LIBBY PURVES
Wrap up and get out
Ancient instinct told us, as the year turned, that it was Boat Show time. Lovely. Anticipation built: everything new and shiny, with hundreds of bilges smelling of sawdust and GRP. Indoors, out of the rain and wind it was, for decades, a time to dream. Except that they cancelled it in this blighted Brexitacious year: not enough punters. Leaving lofty Earl’s Court, where we could actually look up at the masts, clearly wasn’t a great idea. We need to look up at masts. All those stunted mastless yachts at the Excel Centre depressed us (this may be Freudian, but we are gentlemen at YM, even those of us who are ladies, so draw a veil).
Anyway, it leaves us without a fixed point, a festival of warm indoor boat worship in the darkest time of the year. Unless you are a really worrying addict of dreaming and dinghy-groping, in which case you may head off in sequence to Göteborg, Vancouver, Boot-düsseldorf, Helsinki, Ghent, Suissenautic in Bern (what??) and all stops to Detroit.
But maybe Boat Show deprivation is a blessing. Maybe we should just get out there in the dark, hopeless months to contemplate the dank reality. The late editor of this magazine, Des Sleightholme, master of the Wodehousian yachting reflection, once gave us a beautifully pathetic portrait of the skipper returning to his boat at the first thoughts of spring and staring at a befurred frying-pan as he ‘wondered how, in fitting out, he could disguise from himself the fact that he never really laid up’.
As it happens I am married to one of the most punctilious layers-up on the planet: he has left various boats of ours immaculate in Essex, Suffolk, Uruguay, Iceland, and – once – tucked up neatly next to a hedge in West Cork. There is nothing he cannot tell you about dehumidifiers. And his scholarly devotion to Peggie Hall, authoress of Get Rid Of Boat Odors, has made me feel I am less than the woman he deserves.
But even so, the first visit to the boat after the turn of the year is always faintly dismaying. Do we really plan to exist, week after week, in this chilly space? Is this the idyllic floating home in which we dream of necking Prosecco in the long balmy evenings at anchor, and putting Bonne Maman jam on croissants for cockpit breakfasts? When we had a wooden boat there was some vestige of dignity even in the dark days: you could pat the sturdy curved knees of the saloon ceiling with respect, and bless the trees they once were. GRP, however, gives little back to the caressing hand. Not when it’s bloody freezing, anyway.
We used to spend quite a lot of winter sessions tending the boat, even sailing. There used to be a tradition of sailing a Christmas hamper to lighthouses: indeed the scouts of the Third Chalkwell troop used to go to Canvey lighthouse to present theirs to the keeper. Even when the lighthouse was taken down in 1957 they carried on the tradition, and, according to their website, in 2015 they ‘learned about heavy-weather ship handling’, rescuing a yacht from a broken mooring before heading ‘back to the Den for coffee and mince pies’.
That’s the winter spirit. Light the stove, boil the kettle, haul on all available thermal underwear and brave up to reality. No fantasy, no tripping down Boat Show aisles in pink trousers to the Guinness stand. Get out in the sleet, even if it means staring at the furry frying-pan of shame.
GRP gives little back to a caressing hand. Not when it’s freezing, anyway