One Giant Leap

To keep us amused over the winter, we’re going to take a little cruise back in time. Whilst the Skipper and I may have let slip one or two clues as to our inexperience when we were let loose on an unsuspecting Baltic with Das Drama in 2011, we had of course already learned some essential stuff, like what to call the pointy end, and where to store - sorry, stow - the gin.

To go back to the book of Genesis, in this case Edward’s Classe de Mer in 197*, would be to test your patience a little too far, I fear. Perhaps one day. For the moment, let’s take you back just a few years, to 2009…

We had learned to sail dinghies in Greece (and were pretty rubbish at it), Ed (for he cannot truthfully be called Skipper until he has actually done some skippering) had done some inshore racing, and we had been to an RYA school on La Gomera in the Canaries, where Ed had passed Day Skipper and I had been officially certified as Competent.

I expect there are plenty of sailors around who have bluffed their way to a bareboat charter with as much, and quite possibly less, experience, but such is not the Skipper’s way.

I was, at that time, far from convinced that I wanted to go sailing at all. The sum total of my yachting experience was that week in the Canaries, which I had not enjoyed: We took the three reefs out of the mainsail once, just to learn how to do it, and put them straight back in again, the food was dreadful, and it was cold. In the Canaries, in June. Perishing. All in all, not an experience likely to infect the novice with the sailing bug.

We had a problem. Ed was very clear that sailing had become a real passion for him. He wanted to get out on a boat as often as possible, and didn’t really want to spend his precious holiday doing anything else. I was too scared to sleep every time he went off cross-channel racing, and didn’t even want to hear about how it had gone. He nobly proposed that, if I really insisted, he would give it up. Fine. This way, please, for resentment, blame, guilt and all sorts of other vital ingredients for a happy relationship. I must at some point have reached a conscious decision, although my recollections are unclear, at least to TRY to share my Other Half’s abiding passion. Why should it be HIS hobby that determines how we spent our leisure time together?  Well it’s got to be somebody’s, and anyway, I didn’t really have a counter proposition.

So. Where to start? We knew something about flotilla holidays from our brief, although frequently spectacular (in the literal sense of providing a spectacle), dinghy days. Then, the “caravanners” were looked down upon. They wore proper clothes and never had wet hair. Older and wiser now, those factors had quietly migrated to the positives side. The Skipper did the research, (He’s the planning half of the team; ENTJ, if you’re interested) and decided upon Croatia. Beautiful scenery, warm weather, reachable by car, not too expensive, recognized holiday company, and there was another factor. Let me think. Ah, yes! Not tidal! Let’s keep it as simple as we can – a sound philosophy if ever there was one.

There wasn’t really a choice when it came to the boat. How big a Beneteau do you want? What’s the smallest you have? 32 ft .Done. The Skipper is always nervous about my reaction to the boat he’s chartered (and never more so than when we first set eyes on Das Drama, years later), but in fact he’s the one who values his creature comforts above almost all else. Actually, I quite like camping!

The flotilla week was booked some months in advance, and I was regularly nagged to brush up the stuff we had learned for our French boat licences, i.e. colregs, lights and marks etc. In short, all the fun bits designed to make sure you’re really looking forward to your, ahem, holiday. My department was to organize some overnight stops between Luxembourg and the flotilla’s home port of Kremik.

The plan that materialized was as follows: 1 night in Salzburg (pretty, spot of culture, dust off rusty German) and 2 nights in Rovinj, on the Istrian coast, (very pretty, pool, souvenir shopping) on the way down, and 3 nights at a winery near Verona (more culture than you could shake a stick at, unlimited Valpolicella) on the way back. I was genuinely looking forward to that bit. I figured if we got that far I would have earned it.

As the departure date grew near, I became increasingly fretful, to the point where I could barely sleep. I spent hours staring at the ceiling and planning how I was going to deal with my terror. The policy which emerged from these extended nocturnal cogitations was that I would just look dead cool, as if I’d been chartering yachts since I was knee-high to a seagull. The theory was that if I acted well enough to convince everyone else then I’d have to believe it myself. The soon-to-be-Skipper was naturally a little nervous himself, at the prospect of his first Command. Unusually for us, we kept our anxieties largely to ourselves, but I think that was just as well. It would hardly have helped to sit there over supper swapping apprehensions night after night.