We’ve posted mostly about the sailing and the places we’ve visited on our travels, but the pattern of life on a small yacht has a certain rhythm…When we first decided to buy a boat together (two couples), there were a few key matters to consider…the usual stuff about hull configuration, sail plan, sailing characteristics,  sea-worthiness etc, but also as important was the accommodation plan. Can two couples actually live together for weeks on end without falling out? Can we each have our own space? Delicate matters of toilet arrangements (the Heads) and how do we manage with two dedicated carnivores, a vegetarian who eats seafood,  and an egg, mayo and butter phobic? This is the first of an occasional series of posts about making it work without actually resorting to violence. About shopping, cooking, eating and just living together. In some ways,  the sailing is the easy part. We plan and check routes, tides, weather and reach, mostly, the same conclusions. We agree mostly about when to reef, when to boost our sails with the motor, how to dock and general boat handling.Walking round the supermarket though, throws into sharper relief the cultural differences across backgrounds as diverse as Hong Kong,  Canada,  Plymouth and working class South London, all overlaid by a collective 280 years of lived and divergent experience.

Heydays is a Moody 346 built in 1989 and still carries that particular style of british boats of that era, which nods back to the golden age of ‘proper’ wooden boats with their heavy wood panelling and swinging oil lanterns. None of the minimalist whites and light greys of the modern french and german boats…

She has a fore cabin with standing headroom (just) as we felt it important for two couples to have their own clear space, although storage is at a premium.

And a rear master cabin…

The main saloon can seat 6 easily around the table, but is spacious for 4 as a general living/eating area..

….and for the regular canasta school…

In fact many evenings have been spent in cosy company, playing cards, reading, and of course all helped down with the odd rum or whisky or chocolate. We rarely find that we are on top of each other.

The chart table and navigation area is more than adequate for offshore cruising…secure in lumpy weather, and with everything to hand…

These days, like most other cruising boats, we use a variety of electronic aids and apps for our positioning and plotting. We’ve tried several down the years, but navionics (Garmin) seems pretty bomb proof for planning and live plotting. Windy for wind and Predictwind for both wind and currents seems like a good combination,

The galley, meanwhile, has quietly done more for Anglo-Canadian-Cantonese relations than most diplomats manage in a career. It has produced soup on passages too lumpy for anything more ambitious, fresh crab and lobster when the pots have been kind, squid, and an alarming number of bakes…

A few final reflections…

Before we move on to lighter matters, such as who ate the last of the chocolate, a few thoughts on how this arrangement came about…

The original logic was straightforward enough, even if it took two couples and several bottles of something to arrive at it. Neither of us could quite justify a boat of this size alone, and neither of us, if we are honest, would have used her often enough to make the sums add up. Buying together let us scale up without anyone needing to remortgage anything, and that, on paper, was the whole of the plan.

What the plan did not anticipate was how much sailing together we would actually end up doing. The original scheme, sketched out with naive optimism, involved each couple claiming first refusal on certain dates and otherwise pottering about independently. This has, indeed, happened, on the shorter trips. But for the longer ones we discovered, somewhat to our surprise, that we could be considerably bolder taking Heydays further and for longer with all four of us aboard than either couple would have dared alone. John and James, when it comes to the actual business of sailing her, trust one another absolutely, which turns out to be a rarer and more valuable commodity than any amount of chart-plotting software.

Sharing costs has also proved a quiet blessing for a boat of a certain age. Major items have failed, as they do, and been replaced without the sharp intake of breath that such moments usually invite when one is footing the bill alone.

And then there is the small matter of getting older, which none of us arranged for and all of us are nevertheless dealing with. Bad backs, uncertain balance, joints that make their presence felt at inconvenient moments on a heaving foredeck… these have all made their appearance in turn. We have managed, mostly, by being patient with one another, and by quietly taking up the slack when someone else’s back, knee, or general constitution has decided not to co-operate. It is not, perhaps, the stuff of adventure sailing magazines, but it has kept four of us afloat, together, rather longer than any of us originally planned.