‘Finding your way by sea’ is a literal definition of navigating, but the word is so powerful figuratively to the ‘English-speaking Peoples’ that the term and its associations have been widely borrowed for related uses. It now very commonly serves when you describe finding your way by land, by internet, and in the ‘course’ of your life.

‘Getting your bearings’ is such a common way of describing the need to assess your position in life that saying this is no longer a metaphor. An uncontroversial theory of language development argues that such a phrase does start out its life as a startlingly new and apt way of enlightening one thing by associating its characteristics with those of another thing, but that this ‘metaphoric quality’ fades into the established background of secondary meanings over time.

I think Shakespeare has a bearing on this. For example when Sir Toby Belch exhorts his friend to stun the lady of his affections with language ‘fire new from the mint’, the idea of ‘minting’ a new way of saying something was genuinely new and striking, but four centuries later it is a cliché.

The first object of navigation in boats and life is to establish your present position. Unless we can do this with reasonable accuracy we have no hope of choosing an appropriate direction to somewhere new.

At sea this position can either be expressed as a mark on a chart, or as values in the agreed co-ordinate system – latitude and longitude – which we use to indicate a point on the surface of the sphere on which we live. On a chart we first try to draw a ‘position line’ by lining up visible objects (landmarks or seamarks) that are located at different distances from us (and so are horizontally separated when not aligned).

We next try to establish our position on that line by taking compass bearings of two or three other visible objects at widely separated angles. To get this right, we need to take account the fact that compass needles do not align exactly with the rotational poles of the world. The difference between the magnetic north and the direction of the geographical pole is known as ‘variation’.

Thinking this over at the dead of night, while suffering jet lag due to my relocation yesterday some 9,000 miles east by south-east, I mused that in life and work there is an important difference between the direction that a magnetic leader takes you and a ‘true’ direction.

Another problem in life is ‘deviation’. At sea this describes the deflection of a compass needle due to the interference by magnetic forces other than those generated by the poles, including metal on the boat, or other anomalies. On land ‘deviation’ can cause a wide range of dangers!

However, I must now post this and get some sleep, or I will just be a ‘wreck’.

‘Esiotrot’ is the title of a wonderful story of mature love by Roald Dahl. This name is formed from reversing the letters in ‘tortoise’, which Dahl mischievously defines as a very ‘backwards’ animal, or in the present context, a ‘golb’.

When I started this blog, I did not at first appreciate (doh!) the effect on the reader of this ‘backwardness’ inherent in the formation of a stack of entries pushed down one place by each new topic.

I just got started by over-typing on the ‘sample page’ offered by the WordPress software I had selected in almost complete ignorance. For several days my headline bore the legends: ‘Home’ and ‘Sample’.

On this page ‘Home’ is not a live link, but a statement of where you are. But ‘Sample’ was a live link and it just led to some boilerplate text. The editor is meant to replace it (immediately, if you are not as esiotrot as I). So at length, I have now finally caught up. I have replaced ‘Sample’ with ‘About’ (see above).  In that page I have explained the underlying purpose of the blog and introduced myself a bit, and of course on that page ‘Home’ is a link which delivers you back to the top of the stack.

Check it out!

Changing your role and way of life is a trial by ordeal. This trial, this ordeal, is exacted by the groups we leave and join, but also by ourselves as it seems to help us visualise ourselves anew.

The giving of the gold watch that used to be the symbol of the rite of retirement is one of these ordeals. Those that had suffered it wore the watch as a sign of their changed life, just as in some tribes it is necessary to bear the pain of widespread tatooing before you can be accepted as an adult member of the tribe.

I instinctively avoided any public show when it came to be my turn to finish working. Since I was 11 years old I have always found transitions difficult. I stayed on an extra year at school but even then my grades didn’t thrive. I joined the Merchant Navy and re-took my exams so that I could go to university, but once having achieved this I was again reluctant to move on and I returned to the navy between the second and third year of my first degree.

This is a photo of a post card I sent to my university tutor showing me playing at being a sailor when I should have been sitting my finals. This turned up many years later when one of the alumni, who had become a professional collector, gathered all the remnants of that time together in a web site ‘most dear to those that know’.

If I had found it hard to leave school, it was four times harder to leave university. I managed to extend my time there to seven years. But that ‘was in another country’, and is a story for a different day.

For the point of this little essay is to heap praise upon myself for the incredible despatch and smoothness of my retirement. I delayed only one year after the traditional age of 65. I made the announcement of my leaving date in March, and duly carried it out in October. Now is my autumn of good content, and the rite of passage that I have designed is a sea trial, an ordeal by water, a marine odyssey.

Read on for adventure!

 

 

 

Hunched & sprawled under Hungerford rail bridge, within a stone’s throw of Whitehall’s Downing Street, there is a specialist shop selling the technical kit that sailors and divers need. Just to visit such a shop as Ocean Leisure enlarges your soul and enables you momentarily to join the tribe it serves and represents.

As when you go away to boarding school for the first time, you get a list of what’s going to be needed in your new life. It fills you with an excited mix of trepidation and expectation, fear and joy, as you visualise the use of the unfamiliar items.

With the willing advice of a young man made wise by the stored experience of generations of sailors I chose these gloves to fulfil the second last item on my list. They are beautiful objects to the technical eye, protecting the palm and gripping digits from rough ropes, yet leaving the sensitive finger ends unencumbered. Designed to perform well when wet, they won’t fall off because the velcro strap can be tightened as needed.

In the olden days, when a sailor on shore leave was caught by the press gang he might pretend with the ready invention and instinctive role play needed for his main occupation that he was a gentleman, and therefore not subject to be impressed to serve in HM ships. The seasoned petty officer, serving perhaps under a lad of good family in nominal command of the press crew, would then ask this ‘gent’ to show his hands. In those days these meaty appendages would be deeply and indelibly engrained with the tar that was used to protect all hempen ropes from rot by the salt water environment. With these gloves I could easily pull the wool over this Petty Officer’s eyes, if indeed the elegance of my turn of phrase had not instantly caused him to tug his sparse forelock in apology for the roughing-up that I would already have suffered!

The other item needed to complete my list was footware. On board Kay Sira, it was explained, we would go barefoot. Even this remark makes me tingle with expectation of the feel of the well-cared-for wood of the decks. But on numerous expeditions to wild beaches we would need to be able to jump into the sea with everyday agility, regardless of  sharp shingle, urchin spines, and sea snakes. With the help of the young man I was nudged towards these:

You might think that the bit of aged leg you see is apparently superfluous to the info provided, but no. I have included a view of the scar left from the operation needed to mend my fibula with a plate of titanium and seven screws.

As I have said, it was the period of enforced idleness resulting from this accident that led me first to dream of this seatrack. And now this doom is nearly upon me – gulp!

There is one screw in my leg for each of the seven seas on which I shall now be a wanderer.

 

“Keep a journal…and stay away from pirates” was the advice of a dear friend, and so here I am learning to blog as I go. Only yesterday blogs were things I could read but not write, but the internet collapses wait time and amazingly just one day later I am making my first tentative steps. This is my second post, and already I can’t wait to see what it will look like when I upload it against the first one.

The title of the blog – seatrack – as I have already said refers to Churchill’s phrase about the difficulty of hunting the German pocket battleship Graf Spee in the ‘trackless ocean wastes’. And of course he was describing something he knew well for many times he like me had cast his eyes around the circle of the horizon without finding the tiniest spot of dry land, but only ‘water, water, everywhere, nor any a drop to drink’.

However we humans are contrary fellows – we are at one time both ‘angel forms’ and ‘poor bare forked creatures’. It is a fact that in this trackless waste my lifetime experience has been the most grounded. In this directionless mass I have found my best and truest directions. Trusting in this I return as a pilgrim, at the outset of my next chapter of life.

Although of course all life began in the sea, the curious ape you see in the mirror every morning cannot now live more than a few hours on it, unless supported by artificial flotation and shelter, and above all unless it can operate some method of locomotion. Of these methods by far the most harmonious is of course the employment of wind. By cunning we can borrow a little of its force to make our track in the waste, and come at last by design to the welcome lights of the home port.