The ‘Salt of reality’
It was quite a moment in July when COVID-19 restrictions eased enough to let us sleep aboard. We hared off to Dartmouth and pottered westward. Two weeks later a 15-year-old set off eastward from Hamble in a Hunter Impala 28: Alchemy was not pottering but sailing 1,600 miles round Britain anticlockwise, to bag a youngest-ever record and raise money for the Ellen Macarthur Cancer Trust. You may, like many thwarted in their own sailing this summer, have followed Timothy Long’s blog reports even before his final triumphant interview here. They’re a treat: modest, sensible and honest, admitting fears and neardisasters and sharing apprehension about the longest legs.
He mainly sailed by day, with a lot of time awaiting his weather in harbour over the 11 weeks (storms Ellen and Francis both delayed him). But when you go anticlockwise, even via the Caledonian Canal, you inevitably face some of the dodgiest bits first: Lowestoft to Grimsby, 100 miles with no easy refuges, vile sandbanks inshore and oil-rigs further out, and shallow seas. Two years ago, our nastiest ever sea was just outside Lowestoft. Paul said Cape Horn was pleasant in comparison.
What I like best is the lad’s level-headedness. When his electronics fail in the maze of East Coast sandbanks he feels that surge of panic we all would, but mutters ‘assess the situation, find the problem, fix it, so that’s what I did’.
When he’s had a 0430 start and a wild ride down the Irish Sea he ties up and tidies before sleeping. He is also a model to us all in his willingness to heed meteorological wisdom, defy impatience and often spend another unscheduled dull day in harbour.
Yet his is a time of life when we assume that teenage hormones make boys into careless daredevils, treating life as a hot video game. At best we portray them as springing around in illegal parkour manoeuvres or getting lost up mountains in plimsolls. At worst we think they’re sex-mad, stoned, or likely to join knife gangs.
Even when they’re three years older than Tim was, parents tremble with apprehension about how they’ll cope during Freshers’ Week at University. Trusting teenage boys even to wash their own socks is considered almost reckless parenting. It’s nonsense. Teenagers learn technical stuff fast, even obsessively if they’re interested. They have quick responses and, as my eldest brother once exasperatedly said to my mother about his parachuting, ‘I want to survive too, you know!’
I have no idea how good young Mr Long was at washing his socks, but he is clearly a competent master of his ship, and, vitally, knows he’s learning all the time.
‘I am a lot better at making decisions now,’ he said after a Scottish crisis.
The final statistics on his blog include 68 snack bars, which suggests that as well as his ration-pack meals he sensibly knew about keeping his energy up (I once had a skinny boy his age crewing, and whenever his attention faltered and jaw gaped you had to post in a fig roll, and see his IQ instantly rise. Boys process carbs fast: it’s like jet fuel).
But the central, heartening message is how good, how formative, sailing is for those children and teenagers who ‘get’ it, and find seascapes and motion exhilarating. If they really don’t, for heaven’s sake don’t persevere. There are other adventure sports: riding, climbing, trekking. But I have seen sea magic at work both on tall ships and family cruisers.
The pure undiluted reality of the experience is particularly valuable, because too often we foist on kids theory, prejudice, and older people’s experience rehashed. What Belloc said about the ‘salt of reality’ applies three times over to the young and restless.
‘Here, sailing the sea, we play every part: control, direction, effort, fate; and there we may know ourselves, and know our state.’
Tim Long displayed character, sense, skill and endurance. He will have got a lot of it from sailing itself.
Yet another reason, everyone, to support all our sail-training and sea cadet charities which are now suffering, disastrously, from the COVID year.
I once had a boy his age crewing. If his attention faltered, a fig roll would see his IQ instantly rise