We Can All Daydream.

But not all of us can make wise decisions and plan things well.

Last week, as I write, I had a bit of a moment when I was out walking : more than a moment in fact as it lasted for the entire walk and carried on into a sleepless night. The thought was that I really wanted a boat in my life again and I even had a shrewd idea what I might buy next year if I make good all of my requirements for the project and most of the preconditions that iv’e set myself. I was so excited by the very idea that I even had a look around to see what was for sale and what kind of price.

In my opinion the best boat I ever owned and the one I had by far the best experiences with was the little Hunter Liberty : a David Thomas design from the late 1970’s. It was all of 22 feet plus small change, had a very unusual rig for it’s day – sometimes called a Freedom (technically a cat-ketch) rig as Gary Hoyt used the same idea with his Freedom range of larger cruising yachts. A steel centerboard and a pair of shallow bilge runners that let it take the bottom. With it’s board, rudder and motor drive leg up it would be afloat as soon as I noticed water sloshing around the keels. From some angles it was quite a pretty boat and yet from others it looked quite odd.

I met David Thomas a few times and I worked with his wife whom at the time was the regular night sister of the cardiac ICU that we both worked at. Of a night sister Trudi would go round the unit, see all the patients and talk with each staff member but she would often come and perch at my bedspace and we would talk boats. I remember saying to Trudi that out of all David’s racing designs it was the Liberty that talked to me : although deeply into racing yachts and the IOR that world was starting to pall and I had an idea even back then that I would become a creek crawler as back creek gunkholers were often disparagingly called.

Part the second.

So, a week ago I had a sudden rush of enthusiasm or what my partner would call ; a sudden rush of shit to the brain. Somewhere in between those two extremes was the two sleepless nights that I had as a result of having to think through the many small details of planning in buying, refitting and then voyaging with a small boat again. One side of that is very engaging and that’s exactly what I wanted with a potential boat but the other half is what I used to experience with my last career jobs and what I always got with a boat : I call it, and my then boss described it as me being in brain-fizz mode – interesting but not always workable.

Dylan Winter of Keep Turning Left video fame once said that you don’t need the perfect (or even ideal) boat, to go sailing with and he demonstrated that by sailing one the worst ever sailing boats – he called his one ; The Slug – and that always seemed appropriate. What came out of that though was him having a whole load of fun in a boat that didn’t matter very much ; it could have got really knocked around and no one would have noticed ; try doing that with your ‘perfect’ yacht !.There is a much better argument for choosing a boat which is ideal for the purpose that you give it although the result of that often seems to be that sailors don’t know what they really want and end up with a generic yacht in a generic marina or mooring and still doesn’t get used as they are often vanity purchases or dream purchases at best.

Since my unfortunate rush of enthusiasm to the brain iv’e come down a bit ; at least that is what it feels like. The enthusiasm is still there and I thoroughly explored, at least mentally, everything about owning the same model of boat that I had before as that was ideal for my budget, my temperament and my situation then. Times change though, as do the circumstances of our lives and my thinking has moved on considerably since my initial epiphany moment.

I know that iv’e had to give up on a lot of things ; obviously i’ll never climb again – in fact I wouldn’t even be able to get up to a crag now, I don’t think I will ever have the strength and endurance for long distance off trail hiking in places such as Yosemite and the deep back country of New Zealand. I have to accept that but equally I really wonder about two of the other things that I used to do and have set aside as maybe being too much for me. Those two things are riding motorbikes and sailing small boats and I think I would like to have one of them in my life again even if whichever one I chose causes me some difficulty.

Once the initial rush of shit to the brain (Jackie) had subsided I went into a more serious and considered thinking and planning mode. I basically decided that the ideal boat for me/us now would be the same as we had before so I started planning around that idea. Liberty’s are all old boats now – at least 40 years long in the tooth – and most would need a substantial refit if they haven’t been looked after well or been messed about with by an enthusiast as mine was. There were some very nice and very pricey examples around ; the best of which was a well cared for boat already on a trailer in the Netherlands but luckily a long way outside of my budget for a boat that size.

It’s now ancient history that the Liberty I bought had been owned by an enthusiast, only a rather incompetent one that only used it (luckily for him) on short day trips in the Solent. That one needed a lot of basic sorting out to even sail properly so I quickly had to abandon my ambitious plan to sail it home, upwind, from the Solent to the west country. When I had it brought over on a trailer and first looked at it in the boatyard I found that it needed a more thorough refit and rethink before I could sail it well. Within months I did my first channel crossing in it and it was still steering a bit ‘wild’ ; when I got back from that trip I only noticed that it’s previous owner had mounted it’s rudder blade back to front – and for some strange reason I hadn’t noticed. What it actually needed was a blade repair and then mounting properly, but once again, that’s ancient history.

The thing that caught me out in my thinking about the Hunter Liberty was me remembering what an ideal boat it was for that time in my life and what I failed to do was remember the things that were basically wrong with it – at least for me. It was an extremely light boat so it was ‘dynamic’ in a seaway and basically so tippy when I climbed aboard that I found it difficult with a failing knee. At sea it was great in light airs, not so good with a brisk beat in a fresh breeze against a tide in the English Channel. It’s size was good for me on my own and it worked well enough for both of us together but only because we could treat it like being in a small tent together.

My final (for the moment) thoughts about owning a Liberty again was a bit like my take on a thing that Adam Savage said : that making is an iterative process. Having decided that there was little possibility and no point in buying a smart Liberty because I would immediately start messing around with it……again, I decided that the only way to go was to find a cheap and rough one and mess around with that at a much lower overall budget. The problem problem was that I was still fighting yesterdays battles and hadn’t thought about what would work for both of us now and in the future.

In short, and to keep this whole post readable I came to the conclusion that : We’ll need a bigger boat.……

Best wishes Y’awl.