EINSTEINS THEORY OF BOAT PREPARATION
Have you ever struggled to read, or more importantly comprehend , Einstein’s theory of relativity? If you are anything like me it starts well but halfway through, my thought processes get ensnared in a sort of mental black Sikkaflex, with no solvent in sight, and I end up completely confused and missing the point completely.
As a result, what I am about to propose may be just a bit pretentious, or even just plain wrong, but I THINK I have discovered a hitherto undescribed major exception to the laws of physics which I shall call “Yacht-Time Continuum”.
You will be familiar with the curious phenomenon of getting 9 people on a boat prior to an offshore race. The boat is prepared, everyone has their kit ready, the food and charts are all organised – but for some hitherto inexplicable reason the whole process takes four hours! We are experiencing something similar in that 3 weeks into our refit progress is slowing so much that we keep on thinking of new things to do faster than we cross jobs off – and the list is getting longer every day!
I have thought long and hard about this and the obvious solution is that time is speeding up. In a spaceship moving near the speed of light , time slows down and nearly stops , so in a mode of transport as incredibly slow as a sailing vessel ( especially one ashore !) presumably time does the opposite , leaving less of it around in which you can actually achieve anything.
Something similar happened to us 30 years ago when fitting out for a Baltic trip , and our solution was to put to sea in the dead of night before the “list “ got so big it sank the boat.
All of which is one way of saying we haven’t set off yet!