DICK DURHAM
Sailing intuitively
Aged 12, I needed only a lift-off rudder, damp cotton sails and bruised oars to attain a sense of achievement. With these tools I could make physical sense of space and time. I didn’t know it then, but I was involved in reality calculus. Change in wind patterns altered the set of the sails and if I did not trim them, I did not proceed. Change in the range of tide could be mitigated by lifting or lowering the rudder blade and centre-plate. And when both elements failed, in other words when the wind died and the tide started ebbing away, there were the oars.
Whatever happened I could advance, and learning to harness the natural forces available in this way instilled intuition. There is no better way to learn how to sail.
That said, I know plenty of great sailors who did not learn this way and who had mechanical power at their disposal. They are a different breed and their ability to unpick the parts of a dead diesel engine and bring ignition, warmth and life back to cold, oil-covered, rusty units is, to my mind, the work of a sorcerer. Nevertheless, such sorcerers have more faith in logic than natural forces: the universe revolves around their prop shaft.
When I became mate of Cambria, the last Thames sailing barge trading under sail alone, the skipper Bob Roberts, who always wore clogs on board, danced on my toes when I stood to weather of him: he needed to feel the wind on his face.
That is how he steered the 92ft craft, especially at night. In the 14 months I spent aboard her I learned how to ‘work’ the tides. As long as you had the tide with you you could turn to windward. The element you were sitting on was decisive and ruled, most of the time, over the element you were sailing through.
When the tide came against you, you anchored. You now had six hours for food and sleep. Today that would be described as symbiotic, to us it was natural.
Bob was so ‘symbiotically’ involved with his environment that he could even smell his position:
I well recall coming up Swin one night in fog. The flood died somewhere off the entrance to the Thames. Bob took a board in towards the Essex shore and had me stand by the anchor. Slowly we pushed through the mist as Bob sniffed the air. Then he said: ‘OK, let go.’
Fifteen fathoms rattled out and we turned in. At daylight the fog had lifted and I could see we were nicely 50 yards inside the Blacktail Spit buoy: clear of the Maplin Sand but also clear of any passing traffic. It seemed like magic, but it was intuition and I later discovered that several great sailors, including the Antarctic solo yachtsman David Lewis and solo circumnavigator Bill Nance, shipped aboard Cambria to experience this dying art. They knew Bob was sailing for a living, not for a stunt. They knew they could learn from this. And, like me, they did.
But if you didn’t learn in a dinghy and you didn’t ship aboard the Cambria you can still become an intuitive sailor: simply go offshore racing. I’m no fan myself but I’ve done my share, including crewing in a Fastnet, and I have nothing but admiration for this breed.
One story which epitomises all I’ve said above was told to me by a racing man, Clive Davison, whose Estuary One Design was becalmed just yards from the finishing line one autumn day. It was high water and the tide was, at any minute, going to come against him. As his sails threw their shadow over a flock of migrant geese sitting on the water, they took off en masse. ‘The wind from the downbeat of their wings just pushed us across the line’, he told me.
Skipper Bob Roberts was so ‘symbiotically’ involved with his environment he could even smell his position