The joys of owning a yacht

by Dick Farrar

 

Dick and his good friend Henry Irving have owned , separately, several boats but their first, Nyanza, was a joint venture. Dick has since become both designer and builder of Farthing, one of the finest racing yachts on the Broads. A part-time resident for some years, Dick has become more involved with the racing scene and the River Cruiser Class in particular. As RCC captain in 1994, Dick spoke at the Annual Summer Dinner of the Norfolk Broads Yacht Club and, in this extract, he refers to his Green Wyvern roots and his first yacht.

". . . On my way here today I passed Acle Dyke. Almost 30 years ago I used to own a cruiser called Nyanza with my old and great friend Henry Irving, who I am sure some of you know. We used to keep it on the public staithe which was right at the top of the dyke.

The mooring had two benefits. Firstly Nyanza was a leaky old boat and Acle dyke had, in those days, characteristics very similar to those which Sanderson's dyke (where my present boat Farthing is kept) has today. That is you can only get in and out five minutes either side of high water. So the boat didn't have time to sink. The second was that it was free. Other, more affluent, members of the Green Wyvern kept their boats further down the dyke at Eastick's boatyard.

Because Henry and I had no money and we ran this leaky old boat on a shoestring, we had to put up with a fair amount of mickey-taking. The main protagonist was another old friend David Snutch. Dave, then in his mid-twenties, was co-owner of Sparklet, which was moored further down the dyke at Eastick's.

On one occasion when he had arrived in a flash car with some of his well-heeled chums having liberally refreshed themselves from London to Norfolk, Henry and I were subjected to an intense session of ridicule. I remember one of the jibes was . . . Nyanza leaks so much that the crew have to sleep on lilos so they don't drown in the middle of the night!

Henry and I got up early next morning. We walked down the dyke to where Sparklet was moored. The inhabitants were still sleeping it off. We got the hose-pipe from the boatyard, removed the forepeak hatch, stuck in the hose-pipe and filled the boat with water. We replaced the hatch and retired behind the shed to await developments. We did not have to wait long . . . a great commotion soon erupted. One of the occupants told me later that Dave had woken up and swung his legs, still in his sleeping bag, out of bed and onto floorboards that were floating in six inches of water!

We had a lot of fun with that old boat. Henry, who is a couple of years older than me, regarded himself as the senior partner and also a world authority on sailing on the Broads and on anything and everything else for that matter. It took me years to cure myself of some of his bad habits. Some, which usually come in a glass, I still have.
He used to like to steer sitting down to leeward and if he got fed up with holding the mainsheet he would make it fast to a cleat on the leeward cockpit combing that was really meant for a back-stay. On one particular occasion just the two of were coming across Breydon in a bit of a blow. No reefs, of course. I was working the jibs. Henry was steering. The main was cleated down to leeward. We took a bad gust. It laid us almost flat. The main, on its cleat, was under water and inaccessible. The boat was so far over that the full length cabin roof came loose, the roof canvas ripped and the roof disappeared over the side. Eventually, after taking a lot of water into the well, the boat cowed up into the wind.

A strange spectacle arrived at Berney Arms. Nyanza, an open boat, towing the cabin roof, which was too heavy for us to retrieve, behind us.

The Green Wyvern in those days set great store by being good cooks. There was great kudos in being able to produce a first class meal on two burners. My first effort in cooking, when sailing with Cecil Howard, resulted in him scraping the breakfast out of the cabin window loudly declaring that he couldn't tell which was the bacon and which was the egg! He was prone to exaggeration.

Pot roasting a joint of meat was a great tradition. The method was to sear the meat and then put it into a saucepan standing on three egg-cups to serve as a trivet. I explained the intricacies of this method to a chap called Graham New, who was my mate on an early sixties Green Wyvern cruise. He was going to cook a joint of pork for our dinner. When it was done it looked and smelled superb, but when I came to carve it, what I thought was crackling on the outside proved impossible to cut. Further investigation revealed that, unbeknown to me, the egg-cups on the boat were made of plastic and they had welded themselves onto the underside of the meat!

As anyone who is a connoisseur of after dinner speaking will realise by now I am not the best in the world at it. The problem is that as I have sogged into middle age my memory has deteriorated. It must have been all that cooking I used to do in aluminium saucepans. Still, I suspect that it does have its compensations. Since it is gradually getting worse, I can imagine myself in a few years time waking up in the morning, turning to my bewildered wife and saying, 'Hello, Dearie, and what's your name?'
Well, that's about it. My wife did say to me some months ago, which disconcerted me at the time, that although I do have a sense of humour, I often find myself funnier than other people find me. So, if this is true, I do apologise.

It only remains for me to thank you all for coming this evening and to ask you all to charge your glasses and be upstanding for a toast to the Norfolk Broads Yacht Club.