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AFFAIRS OF THE HART – THE FATAL LURE OF GREENER GRASS

02/06/2017
by

Harty muses on the multi headed beast that is travel.

Why is it so many relationships bust up at Christmas? Terrible timing. If someone’s going to leave you, why can’t they have the decency to do it in early January when everyone’s miserable? Pro windsurfers spending 30 weeks a year away in exotic climes should never be surprised to find the ‘Dear John (or Jane) …’ letter on the mantelpiece on their return, but I hadn’t seen this one coming.
On the same day as my romantic dismissal, I was asked to a party by two friends who’d just had their first child. God knows why I decided to attend a function tailor made to compound my misery, but I did. It was even worse than expected – Bing Crosby crooning to the tinkle of sleigh bells, baby gurgling in its holly-fringed crib as the proud couple embraced and cooed to create a scene which screamed “we’re secure, blissful and fulfilled – and you’re a sad lonely git with nothing!” A couple of hours later, Ian, the hubby, stumbled over slightly the worse for 4 champagne cocktails, looked me squarely in the eye and said:
“You b@#¶*!d!”, I couldn’t think of a witty reply so I let him continue …
“You’re off to Barbados next week aren’t you? I haven’t been on the water for 5 months … and even if the opportunity had arisen, which it hasn’t, I’d be too bloody knackered … the longest little Beyoncé has slept for is about 6 minutes … YOU can do what you like, when you like … oh the thought of cruising over the azure waters of Silver Sands in shorts is just so unbelievably, fabulously …” his voice tailed off as a tear welled in the corner of his glazed eye. And there followed a classic greener grass conversation as we admitted to desperately craving each other’s lives. We didn’t swap … but realised that we’d both got the balance a bit wrong – itinerant hedonist vs. domestic slave – you need a bit of both.

The Joy and Misery of the Journeyman
Trips and travel – they can be life affirming and disruptive in equal measure. I’m enjoying the journey theme of this issue – from the philosophical observations of our editor to the outlooks and stories of various pros.
Everyone will have a different reaction to travelogues – “I’d love to do that … what an experience … life is short … let’s get out there …” to: “not for me … I don’t mind the odd trip to Lanzarote … but I like a solid itinerary and after a week I start to miss the cats.”
Journeys, real and philosophical, need to match your state of being and current circumstances, which are of course ever changing – usually due to aging but not always.
My attitude to journeying has changed enormously over the years.
I suppose the early 80s were the golden years where every venue from the Canaries to the W.Indies to Hawaii to Ireland, was new – and in windy terms at least, we were treading a relatively untrodden path. So many disasters, so many stories – it was amazing and exhausting.
In the era where this tale kicked off I’d been competing for 10 years and had had enough of travel – at least the sort of travel I was doing. I was on a Groundhog Day circuit. They weren’t journeys in the romantic sense – more just trips. Proper travel is where, by taking a fork in the road, you create the day and confront the unexpected. I was just proving how easy it was to travel the world without seeing anything.
My tipsy friend Ian was imagining the sights, sounds, smells, colours, freedom of being somewhere completely different; I was contemplating getting through Gatwick with a ton of kit and then having to rig 5 sails in time for the first heat on Monday morning, and then the prospect of doing really badly (again) and losing my sponsorship, before packing everything up and leaving on Saturday. Of course there were good times but ‘being in transit’ rather than travelling is how I would describe that era.

Better
These days I’m ‘only’ away about 15 weeks of the year – and apart from a month in Ireland, never more than 10 days at a time – which is probably why I’m still married.
The same thing happened with trips as it did with training sessions. If you’ve got all day to sail, you tend to throttle back and take it easy. If you’ve only got 2 hours, you really go for it, try everything and emerge knackered but exhilarated by the intensity.
On shorter trips now, I’m never saving myself or thinking about the next day or hoping for conditions that might or might not materialise or getting stroppy if they don’t. It’s become a terrible cliché but living in the ‘now’ is ever so important if you’re to make the most of a jaunt.
And I’ve also changed my attitude to disasters. I like a good disaster at a wedding, otherwise you can never distinguish one from the other. But I want trips to be memorable for the right reasons. Getting robbed of everything in Morocco and having to hitch home without a passport in a pre-internet era; ending up in a French gaol having been mistaken for an armed robber etc etc, I can absolutely do without that now and pray that I get there without a hitch, that the van doesn’t break down in bandit country, so I can savour the good things. And then of course there’s home.
Not 6 weeks ago I was running a course in Brazil, where the instant availability of wind, waves, heat, laughter, bossa rhythms and industrial cocktails produce a windsurfing Garden of Eden and makes January a month to savour. And it was bliss. On the 9th day, I was at the Club Ventos bar with a Caipirinha in hand watching the sun plummet into the golden surf after a truly great day on the water, when I heard a ‘ding’ on my phone. It was from my local WhatsApp sailing group, ping-ponging messages about the size and beauty of the swell that day on my local patch. Could that really be a pang of jealousy I was feeling? It was.
Coming home should always be the best part of a journey.
PH  21st Feb 2017

Harty dreaming of the cold, beige waters of home … some of the time.
Photo Hart photography.

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