aving no bank balance is not all bad for a young sailor. It keeps him out of the pubs and it gives him a sense of priorities. My first serious cruiser was acquired half a century ago. Finances were in a dire state. The boat was a 32ft Colin Archer pilot cutter built in 1903. Today, advertisements on the internet assure would-be buyers that any old double-ender or even canoe-sterned yacht is the work of the great man, but informed readers know better. Archer’s boats were noted for extreme beam. This is an easy enough thing for a designer to work with on a modern flat-floored hull, but try your luck with a deep-keeled classic and you run into problems. The result is that most of these so-called ‘Colin Archers’ can’t get out of their own way. My boat was different. She was the real business lines below the water were much too fine for a centre propeller, so she’d been fitted with an early hydrostatic unit. ‘Ovlov’ turned a pump serving an experimental drive-pod bolted outside the planking under the starboard quarter. The mysteries lurking inside this creation from hell used to lock up regularly and, once this happened, nothing could be done without hauling out and hiring an expensive hydraulics expert. The trouble became terminal somewhere south of Rio so, being far from home with no spare funds, my wife Roz and I sailed engineless.
