Consuming Interest
Boating About in Mess By LESLIE ADRIAN TifE: Which? type of analysis will not do for boats, any more than it did for beer, for personal fancy is decisive with both. This is abundantly illustrated at the Inter- national Boat Show .(Earls Court, January 4 to 14). Among the 760
n° boats on display every- one with the faintest interest in Ratty's fav- ourite pursuit will find plenty to fall in love with and plenty to detest.
As a rather desultory small-boat weekender myself, i particularly detest the waterborne charabanc—of which there are splendid ex- "Vies this year with more windage, chrome and horsepower than ever; and I am in no way reconciled by the blonde in a sailor hat who adorns the poop of one of them; she is not included in the price, anyway. 1 used to believe that it was very difficult to build an ugly boat, but new materials (tin masts, plastics, fibre- glass and so on), and new shapes (catamaran, (wo-storied cabins, bigger engines), are making it easy. It is hard not to feel that, as with air- craft, it can't be right unless it looks right; and for boats that are meant to be driven primarily by the wind there is still a lot of truth in this. Rut no doubt there is a lot of fun to be had from the other sort, especially if what you really like is messing about with engines. Sailors, amateur as well as professional, are of course the most conservative folk on earth, and the English the most conservative of sailors.. From the day when an aborigine floating in a hollowed-out log first hung up his shirt to dry and so invented sail until the advent of the aeroplane and the aerofoil, sailors supposed that the wind pushed them along--whereas with a well-designed Bermudan mainsail, for instance. most of the work is clone by pulling. Again, it took pilots (air not sea) navigating in open cock- Pits to discover thal it is easier to do sums with a 'ompass card marked in degrees 00 to 3600 than °ne in points of 111°--a lesson which some, but by no means all, sailors have at last learned; and nobody is selling the nautical equivalent of the simple aeronaut's device to work out the triangle of forces, Not that you need to navigate any more with Pencil and ruler, if you are (a) rich and (b) gadget-minded. It is now possible to sit in the cockpit and read from dials and gauges the wind strength (by masthead aeronometer which Will also tell you when to change jibs and direc- tion); depth (by echo-sounder); speed; distance run (by patent log); position (by d f radio); and Whether it is raining. You needn't even steer— leave that to the automatic pilot; and if you are .too tired to pull up the sails, with one flick of a switch the mighty engine thunders into life. At hest year's Show, I suppose, You will be able
to work all this lying on your foam-rubber bunk below; and the year after that, from the yacht- club bar.
Other, and to my mind more sympathetic, seeds are also taking root. Blondie Hasler sailed his Tester—to be seen afloat at Earls Court— single-handed across the Atlantic with an un- stayed mast, a Chinese lugsail which rolls up like a blind and all working ropes led into his tank-type cockpit. Compare and contrast Francis Chichester's traditional Gypsy Moth III, on dis- play outside (a good touch this), which won the famous race. And both of them in their quite different ways are exceptionally good-looking and efficient boats of their type. The Hasler idea of simple, easy gear is also to be seen in some of the baby dinghies—for example, what is said to be the cheapest sailing craft in the Show, the children's Optimist (American idea, developed in Scandinavia and now available in the UK for £39, or £28 10s. in do-it-yourself kit form)—one sail, no rigging, minimum of string and fuss.
This is not the only interesting contribution from abroad, for the Show is international for the first time this year, and the Scandinavians especially are as fervent for sailing as we and have much to show us. Please will they or some- one bring for our English galley-slaves next year gas cooking-stoves designed for boats (with gimbals and fiddles), and liberate us from the present choice between stoves mostly hideous, awkward and large and all made for houses or caravans which have, relatively, plenty of room and do not normally go up and down?
But let us not carp. This splendid Show, spon- sored by the Daily Express, shows that boating is no longer the rich man's perquisite. Nowadays you can buy a boat with a sail for £50 on the never-never, or build one yourself for £250, or pay £15,000 cash down. Good luck to all, but don't be sick to windward.
One final word, of commination, must be reserved for Earls Court itself. Of dismal ugliness inside and out; with lavatories and bars that would disgrace a war-time railway station; dreary, inconvenient and dirty; it does its utmost to defeat before opening day every exhibition that tries--as almost all of them do in one way or another—to project in it an image of a lively and up-to-date Britain. When, oh when, will Lon- don be given a modern, efficient and--why not? - beautiful exhibition building that will be a pleasure to visit and will grace instead of shame the capital? Exhibitioners, LCC, Government--- New Year's Resolution, please.
A new chocolate which is going about might have been specially designed for sailors—Irish Coffee Milk Chocolate. The Spectator staff tested this item over Christmas in circumstances which though not actually waterborne could hardly be described as dry, and found the mix- ture of chocolate, cream, coffee, nougat and (the thing we actually noticed) Irish whiskey to be a fine Is. 8d. worth.
Previous page
