Secrets of a long life

If it’s not broke, don’t fix it or, as it were, maintain it.

- Adrian Morgan

Should I fear for Sally? She’s 80 years old this year. Whereas every month in Classic Boat – a youngster at 30 this year – I read of wooden boats well before their middle age undergoing the full treatment from keel to truck, Sally has never been refastened, replanked, re timbered or pretty much re-anything’d in all that time.

Sally II is a 1937 Laurent Giles 25-footer, the second of what, raised and modified to a more sensible cruising configuration (at the expense, perhaps, of elegance) became the Vertue class after an exploit that won her crew the Little Ship Club’s Vertue Cup. Sally has never aspired to such heights, although she has cruised from south to north, Brittany, West Country, the Welsh Coast and from the Clyde to Cape Wrath. She has also seen the M6 speeding past from the flat bed of a lorry en route from Hamble to Edinburgh.