LIBBY purves
Life is simpler at sea
Igo to sea’ said the singlehander, ‘because it’s so much simpler out there.’ He was an old friend, many oceans under his belt. Listening to his reminiscences about storms and narrow shaves in his past, you might think that a bewildering statement. Simpler out there? Sailing-boats are complicated, all the way from leaky bilges to fraying halyards, frying electrics to blocked galley sinks. There is no moment at which nothing needs fixing, updating or replacing. Navigation is an art, even more so when those electrics fry, and in his first 30 years at sea it was all sextants, dead reckoning, triangulation and doubling-the-angle-on-thebow. Tides, winds and currents are hardly straightforward either. What did he mean, ‘simpler out there’?
He stuck to his guns. ‘On shore it’s politics, and negotiating with other people, and filling forms and making applications and pitching ideas, putting things to committees and remembering people’s names and how to be polite, and choosing what to buy at shops, and not offending anyone by accident. Go to sea and it’s simple. Either you stay afloat and reach wherever you’re going, or you don’t. That’s all you have to do — one job! Do your best. Make the voyage, and don’t fall overboard.’
You can see his point. He has, I know, sailed with a crew before, but clearly that meant that at least the negotiating and politeness and discussion did have to happen in miniature. When he’s all alone he is spared that problem. But even with a crew, the rest of his argument holds true: there is just this one central job, and you do it together.
As for ordinary personal animosities, why bother? Once you’re 50 miles offshore you’re stuck with one another. I did once spend an interesting hour on a boat where the four of us were a bit scratchy. One went huffily up to the spreaders and sat there, one retired to the end of the bowsprit, one stayed on the helm and the fourth spent a while trailing behind in the dinghy. But it was a very calm day. One little squall would have had us all back, hugger-mugger in the cockpit, co-operating.
Singlehanders are a bit special though. Not all of them are on the run from life’s shoreside complications, at least not all the time; but what they do have is that pure, cleansing willingness to take on total responsibility for themselves. That is rare these days, as we all rely on train timetables, 24-hour services, and a health ’n’ safety environment in which you can sue a local authority if you stub your toe on a paving-stone.
Alone in a boat on the sea you have nobody to blame except the weather, and there’s really no point starting down that road. Decisions are ultimately your’s alone, even if you are a cosseted modern racer with a sleep-coach following the graph of your sensor and a shore team online 24/7.
You are Invictus in the poem, or if female, Invicta: ‘Master of your fate, captain of your soul’. Like Victorian W.E. Henley — tubercular, one-legged and in pain, you can only snarl: ‘In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud; under the bludgeonings of chance my head is bloody, but unbowed!’
But on the upside, as my singlehanded old friend says, you don’t have to negotiate, fill forms, pitch ideas, put things to committees or remember anyone’s name. Yes, some days I can see his point.
One little squall would have had us all back in the cockpit, co-operating