The yearn for abroad
Break out the yellow duster! Brexit has its downsides, but at least will give a new life to the dear old Q-flag, even for short Channel hops. That humble custard-coloured square has a great resonance for those of us with creaking knees who well remember the pre-’73 days, when even a cautious creep from Dover to Calais had all the glamour of ‘going foreign’.
The mouldering yellow cotton from the back of the chart-table drawer carried, for us nervous beginners, all the historic implications of words like quarantine and contraband. It bore the derring-do of historic seafaring. Blimey, you felt like Columbus or Magellan as you edged your 22-footer into St-vaast-la-hogue or tied up bashfully to a reekingly exotic vissersboot in a Dutch lock.
Our EC and EU decades of course removed that duty, though visiting European ports of any kind retained some of the glamour. But no romance at all attaches to the word quarantine now, and as for smuggling, there’s none of that Kipling bravado (‘brandy-for-theparson-baccy-for-the-clerk.’). Not now that smuggling is all about horrible drug-dealers and despicable people-traffickers. But maybe the need to put up a Q-flag will bring back a little bit of excitement, alongside the nuisance.
Not least because one of the dismaying – if rather niche – problems of the COVID-19 year has been the restriction on going foreign in your own boat. Freedom of the seas seemed to be over, a classic example of not knowing what you’ve had until it’s gone. Seems incredible that people used to say ‘We’ve only been to Boulogne, quick hop,’ or ‘Just a little family trip round the Ijsselmeer’. Either option now feels daringly exotic, for as I write yachts are still circumscribed by law and traffic-light rules, on both sides of the Channel and the Irish Sea. Friends with boats moored abroad have been trapped away from them for a year; one pal, still marooned in French Polynesia, finds even a coral lagoon a bit
– well, samey – after 14 months.
Those of us with UK moorings have become ever more familiar with local harbours. There was even, at one point, some doubt expressed as to the wisdom and welcome of English boats taking a Scottish or Welsh cruise, though I haven’t heard any worries about it applying the other way round.
But as mariners, however humble and cautious, we yearn for abroad. Britain’s yachtsfolk will cram on sail and throw themselves across the water as soon as allowed. We shall break out not only the dear old Q-flag but the roll full of courtesy-flags, national and regional – I love the stylish black-and-white Breton one, Galicia is impressive, and it would feel very wrong to approach Welsh waters without the dragon or Scotland without St Andrew fluttering aloft. If the return of foreign-going involves a bit of bother with clearing customs, we will have to accept that as part of the exotic experience.
It may not be all that bad. I hope Ireland, in particular, keeps up the old tradition of lackadaisical welcome. Once in the late 1970s we arrived there to be met in Crookhaven Harbour by a chap who had driven all the way from Bantry – ‘Well, it’s a grand run out’ and rowed to us in a borrowed boat. He sat in the cockpit, admired the little Contessa 26, and said meaningly, ‘That’s a fine brown Irish teapot you have’. Cake and tea were shared, and we hauled down the Q flag together in amity.
So dream of foreign shores again. Recite John Masefield’s Cargoes. We may be butting through the grey Channel, salt-caked and windblown, but we claim our brotherhood with the Quinquireme of Nineveh, the stately Spanish galleon, the cargoes of ivory and gold moidores. Even if in reality the cargo in the cabin consists only of a case of ordinaire, a round of challenging cheese, and a copy of Parismatch with a feature on Mme Macron’s
outfits. We wanna go foreign again!
The humble custard-coloured square Q-flag has a great resonance for those of us with creaking knees