I came across this story of a superficially mismatched Welsh couple's attempt to take up the cruising lifestyle by chance, and was surprised and gratified that it captured what I understand (admittedly ahead of time) to be the challenges of setting off on long-term cruising where husband and wife are co-skippers.
Author Gwyneth Lewis was the National Poet of Wales, a position I would have suspected to have existed, but which did not exist, apparently, until recently. She is also a clinical depressive in (mostly) recovery and is a recovering alcoholic, as is her considerably older husband Leighton, a fit but fury-filled former merchant seaman with a great deal of experience in boats, but not, significantly, of sailing them.
In Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage, the bookish and self-doubting Lewis recounts accurately the transformation of the couple's marital dynamic from one of parity to one in which Leighton is referred to as "Captain Bastard". Now, an account such as this could be hard slogging, but Lewis's dry wit and sharp honesty about her own nautical shortcomings and (perhaps) too tender feelings concerning her husband's impatience with said shortcomings, is very revealing and says much about the moving needle of the cruising couple dynamic.
The "Captain Bligh" effect is well known in the cruising community, and many a discounted, fully-fitted yacht is available at Gibraltar, Panama and other cruising bottlenecks around the world's seas due to it; these boats are forlorn, floating testaments to ongoing divorce proceedings as wives and husbands pass the breaking point over life aboard. It seems, time and time again, that you can have dodgy amenities, bad weather and cramped, damp saloons, but if you have a screaming male skipper, it's time for most women to demand to be let off the ship.
Why, however, do skippers scream?
To her credit, Lewis does not look for easy answers, and she is frank about her inexperience. She (rightly, in my view) ascribes husband Leighton's growing irritation to his fatigue and the realization that even as he is the alleged "voice of experience" aboard, his own considerable skills are neither always sufficient nor always applicable to the problems...and they are legion...thrown at them on their journey from Cardiff to (after many disheartening setbacks) North Africa.
Lewis has brewed here the sort of "nav station psychology" that will strike a chord of recognition in any cruising couple. She offers a few solutions by way of understanding, but she is quite clear on how damaging and corrosive the cruising life can be to boat-bound marriages. In the end, it is a crisis of a different kind that brings them back together on the same course, if on a different map.
On a personal note, Lewis has quite a bit to say about Wales and Cardiff, a city where my father was born and where I still have family. Her husband's first year as a teenaged merchant seaman occurred in the last year in which my father was at sea, so there are several references and parallels I "got" that others may not. Some reviews of this now-five-year-old book have apparently found it a "downer" due to descriptions of salt-water bickering and the depression brought on by thieving mechanics in foreign ports...but this, too, is sailing, and Lewis does a great service by forgoing the brightwork and giving an unvarnished, beautifully written account of a marriage at sea that I finished in one go. It's a cautionary tale, to be sure, but it is far from a horrible warning.
Now, if I can only get my wife to read it!
