Why every sailor eventually starts singing to their boat – Libby Purves

Your boat can be many things, family, home, safety and trouble. Libby Purves considers the complication relationship between boat and owner

During the romantic wedding season, let us muse on the emotional attachments we yachtspeople have, not all of them human.

The obvious grand affair of the heart is with the sea and wind: a relationship that ranges from calm affection to something akin to coercive control; if any man treated me with the brutality of one particular sea off Lowestoft in summer 2018, I’d definitely divorce him.

But, of course, our big emotional relationship is with the boat itself: she is home and adventure, a staunch protector and either a heartbreakingly beautiful object like our old Rummer, or at least one offering the grace of solid utility.

If you have never sung to your boat, under your breath at the helm alone, you lack a soul.

I always favour The Queen of Connemara, with its lilting ‘Oh, she’s neat, oh she’s sweet… she rides in her pride like a swan’.

I never like to hear of people insulting a boat which has got them home safely, even Sir Francis Chichester, who moaned that Gipsy Moth IV was ‘difficult and cantankerous’, and was probably quite justified.

Me, I have always stayed on the sentimental side, buffered by a strong awareness of personal limitations: as one old chap used to say, lurching around off the Fastnet Rock on a battered Stella, ‘don’t worry, we’re just amateurs, the b-b-boat’s a professional!’ I’ve said that to myself often, when trying to work out that there surely must be a way to set a goosewing or raise a jackyard topsail smoothly. Cleverer people designed it, I’d think, so it must be my fault.

That said, as in any long-term partnership, boat-love is complicated. You can love her lines, speed and grace without loving her awkward running backstays, find it hard to tolerate certain inconsiderate forehatch leaks and positively curse the vicious behaviour of the bilge pump.

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And the engine is, of course, a completely separate emotional family relationship because you may end up taking the whole damn thing out and never wanting to set eyes on it again.

But mostly we all feel a real, if sneaking, affection for the ‘iron topsail’, if only because the days are gone when a yacht might elegantly come alongside a clear wharf under nothing but an artfully managed jib. Now it’s more likely to be a matter of jigsawing yourself into a coffin-sized space up at the windward end of a crowded marina in a fast tide.

Indeed, when we finally got a bow-thruster, my husband spoke of it with the passionate attachment of a medieval troubadour.

But this brings me to another heartfelt feeling: anxiety about your propeller. We have had many over the years – two-blade, three-blade, feathering and folding, brakeable and un-brakeable. And at times we have felt almost
the kind of worry you would feel for a child out on its own, vulnerable to tangled events which it can’t foresee, and you can’t either.

Well – you guessed it! – this brings me straight to Yachting Monthly and the Cruising Association’s new campaign for the proper marking of fishing gear: pots, creels, lines in between them on buoys. If you can’t see them, you can’t avoid them.

A line round the prop is potentially disastrous for you and maybe for the engine itself.

It is also, if you do get clear, a source of guilt: you’ve messed up the precarious living of any fisherman by dragging their stuff around or cutting it through. For years I urged against cutters on props for that reason, but we did succumb. And, having sailed a lot on the Irish coast, we at least understood how that particular local fishing works, and had the experience to look downtide to see if a harmless-looking buoy was only one end of a trailing net or line.

So this campaign for safe sea-sharing is a good one, and should be in the minds and hearts of everyone from tall ships to wetbikes. Not least because good yachtsmen have a real and respectful sense of fellowship with professional users of the coastline.

Fishermen are not the enemy. More than once over 50 years we have found them showing remarkable friendship towards us amateurs. Marking gear well keeps that alive.

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The post Why every sailor eventually starts singing to their boat – Libby Purves appeared first on Yachting Monthly.