Tom is reminded of how a perfect weekend’s sail with family and friends on home waters can soon banish the memories of less pleasant occasions on the high seas
I’ve just taken a glance through my last two columns and it’s perhaps inevitable that the content reflects the sort of summer most of us have endured. They’ve concentrated on blocked loos, headwinds and all those things that drive us daft about boating. I doubt there’s a single reader who hasn’t faced up to the question, ‘Why am I bothering with all this grief.’ Logic may encourage the quitters to give up, but the rest of us soldier on through the storms of adversity, knowing that somewhere up ahead is a better deal.
And so there is. A magic weekend always turns up whose memory makes everything worthwhile. Let me share one of mine. It almost seems to hail from another era, yet it remains as real as it was on the day.
It’s a quiet Saturday morning on the Beaulieu River. The oaks in the New Forest are just beginning to turn. Stubble in the fields tells of a harvest safely home. Local cherries have all been sold on Lymington’s market stalls, and unpicked apples are beginning to fall in my neighbour’s orchard. Mist lies on the water, waiting under a clear sky for the sun’s banishment. Autumn is upon us.
We are five-up today on the boat we’ve recently sailed from Canada. There’s Roz, me and our daughter Hannah, plus a couple of friends we’ve known since the dawn of time. Westernman would be something of a mystery to most sailors of today. She is a full-on 40ft gaff cutter, designed by Nigel Irens for sea-keeping and sheer speed. Her heavy displacement hull has just seen us through some notable North Atlantic gales, heaving-to safely in 20ft seas, then ranting homewards at 7kts past the lonely Bishop Rock and on up-Channel under storm jib, reefed staysail and triple-reefed main. The gaff that spreads the head of her mainsail is hoisted with two halyards, a throat and a peak. Above it she spreads a big topsail generally called a ‘jackyarder’. Her long bowsprit supports a high-cut jib. The large staysail sets from the stemhead forestay and is the core of this ever-fascinating rig.
As we wash up the wooden breakfast plates, the boat is sitting above her own reflection on a gently ebbing neap tide in a whisper of air from the north. She’s head-to what wind there is and facing upstream, so we hoist the main and swing up the jackyarder. We unfurl the jib as we slip the buoy, then we back it and give her a sheer with the long iron tiller. The extreme lev
