“0, to be self-sufficient against contingencies!” sang Walt Whitman in his poem ‘Leaves of Grass’. And this, above all, should be the motto of the dinghy cruiser. Let me give a small example:

It was only 18 March, but the temperature was nudging 70ºF and the sun was shining. It was a perfect day for a cruise upriver and a picnic. There was still a lot of storm water coming down the river, and there would be a head wind. With three adults, two small children and a dog aboard, we would need the outboard. I got out the Seagull, which had stood empty all winter. When I filtered fuel in to the tank, I was dismayed to find it come trickling out of the petrol tap onto the ground. On dismantling the tap, I found the cork seal to be shrunk. Had it not been Sunday morning, I might have gone to buy a spare part. As it was, this bit of shrunk cork threatened our outing. So I put the slider into a little water in a saucepan, gave it a dash of washing up liquid, and boiled it for a couple of minutes. Abracadabra — it came out with the cork plump as new, and when reinserted into the tap it stopped the petrol as of old. The outing was a great success.

‘A surfeit of the sweetest things/the deepest loathing to the stomach brings’ wrote the Bard of Avon. Time was when the motor car was a sweet thing to have. In it you could go anywhere and stop wherever you liked when you got there: no yellow lines, no car parks, no meters, no traffic wardens, no clamps — nothing. With the growth of the affluent society since the 1950s, the number of cars has vastly increased. Just as the railways gave rise to popular yachting in the 19th century, it was the car that fostered the explosion of popular interest in dinghy sailing. Now it is the car that is beginning to have an adverse effect on the sport as far as cruising people are concerned who trail their boats from home.

I have always kept Windflower (Otter, 206) at home, from where I can set off in any direction I choose, provided nowadays that nobody has parked a car across my entrance. To go to my home waters on the Thames I have to contend with long traffic jams on the main road or, if I use the back streets as I have done for many years, I find them choked with cars parked both sides leaving just a single lane between. And if you meet a car coming the other way while you are trailing a dinghy, you have got trouble! There is indeed a surfeit of cars. At least, once I got to Twickenham, there was always room to park near the slipway. Gradually, as even the humblest clerk or shop assistant started to drive to work, the area became choked with cars on weekdays, though on the weekends it was clear. The last July, the Borough of Richmond laid out yellow lines and marked out the best parts, which are not flooded at high tide, for ‘Residents’ Permits’ only, Mondays-Saturdays. This greatly limited the space available on Saturdays for those who would go afloat, and technically there was no place at all to leave a trailer. Appeals to the authority for permission to use the permit spaces for pay-and-display on Saturdays have come to nothing, and Saturday boating here remains badly affected. The car can still bring the would-be cruiser here, but it is the car that prevents him staying.

To finish on a brighter note, there is still an advantage in having a tow-bar on one’s car. Driving through one of our congested roads, I had to pull into a gap on the left to let some oncoming cars get by. While waiting, there was a sickening crash from the rear. I got out resignedly to view the damage. An apologetic young man had impaled his light van on my tow-knob which had crushed his number plate and lower bodywork, but stopped by a hair’s breadth real contact with the bodywork of my car. I had escaped unscathed. “For this relief much thankst.” (Hamlet).