On wiring and other (narrative) strands

Here's why I haven't been on the boat for quite a while. I'm in awe of Alex's willingness to create such a mess, knowing he must find a way to put it all back together again! All the parts of the new AIS system have arrived in the past two days and must be fed into this jumble of wiring.


Meanwhile…

How much fun can a girl have in a  bookshop devoted to boating, and only boating? I found out yesterday when I went to Boat Books  in Crow's Nest, to buy the extra paper charts we need for our voyage. We, like most other cruising types, are GPS-dependent, but nevertheless we carry a fair old load of paper a) in case the GPS (and the back-up GPS) falls over, and b) because it's often easier to plot your course on paper, particularly over a large distance. I personally love the whole pencil and rubber thing. 
Charts are dispensed upstairs at Boat Books with all the seriousness due to such venerable and official documents, but downstairs it's a honeypot.  I spent over an hour browsing the shelves, and if I hadn't been meeting a friend for lunch nearby, I'd have willingly stayed longer. I passed once lightly over the cruising guides and the practical how-to books - how to anchor safely, how to survive in heavy weather, how to fix a marine diesel engine and so on. We're right for those. Maritime disaster and history books (often one and the same) leave me quite cold - though give me time and I may yet see the attraction. As for books on weather, well, for many years Alex wouldn’t travel without packing a hefty tome called The Mariner’s Weather Handbook. It came with us on holiday to France twice, and still has, pressed between its pages, a faded roadside Provencal poppy. I suspect we’ll spend the rest of our lives trying to forecast the weather, and most of what we learn won't come from books.

What I was looking for was nautical writing, not fiction (the world of Patrick O'Brian still waits for me) but non-fiction. I've only recently discovered its pleasures. Jonathan Raban set the standard for me, and as it turns out, it’s a hard one to match. After Passage to Juneau, I read his earlier book Coasting, which Alex considers a kind of sacred text.  I could have kissed the man – Raban, that is. His prose is glorious, variously taut, wry, lyrical, erudite (he wears his learning lightly in the best of British traditions). I love the way he moves his eyes across landscapes, both natural and urban, and draws their features like a portrait artist. He writes about the sea the way others write about the heart, mapping its movements and its moods in intimate detail. Since then, I've read a  couple of Chichester's books, Bernard Moitessier's The Long Way, and a few forgettable accounts of the living the dream, as cruisers call it. It's not a travelogue I'm after, you see, not a list of islands and continents visited and oceans crossed. Of course I want the broad outline of how it was getting from A to B,  but what interests me more is what goes on in people's heads and hearts, what they think and how they feel when they are “out there”.  People used to travel by sea much more, before planes got so good at staying up in the air. In a world which values speed, productivity, progress and wealth creation, floating about in a small boat for months on end is a strange choice to make. Sure, it's the ultimate escape fantasy, but how does going to sea alter a person’s view of the world, and of what it means to be human (one guy told me, “once you leave land, you are at the bottom of the food chain”)? That's what a good writer can tell me. 

So I left the cruising yarns on the shelves  (I'm sure I'll find some satisfying ones if I look harder - and there are stories yet to be written, of course). Instead I bought a biography of the mesmerizing Frenchman Moitessier, written by his friend Jean-Michel Barrault, a new-ish biography of Joseph Conrad, by English academic John Stape, and a hybrid volume of memoir and distilled practical wisdom by Jimmy Cornell, the man who got yachties offshore in packs (Alex participated in one of his earliest Atlantic Rally for Cruisers in 1989). Not a thing about 12-volt boat electrical systems though.