THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN'

Technology has transformed sailing, but was the past better or worse? Andy Du Port shares his views

- ANDY DU PORT is a former RN navigating officer and RYA cruising instructor. He also edited Reeds Nautical Almanac for five years.

Bob Dylan's ageless song was released at about the same time as I started sailing yachts.

Its aim was to influence people's views about society, so it seems to be an appropriate title for an article about how we have been influenced by developments in yacht design and equipment over the last 60 years or so. The views, however, are entirely mine!

I would have sailed anywhere, in any conditions, with Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey (of course he's real!) in the early 1800s. He was the consummate mathematician and seaman, but his only knowledge of electricity was thunder storms; electronics would have totally bewildered him; and he would have refused to believe that ships of the future could be made out of iron or steel, let alone plastic and glass fibres. If he were around today, we would have a very baffled man on our hands, but I think he would envy our ability to keep going when the wind fails. As for the capability to communicate with the Admiralty when on the far side of the world, he would doubtless resent being told in real time where to go and what to do next. Not his style at all.

However, this is not a rant about ‘the good old days’ and how everything was better when Nelson was a lad. It wasn’t. Nevertheless, much has changed: GPS has largely replaced sextants and three-point visual fixes; electronic charts are rapidly displacing paper charts and 2B pencils; to ‘hand, reef and steer’, the traditional qualification for seamen, can now be achieved by pressing buttons and programming the autopilot.

By comparing what was the norm in the 1960s with what we take for granted in the 2020s, we can speculate how our approach to sailing has been affected.