Roundabout
Messing About in Boats
By KATHARINE WHITEHORN THE word 'Regatta' is apt to conjure up visions of gleaming brass and roaring navy blue, of
It is not long since West Mersea subsisted entirely on the sea; people still living on this coast can remember the time when for a girl who lived off the water to marry a man who lived by the land was a Montague and Capulet affair. There are still distinct divisions between the oystermen, the longshoremen and the yacht club, with a good deal of arguing over moorings and oaths ringing across the water. It is one of the few sailing places that has no official harbour authority; arguments over moorings are not generally settled without a good deal of rope- cutting on a dark night. (Some owners of private ones prudently use chain for their moorings —w hich has. the added advantage of ruining the propeller of any motor-boat so ill-mannered as to run across it.) Not of any particular standing in the world of small boat racing, West Mersea is a renowned cradle of ocean racers. It is a community of individualists: people like the parson who would go for an hour and half's sail between early service and matins; or the schoolmaster who, when asked how good his boat was against the wind, said he never sailed against the wind: he got out to the end of the estuary, went the way the wind was blowing and waited till the wind changed to come back.
Things start early on Regatta day, and all morning the mouth of the estuary is thronged with little boats: blue-sailed Enterprises, small boats with a strange bulbous mutation of a spinnaker sail to give extra speed; boats in which a dog sits proudly in the bow (though sea-going dogs have their Achilles heel. Few can perform their natural functions on board, and at evening a procession of dinghies brings the bursting dogs ashore). An old-fashioned ketch whose beauty takes your breath away passes a tin- masted sloop described disparagingly as 'all
right to keep biscuits in.' Here and there a motor-boat screams its way among them: motor-boats whose smelly and noisome presence is only excused if they carry blondes of an exceptionally high category. Women at sea are classified as not worth lifting the binoculars for, just worth lifting the binoculars for, off course and gybe—the last two describing the results of the inattention involved.
Best of all there is the vast black bulk of a Thames Barge, a boat from another age, when sailing ships were merchantmen: in those days its five huge prune-coloured sails were all handled by just one man and a boy. It is a strange contrast to the row of moored tankers, inactive for the first time since the Depression; and the square grey shape of Bradwell atomic power station, great source of local argument as to whether it does or does not make the water warmer, and whether this does or does not annoy the oysters.
Through all this I was sailing on my brother's tiny sloop Waterwitch. He and his wife could not be described as entirely serious racers. They time their races with an egg-pinger: in last year's race they simply sailed on instead of turn- ing at the halfway mark, and went for a distant picnic; in a race a week before they not only had a pigeon sitting peacefully on the end of the boom for two hours but bathed in mid-race. They do not, however, swim together when the sails are up: warned by a couple they know who once dipped into the Mediterranean in a dead calm. A tiny puff of wind carried their boat just a few yards out of their reach; when they swam up to it it moved off another few. They were strong swimmers, but there came a point when they realised that if they chased the boat any more they would have no strength left to swim ashore if they failed. Landing on the coast of Spain knowing no Spanish and wearing no clothes was not an attractive prospect—they made one last despairing effort and caught a rope that hung from the ship.
My brother's boat improved on its record by coming only third from last in its race. The morn- ing's races were moderately serious; the after- noon's somewhat less so. Between the moored Thames Barge and the shore there was an area cleared for the events; at its edges dinghies jostled each other, children screamed, people scrambled over other peoples' dinghies and dogs regardless. Clothes ranged from the racing jerseys of the morning to beachwear; the only man who looked remotely naval was the man in charge, who controlled (more or less) the races from behind a beard and a microphone, admonishing the com- petitors by their Christian names. There were children's races and women's races and one which assumed that all men are the same with a bag over their heads; it depends on the skill with which the stern-seat driver shouted instructions to her shrouded mate. There was a chase in which a man ran up the rigging, ducked in and out of the moored craft and finally ended up in the water; at the end, the lads of the village tried to run along a greasy pole and grab a flag on the end. Some wore ordinary clothes; one
THE SPECTATOR. AUGUST 31. 1962 wore pyjamas; one wore a checked bricky cap and held still for an immortal minute with his finger to his lips saying 'Shia' before he, like the others, fell into the sea.
As darkness fell there were fireworks, and the crowd went oo0000 and AAaah like the Players' Theatre as the rockets climbed and burst; hopes that a cruiser on the foreshore would be set alight by the well-insured blaze were unfortunately unfulfilled. There was ri° loyal picture of Her Majesty outlined in sparks, as there had been the year before; but the indig- nant villagers sang 'God Save the Queenh'etrae make up before trooping off to the fair. There the roundabouts moved like a ship on rough seas; there were hoop-la stalls and darts and guns with corks in them, and other ways of losing money and winning coconuts; it seemed almost unbelievable that at one stand all you had to do to get a balloon was just pay money It was a good balloon; it had a fish dangling inside it; we flew it at the masthead next da}1.
What is so enormously attractive about this sailing? Even to a small boy on the quayside, the great sails no longer suggest the endless distances, the voyage to the end of the earth: not since steamboats and aeroplanes. It is not competition and speed alone: almost anything goes faster than sails. Perhaps part of the attrac- tion is that all the rules of the sea make sense' they are not arbitrary: ships running can obviously give way more easily than ships tack- ing, things put down carelessly simply fall into the sea, ropes are called by funny names dot from fancy but to identify them in an order . shouted in a crisis. Perhaps it is the mateYness' feuds and rivalries apart, sailors seem to get the point of each other as few other people do perhaps just because they are so little dependent t on each other. For one of the great things Ali sailing is certainly its independence: to go another for a day or a week not dependent on allot''' human being even to pour you a drink or se"l you a newspaper. It is reassuring to think that there is still one way to be absolutely on °tie,s i own, however crowded the shore; and thin
at
, whether it is covered with pink sand or pk sunbathers, oil or barbed wire or landmines, the waves will always break on it in the same waY4
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