Five men in a boat

She’s called Sea Flower and she looks like yachts used to look when yachts had character, not the white-plastic-hulled caravans that languish in the pontooned berths of modern marinas.

She’s not a perfect yacht and never will be. As each item is crossed off the “to do” list of jobs, another seems to emerge, demanding the renewed attention of her owner, my old colleague Victor Mallet.

Victor has changed over the years. He’s not quite as phlegmatic as he used to be. But none of us are as we enter our fifties. He seems to have dealt with those concerns and worries that accumulate as we age by depositing them within the confines of his Taiwanese-built Tayana 37 that is fully equipped to service every niggle and irritant known to man, and a few more besides.

He caresses her woodwork and worries about the varnish in the heat of a Mediterranean summer. He worries about the security of mooring lines, the bend in the mast, the strength of her shrouds, the chafing on the sheets, the reliability of sea-cocks, the gas feed, the foul air valves, the engine filters, the water pumps, the caulking and the strength of the fixings on the boom that doesn’t have a vang. It really ought to have a vang, he says.

You would think that all of these worries would be a drain on his constitution, yet he seems to take strength in his yacht’s unremitting demands, as if there is something soothing about surrogating the wider anxieties of domestic and professional life to the off-the-shelf alternatives acquired in the purchase and restoration of an old boat.

Sea Flower doesn’t have to be my worry but I and three others volunteered to share Victor’s burden for a few days in sailing her from a haven on Spain’s Mediterranean coast just south of Valencia to Minorca. I wanted to exorcise the memory of an earlier voyage to Minorca more than 30 years ago in a steel-hulled yacht called the Arco that had been welded together by a former fireman from Huddersfield whose navigational limitations would be exposed a few months later when he was wrecked on the Cape Verde islands.

We found a body in the sea on that crossing and left it where it was floating. It troubled me at the time but it's in the past now. You'd find a lot more bodies in parts of the Med today and that is something for all of us to think on. The rich cruise their super yachts while those who have nothing in Africa, risk everything for a new life in the West.

This voyage would be different and, indeed, that’s how it turned out. The sea had been like a pond on that first occasion, but not this time. The wind got up to about 25 knots at its worst - not particularly troubling – but the sea was quite big, stewing over a heavier blow to the north. The combination of this heavy swell and a confused sea state was enough to revive a sea-sickness I hoped I had put behind me.The 40-hour crossing was not my finest moment at sea. After regaling my crew mates, Shawn Donnan, Jeremy Grant and Brian Douglas with stories of surviving the southern ocean, I retreated to my bunk a broken man, retching at regular intervals and pondering in the more lucid moments just what it is I like about sailing.

One of the crew cruelly held on to my jacket as I would happily have slipped under the rail and ended the misery of it all. I hadn't been sea sick for a few years and had forgotten how bad you can feel. Of course the pictures here show the usual island paradise image of sailing. But it really isn't like that at all.Sailing, it seems to me, is one per cent how it looks in the pictures, 19 per cent problem solving, 80 per cent worrying about leaks, widgets, breakages etc, and 100 per cent work. But in a world where in the workplace at least, the defences are rarely lowered, life on a yacht exposes every facet of a character. There's no better way of getting to know people.

But when that sea gets up I dream of a different cabin. Yes, there's nothing more cosy than a hut.