making safe and easy choices or decisions all of the time though. Life has risk, as the song goes : No one gets out of here alive. My health is as it is because I failed to keep my eye on the ball when I was first diagnosed with hypertension. Although treated successfully I came off medicines quite quickly and didn’t keep a basic eye on my blood pressure and then my weight. I suspect that both things have played a part in me having a series of strokes but if anything that experience made me sit up and sniff the coffee : eight months ago I started to take a real interest in my health and am in a probably better state of metabolic health, blood pressure control and body weight than when I had knee surgery ten years ago.

I admit that iv’e managed myself and my own health very badly and got sick as a result. Iv’e done lots of stupid stuff throughout my life and yet I find that none of it has killed me yet. I have perhaps given up on stuff too quickly : stuff that once gave me good reason to get up in the morning – such as a boat to think about and jobs to do on it let alone actually sailing the thing in horizon mode.

Writing out both choices today has made me think again about both. I think I made the best choice I could at the time I gave up bikes to have a car instead, Giving up boats, sailing and the sea is a different matter because I made that decision in a poor state of mind ; a period of depression after my strokes. Although there would be many practical choices to make in potentially buying another boat I don’t see any of it as being insurmountable. Even on the first day that I had my walking epiphany I was hugely engaged, even excited about being back on the sea and heading towards one of my favorite anchorages.