Boats ahoy!
On Wednesday I jumped onto an Easyjet flight at Gatwick in order to nip down to Palma, Mallorca, and spend just 28 hours seeing my son Barry who lives and works there. I’d originally hoped to do this seven days earlier – on his birthday – but such is his hectic work schedule that he had to ask me to postpone the trip.
The top end of marine industry is a strange one inhabited by high net worth individuals and their families (on the one hand) and a vast army of professional seamen and crew, yacht designers, yacht brokers, insurance brokers, maintenance engineers, expert craftsmen in skills of every type you could imagine – and some you couldn’t – plus hangers-on of every description (on the other).
Inserting oneself – or being invited – into it is to join an alien world. I don’t mean that in the sense of it being something from outer space but in the sense that it’s an area of human existence that, however much I get exposed to it, seems inherently daunting because it is so far removed from anything I’ve experienced before.
I certainly couldn’t work in it myself.
Mind you, when you think about it, if you took a professional seaman and dropped him into the upper echelons of the world of the law (in which I was trained) – say, into the judges’ changing rooms at the Old Bailey, he’d probably find that pretty alien as well!
It was decades ago that I first heard the old gag about the car industry “If you have to ask the price of a Rolls Royce, you cannot afford it” but that certainly applies in practice within the modern marine industry.
For example, prior ‘coming ashore’ about sixteen months go Barry had been exclusive captain to a businessman who lives in Switzerland and owns five yachts in total located around the world. Occasionally, if said gentleman wished to discuss something face to face, he’d send his private jet to collect Barry from, and return him to, wherever he was stationed at the time with the flagship yacht. On Barry’s last voyage skippering her she spent two years away from her home marina which (solely because he wished to retain her berth there) cost her owner 2.2 million euros, apparently a matter of little concern to him.
Upon arriving at my hotel courtesy of Barry’s lift from the airport at about 2.00pm on Wednesday afternoon I checked in and dozed on my bed for an hour and a half.
My first real chance to exchanges family updates with Barry was at dinner at 7.30pm, for which he arrived half an hour late because of work commitments.
During my wait I had made myself at home in the corner of the bar, nursing what the Spanish (or maybe it is the Mallorcans) call a gin and tonic: i.e. a massive spherical cocktail glass laden with ice and a lime slice into which had been poured – I would estimate – what in British terms would have been a triple (if not quadruple) shot of gin and a tiny sliver of tonic delivered into the glass down the outside of a long spoon being used as if it was the tonic equivalent of what the Americans refer to as a honey-drizzler.
As it happened we had been to the same restaurant on my last visit to Palma in mid-December. When Barry walked in he was immediately greeted by the mâitre d’ and the bar tender almost as if he was a celebrity and – whilst he then nipped off to use the facilities before joining me at my small table beside the bar – the mâitre d’ came over and apologised to me, explaining that he had recognised – but couldn’t ‘place’ – me from my previous visit and he hadn’t realised that I was Barry’s father. I couldn’t make my mind up whether to be suitably flattered by his line of patter or just regard him as an obsequious little prat.
Just after we had ordered our starters another captain of my acquaintance walked into the establishment by chance, came over to pay his respects and ended up joining us at our table. This somewhat kyboshed our intended ‘one to one’ catch-up, but nevertheless the evening turned into a rewarding one from my point of view.
Our companion was a chap of about my age (mid-sixties) who, in one form or another, had spent forty years at sea. His current ‘owner’ is a fanatically keen sailor who competes in his chosen class’s world championships but keeps and uses a super yacht based in the Mediterranean rather as perhaps a Londoner in Britain might use a weekend pad in Brighton.
As our guest sketched out his schedule for the coming season – dropping in at several points almost as far as Turkey – I marvelled both at the range of the itinerary and the fact that, despite the owner’s sailing skills and his penchant for taking the helm on short legs, he always deferred to his captain’s decisions and commands whenever they were at sea.
Yesterday, as predicted by the weathermen, I awoke to find Palma awash with wind and rain.
Not quite what I had prepared for – I’d packed shorts, a T-shirt, dark glasses and factor 30 sun tan lotion, expecting to be acquiring a mahogany hue in the blazing sunshine!
Knowing that I was going to be amusing myself all morning, I therefore ate a hearty breakfast and then set off to walk along the sea front to the Cathedral and back.
Damp is not Palma’s finest circumstance. It left an atmosphere of ‘the morning after the Lord Mayor’s Show’ hanging in the air.
Later, as I sipped the first of four Americano coffees waiting for my luncheon rendezvous with Barry outside the marina café/bar, I ventured out to take a few snapshots of some of the nearby the yachts and nearly drowned in a standing position in a sudden squall that blew through with great violence.
Last night – after the frustrations of a half hour delaying in getting off the ground at Palma Airport and therefore a half-hour delay also in arriving at Gatwick – I reached the sanctuary of my home at about 9.30pm.
And went to bed within about twenty minutes of my arrival, totally bushwhacked.
