Not so far from retirement now and being something of a human anachronism, ill-adapted to the pace and demands of contemporary life, I will be far from sorry to withdraw from the ranks of the gainfully employed and remove to a place where priorities are different, and where values centre around decent behaviour. My family and I recently visited our proposed pasturing grounds in Pooc just outside Cebu City in the Philippines.

Our house in Pooc is nearly ready and there only remains the accrual of further pension contributions and the completion of my 'final boat', my beloved Faversham Dinghy 'moored' in the back garden of our Dagenham home. The boat's basic shell was purchased from John Pollitt at JEP Marine near Faversham in Kent. The most obliging of boatbuilders, John couldn't do enough to satisfy my pedantic and fastidious requirements in my plans to fit out the boat for coastal cruising in Cebu. Here the north-east monsoon blows sedately in the morning and somewhat more boisterously in the afternoon from about the beginning to the middle of the year. For the rest of the year the south-west monsoon can be a rumbustious blast of quite daunting velocity. A generous beam, a deep and heavy centreboard and a conservative sail plan are a good combination here. This is indeed what is taking shape in the suburbs of Dagenham. It must also be conceded that the most efficient way to windward can sometimes be an outboard motor. Wretched, noisy, smelly products of the consumer society dispatched while enjoying a measure of grog by the fire on a winter's night. Essential developments of modern technology, since the abolition of slavery has precluded the labour of indentured oarsmen, – this when standing on a Philippine beach observing the whitecaps. I wonder what John Pollit would think? Certainly there is no engine well in the mouldings of his Faversham Dinghy, so perhaps that speaks for itself. Actually he would do well in the Philippines would John, his philosophy almost exactly mirrors that of the majority of the people there, 'Well, I've reached the end of the week. I've made sufficient money to live on and had a bucketful of laughs along the way. Life's good.'

The people of the Philippine Islands, like their British counterparts, have from the earliest records of their history harvested from the sea and used it for transportation. Local conditions have influenced the design and development of local craft. Could it be that my Faversham Dinghy, ideal as a workboat of yesteryear on the Thames Estuary, might prove to be ill-designed for the conditions it would meet in the Philippines? No, a good sea boat is a good sea boat here, there and everywhere, a global awareness echoed in the words of Robert Service:

And though it's all an ocean far from Yucatan to France
I bet beside the old bazaar they dance and dance and dance.

They certainly like to dance in the Philippines but what do they sail and does it have much in common with my Faversham dinghy in its cruising livery? The basic design of the Philippine 'banka' has undergone only one significant alteration since its inception as a workboat centuries ago. This modification concerns its motive power. Gone are the downwind sails and paddles to be replaced by engines as various in size as the craft themselves.

Philippine bankas range in length from about 12' to about 100'. They all, however, reflect the same design parameters. Trimarans constructed from coconut palm wood (with ply for the main hull a recent innovation). Coconut palm wood, by the way, is an astonishingly versatile material. It has an attractive grain and is flexible to a degree that rivals plastic. I only wish it grew in Dagenham.

My brother-in-law, Frankie, treated me to a cruise aboard his banka Cha Cha (I told you like they like to dance in the Philippines). We launched Cha Cha from the beach in Pooc, wading waist-deep before scrambling aboard. Frankie fired up the engine, a petrol-driven monster extracted from a wrecked 3-ton Bedford truck of decidedly mature vintage. We skimmed across the water at great speed, so fast that the slipstream helped cool the engine via the still-fitted radiator. At judicious intervals, Frankie employed his less than high-tech salt water cooling system in chucking a bucket of sea water all over the engine plant. It hissed and steamed gratefully in response – and kept right on going.

We zoomed north towards the harbour, passing houses built out over the water on stilts, past palm lined beaches with sparkling waters,

'All in the feathered palm tree tops the bright green parrots screech
The white line of the running surf goes booming down the beach'. (John Masefield)

No parrots actually, but I have discovered where Dagenham's sparrow population, flocks of them, might have gone and I really don't blame them. Drawing closer to the harbour, abreast of Tabunok, the skipper executed a U-turn to set a return course now heading south. This was an altogether sensible move as fishing is now prohibited, a belated sledgehammer reaction to decades of dynamiting, and the authorities deal harshly with those violating this law. In some minds the sight of a small banka is synonymous with fishing and the mere sight of one evidence of skulduggery.

On this return leg we were ploughing to weather and office-wallah stomachs began to cha cha themselves. Despite the motion, Frankie extracted from the galley the ship's best china, two redundant paint tins, and brewed a fathomless steaming brown liquid. About the colour and consistency of SP epoxy, it was so sweet that no other flavour was discernible. It might have been tea, coffee or indeed epoxy but it did lay heavy on heaving stomachs, like oil on troubled waters, and embarrassment was averted.

Our cruise took us south down the coast to Carcar, where we darted briefly into the calm of the small estuary for a bite to eat and another shot of epoxy before resuming the relatively tranquil northerly course back to Pooc.

With the weather again behind us we flew along seeming barely to be in contact with the water, save for the occasional gargantuan, jarring thump as Cha Cha briefly crash-landed. I was glad when we arrived back in Pooc as the presence, abeam, of another banka seemed to bring out the competitive spirit in Frankie and he was pushing his vessel to what seemed to me to be its upper limits. I was conscious that the marriage of the colossal engine with the flimsy-looking hull structures was one of accident rather than design.

Frankie headed Cha Cha directly for the beach, cutting the engine at precisely the right moment and heaving the 'anchor' astern as Cha Cha waltzed gracefully into the shallows. We didn't quite touch bottom and the skipper jumped into the water and ran a rope ashore to secure Cha Cha fore and aft. There she would wait comfortably and patiently until nightfall came and it was safe to start our fishing expedition – but please don't inform the Coastguard; DCA members should after all be ambassadors, compliant to even the daftest of laws. JB