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At sea with the theory of relativity

Everybody, out of the Poole. In lands where the climate is benign enough for outdoor swimming pools, lifeguards, when they’re not harassing kids about running or cannonballing off the high dive, keep a close watch on weather.
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Everybody, out of the Poole.

In lands where the climate is benign enough for outdoor swimming pools, lifeguards, when they’re not harassing kids about running or cannonballing off the high dive, keep a close watch on weather. If big, dark clouds get too near or start rumbling threats of lightning, they blow their whistle and hustle everybody out of the pool.

It was like that – in a perverse sort of way – in Poole, England, Sunday. Good weather; everybody out of the Poole. The window of tolerable conditions for crossing the English Channel was slight and the marina, jampacked with boats tethered two abreast in places because of some bank holiday, looked like the start of a Formula One race, everybody jockeying for position to squeeze out its narrow entrance at the same time. Cannon and tempers flared. Many ships were sunk and many more egos lay wounded and screaming. Or so it seemed.

I am convinced, having spent an unplanned week in England waiting for slightly less nasty weather, the story I was told in school about why Great Britain became such a vast colonial power was just another convenient lie. Theirs was no search for power, wealth and empire. It was a hunt for better weather. No wonder they thought Canada was a paradise.

But finally, we’re off. With a scant crew of three – the Pirate Princess of the Mediterranean, Peter the Wizard, the Human Windlass – and Mike the Mercenary who we took aboard on the spurious claim he knew how to make nice with the hostile natives where we planned to anchor the first night out, we nosed out of the safehaven of the harbour into the maelstrom. We’re cruising for pleasure and plunder but mostly we’re cruising to deliver the Princess’s new boat to its home in Malta, land of the famed malt tree.

I’m not certain "boat" is the right term. Having entered the land of Boatspeak – a subdialect of English, which a stay in England proved I have only a limited grasp of to begin with, laden with a historic and confusing jargon for simple, everyday terms – I’m not sure what to call this vessel. I thought it was a yacht but when I called it that, someone corrected me. Yachts have sails. Motoryacht is acceptable but seems pretentious and if these pedants want to get picky with me I’m more than happy to point out that motors are electric and engines are internal combustion so it’s actually an engineyacht Mr. Smartypants. I’ll stick with boat until something better comes along.

I thought, at 72 feet, it was a big boat. But boating is one of those activities that has a way of manifesting poignant examples of the theory of relativity every time you turn around. It seemed like a big boat when I first saw it, being bigger than the other boats around it at the marina. It shrunk dramatically when it pulled up next to another boat at the fuel dock that was 105 feet long. Both boats seemed like Tonka toys next to the scrap metal barge parked, er berthed, behind, er astern, of them.

It seemed like a big boat again when the guy got done pumping a few thousand Pounds worth of diesel into her – all boats, yachts included, are her; no guys in boatville. And it seemed smaller than a cork when we were being tossed around in the Channel.

It seems big when people gawk at it, which they seem to do whenever it pulls in someplace new, an activity generally associated with the big-seeming act of sucking down a few thousand more Euros worth of fuel, which the Euros – people in this case, not currency – call gasoil, not diesel.

No one who’s ever gawked at it has made the mistake of thinking it’s my boat. They look at the boat, they look at me, they draw their own conclusions. The only guys who ever think it’s my boat are the guys pissed off because I’m tying it onto some place they don’t want me to tie it onto. I used to shout back at them to talk to the captain if they had a beef but that didn’t work, given they were generally yelling at me in a language I didn’t understand and I was yelling back in one they didn’t understand. Now I just feign the universal symbology signifying I’m deaf and mute, point to the Pirate Princess, cringe as though I’m being flogged with a cat ’o nine tails, and ignore them. Then they yell at her… until they see the whip.

The only part of this boat I could comfortably own is the little boat tied, er tethered, onto the back. I made the mistake of calling it a dinghy. I called it a dinghy rather proudly, much in the way someone who’s mastering a new language might accidentally try to compliment someone on their hat and accidentally tell them it looks like a smouldering heap of dung instead of a sharp chapeau.

It’s not, apparently a dinghy. It’s a tender. Not the kind of tender like you hope your steak is. Not the kind of tender like currency, legal tender. The kind of tender as in, "He tends to ’er every need," a phrase striking dangerously close to home these days. The princess’s old boat had a dinghy; but boats over a certain size have tenders. Capiche?

This boat has a smallish tender. It’s actually the same size Zodiac as the old dinghy except it has a steering wheel and jet propulsion instead of an outboard motor. It looks like fun but until we’re in warmer water, I’m not getting anywhere near it. Bigger boats have bigger tenders. Boats are kind of like RVs in that way. Little RVs pull little cars, big RVs pull SUVs and I once saw an enormous RV pulling a plane, which seemed pretentious. But not as pretentious as the story someone was telling me about a big cheese, floating in Microsoft dollars, who has a boat so big, probably big enough to call a ship, that his tender is actually the boat I’m now on that people gawk at but never mistake for mine.

And, of course, that’s the ultimate ironic example of relativity in the boating world. It’s what boat brokers and yacht builders bet their future on and it explains why, in the world of yachting, as in the world of fast food, everything’s getting supersized. For most boaters, it seems, are deliriously happy with their new boat… for a while. Then they’re only relatively happy with it because it’s always just a little smaller than what they hope their next boat will be.

I don’t know what they call that in boatspeak.