A Griff at sea

5 April 2012

Funny fellow, Griff Rhys Jones. Barely into his mid-20s, he became a household name with Not The Nine O'Clock News. From there, the world was his oyster.

He might have become a film director like Mel Smith, or a full-time actor like Rowan Atkinson. Instead, he has taken an unusual path and developed into what he is today - a sort of loveable freelance crackpot.

I'm thinking of his long stint as a loony physics professor crawling all over Vauxhall hatchbacks with a tape measure and a bird's-nest beard.

And, of course, there's his latest incarnation as the preserver of Britain's heritage. He's spent the whole summer on BBC2's Restoration, tramping around the country like a benign but irritable history master, lecturing us about crumbling ruins in his characteristic tone of dismayed geniality.

His interest in condemned buildings is quite genuine. He has devoted countless hours of his spare time to saving the Hackney Empire, a music hall in the East End.

It's no surprise to learn that his secret hobby is just as irrational and time-consuming. Griff adores old boats. To The Baltic With Bob is his account of a summertime odyssey from Whitstable to St Petersburg on board his beloved yacht, Undina.

The roots of this passion are hereditary. His father, a hospital consultant, was the proud owner of a succession of timber-built craft. He encouraged Griff to disdain those sailors who favoured 'namby-pamby fibreglass'.

For the seafaring purist, these ' bathtubs' or 'floating caravans' are far too easy to maintain. A wooden boat needs constant attention. Twice a year, according the manuals, it must be lifted out of the water to be scrubbed, polished and smothered in several layers of varnish.

Griff was not an instant enthusiast. He recalls standing for hours in chandlers while his father looked around 'seemingly hypnotised' by the gleaming array of shackles, brass hooks and rope off-cuts.

When his dad opened up the engine of their boat, they would kneel down together and pore over its innards. It turned into a scene from an operating theatre, with Griff playing the press-ganged nurse passing the tools to the surgeon.

The obscure pleasures of sailing began to take hold of the grudging youngster. At the end of each season he was given the task of stripping barnacles from the ship's hull. The yacht would be propped on its winter legs and Griff would lie flat on his back and apply a foul-smelling goo to the encrusted planks.

'At least all that scraping was vaguely enjoyable. Like picking at a scab. On a good day the skin of dead molluscs would fall away in satisfying strips,' he writes.

When the job was finished and he stepped back to admire the sparkling hull, he admits he was touched by 'a daft romantic pride'.

As soon as he could afford to, he began sailing himself. At first he found it easier to charter boats. 'For the money my father spent just mooring his yacht, I could have two weeks in the Caribbean. I could take friends, sail in warm water, catch fierce fish and then walk away.'

He searched around for the ideal companion. Mel Smith, he remembers, took to the water 'like a chest of drawers'.

Another friend, Paul, was full of fidgety expectation. He hadn't acquired 'the delusion of sailing', a mental state in which you convince yourself you are purposefully engaged when in fact you're doing nothing at all.

One day, Paul made the cardinal error. He offered words of praise for a noisy motor-launch that had just gone fizzing and bouncing past their yacht. 'That,' Griff said tautly, 'is like sitting on a washing machine after it's been thrown down a hill.' Paul didn't come back.

And then Griff found Bob, one of life's layabouts, 'a man who was always ready to drop absolutely nothing at all and come with me'.

As they cross the Baltic together, Bob acts as crew and on-board clown while Griff plays the self-confessed 'boat-pedant'. It's an ideal comic partnership. At night, Bob takes the helm and steers the vessel in a series of ever-widening zigzags while Griff tucks himself up in his bunk, muttering and cursing.

At times, Bob is even battier than Griff. In a Swedish wine bar he tries to chat up a waitress by telling her that Chateau Haut-Brion is owned by an Irishman named O'Brien.

Later, against Griff's advice, he buys a sextant from a Russian markettrader. He then offers it to his captain for an 80 per cent mark-up.

The beauty of this book lies in Griff's skilful and evocative authorship. He communicates his sincere love of the sea while sending himself up without mercy. It is a must, not only for committed sailors, but for anyone who has ever glanced at a yacht and felt that uneasy twinge of desire.

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