Long live yachting diversity
Roaming the Southampton Boat Show and wandering onward to the brokerage yards for something financially less challenging, you know what you’re looking for. A longkeeled offshore cruiser? A sexy superlight racer, a cautious family picnic-boat, a classic? A beamy floating caravan with all mod cons, an unashamed motor-sailer? Maybe something poised between two of these, a compromise you will have to learn to love. But sailing this summer amid a cheerful fleet of some 21 boats I reflected that the choice of sailing companion is almost as crucial. Yachtsmen and women come in different temperamental varieties: even Maurice Griffiths tended to fall out with his wife over the merits of mud versus deep water.
The distinction between racers and cruisers is the easy one. If someone’s regularly haring round the club buoys, calculating handicaps with narrow-eyed precision and coveting engraved silverware, you know where you are. Similarly, the letters RORC on a cap tell you that this person is capable of sailing nearly 300 miles to the Fastnet, tacking within five miles of Sullivan’s bar at Crookhaven but perversely sailing back again without putting a foot ashore, let alone ordering a pint and a crab sandwich. You have been warned.
But among cruising people there are equally important distinctions. When dating, marrying, or just buddying-up with a skipper you need to know what variety they belong to. Not just safe-versus-stupid. There are wider, subtler distinctions. You can roughly divide us ‘cruisers’ into several categories.
There are Explorers: never happier than discovering new harbours and anchorages most people (and a lot of
pilot books) avoid. Their thrill is in sneaking into a subtle crack in the rocks in West Cork to lean on Goleen pier for a tide or two, or anchoring underneath a French lighthouse in a ring of jagged rocks where absolutely nobody else sane will ever have been. A cruise involving three marinas and some pleasant days anchored in Lulworth Cove and Swanage is, to them, a boring failure.
Allied to them are the Achievers. They do not start out with any idea of a rejuvenating holiday, but quoting Tennyson’s Ulysses: ‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield!’ If they set out to round Cape Horn, that is what they will do (Reader, I married one). If their free time is more limited it’ll be a lesser ambition but equally gruelling: possibly a remote island in the far north of Ireland or the Hebrides, upwind.
Among the Explorers and Achievers there may be some prudent types, but a few will also be Heavy-weatherers. These consider a season ruined if the wind never rises above Force 6, and find the sight of an unreefed mainsail babyish. ‘Hardly worth going out…’ they grumble. Serious Heavy-weatherers will also eschew roller furling, because the height of their pleasure is achieved on the foredeck, hanking on a storm jib with spindrift up to their waists. They should not team up with their opposite numbers: the Ghosters, whose favourite skill is in coaxing boats to move in a flat calm, ideally with enormous asymmetric foresails made of cobweb and tissue-paper and costing as much as a car. Ghosters will never fire up the engine just because it’s coming up to closing time or the last train home.
There are other types too. We all know the shellback traditionalist who talks as if he’s in a Patrick O’brian, the oyster-eyed pub-crawler, the marina-softy who won’t go anywhere without pontoons, the meany with a dread of harbour-dues… name your own. But long live diversity: there’s no such thing as a typical yachtie.
The choice of sailing companion is almost as crucial as the choice of boat