The log of a ship – date, time, position, course – are the vital statistics of her story. The ‘comment’ section should be the vital statistics of yours. For stark, disjoined facts don’t reveal the truth. We need them joined up for that much-overused contemporary phrase: narrative.

There is something about a sailing vessel and her handling that invites personification, more so than with any other form of transport. It’s something to do with overcoming adversity slowly. It’s a performance you do together: sea, man, and ship. And, because the avoidance of potential grounding, dismasting or blown-out sails is something which happens incrementally, it becomes a deep experience, a truth which can be relayed via the saga.

With this in mind, I set out to judge the logs of sailors for the Cruising Association’s long-running eponymous awards.

And there were plenty of them, with a strong bias towards Scottish waters, as though a wilderness is being sought out far away from, well, other people.

The silhouette of a stag on Rum; an orca sniffing round Canna; golden eagles skating across a Shiant sky. If you’ve seen something like that it is only human to want to share it, to somehow make sense of it, and the only way you
can do that is by recording it, and here cold prose still has the upper hand. To see a video clip of the same thing has been corrupted by AI.

There was a time when, scrolling through some social media offering, I would stumble across, say, a crocodile bursting from an African lake and dragging a drinking deer to a watery death. I was naively astonished until a pal quietly explained it was created by robots. There is probably a philosophical argument for saying that as long as you are viewing it second-hand, it is real. But it’s not an argument I share.

The best logs are those which detail problems solved: few log-keepers are poets, few can lift the sighting of a dolphin, a sunset or tropical landfall above the many which have been written before, and no one wants to read tick-box accounts of fauna seen, flora eaten, or places visited.

Article continues below…

Mooring mayhem: How a two-hour limit led to a close encounter with a high-vis bailiff – Dick Durham

A hot weekday morning heralded the arrival of Betty II alongside the floating pontoon at Rowhedge, near Colchester. A sign…

‘An orange glow lit up the horizon: an oil tanker had been torpedoed’ – Dick Durham

Inside an old jewellery box sits a yellowing fang set in a gold mount. It is the triangular molar wrenched…

These days, many logs are written as public blogs where innermost thoughts, poor decisions and shame are edited out. Mostly. When they are not, you have a compelling read. The best logs are those which are revelatory, candid, confessional. There were some of those.

The best logs describe the psychology of sailing, the make-up of the crew or skipper’s character. There were none in that category. The most interesting ones put the fear of God into you as you sit round a winter’s hearth, yet still make you yearn for the sea. There was just one under that heading: a candid account of a lifeboat rescue.

In his autobiography, The Mirror of the Sea, a continuous logbook of his many years afloat, Joseph Conrad tells a story which combines all the above.

Having rounded Cape Horn in a tall ship pooped with a sea that smashed in the cabin skylight, he joins the master over dripping charts and is asked his opinion on where they are.

For weeks they have sailed under eight-eighth cloud cover and no celestial fix has been obtained. Conrad knows his reckoning could be used against him later and so prevaricates. When at last they get sight of land – St Catherine’s Point on the Isle of Wight – the skipper says: ‘I thought that’s where we were.’

Conrad’s masterful observation of the dreadful burden of the captain’s responsibility combined with the human weakness of bravado once that burden is lifted is unforgettable.

You don’t have to double Cape Horn, you can be becalmed off Bognor; navigate into Whitby via the smell of candy-floss; drag through kelp in the Small Isles; or steer the wrong side of a super-tanker in Milford Haven, and we will keep turning the pages.

We can’t all be Conrad, but we can try.

Enjoyed reading this?

A subscription to Yachting Monthly magazine costs around 40% less than the cover price, so you can save money compared to buying single issues.

Print and digital editions are available through Magazines Direct – where you can also find the latest deals.

YM is packed with information to help you get the most from your time on the water.

• • • Take your seamanship to the next level with tips, advice and skills from our experts
    • Impartial in-depth reviews of the latest yachts and equipment
    • Cruising guides to help you reach those dream destinations

Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Note: We may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site, at no extra cost to you. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.