Short adventures
The moment of liberation dragged on forever. On the horizon shimmered normality: government permission to sleep away from home, harbours open even if going foreign meant heavy restrictions. For weeks we wondered when we could legitimately get down to the boat, 200 miles west because that’s where her mooring is. The word came that liberation would be synchronised with the moment they allowed caravans. It felt reasonably democratic. Releasing yachts before caravans, though probably sensible in terms of infection, would feel classist coming from a Tory government, would it not?
So most of us obediently waited, irritated by secondhomers, government advisers, beach bums and mass demonstrators who didn’t. And given that, for many, the release coincided with a pressing need to get out and earn some money there must be some shorter cruises than usual this year. Some will be further shortened by doubts about the wisdom of hunkering down in small cabins with crewmates outside your lockdown household: great hunks snoring out assorted viruses all night with the hatches dogged against the driving rain.
Since the government devoted three months to converting us all into agoraphobics with a morbid fear of other people’s breath, there may be a new squeamishness afloat for a while.
But if they’re just long weekends and snatched days with ambitions curtailed and thoughts of Spain or Shetland mothballed, relish them all the more. When time is tight invention is vital. So is imagination. And anyway, memory confirms that it isn’t always distant voyages which stick in the memory: such is our pastime that a lot can happen in a bewilderingly short time.
I remember one weekend in the Bristol Channel on a veteran oyster-smack, the topsail getting stuck aloft as we proceeded helplessly sideways past the entrance to our designated harbour. An overcanvassed jaunt out of Newhaven in an 18 footer, which culminated in the Sportyak dinghy catching a gust, broaching us helplessly sideways towards the pierhead and having to be cut adrift for survival’s sake. Then there was our new (old!) Rustler’s maiden voyage ending in my brother taking a death-leap onto a pontoon when the reverse gear failed. Even Wild Song’s jibsheet, on our first tentative get-to-know-her outing, contributed to the sense of adventure by flicking violently back and destroying the spray-dodger. Several hundred quid of damage within 20 minutes…
Of course one overcomes setbacks – I mean, when we got beneaped on the hard in Dartmouth just as springs were taking off we did get a tow off – but they provide stirring anecdotes for years. It is a bigger version of the phenomenon of dinghy cruising on some sedate river, where a picnic afternoon turns into the Voyage of the Damned, or a whimsical detour through the tangled creeks becomes a Terror In The Rushes movie (‘Which way did we come in?’). A wind shift and a frisky tide can provide embarrassing hours on the mud; once, towing two children’s Toppers, I waded upstream through the said mud for an hour because I knew that otherwise the other child’s anxiously waiting mum would make a great deal of this at the school gate. Ultra-short trips in my old Tinker inflatable had their moments too, always less than a day long but feeling longer. It was almost like an OSTAR triumph when, with the starboard tube gradually deflating on the way back from Orford to Aldeburgh in the dusk, I became an integral part of the rig, holding the mast up with the sagging shroud wrapped round my foot.
So take heart. However short your adventures this summer, the odds are there’ll be tales to tell by the fire in winter.
It isn’t always distant voyages which stick in the memory