Mats in Sweden recently mentioned in an email ‘On Becoming an Old Sailor’, an article I wrote a little more than ten years ago. Out of curiosity I reread it myself. One of the benefits of making a career of narcissistically writing about yourself is that you can follow the evolution of your thoughts, such as they are.
I was sixty-five when I wrote the article. I still owned THE HAWKE OF TUONELA and her mooring in New Zealand.
I have now been seventy-six for a few days. HAWKE and her mooring are long gone. I’ve almost completed two more circumnavigations since then. And for the record, I can still do my age in push-ups. In fact this week I have done 80 in the first set instead of the requisite 76. That was still followed by 40 each in the second and third sets.
I have now been seventy-six for a few days. HAWKE and her mooring are long gone. I’ve almost completed two more circumnavigations since then. And for the record, I can still do my age in push-ups. In fact this week I have done 80 in the first set instead of the requisite 76. That was still followed by 40 each in the second and third sets.
I have gone blind in my right eye, almost completely severed the supraspinatus in my left shoulder, wear hearing aids, and have had several skin cancers whittled away.
The fact is that none of this matters very much. They are mere nuisances. I may be deluding myself, but I think I am still good.
As I noted in an addendum to the original piece, I did buy Facnor gennaker furling gear, which revolutionized how I sail. On GANNET I replaced it with a ProFurl Spinex top down furler, which is even better. I set asymmetricals much more often than I used to rather than less. GANNET is very much a three sail boat.
I never did buy a power windlass for THE HAWKE OF TUONELA and certainly don’t need one on GANNET.
My back seldom bothers me and my memory is still reasonably good, though I am aware that if I don’t use new information I tend to lose it.
The last sentence of the article is: So far turning a middle-aged fool into an old one hasn’t made much difference.
Turning an old fool into a much older one hasn’t either.
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Chris in South Africa and Graham in Australia independently wrote to me about John Guzzwell’s TREKKA ROUND THE WORLD. I very seldom read sailing books any more. I read this one decades ago. After their emails, I found and downloaded a Kindle edition and just finished and enjoyed it, in part because I have since sailed many times to the places and along the routes he followed and was interested to learn how they were when he was sailing TREKKA in the late 1950s, and in part because John Guzzwell’s thoughts and opinions about boats and seamanship are much the same as mine.
We do vary in significant ways. He is a trained carpenter and built his own boats which I cannot do. On the other hand, I don’t get seasick or sail in company with others. Some single-handers are more solitary than others.
If you do not know of TREKKA, she was 20’ long, built of wood, and at the time the smallest boat to circumnavigate. Guzzwell built her in nine months near Victoria, British Columbia and then made a four year circumnavigation when he was in his mid-twenties.
TREKKA was a fine boat and ahead of her time. Guzzwell went with light displacement when most sailors wanted heavy boats. Oddly, some still do. TREKKA, a few feet smaller than GANNET, displaced only six hundred pounds more. As a percentage that is almost 30%, but remarkably light for TREKKA’s time.
The sailing world was very different in the 1950s. Few boats. Few facilities. And far fewer regulations.
I second Chris’s and Graham’s recommendation of TREKKA ROUND THE WORLD.
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The famous French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson was known for trying to capture the decisive moment. My friend Steve Earley just took a photograph worthy of Cartier-Bresson when he heard a bicycle rider approaching as he was preparing to shoot a docked hundred year old sailing ship. That perfect image appears on his site separately under the heading ‘On the waterfront’ and in ‘A walk in the park', a collection of excellent images taken at various times near the same location.
