Roots and Mooring Lines

My husband, Jason, and I didn’t grow up sailing. We never darted haphazardly around sheltered bays in highlighter yellow dinghies, joyous screams carrying on the wind and saltwater stains creeping up our torsos. But when we moved onto a boat, it was something that we both promised we’d commit to learning. We wanted Lowenna to be a boat first, our home second, and didn’t want our inexperience to get in the way.

A year on, and I’m still poring over the Royal Yacht Association’s Go Sailing: A practical handbook for young people, left in the shallows whilst Jason only progresses. Within a year of boat ownership, he has ticked off channel crossings, night sails, and navigating gale force storms at sea. Today, though, we are sitting in the little flat we have started renting in Newquay. It’s a base we adopted when we realised renovating a boat takes far, far, far longer than you think it does, and because after spending a small fortune on Premier Inns throughout the previous winter, we want to be better prepared.

Jason is sprawled across our little, second-hand striped sofa, twirling his hair around his fingers and looking for fridge compressors on eBay. Lowenna’s had decided to shudder to a halt, and had lain there through the mid-Summer heat, getting warmer and less helpful by the day. An ocean-related question breaks the furrow of his brow, and lightens his warm, chestnut eyes.

‘What made you interested in boats?’ I ask. He pushes himself up to seated, swigs from a bottle of water, and contemplates.

‘Well, I’ve spent a lifetime in love with the ocean,’ he says, a fond memory pulling on the corners of his mouth. ‘My first bedroom was covered in boats – I had little carved ones on my windowsill. Growing up landlocked made me crave the water so much more. You become attached to it in a different way to people born in coastal places.’ Jason’s childhood bedroom overlooked other people’s gardens in North Nottinghamshire, but he made the pilgrimage to Scarborough whenever a North Sea wave threatened, the glacial waters of the North East coast leaving him with salt on his tongue. The move to Cornwall in 2019 should have been obvious to us, really.

Jason’s workplaces became increasingly oceanic, from running kitchens in coastal cafés, to training as a fish monger, until eventually he worked with one of our closest friends to open a popup seafood restaurant in Newquay in the summer of 2022. ‘We had a view of the harbour,’ he says, ‘and I would watch people coming and going in all sorts of vessels. It seemed like such a beautiful way to live and explore.’ We think about the times he talked himself onto a few fishing boats, showing up in an old yellow oilskin I’d bought on Depop when we were in our early twenties. Laughing, he covers his face at the thought of how underprepared he was. He sighs, then, breathes life into a thought. ‘There’s a freedom that comes with being out on the open water that’s difficult to forget once you’ve experienced it.’ And if there’s something you need to know about Jason, freedom is his one, overarching goal in life. It’s why he swapped hemmed in cities for open coasts; why he swapped cheffing all weekend for boat building four days a week; and perhaps explains his frustration with renting.

‘For a while, I hated it. Things are almost never as good as you expect them to be, it’s difficult to get things fixed, and the complications are endless. I knew I wanted a boat, and I knew I wanted to try living alternatively, so I just thought: why not?’ Had Jason not known the basics of boat maintenance and sailing, this idea might never have gotten off the ground. But watching the person you love grow taller and broader as they talk about an idea has a way of bringing you around to their way of thinking. Not that all my fears were assuaged. 

‘Don’t you find the idea of being a beginner at something in your thirties a bit daunting?’ I ask. I know that I’m putting my own fears onto Jason – I’m the one who does all the tasters for all the sports, never to return if I’m not told I’m a natural immediately. When it comes to trying new things, he’s scared of nothing.

‘What the hell does it matter?’ He says, eyebrows shooting upwards. ‘We get to be at the start of it all – to build new passions and discover new skills. And the first time you properly set your sails and feel the wind pull you along and take you where you want to go, you feel such a sense of accomplishment.’ He practically jumps out of his seat whilst reminiscing over his first proper sail with our friend Mackie – the former owner of Lowenna. ‘I remember my primal, lizard brain convincing me the boat was going to capsize and that it was all going to go wrong, especially the first time I felt her heeling,’ which, he explains, is the technical term for a boat tilting almost horizontally when turning, ‘but all you have to do is adjust a sail here, or release a jib there.’ Since then, Jason has crewed a sail across the Celtic Sea in gale force six and navigated to France under the stars, experiences that make my stomach feel cold and heavy, but fill his cup to overflow. ‘Knowing there’s no safety net and that you have to work together to make your crossing is so exciting to me. There’s no better feeling than adventure; of getting to a destination and that satisfaction of anchoring up and knowing that your journey has had so much worth.’

For the last year, Lowenna has been our home. She’s been shared with our cat – Sarge – and been the site of birthday drinks, lazy Saturday morning brunches, and film nights. But she was designed, first and foremost, as a boat to be sailed. We’ve got our dreams of taking our home through French canal systems, or lazily through the Mediterranean, but it does beg the question: what happens if our home sinks?

‘Living on a boat is a wonderful thing. It’s given me a greater appreciation for invention and innovation and really highlighted how little you need to feel truly comfortable,’ Jason begins, ‘but sailing your home and your worldly possessions makes you a lot more anxious. Think about all your clothes, the sentimental things you’ve accumulated, we’ve got our cat. If something goes wrong, they all go under.’ He settles against the back of the sofa, resting his head on the wall as he thinks about this. I know that it’s one of the main reasons we’ve decided to rent a flat again, and why our Sarge is currently living with Jason’s parents. He lifts his gaze up and meets mine, brows knitted again, but this time in contemplation. ‘I don’t have any regrets about living on the boat; I know I want to live life a bit differently. Especially when I see the obsession with buying the bigger car, getting the bigger house, and living the classic nuclear life. I have never felt more at home than living between this tiny little flat and our boat.’ At the end of it all, it doesn’t matter if we take Lowenna to the Scillies, to France, or even just to Fowey for a weekend. She’s nurtured a sense of excitement in both of our lives and shown us home in a new light – one in which feeling settled and adventurous can both exist under one easy heading. Feeling free.