Left: ‘By staying north starting the Cowes-Dinard we enjoyed a substantial lift hugging the Lymington shore; here we are bursting through the Needles ahead of most of the fleet. The 22-hour race had just the sort of conditions in which Argyll thrives, with 25kt out the northwest rushing us past the Casquets. On elapsed time we were fourth overall of 173 entries and first in class (IRC4) by nearly 40 minutes!!’ Argyll’s wide teak decks (above) feel safe even in a blow while a central companionway makes for a generous aft cabin
dozen or so regattas each year in the Mediterranean since he bought her in 2010. Before that he sailed Undina, his 45ft wooden Philip Rhodes sloop; there were a couple of years when he had both Argyll and Undina racing at Les Voiles de Saint- Tropez. ‘I was on the helm on Argyll sailing by them and shouting at them to put the right sails up!’ is how Griff remembers it. ‘The only thing worse than owning your
own wooden boat is owning two wooden boats,’ he announced to a crowded room some time back then. And I noted the quip got a good laugh and some knowing looks, especially from the other classic owners. ‘I bought a boat for £70,000, spent
£500,000 on her over a few years and now I find when I want to sell her she is worth… £70,000,’ he continued, confirm- ing the sometimes upsetting truth that many a wooden boat owner has tried to hide from their spouse. I was curious why he hadn’t gone this
year, and I wondered how much it might have to do with how Les Voiles has been changing in recent times. The two years before last, for instance, the organisers had broadly split the moderns and the classics into separate weeks; the word on the quays was that the port was like a ghost town when the moderns were there, but that the classics had still drawn the usual large crowd. So I got in touch with him. ‘Well, Saint-Tropez is like Harvey
Nichols without the roof,’ Griff says. ‘You know it’s all about expensive restaurants, shops selling gold bikinis or an unwearable pair of deck shoes that cost £400, and it’s not really for me. I don’t drink so I don’t
do the late-night thing and I’ve only been in the Sube (Hotel and more or less gossip- central for the event) twice in 20 years. ‘Also, I am not really in favour of that
hard-arsed sailing that starts to come with being rules-bound and being aggressive with each other in an effort to show off sailing abilities.’ I wonder if this sounds a little odd from Griff with his quite famous full-on attitude to racing? I remember racing with him aboard
Argyll in the Cowes-Dinard in 2015 when, despite my warning that the spinnaker I was trimming that night was getting decid- edly overpressed, no move was taken to shorten sail. And then when the big white balloon burst in front of me, replacing its resplendent ghostly power with a slab of darkness and some shivering shreds, I was merely asked to put up the spare. ‘Well, I am not complacent,’ Griff avers,
‘and I could never be accused of “compla- cently” losing a race. So, no, that is not me… Every race has a ‘What-Happened- There’ debrief; if necessary we’ll also go to see people we think may have cheated… ‘It’s also true that when you sail in the
Med now you join an elite who are sailing some extraordinary boats. It has to be said that there is a kind of Formula One attitude where you have someone like Tara who can dedicate a team of experts and, well, scientists, to getting the best from his boat. ‘And I am not complaining about that,
but a lot of these boats used to be sailed by architects and doctors and now that’s changed. Many of them are also carrying professional crew. So in our class Stormy Weather has upped her game; we used to
be able to beat Comet, now we don’t; we used to beat Varuna, now we don’t. So gone are the days when you just bring a few mates down and sail.’ Griff was a cruising man sailing Undina
back from the Baltic in his 50th year (a voyage told in his book To The Baltic With Bob) when he joined the Flensburg Classic Week event in 2003. ‘I got my older brother over, who has raced all his life and taught me about the sense of frus- tration when things aren’t going right! ‘We were in a raft of boats littered
across the fjord, then we all went off at once with a downwind start. We put up the cruising chute, hauled up the centre- board and started moving through the fleet… and at the end of it all we got a silver cup and we’d come third or something. And I was completely hooked.’ Since boyhood Griff had been a cruising
sailor and remembers formative passages with his father on their Yachting Monthly Senior sailing into the creeks and swatch- ways of the English east coast. ‘The differ- ence is – if you go cruising you stick the sails up, and you say: “Where are the biscuits?” But if you go racing you stick the sails up and someone says: “That’s not right, let’s trim that, let’s put the other sail up and let’s do something about that leech…” And you spend your whole time fiddling and faffing and that’s really excit- ing. But I came to it late… ‘My dad taught me sailing but he was a
biscuits-and-spending-the-night-in-some- distant-creek and not-using-the-engine man. We’d be fighting and losing against the tide all the way up the Blackwater and
SEAHORSE 59
ALAMY
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