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    Sailing - A Guide for Everyman
    Sailing - A Guide for Everyman
    Sailing - A Guide for Everyman
    Ebook162 pages2 hours

    Sailing - A Guide for Everyman

    By Aubrey De Selincourt

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    About this ebook

    This antiquarian book contains a comprehensive and novice-friendly guide to sailing. Including all the information a beginner needs to know, this accessible and profusely illustrated guide constitutes the ideal introductory book. Although old, the information contained within this volume is timeless, and would be of considerable utility to the modern enthusiast. Chapters include: “Is It Expensive?”, “Old Boats and New”, “Beginning to Sail”, “Engines”, “Rigs”, “Cruising: Gear”, “Cruising: Buoys and Charts”, “Cruising: Coastal Navigation”, “Some Miscellaneous Tips”, “Maintenance”, “Flags and Rule of the Road”... and more. This vintage book is being republished now in an affordable, modern edition - complete with a specially commissioned new introduction on sailing.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateMay 31, 2013
    ISBN9781473389076
    Sailing - A Guide for Everyman

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      Book preview

      Sailing - A Guide for Everyman - Aubrey De Selincourt

      Chapter I

      IS IT EXPENSIVE?

      BUY A yacht and see the world—I remember reading that piece of advice in some book or other. It is good advice, but unpractical. I myself should dearly love to follow it; but I have neither the time, nor the knowledge, nor the money to be able to do so. No doubt many others are in the same case.

      I would therefore amend this romantic counsel. Buy a boat, I would say—or hire one, or borrow one—and see certain other things nearer at hand than the Galapagos, or the Milky Way of the sea, but hardly less interesting if you look at them with a receptive eye.

      For instance, you will see the absurd inaccuracy of almost any account in almost any newspaper of accidents to yachts or ships—and hence the falsity of the belief that Englishmen naturally understand and love the sea. Not one in a thousand knows the first thing about it. You may even trip a favourite and admired author—as when Thackeray describes the table-cloth of a certain baronet as being as broad as the main sheet of an admiral (but you won’t trip Dickens). This, however, will only minister to your vanity. There are other things more important.

      For the first time you will see a harbour; no longer merely as you would see a picture, with detached aesthetic enjoyment, but with a pleasure more near the quick; for what will be doing there will be in part your own—the multifarious goings-on of ships and boats and men. I can idle for hours—and do, when I have the chance—on some quay or foreshore, watching the craft, especially the sailing craft, going about their business or pleasure; even looking at them on their moorings, and telling myself how they would be likely to behave in various conditions of wind and sea. For boats, though they may look much alike to an unaccustomed eye, have an expression—a physiognomy—as subtly various as men; and, just as with men, the expression is a key to their character.

      Have you ever seen a shipwright using an adze? You will, if you are lucky, next time you visit a yard. The thing is a marvel. I was told of a shipwright once who could sharpen a pencil with that lethal tool, holding the pencil down with the toe of his boot. No tale of the skill of shipwrights is too tall for my belief. I built a boat myself some years ago, with the help of friends. She floated more or less, and we had many hours in her which were delightful, and not a few that were comic; but the chief thing she taught me was a proper reverence for real boat-builders.

      There are plenty of other things to see in a yard besides the shipwright and his adze: the boats themselves, for instance—yachts big and little, some tied up alongside the jetties, with a man aloft perhaps in a chair, scraping down the mainmast for a new coat of varnish; others hauled out under the sheds—two or three if it is summer time, thick as fish in a can if it’s winter. How on earth were they got there? What is the skill that can push a fifty-tonner tidily up into a corner, as if she were as easy to move as a bath chair?

      I love to watch an expert rigger at work. Once I wanted a leader fitted for my topsail; and being in Brixham, where leaders were first invented for the topsails of the big smacks, I thought it was a good opportunity to have it done. Of course I ought to have done it myself; but I am glad I didn’t, or I shouldn’t have made the acquaintance of those three men who came off from the yard to do it for me. Naturally, we talked for a bit before setting to work; for even to-day, thank goodness, no job on a boat can be done without an appearance of leisureliness. All three had been trawlermen, before that beautiful fleet (once a hundred and thirty strong) melted away, and therefore were amongst the best seamen in England. They pointed out to me two or three smacks, now converted to yachts, which were still in the harbour.

      That one’s a Dandy, that is; and she yonder’s a Mule. The speaker pronounced it mühl, in his lovely soft Devonshire speech. Then, when I told him we had just taken twenty-four hours coming up from Plymouth, he told me in return how in the old days one of the smacks had sailed from Brixham to Plymouth in three hours and four minutes—timed by a stop watch. That’s some thirty-five miles: not bad going for a fishing smack. But the Brixham trawlers were wonderful vessels. On this occasion, needless to say, the wind was blowing hard from the east; but my goodness, they must have pressed her; and what a sight she must have made when she brought it on the beam and came foaming up to the breakwater in Plymouth Sound!

      Then, when we had had enough gossip, the eldest of the three, a big loose-boned man of few words and saturnine aspect, tucked himself into the bosun’s chair, and the rest of us swung him up to the mast head. In less than two minutes that splice was turned in, and he was down again. It was as easy as tying your tie. Now if I had been doing that job myself . . . but I wasn’t; so I’ll say no more about it.

      You will notice a number of things about salt water itself, which were hidden from you before you took to sailing: the darkening and shudder of it, for instance, under a harder gust of wind; unaccountable streaks and belts of smooth, as if some demon had amused himself by drawing patterns with a gigantic brush filled with oil; the varying height and steepness of waves, which always in a breeze look steepest just astern; the swirls and ominous suckings of the tide in narrow channels; the fact that in a rough sea the waves will suddenly diminish for a moment, for no apparent reason (which is the moment you must choose for putting your ship about, if she is sluggish, or, if you are running, for bringing her to the wind, should you need to do so); the alarming, and indeed execrable, behaviour of the water in a tide race, when the waves no longer march but run amok, and attack you from all sides at once and drown you if they’re given half a chance; and that not only in the notorious tide-rips as at Portland or St. Catherine’s, but off every headland of any prominence around our coasts. You can’t count on tide-rips (except Portland, which is always bedevilled). That makes them all the more sinister. I have passed St. Alban’s Head in calm weather, when the sea for half a mile was a sheet of white—little waves, not more than a foot high, but all breaking, with a muted and continuous roar. There was no danger whatever; but it was frightening from its very strangeness. And I have passed the same headland in a breeze, expecting a ducking, and found no disturbance at all, though the tide was running hard.

      You will see ships themselves—your own ship, and her movement which is as mysterious and wonderful as that of a serpent on a rock. You will see your own sails black against the night sky; the ship’s wake burning with the cold fire of phosphorus; puffins cocking up their tails and disappearing at your approach; gannets diving; porpoises—not the black discs they appear like at a distance, but long lissome bodies, silver-bellied, diving and criss-crossing under your stern; the cliffs of your landfall at evening; the ancient, solemn dawn, which makes you forget how tired you are after the wearisome night watches; and other ships passing, by night or day.

      Perhaps you may also see a little bit of your own character, of which you were not aware before. You may be secretly proud of it; or you may not. That will depend upon what you see. Scares and crises come readily enough to men who sail; especially to men who sail alone. How will one face them? Or those long hours which call for sheer endurance . . . for it must be confessed that all of us have known, at one time or another, certain hours at sea which have been frankly abominable. Sailing is a fine thing for showing up a man’s weak spots; or he may fear a weakness, and be gratified to find it isn’t there. One never knows.

      A friend of mine used to say that a man who can ride a horse and sail a boat can do anything. I wonder if he was right. At any rate I can quote his saying with no sly personal reference, because I cannot ride a horse.

      Now there is a persistent belief amongst that great majority of our countrymen who have no business with the sea that sailing is a rich man’s pastime. If that were true, a book like this would be useless and absurd. But it is not true.

      The origin of the belief that yachting is a rich man’s pastime is probably the common association of the word with big class racing and social events such as Cowes Week. Now that kind of yachting cost a pretty penny, even in the old days. No one will dispute that. But those days are gone, presumably for ever. There is not a single man in England to-day who could afford to race a J-class cutter. The more’s the pity? Well, that will depend upon the point of view; though everyone will agree that with the passing of the big racing yachts we have lost a beautiful spectacle.

      But it is not with the big racers that I am concerned here, nor even with the small ones (which have increased so enormously in number and type during the past generation). I am concerned with the man, or woman, who wakes up one morning and suddenly realises that it is necessary to get afloat, or burst. To get afloat in anything, anywhere: in a sailing dinghy, or an old ship’s lifeboat, or some little straight-stemmed cruiser, perhaps, who was old so far as years go before the world forgot itself in 1914, but still jauntily survives, still confidently looks for someone’s affection, and is still fit for a brush with the Channel seas.

      Now is that kind of sailing expensive?

      Well, I cannot give a straight answer, yes or no. I can only begin by saying that depends. It depends on a number of things; mainly, perhaps, on these three: what type and size of boat one gets, where and how one proposes to keep her, and whether or not one is willing to spend a portion of one’s available leisure in the work of maintenance.

      The purchase price of nearly all boats has trebled since before the last war; the cost of materials, and of labour at the shipyards, has more than doubled. This is a grievous fact and must be squarely faced; nevertheless, it is by no means the whole story. In the first place it must be realised that the price of boats in the secondhand market is, and always has

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