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Remember Barry Mcguigan, the pint-sized Irish boxer who defied the odds to become WBA featherweight champion of the world in 1985? I certainly do. But not so much for his fighting as for his homespun philosophies. The one that sticks in my mind from a particularly gruelling but ultimately victorious post-match interview was his assertion that “it’s not the size of the dog in the fight but the size of the fight in the dog.”
While I hesitate to make a comparison between having seven bells beaten out of you in a boxing ring with the rather more genteel sport of motor cruising, the man has a point.
Take MBY reader and contributor Andrew Morton, who last year took his 25ft single-engined Finnmaster pocket cruiser on a 300nm round trip to the remote Outer Hebridean archipelago of St Kilda (next stop Greenland) and then proceeded to paddle round the islands solo in a carbonfibre ocean kayak. Not bad for a retired teacher on the wrong side of 75!
I know we get a lot of stick for featuring quite a few big, expensive craft in Motor Boat & Yachting that are beyond the reach of ‘ordinary’ boat owners but as Andrew’s story on p50 clearly demonstrates, that doesn’t mean big adventures are out of reach too.
GOOD NEWS FOLKS!
I’m pleased to say that after a lot of foot-stamping and pencilsharpening, we have managed to procure a small stash of top quality printing paper. It didn’t arrive in time for this issue I’m afraid, so we’re still on last month’s thinner stuff, but it will be here for next month’s bumper Custom Yachting edition. In the meantime we’re hoping that the strike at our paper mill in Finland
will finally be resolved and normal service can resume.