A-sailing.

Since childhood I always thought that sailing a boat was a thrilling skill. I vividly remember the long hours I spent waiting for a downpour during the early weeks in autumn. At that time it always rained in bucketfuls. I used to squat on the very edge of the pavement in front of mother’s house watching rainwater rushing in front of me. With glee and satisfaction, but to my mother’s chagrin, I folded into paper-boats the pages taken from my best school copybooks.

I just loved watching my paperboats racing down the road. For me they looked like the smart brigantine sailing the high seas.

Soon enough the famous sailors who sailed the high seas became my teenage heroes. During the long sessions of my first reading experiences, I regularly met Captains Flint, Smollett and Singleton. They haunted my dreams. Living so close to the middle sea was indeed a great help to give colour to my wishful wild life sailing in and out of the nooks and crannies of the coastline indenting my Island.

My heroes changed to more important explorers with the passing of time. At my middle teens Columbus, Magellan, Polo and Cook were held in high esteem. Notwithstanding the lack of to-day’s navigational equipment they chartered the oceans with great faith, courage and perseverance.

My brother who was only four years my senior shared the same seafaring feelings. Our parents thought that having a sailing boat and managing it well would add a new perspective to our ample leisure summer time. During the long hot summer months we all lived at the Bay. A second-hand marauder soon became our proud possession. In no time at all we were becoming master sailors.

That was the very start. We never looked back. With the passing of years and with the gaining of further and further sailing experience a succession of models took centre stage. The boat coming next was always larger and faster than the one before her.

Using wind to propel a boat is marvellous. No sound of running engines, no fumes polluting the area, but all that is heard is the noise of waves breaking against the bow. A towering sky-reaching mainsail with its topmost end almost touching the low flying clouds should always be steadily full of air, when cleverly angled and artfully managed. It races the boat to its destination. The boat and its sailors, like the heroes of old before them, move on, faster and faster, tacking right, tacking left, at times against the wind and at other times into the wind, but always moving on, and on, and on…….

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