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About forty five years ago, when the British first started going abroad for their holidays in numbers, I had a job on a holiday camp at a place called Cala Mesquida in North East Mallorca. I was a water sports assistant, mostly teaching sailing, though I did some water-skiing and scuba diving. I had two main boats at my disposal, a Shearwater catamaran and a Vouxrien, which was a French, flat bottom, version of the Enterprise dinghy, there was another small fibre glass dinghy with a lateen sail we knew as “The bath tub”.
People would buy tickets from the office and then come down to the beach looking to sail. I quickly learned that if I simply said “Can you sail?” they would lie through their teeth, thinking it was simple and any idiot could do it. Then, as they drifted further and further off shore towards France, I would have to launch my rescue boat, an old Zodiac inflatable with a 40 hp Honda engine, and bring them back.
Instead I would ask “What have you sailed?”. If they said something like “I have crewed for my friend in a Fireball and taken out a Mirror dinghy on my own” they were unlikely to kill themselves. Those who had no experience would not be able to name anything of course, and I would suggest taking them out on the catamaran for a first trip.
One day I was approached by a man in his forties wanting to borrow a boat and asked my question, “What have you sailed”.
“Everything from a three masted schooner to a square rigged, double ended catamaran”, was the reply. He turned out to be a most experienced sailor who had served an apprenticeship on a German Brig, carrying coal.
Before the war he had got a job as number one on a brigantine, built with no ferrous metals on board and intended to map magnetic fields around the world. He spent several months helping an elderly sailor to rig it and then, just about as they were ready, war broke out and the project was abandoned.
During the war methods were discovered to do the same thing from aircraft and it was never taken up again. His usual holiday was on a deserted beach a day’s walk from anywhere in Corsica, Mallorca was a compromise with his family. He was a member of the Tall Ships Committee, and I learned more about sailing and the sea from him than anywhere else, we would spend hours sitting chatting on the beach whenever I had time.
The square rigged, double ended catamaran? That was another ship that was outmoded before it got properly under way. It was a prototype built on the Norfolk Broads and aimed at the cargo market. It had a tripod mast with a square rig sail hung in the centre and leading and trailing rudders between the hulls, one each end. When it wanted to go about it simply jibed to change direction, so the aft became the bows and the bows the stern. It was superseded by steam of course; perhaps as we start to run out of oil someone will remember it.
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