Dave Selby
Here’s what happens when you swap a proper plastic boat for one with brown sails...
We’re all very concerned about Tommy. He’s gone gaff. And worse than that, his gaffer is made of stuff called trees. As you know, gaff is a lifestyle choiceÉ without the style.
And in that respect Tommy has until now been something of a trailblazer. Well, it’s not literally a blazer, but one of those boat show jackets made out of racing sails with numbers on them, which you open with a tearing rend of Velcro that wakes off-watch sailors with a sound like sails shredding in a gale. His is the extreme highperformance version with battens.
In fact, apart from a few Sloane Square sailors, Tommy is the only person from North Foreland to the Wash to own such an item, and apparently he once even considered the matching fully battened trousers. What I’m saying is that Tommy is a racer at heart.
But lately we’d noticed he’d not been wearing the must-have go-faster sports garment of 1997 quite so much. Also, his discourses in The Queen’s Head less frequently included the phrases: ‘I had the overlap’, ‘he took my water’, ‘over the line at the start’ and ‘that’s a matter between him and his conscience, if he has one.’
Instead Tommy was just as likely to be found gazing longingly at images on his phone of his newly acquired 1980s re-creation of an Edwardian 20ft Brightlingsea pilot boat called Albert & Florence. I agree wooden gaffers are lovely for gazing at on phones, and in fact gaffer owners in The Queen’s Head are notable for doing this, while eulogising about how: their timbers are all of ‘the right stuff’, ‘they don’t make them like this any more’, ‘I just sold my house to pay for the restoration’, ‘she leaks just enough to keep her sweet’, ‘she may not point quite as high as a Bermudan’ and ‘there’s just a touch of weather helm, nothing more than three on the tiller can’t cope with.’
All of which was more than a little puzzling, as Tommy also owns a proper plastic boat, a Beneteau First Class 8 called Geronimo, a formidable racing machine of the kind that barely slows down when you trail a spinnaker as a drogue, litters the sea bed with winch handles and leaves you covered in bruises every time you step on it. I speak from experience.
As for gaffers, it’s well known that they lead to wearing smocks, singing sea shanties, reading Arthur Ransome and, ultimately, Morris dancing.
I just didn’t get it, so when Tommy asked me to meet him at 4.30am at the Blackwater Sailing Club for a 40-mile ‘jaunt’ up the coast to Suffolk I was intrigued enough to say: “Maybe. Has she got a spinnaker?” When Tommy said ‘no’ I agreed to give it a go.
For the first hour I found the intricacies of the gaff rig all very straightforward. But then Tommy decided to put the sails up. And that’s when it became confusing.
For aesthetic reasons all the ropes on gaffers are the same colour, and there are lots of them. Neither is it considered fashionable or seamanlike to festoon gaffers with Dymo tape labels telling you what to do, such as: pull; don’t pull; pull only in an emergency; don’t pull even in an emergency; cut here to send the mast overboard.
But despite my best efforts we were moving along at a merry lick, surfing in fact, with the huge, tan, battenless mainsail harnessing the rising southwesterly over our quarter, at times recording 9.8 knots over the ground. Albert & Florence is a slippery thing, with a shallow soap dish bottom, internal ballast and a centreplate.
And when it came time to reef we managed it without have to come on the wind as you would in a Bermudan, and with no fury of flapping of sails and flailing lines. I was beginning to get it.
When we tied up on Tommy’s summer mooring at Felixstowe Ferry on the Deben I realised we’d covered 40 miles in six hours.
Tommy reckoned his First Class 8 would have made the passage a little quicker, but Albert & Florence got us there in better shape. In my Sailfish 18 the same passage has taken me 11 hours.
There’s a strong case for brown sails without battens. In fact Tommy’s so enamoured he’s thinking of having a jacket made out of one.
‘For the first hour the intricacies of the gaff rig were straightforward. But then we put the sails up’