Situations vacant: sailing Dutch Aunts and Uncles • By Peter McGrath

My uncle sidled up
to me yesterday. ‘Look at this,’ he pressed a survey into my hand, ‘let me know
what you think.’

As it happened, I
thought he’d bought a corker. 26 feet
with a pilot house, helming positions inside and out, lines led back to the
cockpit, aged but lovingly maintained. Deep, comfortable cockpit, lots of instruments inside, hefty new
batteries to power them and well-kept two cylinder auxiliary for punching the
North Sea swells, winds and tides. Scandinavian built, with a fibreglass layup
that would stop a six-inch shell.

I’ll look forward
to sailing it with him: I’m a commercial yachtmaster who’s just spent a season in charge of big
ketches, so I think I’m pretty good. But
on this boat, I’ll sit back and be deckhand, do as I’m told. Because the owner isn’t my blood uncle, he’s
my sailing Dutch Uncle.

My first
experience of sailing was being told by people I now recognize as racers to
**** off when I asked how to sail, could I sail with them? Generalising from this, I thought all
sailors should be hurled into pits full of poisonous snakes – not very
poisonous, I didn’t want a quick death for them – until I met DU.

He taught at a special school and one day
needed bodies to help on a days sailing with some of his kids – Wayfarers. Remember that epiphany the first time you’re
in a boat that gets up on its toes and you know you want to sail? Well, that was the day, gloriously made
better by watching our school’s head boy, pompously skippering another boat,
sail it into the embrace of a fallen tree.

Pause to re-live
that happy memory.

Anyway. Uncle saw that I liked, was besotted by
sailing and invited me on his
25-clinker-gaff-bilge-keel-motorsailer-thing. None of which meant anything to me. Uncle brought his regular crew, another experienced dinghy sailor and
boat owner, who we will call Captain Caveman. I rapidly pegged Uncle as a methodical man: the boat was tidy, he did
things in a certain way and always thought, looked and checked before he acted.
Captain Caveman was sailing entropy personified. Cheerful disorder attended his every move.

The sailing wasn’t
wildly exciting: a series of day sails from our home port. But it was all there: the chest-bursting pride
when they trusted me with the tiller, the feel of the mainsheet, cocking up
your tacks, then taking notice of the growled, ‘sail her through this one…’

I learned my
basics on Uncle’s gaffer. Then learned some lessons on Captain Caveman’s
Silhouette. It was as chaotic as
Uncle’s gaffer was orderly. At its floating moorings it looked a boat that had
seen better times, but what did I know? When I put my head below, I knew for sure that an outboard engine
shouldn’t be lying in a few inches of oily water.

But, I was young,
Uncle was there (albeit frowning and muttering Bardic disapproval) so all would
be well.

We sailed down the
coast on the flood, a light airs day. I
can see it now: you’ll see why. I
learned that a light boat drags her stern and sails badly if too many people
lounge in the cockpit, that my 13 stone elsewhere made a difference, that sail
trim matters. No GPS in those days, but
the Jurassic cliffs slipped by a little quicker if my weight went forward.

We came back on
the ebb, and as we got to within reassuring sight of the pier ends, the inshore
ebb-swell was starting to build. It was
the first time I’d ever been heaved up on a long, powerful, deliberate swell. A swell I watched march about half mile
inshore and break before crashing into the foot of the cliffs.

Then we caught a
stray lobster pot line. Captain
Caveman mucked around trying to untangle us, then Uncle took charge: cut the
line. Youngest, strongest, most supple
I was nominated to hang over the side and do the honours. Caveman’s knife was blunt and loose. Uncle’s was scalpel sharp and on a lanyard,
loops neatly spliced in each end. The
wind had died, and each swell now heaved us towards the cliffs. Caveman went for the engine. A decrepit Seagull, which spent its downtime
in oily water.

It didn’t
start. Pull after pull after pull, wide
eyed assurances that it used to start every time, first pull. A smell of oily
petrol as the ‘gull refused to do its duty. The wind still dead, swell by swell we headed for those cliffs. Long before we got there the swells, the big
swells would have upended our boat. Smashed it to bits. And killed
us.

Uncle: ‘Maybe we should give the coastguard a call.’

Caveman:
‘Battery’s flat on the radio.’

Uncle (ominous):
‘Flares?’

Caveman: Addresses
himself to the outboard. What flares?

I, meanwhile, am
looking at the piers. 400 yards away,
ladders up the side, I’m a strong swimmer. Maybe I could make it before the North Sea numbed my muscles and I was
dragged by those breakers and smashed into those cliffs.

The breaking
crests, the cliffs get ever closer. You
know what happens next. The Seagull
clattered into metallic life. Huffs of
justification and relief from Caveman, looks from Uncle. I refastened my shoes. We motorsailed clear of the breakers, around
the pier ends, into the harbour, picked up our buoy. Admiring, possibly envious people watched from nearby piers and
proms as we put the shabby boat to bed and tumbled into our tender. I detected strain in the air, unspoken recriminations
(pas devant le sailing enfant) as we rowed back to land.

Since then, I’ve
sailed many of Uncle’s boats. He hasn’t
got his yachtmaster, maybe not even his day skipper but he hasn’t put a sailing foot wrong while I’ve watched
and crewed. Boats he’s bought and done
up, boats he’s designed and built, experimental rigs and all. Including the one that the berthing manager
said looked like someone had ‘cut the end off a ****ing shed, bodged a mast on
it and dropped it in MY harbour.’ It
had a dipping lugsail rig, went like the clappers and but wouldn’t tack. The best was a return to gaffers. Uncle would take her off the mooring and
we’d motor downriver towards the swing bridge, its environs usually packed with
gawping tourists – she was a pretty boat. Uncle is the least ostentatious man I know. But as we approached the
bridge with its audience he would give the tiller, the precious tiller, to me
and he would stand on the coachroof, holding onto the shrouds to ‘look out for
other boats’ while we passed the admiring faces, dozens, hundreds and in summer
thousands of them.

Lookout my
Musto-clad backside. He was showing
off. And quite right, too. He had bought a clapped out gaffer, made it
look lovely, sailed it as well as ever it could and been generous with its
decks. And he had taught me lessons I
remember to this day. But wasn’t just
the lessons, it was the tone.

I still go sailing
with Uncle: he’s 20 years older now, stiffer in the joints, loves my tales of
big ketches. Still loves his wooden
gaffers, and bonkers experimental rigs, but age and sense has brought him to a
pilothouse 26 foot GRP boat with inside helming (outside tiller, too which will
get the use until the North Sea does its very worst), Eberspacher, furling main
and jib. He bought it the morning he
went in for big joint surgery. He still
sets the tone.

Kids I skippered last year still ring me: some want to
get into sailing. Suddenly, I’m an
Uncle. And I’m only one because I had
one. When a 13 year old comes down the
pontoon, looks wide-eyed at your boat, asks about sailing, remember that some
people need sailing Dutch Uncles and Aunts.