I'm really tempted just to leave it at that. However, I'm currently working on a personal goal of being much less inaccessible, so, in order that this doesn't just become a deeply obscure collection of non-sentences designed to make me (and no-one else) laugh, I shall expand.
The following is a stream-of-consciousness ramble about the sea. It is not focused or coherent. You have been warned.
I found myself revisiting The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicolas Tomalin and Ron Hall this month. I borrowed a fantastically 1970s looking Penguin paperback from the Hoodlum Scientist many years ago and it's fascinated me ever since. The tragic story of Crowhurst's solo round the world trimaran attempt has been retold many times, much more effectively than I ever could, especially in this particular biography.
You can find the full details elsewhere, but Crowhurst was a gifted engineer and self-publicist, a driven and rather difficult man who took on a challenge he was ill-prepared for. Once it became clear to him that he was (literally) on course for disaster at sea, he attempted to fake the log evidence of his voyage, leading him into what the authors convincingly argue was a guilt driven breakdown and eventual suicide.
From there, I went on to Bernard Moitessier, who set out at the same time as Crowhurst in a yacht that had been stripped of almost every aspect of modernity, to the extent that he refused transmitter equipment, on the grounds that he had a good slingshot and a supply of film canisters (you put the messages in the canisters, then use the slingshot to shoot them onto the decks of passing ships; took me a while to get that bit).
Moitessier's The Long Way takes a literal description of his own journey and transcends into a philosophy of existence as he slowly retreats from civilisation, eventually abandoning his own round the world attempt in order not to return to Europe. It's a hypnotic, beautiful book, about the stars and the waves and the sun, a sea-going version of the novels of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
One gets the distinct impression that it took a real effort just to moor up near human beings; there's a sense of the strength needed to re-integrate into any kind of society. A good part of my therapy has dealt with my own tendency to withdraw from the world and I shudder to think how I'd end up if I had the opportunity of buggering off alone on a boat for a year. Well, apart from sunk, obviously.
Moitessier describes his early years, learning to sail tiny boats, working on Vietnamese junks and all those other things that make Graves Park Boating Lake look a bit tame. It was whilst reading these parts that I began to wonder; how exactly does one end up being able to undertake adventures like this? I mean, the money alone is so far beyond my means to make it impossible, but what about the experience, the training? What kind of background would you need? As I say, Moitessier grew up stealing bits of other boats in order to get out on the waves, but would that be an option in the 21st century?
The feeling grows that worlds like this are increasingly cut off. The vast majority of people don't get to learn to sail, myself included. It's mainly on economic grounds, but the fact that I live as far from the sea as it's possible to get probably doesn't help much. Alright, geography aside, do people who grow up by the seaside get to learn this stuff? Maybe if you're from a fishing family, or loaded to the point where I'm scared of you, then yes.
I've no idea where I'm going with this line of thought, except that the sea used to be a working class experience (or at least, one open to all), as recently as the last fifty years, whereas now it's become the domain of the rich, unless you're lucky or up for joining the Navy. That makes me a bit sad.
But my mind is incapable of being in that state for long at the moment. So, fusing social comment and the sea, here's my third ocean going focus of the month, Uncle Walt Disney with 20000 Leagues Under The Sea.
There are many reasons to love this film...
...not least of which, this dialogue:
Captain Nemo: I am not what is called a civilized man, Professor. I have done with society for reasons that seem good to me. Therefore, I do not obey its laws.
He's a steampunk bad-ass revolutionary, is our man Nemo. Shame they couldn't actually have got a actor of the same ethnicity as the actual character*, but hell, it's James Mason. The unfairly reviled League of Extraordinary Gentlemen gets it right; guess which film I'm rambling on about next time?
So, um, here's my conclusion; it's right good at sea. But it's right expensive and might make you go mad, which is all very unfair in historical context, so get a massive steampunk submarine and see it from the underneath part. The end.
Imagine if I got paid for writing this rubbish. I'd be laughing right now, I would. Laughing.
*Look it up if you don't know.
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