Authors Electric

 I didn’t stay to chat. I didn’t join the group which was heading for the pub. I left the meeting as quickly as I could and hurried down the beach. This year’s Peter Duck holiday had begun. There was already a game of cards in progress on the cabin table but I didn’t join in. Merely pushed my meeting notes somewhere far out of sight, ate my share of the supper and settled into my bunk. Nine nights of sleeping on board and waking early every morning to walk along river walls or beaches with the dogs instead of our familiar fields (lovely though they are). The saltings above Waldringfield Gwen, my oldest granddaughter joined the following day. I was impressed by her initial questions: did we have flares? where were they kept? Was there a VHF set and who was qualified to use it? You might think this implied some lack of faith in our ability to negotiate our very modest river to river passages but I thought they were good questions to ask on arrival on any new boat on which you we...

There was a moment, last autumn, when I was rummaging through old storage boxes and came across a container I’d never seen before. This happens periodically. It’s as if the layers of softening cardboard boxes, plastic crates and vintage suitcases convulse and shift to throw up unexpected treasure. Metal detectorists would understand the breath-stopping moments of surprise, the quickening excitement with which one picks out the unfamiliar item, brushes off the dirt, peers at the possible treasure.  This trouvaille  is a cuboid cardboard box, 8 ½” square and 6” deep. I’ve no idea what it had have held originally. A teapot perhaps? It was tied with string and marked LETTERS / Old Letters (Family). I prepared myself for disappointment: business correspondence, school Sunday letters kept out of duty.   Inside there was a mass of letters, hundreds of them, many on blue airmail forms  – I haven’t counted them all yet. I felt a thrill when the first letters I glimpsed w...

It should have been an achievable adventure, an old-style family jolly, nicely within the capacity of different-aged adults, an old wooden boat, visiting children and dogs. Three of my grandchildren would be sailing from the Mount Batten Centre in Plymouth for the Cadet dinghy national and world championships. My son Frank and daughter-in-law Alice were lead organisers; Francis and I were among the sponsors. This would also be my oldest granddaughter’s last event. Retirement comes at 17 in the uniquely child-centred Cadet dinghy class. What could be more fun for me, my brother Ned, son Bertie, dogs Nellie and Solo, than to spend a week or two sailing Peter Duck to Plymouth from Suffolk, so we could show our support for the young sailors and watch the racing from on deck? Yes, it’s 300 miles – we could reach Scotland for that, or the entrance to the Keil Canal – but, taken in stages, it would be a matter of six long days or eleven shorter ones. Time on land for the dogs to empty thei...

  Peter Duck  in early morning sun, Aldeburgh, October 2023 (Jane Russell)  Every year Classic Boat magazine puts forward its selection of yacht restorations and newly built boats in traditional style for public vote. The prize last year was a tasteful trophy and a bottle of gin for the owner. The shortlisted boatyards get an opportunity to display a Classic Boat logo, if they wish. It’s good for their business and local community awareness. I'm hoping that the public votes make the boatyard workers feel good too.  In 2023, traditional wooden boatbuilding was officially put on the endangered list of British crafts . Perhaps this is a little like removing the word ‘acorn’ from the Oxford Junior Dictionary : arguably it's recognising a truth – young people today don’t need to name ‘acorns’ -- or adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pastur...

  An odd quirk in the human brain allows us to feel that the things we love are living, even when they are manufactured objects – like boats, for instance. Things that live can also die. I’ve just been reading the writer and sailor, Peter Nichols, mourning the death of his yacht, Toad . Toad is gone. I know this absolutely as I sit here in the cockpit on what is now becoming rather a nice day. The sun is out, the sea is going down. Knowing this I look at the boat around me, the teak vent boxes I built on the cabin roof. The stainless-steel guard rail stanchions I installed. The winches, the rigging. The new compass Martin and I hooked up. The slight imperfection beneath the paint on the cabin side that I know is my plug of a hole made by Harry’s useless depth gauge. I look up and down the boat and I cannot see an inch of it that I haven’t remade according to my idea of what would make Toad the best it could be. Now I know that the leak will not get better but worse, that I mus...