Page 39 - Folk Boat Year Book 2023

Sailing in the Canaries by David Jenkins

Perhaps this is a daydream for many people, but I have to admit that this is a reality
for me. I was lucky in that my job brought me out to Tenerife (I was the English
chaplain here for some years) and once I retired I realised that I could now
concentrate on my boating.

While working I’d had a Drascombe which let me keep my hand in, but she really
wasn’t up to the waters here. I’d parked her in the Parsonage grounds, but once I
knew I was leaving, I sold her to someone on the adjoining island of La Palma. The
sad ending to this chapter is that the boat was destroyed last year in the forest fires
and volcano eruptions there.

I began my sailing on a lake in Wales as a boy, and then while a student, I had spent a
year in Toronto. As soon as I got there, I had joined the National Yacht Club and was
lucky enough to spend the summer crewing on a Nordic Folkboat. The sailing season
on Lake Ontario is almost a full-time occupation, with a series of regattas just about
every weekend along the coast in the various ports there. After that I was hooked on
the Folkboat.

Although I had had two different keelboats in the UK over the years, this time after
my Drascombe experience, I knew I needed a good sea-kindly boat. I hadn’t bought a
Folkboat before but this time I discovered the British Folkboat which gave me the
headroom I craved, so I bought one and shipped it out here in a container.

You need to realise that sailing here in Spain is not the same as sailing there. Here,
there is nothing like Ratty’s “messing about in boats”. Bluntly, sailing is considered a
luxury sport, and is priced accordingly. And, when Chindit (my boat) was uncrated,
the first reaction from onlookers in the yard were on the lines of “There’s another
wooden boat in the marina down the coast”! That says it all, I think. I am one of the
smallest boats in a fleet of plastic behemoths. But that said, there is still the same
camaraderie among sailboat owners. I must say though that the reactions I get
remind me of the sort of thing that happens when an MG TF or a Morgan arrives in a
car park. We all think how lovely but go back to the comforts of our Ford Sierras or
whatever.

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