There is an old saying that the happiest day of your life is the day you buy your first boat. And the second happiest day is the day you sell it.
I can’t relate to this. I have only ever owned one boat, a very used Cape Dory Typhoon. She was 12 years old when we bought her, solidly built, fairly well-maintained, a little grubby and her sails were functional but old. My wife and I loved her. We gave her, her first name Alad (a contraction of our first names); we cleaned her up, worked on her teak, and then tried to clean the teak stains I had created. We bought her presents like new cushions and a sturdy British Seagull outboard engine. Above all we sailed her. Every weekend we could, without fail on “lovely” Galveston Bay. Never more than a day sail but she was our sanity and a very important part of our early marriage.
When our son came along, we sold her. It was a sad day. We were blue for weeks about it. We still miss her.
Since then, it’s been renting and reading. Chartering whenever we can and reading pretty much anything written about sailing (lately, especially the backs of the sailing magazines. At some point Alad II is going to happen).
Mostly I have been reading about the great sailing adventures of the single-handers: Chichester, Knox-Johnston, Slocum, MacArthur and even Donald Crowhurst, poor guy. The thing that struck me most about these stories is the range of relationships these sailors had with their boats.
Like love affairs, they come in many varieties, from the spiritual to the down-to-earth nature of a long solid marriage, from the troubled short-lasting affair to the tragedy of a flawed relationship.
At one end of the spectrum was Bernard Moitessier with his speed machine, Joshua. She was a model of
functionality. Built out of steel with a telephone pole for a mast, not especially beautiful to look at but Moitessier had an almost spiritual relationship with her. In my view, Moitessier seemed have spiritual relationships with just about anything except living humans. Moitessier had the opportunity to be the most famous sailor ever. He had a shot at winning the first and fastest son-stop solo circumnavigation in the Golden Globe race of 1968. Instead, he abandoned the race and rather than return home to his real wife, he stayed at sea to be at one with Joshua, the sea and nature.
Then, there were the more down-to-earth relationships that Knox-Johnston had with Suhaili and Slocum with Spray. Like a
comfortable long-standing marriage, they knew their boats well, what they could expect from them, cared for them and were grateful for what they got in return. Nothing too flashy or passionate, the relationships just worked, They weren’t especially sentimental about each other but like a good marriage it was based on trust. Man and boat, counting on each other, protecting each other.
PART 2 TOMORROW. – FRANCIS CHICHESTER AND GYPSY MOTH IV