CAPTAIN SLOW BUYS A BOAT

When James May decided to go shopping for a boat he made the mistake of asking MBY editor Hugo for advice. It turned out to be an expensive but ultimately very rewarding call

- Hugo Andreae

For a brief period back in the 1980s James May and I used to work together. James was the production editor of Autocar magazine and I was selling adverts for a sister title called Car Choice. It didn’t end well. Car Choice closed – I never was any good at sales. And James got sacked. At least he went in style; while sub-editing a supplement, he changed the first word of every article so that the capital letter at the start of every page spelled out a witty little message. We thought it was hilarious. Our managing director didn’t and fired him on the spot. Thankfully, James found a more appreciative audience for his famously dry sense of humour presenting Top Gear and I ended up scribbling about boats for a living.

Despite our divergent career paths, we have stayed in touch over the years so it didn’t come as a huge surprise when a message popped up on my phone from James in 2013. It simply read, “I have been gripped by the desire to buy a Riva Junior. Is this a crap idea?”

I was tempted to give an equally succinct answer but as it happened I was sea-trialling a classic Riva Tritone in Italy at the time and was able to ask the people who really knew what the pros and cons of running an old Riva were. In the end James decided not to take the plunge but it clearly triggered a boating itch because six years later in 2019 an email dropped into my inbox from him with a link to a secondhand XO270 and the even more concise message, “Is this sort of thing ridiculous?”