Getting Over The Bar

What kind of cruising person have you become?

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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?”