Well, Mr Know-it-all, here you are on a very skinny foredeck belonging to 'Athena', a gorgeous racing 8-Metre yacht, owned by a Peer of the Realm, Lord Jonathan of Cork, who has assumed from your Australian accent that you are the very bee's-knee's of foredeck hands, (despite being the oldest person on the boat), and miracles of calm efficiency are expected ! Oh, and did I mention I am nursing a shoulder cuff injury from a previous attempt at biting off more than I could chew.

By the time I’m 10 years old, I can keep a 2 hour watch, trim sail as needed, track our knotmeter (a glass tube I dangle over the stern on my belly, watching the little red ball bubble up–until I can just stay right side up and guess it pretty accurately based on a number of things i can’t even enumerate) and my printing is disciplined enough to keep decent log entries if anything changes

My mother wears a silk scarf as we sail, to keep her hair from blowing everywhere or into her eyes. Her dark glasses hide her smiling eyes. But I see that she’s thrilled to bits. We serve up sardines and tinned fish and cheese and biscuits and soup and hot strong tea and Daddy always gets “a tot” when the sun is over the yardarms and again at “elevenses” and then after that, whenever he wants one.

Two outstanding vessels in excellent condition purchased for very reasonable money by modern younger people looking to find their analogue islands with a bit of friction maxxing thrown in to spice it up. I’m hoping this is a trend. My other crew members are green with envy.

You kept your star charts, your local tides, your moon phases, your dawns and dusks in your mind. You tracked stuff half in your head, half in your hands, half in your heart, half in your ass, and half in pages of your notebook or in scribbled margins of reference books.

In the crepuscule of pre-dawn each day, I silently pop out the forehatch like a woodchuck to hop in a dinghy with a couple of new friends who sailed their Wharram 30 from England. He had been a policeman, which struck me funny for some reason. And she was like a Viking, long blonde braids, always wearing a navy blue turtleneck sweater with her jeans. It was winter in Miami (but still, not that cold.) Nevertheless, they had a big contract up at Jones Boatyard refinishing the exterior of a 90-foot yacht, Southwind (or some wind, I don’t really recall).

And aboard the boat anchored next to us, the playboy model American girl came up on deck with her walkman hooked to her string undies. I think we call them thongs, now. Things. Thongs.

Personally when I cast my eye over my 100 year old boat her signs of age endear her to me. My aesthetic is that of the cathedrals gloomy with the smoke of innumerable candles, the scars of the sackings by the Ottomans, the steps worn hollow by a thousand years of kneeling penitents. Further to that my humble vessel belongs to a vernacular tradition based on the Queenscliff fishing boats from the turn of last century. A tradition of hard usage, hard knocks, and short pockets.

This is how I like to think of wooden boats. Infinitely repairable, like grandpa’s axe. And even though philosophers have long debated whether an object consisting of multiple parts is still fundamentally the same object if all of its parts have been incrementally replaced over time, very few of us are curmudgeonly enough to question the authenticity of boats like TALLY HO, PEGGY BAWN or VARG