I guess like everything I have to apportion responsibility for my love of boating to my parents for much the same reason that is the theme of any TV awards ceremony speech.
I don’t remember my father as a person because he died of lung cancer when I was still too young to have learned much from him. He was head of science and a house master at Rugby school and was involved in a mixture of mechanical engineering, chemistry and physics both as a job and in his spare time. When he died he left a young family, a half built house, his book collection (including text books that he had written) and a variety of furniture and other items that he had built himself. May be genetics or the presence of things that I saw every day and knew he had made, but I think that predestined me to be a scientist or engineer. Key things at an early age were a huge Mecano set and a model steam engine that he had built. Later I learned from others that he had a small collection of vintage cars which he had maintained and at least one of them is still running as a wedding car some 60 years later. There was also a scratch built clock that I still have and which has taken up several hundred hours changing batteries and persuading the reluctant mechanism to work.
The boat side of things was started by my step father Ted. He was born and raised in the Southampton area and sailed on the Solent as a young man. I dont know what boats he sailed or whether he worked on building or maintaining them but his father was a carpenter & joiner so that was a major possibility. After national service and his time at Cambridge studying engineering he moved to the West Midlands (almost as far from the sea as you can get in the UK but still only a little over 100 miles). For many years I would go with him when he went to work on a Saturday morning and also help him with all types of DIY jobs around the house. If my engineering and woodworking skills are not up to scratch it was my failure to learn rather than his inability to do the job or lack of patience allowing a teenager to try to do things. I didnt appreciate it at the time but a lot of his tools originally came from his father or were made by the company he worked at (Woden tools). That line had been sold to Record and the company had changed it’s name by the time I was visiting the factory which still went by the postal name Woden works.
Our first boat as a family was a Puffin Poineer, an unsinkable rowing / sailing / motor boat which was memorable for being made mostly of expanded polystyrene about 3 inches (7.5 cm) thick. Usefully it went on the roof rack while the car towed the caravan but we were permanently terrified of spilling petrol as the fuel could dissolve the boat if it went in the wrong place. After many years service and a lot of non-standard repairs / modifications by both of us, Puffin was replaced by an inflatable water-ski boat but not before all the children had learned to sail it solo, rowed many miles on rivers & lakes, taken numerous trips to europe in the summer and had embarked on several “Swallows & Amazons” style adventures such as sailing to islands on Loch Lomond and camping overnight.
Like many of my generation, my original boat was a Mirror Dinghy which I built more or less on my own in the garage. It was always clear that help was available if I asked but the whole thing was my project.
Apologies if you ever owned Mirror 42877
and couldn’t officially race her but as a 10 year old I wasn’t careful enough about sticking to the measurement certificate limits and should have checked and encouraged several bits to be in the right place rather than where they naturally wanted to go.
I still have an inch and a half (4 cm) scar from an accident while trying to use force and a blunt chisel to shape a small block. It was typical of me and both my parents that I was more in trouble for bandaging it up and carrying on working for another 6 hours than for having the accident in the first place. I eventually allowed my mother to see it because it wouldn’t stop bleeding and was calmly taken to A&E for three stitches followed by 2 weeks boat building abstinence. Ted’s reaction was to teach me to sharpen the chisel properly so it wouldn’t happen again.
The main lessons from the build were about patience and the impossibility of heating 2 car garages enough to get a decent fiberglass cure in the winter. Unless it is mid-summer I still pre-warm my resin on top of a radiator before trying any fiberglass work.
Anyway the job got finished and I spent many a happy hour sailing on the Dovey estuary (as often as not going backwards with the tide) and on various holidays to Scotland, France and Spain.
When I came to enter the fifth form at school I could finally escape from he usual cricket, football & rugby by choosing sailing as my Wednesday afternoon sports lesson for the next three years. Suddenly the “useless non-sporting” kid was in his element and was quickly discovered to already be RYA qualified as a day boat skipper and more than able to help maintain the three Mirror dinghies that the school used to teach sailing on a local lake.
Sailing continued while I was at university and was soon joined by gliding as my other participation sport (or is that Obsession?). Both of those fizzled out by the time I was married and went to the US for a few years as a post-doctoral fellow. Returning from that had me working and raising a family in South Yorkshire. As you will see later I think something of my childhood has been passed on to my three children.
So that just about brings us to the stage when I was beginning to think about what I was going to do in my eventual retirement. At that time we were living in Gainsborough and while looking on Google for something I stumbled across a reference to the town in Dylan Winter’s video blog (Keep turning Left). I was hooked on his mix of sailing and local history and that set me thinking about getting a dinghy to go sailing with my younger daughter. She really enjoyed going to the lake district every year with Christian Adventure Holidays to go Kayaking, sailing and hill walking.
Even a small dinghy is quite expensive and you can get a larger e-bay wreck to do up for about the same money so here we are with the metaphorical itch to scratch and a web browser to search with…….