Corking ideas
A visit to the biggest boat show in Europe results in a kaleidoscope of sparkling new plans
Earlier this year I nipped over to Düsseldorf, a charming town on the Rhine where the inhabitants seem to subsist on an all-pork diet and in January visit the biggest boat show in Europe, spread over some 15 halls each the size of Earl’s Court.
I returned to Blighty, bathed the feet in hot brine, and told myself I had forgotten all about it. Then in the middle of a night some months later the flashbacks began.
You know the scene: 3am and wakeful, mentally going over the roller forestay arrangement of the ketch. Do I need one of those halyard diverters like a little fairlead on the mast, or would it be better with one of those plastic wheels that keep the halyard out of the way of the rolling bit of the forestay? They had both been at Düsseldorf, in about 12 different versions. Which? All right, both.
Now the eyes were wide open and the thoughts were pouring in, based on a sort of kaleidoscope of sparkling new Düsseldorf ideas. The thing to do was to
use the best bits of the boats in the show and design something absolutely, well, now. The hull, for a start. Wood, ideally, but I know my limits. Epoxy, then. Filthy stuff, of course. But there is green epoxy, made with 30% vegetable oil instead of petrochemicals. And if you make a bish you can trim it off with an angle grinder. Fine. And decks. Deck paint is so last year, and teak decks are so expensive, and plastic syntheteak is nearly as expensive and made of oil. Cork, though. Warm, durable, practical. And the rig. Bermuda rig is so like totally over. The mainsails on those new America’s Cup boats are square at the peak, no doubt derived from the curved gaffs on Dutch traditional boats. Efficient, that. And ropes from Marlow made of recycled plastic bottles, themselves recyclable.
But of course there is not always enough breeze, and when there is it may easily be coming from the wrong direction, so an engine. Diesel is just as last year as deck paint. Electric is the way forward, with massive banks of solar panels to charge even more massive banks of batteries.
And if there’s an electric engine on the boat we will need one for the tender too. There was a spiffy one that hung down from the bow of an inflatable, and had a built-in GPS so you could programme it to troll where you wanted without having to touch the engine. Excellent for a festive night on shore. Programme the engine, 47 pints please Doris, fall into the tender some time after midnight and back to the boat you go, barring accidents. Excellent.
And anchors. Preparation for all situations is key. We could have a Rocna, which is good, and a Kobra, which is just as good, and a Fortress, which folds flat, and a fisherman, for nostalgia and heavy weed, and...
Hold on. This is too many anchors. Besides which, the mind has moved on to living, for we are not racers but cruisers. We need a wood stove, and there are some little Scandinavian beauties. We probably also need sheepskin bunk liners, and wipe-clean organic headlining. And before we get that lot up we will have to do the wiring for a really good suite of instruments that not only tell us where we are and where we are going but will give us a decent game of Scrabble at the same time as checking the sea temperature and cooking our lunch. On the induction hob, naturally...
Then the darkness outside the bedroom window sweeps in, and with it despair. The sail will fail, the battery bank will be drained by the engine, and there we will be in the Portland Race, drifting helplessly down on the Shambles, and it does not matter that the new epoxy is biodegradable and the new sheets and halyards are totally recyclable, because the whole lot is going to land up at the bottom of the sea, and the wood stove will be a home for lobsters.
And come to think of it there is a perfectly good boat waiting in Scotland, with plenty of old but sound gear on board and a few bottles of last year’s wine reaching maturity in the bilges. So the hell with up-to-dateness. Except for the cork decks. The cork decks sound proper lovely.
First, though, we need to sort out the forestay.
‘Programme the electric engine with built-in GPS, fall into the tender some time after midnight and back to the boat you go, barring accidents’