Ultimate hand-me-downs
Recycling in the best possible taste
Iam standing on the teak deck of a superyacht’s gym; it might even be a bit of the captain’s personal gym, or even the crew’s gym – after all, they above all need to keep in trim with all those heavy trays of canapés to hand around, as well as all that hoisting of sails at the push of a button, which must exacerbate any tendency to repetitive strain injury something terrible.
Facetiousness apart, the square of decking under my feet is now the cockpit sole of Sally, a tiny bit of recycling or repurposing, stripped and saved from the bonfire when the new owner, or perhaps his wife, decided that the previous owner’s ideas were not to his liking. The gym, possibly, is now a beauty salon, dance floor, basketball pitch; who knows, for the rich, as the saying goes, are not like us.
His loss is Sally’s gain. I’ve always wanted a teak laid cockpit sole and there was spare enough to floor my workshop. On which once the high glitterati would cavort in leotards, is now covered in wood shavings and – I have to admit – badly stained with paint splodges, glue, and bird poo from the resident robin redbreast.
Sally has a few more bits and pieces, salvaged from various places, including the ornate brass bars used to raise the sash windows in a certain Victorian house in Stockbridge, a gentile part of Edinburgh where curtain twitching has been raised to a fine art.
Sally’s modest contribution to the problem of waste is in contrast to the profligacy of many owners of large yachts; the stripping of entire interiors at a whim; the ditching of fine furniture (although much of it is spirited away into the hills where it is said, whole villas are furnished with the cast offs); and, of course, the ripping up of decks, laid with the best, flawless, irreplaceable teak.
Sally’s sole is, to be fair, teak faced plywood, laid to look like a deck, perhaps 10mm of timber, no more. There were signs of staining, which I put down to sun tan oil, apocryphally a major reason why decks are replaced. I have heard first hand, of piles of smashed teak in marina skips, and no way to recycle other than burn. Does teak make a good timber for burning in stoves, I wonder?
Sally’s anchor windlass is also salvaged, probably from the barge up the top of the Hamble where you could find pretty much anything, in my time usually about 30 years out of date, or older. That meant the bronze fittings from wooden yachts from the post-war era, now broken up: Blake heads, Highfield levers, blocks and such like. Today, if the barge still exists, it’ll be the hand-me-downs of the ’80s and ’90s, electronics for which spares are no longer available, roller reefing gear by a defunct manufacturer, and maybe, just maybe some of the good stuff that we classic boat owners cherish, of the kind we drool over in old Simpson Lawrence catalogues – of which I have two – or the current Davey’s.
Long gone, and replaced by housing, on the banks of the Itchen, Belsize Boatyard used to be a favourite stamping ground. I remember near the entrance, high above the jumble, two huge Deltic diesels, from what wartime patrol boat, who knows, but surplus to requirements. One entire shed was filled with Bell & Howell projectors, of the kind that flickered in smokefilled cinemas and village halls. Maybe the owner – who went by the name of ‘Squeaker’ – thought one day they might become popular, if only as props in a nostalgic movie shot in black and white.
Of rather more interest to those seeking maritime memorabilia, but hidden from prying eyes behind barred and padlocked doors, was half a yacht which, from her good side would have looked intact. Dashed against the rocks inshore of the Mixon, this was Ted Heath’s unlucky Morning Cloud, wrecked on a delivery passage with loss of life. Everything in ‘Squeaker’s’ yard was for sale, from the Deltics downwards, but not Morning Cloud. There were limits then to what was right and proper to strip and pass on.