When clients choose a charter, the first thing they look at is always the boat: how long, how many cabins, how handsome the deck. Our homework runs the other way round: first the captain, then the boat.
Because over a week’s charter the boat is only the vessel; the captain is the content. He decides which bay you make for today, decides what hour to weigh anchor to slip past the tourist fleet, decides whether you feel anxious or at ease when the sea gets up. The same boat, under a different captain, is another journey altogether.
So our captains’ files record not certificate numbers — a certificate is the ticket in, not a mark in his favour. They record other things: whether he talks much or little; whether he is willing to teach the guests to work the boat; whether his knowledge of the sea is recited or lived; whether, after supper, he retires to his cabin or stays on deck to share a drink and tell some foolish story of his younger days in one strait or another.
Then comes the matching. A family with children we pair with the old rogue who always has a trick in his pocket and can turn the tying of a knot into a piece of magic; a couple wanting quiet, with the Finn famed for ‘ten sentences a day, every one of them useful’; those wanting to learn to sail, with the former sailing instructor whose refrain is ‘the helm’s yours, I’m watching’. We paid for the cost of getting it wrong in our early years: an over-eager captain and a couple who wanted only to be left alone, both sides worn out by week’s end — ever since, ‘temperament match’ has been a field ranked above the type of boat.
The feedback after a trip bears out the same order: clients describe the boat, on average, in a sentence and a half; the captain, in a paragraph and a half.
The boat is hired; the memory is given by a person. Do this trade long enough and you learn that everything else can be compromised — who holds the helm cannot.