Getting Over The Bar

What kind of cruising person have you become?

Do you worry more about whether the harbour has wifi than if it has water? Does your crew on sighting land cry for joy, hold up a phone and exclaim: “I’ve got three bars” and start thumbing out texts to friends telling them, presumably, they’re on a boat and have just managed to get a signal? On leaping ashore do they enter the nearest internet café, or head for the shower block (or one of those three bars)? What kind of cruising person have you become? Have I become?

Two boats, one a modern French production yacht, the other a 1946 McGruer sloop, provoked some intriguing comparisons over a three-week holiday in the Western Isles. In the old days it was the three ‘sh’s (sh*t, shower, shave) now it’s wifi, water and: “Where’s the nearest cash machine?”