Probably one of the most famous lines in film that is misquoted by sailors : when my old mate Jaws actually said that it was in reference to his boss’s (Peter Blake) attempt on the Jules Verne challenge and nothing to do with a great white shark terrorizing a coastal community.
Needing a bigger boat is one of the most commonly pervasive traps in the world of leisure sailing : sometimes it’s as though sailors have the automatic assumption that bigger is better. That’s probably why the British boatbuilding industry failed in the 1970’s and 80’s because the French manufacturers could give you a bigger, although not neccasarily better) boat, with more berths per food and at a lower price. Many of those boats are now sitting largely unused in the huge French marinas and many of them are simply abandoned and now being hauled away and broken up as so much GRP scrap.
A generally useful rule with boats is that you pay by the pound, or Kilo : thus a smaller, heavier and better built boat is just as much an expense as it’s longer. larger and weakly built counterpart. Badly built medium sized yachts really came to grief in the 1980’s in the infamous Fastnet race (Ok so that was 1979 but WTAF ) and a few years later in a bad weather incident at Cabo San Lucas. Not to have too much of a downer on industrially mass produced cruising yachts but at one time we always used to refer to Benetau’s as Bendytoys.
If you’re interested in the Cabo San Lucas storm that destroyed several poorly built European cruising yachts then look up the Pardey’s account. The TLDR is that a storm blew in and turned the anchorage into a lee shore, many boats dragged their anchor and were driven ashore where many of the hulls broke up from being pounded repeatedly on hard sand in a vicious surf. As a side note it demonstrated how poor most boats anchors were and how weak their whole anchoring gear : that’s pertinent again today so i’ll come back to it later in this post.
In fact, lets deal with that straight away. The spirit of the age or zeitgist of leisure yachts in the 80’s and 90’s seemed to be relatively cheap and badly built boats sold at as low a price point as possible : potential owners wanted as large a boat as possible for as little outlay as possible. Most of that kind of boats were always destined to live in marinas or established sheltered moorings and would usually only go out in ideal weather thus they didn’t get a whole selection of wind appropriate jibs to sail under ; what they all got was what most leisure sailors demanded which was roller furling jibs and in so doing lost, or never had in the first place, the ability to work the foredeck in a rising sea state. In short, sailors became a wealthy microcosm of modern life ; fat (like their boats) lazy and stupid – they got what they so deserved. Ok so call me a grumpy old cynic !
I consider myself lucky in that I was drawn to offshore racing early on and quite naturally started at the bottom of the skill heap but in so doing I had to become a steady and agile foredeck hand. That kind of sailing has often been seen as a branch of Corinthian sailing and in it’s later versions that seemed to become the province of small boat sailors without much in the way of hard cash – thus they had to do the work themselves and find the cheapest options for mooring although were usually a lot more careful about their sail selection and their anchoring. All my own opinions of course.
Many years ago, and I wrote about this at the time, I took a walk around one of the French marinas while I was waiting for the fierce spring ebb to settle down and stop pinning my long keeled Frances 26 hard up against the pontoon – must have Benny-Odet. My Frances 26 had better and heavier anchors and more of them than most of the 35-40 foot modern cruising boats but then I didn’t spend much of my time alongside in a marina : I think I was only there that morning to do my shopping – that being the morning that a friendly Dutch sailor bought me a pack of safety pins in the supermarket when he noticed that my arse was hanging out of my trousers !
A diversion sideways for a moment.
A sailor whom iv’e followed on and off for years by the name of Sven Yrvind, is soon to be heading off to sea with the aim of sailing to New Zealand. Nothing exceptional you might say except that his boat is about the same size as the expedition dinghy that I built, oh, and he’s in his 80’s and built the boat (Exlex) himself. Iv’e always found Yrvind difficult to deal with which is why iv’e never featured him in my blog although I should have. Yrvind is definitely a man who has gone his own way and his boat is nothing like most circumnavigators boats : it is though built with the single minded purpose of getting across the Southern Ocean and is even built and set up to deal with knockdowns and rollovers.
The thing that Yrvind says which is relevant here is that bigger isn’t better; rather he says that smaller boats are ultimately safer but even more pertinently he says that comfort is a trap. Some days I feel that in owning a house, doing normal things and having given up most of the difficult/uncomfortable things in my life is exactly that kind of trap.
Where we are at right now.
This morning we found out that my partner needs medical treatment that will include chemotherapy. The chance of her being treated successfully is thankfully very high so that was the silver lining in a cloudy morning and in some ways a relief to know what’s wrong and that it can be treated. Given that both of us have and have had, medical problems is a bit of a wake up call about what we do and how we live our lives next. The most important precondition with anything to do with a potential boat is that Jackie has her treatment and that that treatment is successful. After that i’m wondering if a good option at this stage in our lives is for Jackie to knock it on the head and for us to go travelling with ‘home’ being a small sailboat.
That brings me up to date with explaining why iv’e been thinking about boats again, been looking for another Hunter Liberty as a starting point but also considering a slightly larger, 24 feet as opposed to the 22 feet of the Liberty, sailing boat. The not so strange thing about both boats is that they are roughly the same age and need the same kind of work done to them : the obvious difference is that one is twice the base price of the smaller and each piece of new gear works out at close to double as well.
From having been very enthusiastic, briefly, about the larger boat, I costed up each thing that i’d decided that I would need to do ; just one thing as an example is that I may need to build a new wooden mast for either one. I costed up the wooden stick for the Liberty as I know how to build a small section birdsmouth spar and building a larger longer section is only a matter of scaling up the materials. Once again though the cost of timber and machining was twice the cost with the slightly longer mast. Just to explain : I could build the mast for the Liberty – it would be a relatively short lug rig – from single length staves of Douglas Fir while to go up a few feet needs a lot more timber and significantly more work because I would have to start by making scarfed staves first and of course each stave would have to be thicker and wider but iv’e had a whole load of fun working out the construction of a better mast than the one I made for the Pathfinder.
The advantage with the larger of the two boats is mostly in it’s greater stability and in it having quite a bit more space for a couple to live aboard and cruise : it’s quite amazing how much more volume you get by going up two feet in length. That’s more comfort yes but perhaps not in the way that Yrvind is talking about comfort being a kind of trap. For me, comfort on a boat mainly means being dry and warm, having somewhere to stow food and cook indoors rather than precariously in the cockpit and above all being in a sheltered anchorage : I think it was Ron Holland said that what he all he wanted in terms of his racing yachts was somewhere to boil a kettle and somewhere dry to lay down for his watch below.
What’s this all about ?
Well, it’s about our health. In the last two years we’ve both had our health problems : you all know about my series of minor strokes and iv’e written about Jackie’s rough time with PMR. This new problem is a biggie though : I recently wrote, but never finished and published, a post where the main theme was ‘live well and get sick anyway’ ; comparing my problems which are entirely my fault to Jackie’s which seem absolutely no fault at all – it’s just that the problem she has now is an unfortunate facet of her family’s medical/genetic history and I won’t go any further into that here.
From my point of view my strokes were a huge wake up call, for 8 months iv’e been working on my health every day but am now wondering what to do with my life given that I seem to have given up on most things. Each day that Jackie works she comes home and one thing that she asks me is have I spoken to anyone and most days the answer is no. It’s not just that i’m unsociable – i’m now pretty well asocial and happy with my own company but it’s not a particularly good place to be. Jackie is far more sociable that I am but the question i’m asking now of both of us is what to do next and how to live this part of our lives. My answer to myself is to go voyaging again but with Jackie rather than solo and in so doing collect a whole load of new memories together – some of my best ones of recent years were when we cruised around parts of Brittany together – I don’t expect to repeat that experience but want to have something similar where we travel under sail, poke into odd rivers, harbors and creeks in a a Dylan/KTL – kind of extended voyage.
I’ll leave this post with one well known meme from sailing though : one that’s been quoted by just about every small boat sailor down the years. Go Simple but Go Now. This post is the other half of a twin – the other part being ‘Normal Service Resumed.
Best wishes Y’awl.
Dirty Wet Dog, the great adventure. 