Perfection is overrated

You know you’re in love when aws turn into features

The shock! The sudden acceptance of a fact you’d been aware of but tried to hide for years, nearly 30 in my case. Your boat, my boat, Sally, born in 1937, fashioned by the finest shipwrights, designed by a master was not, in fact, not... perfect.

Until that moment (I can date it precisely to midday on 24 May) and place, Johnson & Loftus’ yard on the shores of Loch Broom when, standing back to admire my undercoat, crouching low to inspect my waterline (it’s taken years to get it right, hopefully 28th time lucky) I noticed that Sally was not, as I said, whisper it low, perfect. The bold sheerline I had admired so much, and the little tippy-up bit at the stern, from a low perspective formed a gentle reverse S curve from bow to stern. In short, the boldness of the bow section, if I were to be picky, was a touch too bold.

It takes a strong man to admit the love of his life is flawed. Or woman. I could take the analogy further. A marriage, after lasting nearly a third of a century, falls apart for the simple reason that one, or both partners, wakes up one morning and thinks: “that nose I once thought aquiline, now appears beaky. How can I live with a man with a nose like a parrot’s?”

Don’t get me wrong. Sally is, for me, (naturally) still the finest looking small wooden boat ever designed, and her sisters possibly the finest small sea boats ever to sail the seven seas. Before that fateful day I had been forced to accept the fact that, in common with most wooden boats, she was not symmetrical. I am not suggesting lopsided, bent, banana-shaped, crooked, just that one side was perhaps 1/2in out at a point amidships, a fact I discovered when trying to match port and starboard waterlines by measuring down from the gunwale.

Does it matter a damn? Of course not: as one old shipwright told me “You can’t ever see both sides at once.”

And then I began to see the flaw (which in truth only I will ever see) as not so much a flaw as a feature, part of Sally’s unique character. We are not talking the schnozzle on film star Cyrano de Bergerac, more like super model Kate Moss’s, or actor Jess Buckley’s bewitching lopsided smiles. Perfection is, quite frankly, boring.

And of course there is absolutely nothing that can be done about wiping the smile off their faces, or toning down Sally’s rather outrageous sheerline, which sweeps up from mast step to galvanised stem fitting, giving her an air of snooty confidence as if to say “with that amount of topsides above the water, I will seldom get you wet,” and that’s a fact.

We’ve had water coursing down the side decks and slopping into the cockpit on a hard beat, but never shipped it green (or muddy brown for that matter) over the bow. And thus from slight disenchantment, came an acknowledgement of Mr Laurent Giles’ forethought in giving Sally such buoyancy up front, while wishing he had given a little more thought to giving her a tad more at the stern, where her sections are positively Folkboat like; less a wineglass, more the extreme curve in the back of a gymnast or ballet dancer.

And thus, on that brilliant spring day I came full circle. Then, climbing a step ladder, set at a distance, rung by rung, from ground level upwards, and squinting, the sheerline which had looked a little too bold when crouched down, softened at rung five into a delicious concave, in which I could almost see Mr Giles’ ebony curve, as he set it down on the drafting paper back in late 1936, and hear him muttering

“Too bold, hmm. I wonder?”, before inviting his partners to gather round his drawing board. Did any of them suggest anything other than what the boss had drawn was anything less than perfection? It would have been a bold move; almost as bold as the line they were scrutinising.

“That nose I once thought aquiline, now appears beaky”