A triumphant return
The triumphant return of Jeanne Socrates after her solo circumnavigation provoked all the usual marvelling exclamations – wasn’t she lonely? frightened, ever? how did she carry enough stores? and how amazing that she set out for the third time aged 76 after recovering from several broken bones… It was marvel upon marvel, especially for non-sailors who don’t meet as many doughty cruising women as we do, and imagine all solo yachtswomen are bronzed young professionals with trimarans and satellite links to sleep-coaches.
But for me, as usual with such voyages, the marvel was admiring her at-sea maintenance. Read the blog (www.svnereida.com) and like all such accounts it tells – alongside cheerful stuff about whales and frightening stuff about storms – a catalogue of mending, carpentering, wiring, contrapting and sewing. Three weeks before the end she spent her birthday stripping down the port winch and replacing a spring; in her one flat-water pause off New Zealand, she had to mend a hole in the cabin roof with a handy plank and rewire nearly all the electronics which had been knocked about. These bluewater wanderers – of all ages and both genders – don’t limp crestfallen into harbour and trudge up the town to find a yard, or at least an ironmonger. They root through their stores and make something work. Even we cruisers do (well, not me personally, unless it’s plain sewing). I’ve known a chap braze a new copper olive to join a pipe, up a Scottish loch.
The key seems to be utter familiarity with the boat, every inch of her, born of doing your own work in the winter: fiddling, adjusting, rewiring, fretting about seacocks, carpentering, light engineering. On top of that there’s a golden rule I was once given: ‘never obsess about what the broken bit looked like, focus on what it DID.’ He explained that once you think that way, an expensive bit of steel may be temporarily replaced by a lashing, or a matchstick wound with wire, or a piece of Blu-tak... One is reminded of the way Clare Francis replaced the alcohol leaking from her bubble compass with brandy…
Fortunately, fiddling about with their boat all winter is something which a certain kind of yachtsperson absolutely loves. He – usually he – regards it in the same happy light as traditional chaps regard their garden shed. It’s somewhere to go, even in the deepest cold of winter up on the hard. It’s a place to put the heater on, take a couple of sausage rolls and a thermos, and spend hours perfecting small jobs, remembering last season’s problems and inventing ways to cure them. It is of course a time to install exciting new electronics, but also to sort out that galley storage, that grab-rail, that light fitting, that deck leak, that catch that swings open and sends a torrent of dry T-shirts into the puddle underneath it. My observation – as a DIY muppet fit only to make the tea and slap on antifouling – is that this is a profoundly happy time for the boat-owner.
It is usually a bloke thing, an escape from the sedentary world of screens and work emails and, dare I suggest it, the duller family preoccupations. The only bit of relationship advice I ever got from my mother, very solemnly, was that ‘A man needs a shed.’ She had grown up in Nottingham, with men whose vital escape was the garden or allotment shed. As it happened, she married a cerebral diplomat who hid behind the newspaper instead: Dad absolutely didn’t want a shed and resented even short visits to the greenhouse, but her belief holds true that in many homes the shed is a saviour.
And in the case of the practical boat owner it’s even better, as well as contributing to safety next season. For after all, what could be more delightful than a familiar shed you can actually go on holiday in? Whenever you get galebound, there’s something down there to do…
These blue-water wanderers don’t limp crestfallen into harbour