Kindly, tolerant people don’t usually rate their friends according to how useful they are. If they do it’s not so much a friendship as a networking opportunity, influence-and-patronage.

In real friendship sometimes, indeed, utter practical uselessness is quite endearing: we murmur that they have ‘other talents’ or perhaps just a good heart, or infectious optimism that raises your heart.

But when you’re on a boat together, especially if you’re skipper or co-skipper, you need to have at the back of your head some idea of how useful they are, or might be in a crisis. And sometimes it’s the one who is least obviously fun or good-hearted who you know will be a rock of support when needed.

I first reflected on all this when I was in my small-ad crewing phase, randomly answering ‘crew wanted’ listings at the back of Yachting Monthly itself.

Well, it wasn’t entirely random: I have said before, years ago here, that I ruled out ‘loonies, lonelyhearts and catamarans.’ I now apologise for that to all catamaran owners everywhere. Anyway, I got a few very entertaining little cruises, an Atlantic crossing and some long-term friends out of it, and of course some entertaining but horribly instructive low points.

But the principle I grasped from the very start was that in taking a strange young person aboard the skipper needed to know two things: will they be an obstructive nuisance? And even if not, will they be of any actual use?

The first is simple: turn up with your own waterproof gear and minimal luggage, take up as little space as possible, listen to the basic safety briefing (or ask for one if it isn’t offered) and look after yourself discreetly if you’re sick.

Do not make demands, do not squeak in alarm or sit around getting frighteningly hypothermic in a T-shirt because you’re scared or embarrassed to take your silent misery below.

But the second question – are you useful? – is a bit harder to fulfil. I once was given the helm straight away on leaving Lymington with a casual ‘follow the marks out’, and became aware that the skipper had gone below, pretending insouciance, to peer anxiously out of the ports to see whether I knew where I was going.

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Luckily I did, but in later years I sympathised with his doubts. Not least when one of our great friends was discovered, at night in the Thames Estuary, to be steering – faithfully within the markers on a grid compass – 180° from the desired direction.

The lines looked the same, OK?

So a basic ability to steer is a good start to usefulness. Follow that, after a few more sails, with enough sensitivity to steer hard to windward, watching the jib telltales, and after a few more to be a reliable helm going dead downwind without accidental gybes or hideous spinnaker-wraps.

Before either of these, a certain usefulness in tea-making and galley-tidying is good. Long before they let me anywhere near the heavy tiller on a Brightlingsea oyster smack I put myself in charge of that sort of skivvying, plus re-stowing charts and pencils whenever a particularly sickening lurch threw them across
the cabin in the night.

I felt as proud of myself doing that as any blackboard monitor in a favourite teacher’s classroom.

Beyond simple crewing, however, real usefulness lies in those who fix things. There’s a famous story about Miles Smeeton’s Cape Horn pitchpoling, his mast,
rudder and doghouse gone and the crew, John Guzzwell, immediately found sitting on the wreckage busily sharpening his tools to start on repairs.

That’s the sort of crew you want. One distinguished sailor tells, almost with tears in his eyes, of finding a chap through small-ads whose first question was would it be OK if he brought his own toolbox?

I am never, now, going to be a skipper-in-charge, but if I was I would be excited to invite any friend with electric, engineering, electronic or plumbing skills, whether or not they were good company.

Actually, the qualities often go together: practical ability, too often derided in this age of fancy-footwork and Instagram bragging, generally has a mellowing effect on the sharp edges of personality. So I now wish you all such useful companions as the summer winds blow fair or foul.

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