TOM CUNLIFFE
A MAN YOU WON’T MEET EVERY DAY A wooden boat is the passport to meeting miraculous souls ILLUSTRATION CLAUDIA MYATT
O
ut of respect for advancing years and the diminishing time I can set aside for scraping, caulking and painting, I sold my last wooden boat a while ago. Now, I sail a carefully chosen American bermudan cutter constructed out of GRP. She ticks every box for Roz and me, but we still yearn for the spiritual experience of living in an artefact carved from the forest, powered by hemp and flax grown in the fields and fastened by metals mined in the deep places of the earth. These things are tangible, but what we miss most of all is the less definable human element of traditional seafaring. When I sit down to write this column, I often start by thinking about a particular boat, then find my mind wandering to the people who bring her to life. A boat on her own can be full of interest, but for the total experience we must meet the people who sail her. An outstanding feature of classic craft is that they attract the sort of characters you don’t meet every day. Looking back over the years of voyaging, I realise I’ve been surrounded by colourful personalities entirely because of the boat I was operating at the time. If I turn up at Paimpol to enjoy the Sea Shanty festival in my current yacht the music won’t have changed much, but the boat won’t make friends like the old ones did. Sail in with a Galway hooker, a Yorkshire coble, a Dutch fishing botter or an Essex smack, however, and you’ve a ticket to a different world. People of the sea seem to burst out from under tidal stones to
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crowd around such vessels. The drinks flow, yarns are spun, home-made music sings and, in the words of Rudyard Kipling, “the wildest tales are true.” All my wooden boats had this effect, but it probably peaked during the 15 years following 1982 when Roz, Hannah and I had the 1911 cutter Hirta. Back then nobody took special notice of a 35-tonne pilot cutter. The only ones anybody had heard of were those made famous by HW Tilman. The surviving examples still at sea were all unrestored but that didn’t stop them making some impressive passages. When we showed up at Douarnenez in 1986 for the first of the great French festivals, we’d just returned from the Caribbean following an outbound voyage taking in Norway, Greenland, Newfoundland and the United Sates. Our allotted berth for this and the magnificent 1988 event which followed was alongside the tidal wall in the old harbour of Rosmeur. We rafted up to Baroque, Peggy and
