Writing about boats (and other maritime matters) is so much easier than building them. That’s a line I find myself using regularly and it usually gets a laugh, which is nice, but actually I am being deadly serious.

A common boatbuilding problem is trying to squeeze a piece of equipment into a space which isn’t quite big enough. In such a situation at one company where I worked we often borrowed a classic line from a famous 1970s film: “we’re going to need a bigger boat”. Of course, we all knew that if we had a bigger boat we would be faced with the same problem because we would be trying to fit a bigger piece of equipment, but we always enjoyed the momentary light relief it gave us.

I clearly remember in the early 1980s I was on board a brand new 66-footer – which was considered to be a big boat at that time – for a weekend of sea trials. The whole point of sea trials is to find out about things which don’t work and we were doing pretty well in that respect as we couldn’t even boil a kettle, despite there being three different systems which should have allowed us to. Moored up in a Cowes marina on Sunday morning when we were all in the need of a tea or a coffee, one of the crew took our kettle to a neighbouring 22-footer and asked the owner if he would mind boiling it for us. He was delighted to do so.

During the course of my working life the biggest boats have just got bigger and bigger. The world’s biggest sailing boat today is 350 foot long but there is a century-old phrase which still rings true (although no one seems to know who originally came out with it): “the smaller the boat, the more the fun”.