The magic of the Avon Redstart dinghy is only fully appreciated after trying out a modern upstart
Here is my thought for the day in a quote from Sylvia Plath, the American writer and poet who married another poet, Ted Hughes, in a marriage that we might describe as being of hurricane force, but that is none of our business here. Rather, I would like us consider her view on the nature of friendship as set out in this quotation:
“There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.”
And where does this take us? In my case, to the very depths of the dusty, spider-riddled gloom that is my garden shed to meet once again a true old friend, a faithful companion of decades now lying crumpled and unloved, a victim of modern times in which we believe anything new will be far better than something without a shine of it. How foolish I have been.
We are talking tenders, and my history with them started badly. As a lad, with my very few quid I bought a weary Leisure 17 – my first little boat. The tender was a depressingly cheap plastic sandwich, French made, with little depth, no comfort, no directional stability, nothing much in its favour, really, except it wouldn’t sink. Every row out to the mooring was to take hold of your life as if it was about to expire. I have said more prayers in that thing that I have ever uttered in a church.
How I envied those flash, massive-looking 30 footers (huge to my eyes compared to my 17 footer) with their stable, faithful, untroubled elephant-coloured dinghy behind them. It was glory days of the Avon Redstart.
That is what I was hauling out of the shed, shaking the dust off it, fearing rats might have made a home. It looked sad, but only as depressed as a balloon that has lost its puff and needed only a few breaths to bring it back to life.
We bought it back in the 80s to accompany our brand new gaff cutter, Grace O’Malley, in which we set of to sail round Britain with our two small children – Libby’s book One Summer’s Grace tells the story.
As I looked at it, times remembered washed over me; small children drilled in the getting on and off routine, later dragging it ashore in countless Irish anchorages, and finally a few runs ashore in the rocky wastes of Patagonia. And only one small repair the size of a postage stamp! What a hell of a dinghy that Avon was.
So when did I fall out of love? It was easy. I was persuaded that the new style of tender was safer, had inflatable floors, solid transoms, even p
