When I was a lad and boats were made out of trees

When you work at a sailing school and earn enough money to buy yourself a bag of chips and a hangover you look for something sensible, reliable, practical and affordable to sail. Yeah right. And so it was back near the dawn of time that I spent a drunken evening in a dim smoke filled caravan at Rockley point sailing school in Poole (can you see the emerging thread that holds this blog together?) .

Imagine if you will a Hagrid like fellow, fuelled on a bottle of cheap red wine, with flares big enough to swallow a beach and he was raving about phobias, magnums, petrochecks, Harvey wallbangers, wombles and skols. Jim Baumann was his name – or Jimbo to his friends. Where are you now? He was, and I hope still is, a very unique and quite distinctive character and so I hope hasn’t bitten off more than he can chew.

And the next day when I saw my folks I proudly announced I’d bought a Moth, a petrocheck, I never saw it in writing so the spellings wrong but that’s how it sounded. Apparently it was conceived – because moths back then were the result of a long hard labour, in Czechoslovakia or maybe that’s where the big tree was found from which it was hewn. £200 quid or so. Deep V hull, more rocker than billy idol, a wooden unstayed mast borrowed from the Victory, and a lovely billowing white sail made out of some long dead Nazis parachute. She was fun and pretty and had varnish and she went quite well in light winds…. And I loved it.

In those days homebuilt Moths sometimes needed a little maintenance, and some seemed sponsored by Isopon. Posh for plastic padding. But my girl, she never needed fixing on a daily basis; Jimbo was always "refining" his Dragon from the ahead-of-his-time designer, Sean Cox.

No.. she was not one for daily gripes and niggles. She was saving herself to depart of this world in one gigantic epic flourish. I had always been puzzled how that unstayed mast stayed up there. And then one very windy day the mast ripped the poor girl open through foredeck to bow. And she was gone. Sad day, but she went how she went. With grace, and style.

So to Lymingtown I travelled, and met a great big black tail-wagging skinny-dog called Shelley. And John Claridge – he's a very nice man. Norman would have liked Shelley.

Norman -

My Mum and Dad always took cakes for Shelley when we visited the Johns Moth “Factory” in Lymington. The factory was renowned in Japan where it had assumed gigantic mythical proportions as a result of the fantastic boats that rolled off the production line. (All the best Ichino if you’re out there – “Now we go down boozer?”). And so John built me my very own new boat, a beautiful gaboon and sapele (am I right?) Magnum 3. State of the art and oh so narrow. 7.5 secs to 60 was quick too, then. And John gave me a sailing lesson at Rockley point – free. None of this £600 a day stuff! Those were the days. John did wonder though - out loud, waist deep in water, if I would ever get the hang of it. And may still do.

And then when I was all grown up I got a magnum 5, and I could sort of sail it. It was really, really narrow, and quite cool.

Thanks again John.

They were, and are, great boats.

Best

Rod

To be continued. ...