Setting Sail

From the editor

It’s a funny old business, this sailing; at least it can be, once you get away from the dreary stuff like painting bottoms, paying yard bills, seasickness and swearing at the damned outboard that you just had serviced and still won’t start. This is of course the painful yin to the blissful yang of actually going sailing. While we may grumble about these least-favored aspects of boating (and I do), there are people to whom this is just part of the rich panoply of the sailing life and who, what’s more, can convey that in a manner that makes us laugh at ourselves, albeit ruefully.

Unfortunately, there are not very many such people, and we recently lost the master of this esoteric craft, boating cartoonist Mike Peyton, who passed away in January at the age of 96. Peyton was the real deal. He spent his life sailing the shallow gray waters of England’s East Coast, where the chilly east wind seeks out every gap in your foulweather gear and every sunny day is received with the gratitude of a besieged population watching the enemy give up and ride out of sight. You need a keen sense of the ridiculous to love sailing in a place like that, and Peyton had it in spades. Over many decades of plying those waters in a series of ferro-cement boats, Mike had seen, done or experienced just about everything you could see, do or have happen to you on the water.

In the early 90s I kept a boat way up a tidal creek off the Thames Estuary, whose bleak waters were as attractive as the Caribbean to a man of Peyton’s mindset. One summer afternoon I heard a familiar voice hail me; it was none other than Peyton, whose boat, along with a kayak whose occupant was obviously a newcomer

to those waters, had been gripped by the black, oozing mud as the tide rushed out.

Peyton was content to put the kettle on and wait six hours for the tide to return and float him off, but the kayaker was not. The poor man’s slow, torturous journey to shore, where he eventually emerged minus footwear and covered in reeking mud from the waist down, had us laughing helplessly in between shouts of encouragement. It was a Peyton cartoon, come to life—or perhaps the genesis of one. s