Hello! "Capsize" Calcutt here.

Having been christened the above in Bulletin 141, may I have a word?

It all started in '87. I mean, if you must make your debut on the water in a sailing dinghy - Cadet - designed to tip up if you sneeze, your only experience being the number of books you've devoured and a stubborn desire to do it on your own, then you're in for a hard time. Particularly so when you choose a day with no other boat out because it's blowing close to F5 with white horses racing over Hollingworth Lake. I didn't actually capsize that day, but charged across the lake on jib alone, the Cadet proceeding to climb over the rocks on the far shore in a desperate attempt to reach the adjacent field where it was much calmer.

For the next five years I practised revolving my boat on all the major lakes, clockwise and anticlockwise. I used to think of the mast and dagger board as being the big and little hands of a clock. When the hands were at:

Six o'clock, flat calm and time for a brew. Five past seven, - well keep to the port tack - I could pretend I knew how to sail. Ten past eight, begin to hang on for dear life. Quarter past nine, - get the picture? - and I'm sitting on the little hand doing some serious see-sawing with the big hand. Half-past twelve, Philip Davies's mother said there would be days like this. Half-past six meant that you were sprawled on the upturned hull with numbed fingers scrabbling in the centrecase slot, cursing the fact that you'd chewed off all your nails worrying about whether to launch the damn thing in the first place!

You do learn things. Hypothermia is no longer just a word; I now know what it feels like. After a series of revolutions on Lake Coniston, see Bulletin 121, I struggled ashore, just - did I tell you I couldn't swim at the time? I recovered with some attention from an experienced lady hill walker who plied me with woolies and lumps of sugar. I felt like a horse! By the time I'd warmed up and no longer needed assistance, someone had sent for the ambulance which, leaving all my belongings behind, whisked me off to Barrow-in-Furness where I was left with no clothes, no money, and no means of returning to Coniston where, when I eventually did arrive, I found that my boat had been 'rescued' in the process of which a hole had been punched in the side. Boat handling I think they call it. I mustn't complain for everyone meant well.

I can already sense Mr Wingfield's pen rushing across paper declaring many safe and sensible warnings, and I can certainly feel the reproachful wagging finger of technical experience from Mr Bick on my choice of boat, but honestly, I'm sixty this year and have done my own 'Day Scupper' and `Yachtmaster Off-hand' courses and I feel I must just "get on with it".

For the sake of others I must add that my method of introducing oneself to sailing does carry a 'Serious Hazard to Health' warning. One other thing, whilst I was communing with the sub-aquatic life of lakeland, I did in my odd spare moment throw together a larger craft - 18' loa - in which I've just completed the first season's sailing, and in which I'm very pleased as it's my own design and is turning out to be a seaworthy boat, i.e. it floats.

Back to the `Capsize' handle. As it has certain 'Omen'istic qualities, and as I plan to sail around our coastline, indeed already have done, perhaps we could let it fade away so that I may be allowed the anonymity many would say I so richly deserve.