Cooped up in his boat in this summer's poor weather led to Paul considering onboard creature comforts including washing-up ethics
It wasn’t the best summer ever was it? Unless you were lucky, or somewhere several 100 miles distant from our beloved home waters. It actually rained on me in southern Brittany, and blew a real gale! Unprecedented in my experience. I’m tempted to ask the French for my money back.
But I coped and kept smiling, as did the crews of most of the other boats I met, all of us knowing that the secret of surviving the dismal elements is to ensure our own comfort. The problem is that not everyone’s idea of comfort is the same, and one sailor’s luxury in another’s purgatory. While waiting for an improvement in the weather, I cast my eye around other boats to see what their idea of comfort might be. Most boats close by towered over me, glistening like dazzling white icebergs, with cockpits of vast acreage one of which sported pot plants. I suppose there must be some comfort to be gleaned from geraniums, but it’s difficult to see how they might cheer you up mid-Channel in fog. On the subject of modern cockpits, it is now the height of fashion to have twin steering wheels. What for, unless you are racing and need to glue your gaze to your luffs? Adding extra things to go wrong doesn’t quite add up for me. And neither does open sterns protected by a single guard wire. I know that the Vendee Globe crowd sail perfectly happily with them, but these people are heroic and haven’t got a cute cockapoo in the cockpit; one mean-minded wave would wash that poor mutt off its feet and flush it out of the stern like a rat down a drainpipe.
But back to comfort. I thought I had all the comforts you could ask for on a boat which, I am happy to confess, includes a fridge, hot and cold running water, and a wood-burner for cold nights. I always thought these were the height of luxury but it seems I am a mere beginner. I have just read in an American magazine that a boat’s ‘selling point’ was the it was ‘fitted with dimmers which don’t make your lights chance colour’. That thought would be comforting on a wild night watch as you fumbled for the light switch to find your trousers. I heard of a chap boasting of his fantastic new satellite connection so he could do his conference calls while his wife streamed old episodes of Sex and the City as the kids uploaded movies to TikTok.
Perhaps it’s time to take a pause and remember what comfort on a sailing boat is really all about. We need to go back to 1925 when SJ Housely became the first person to
