‘Sailing your own boat is the last available way to feel that old-fashioned traveller buzz’ – Libby Purves

Libby Purves reflects on modern ferry travel, which has moved a long way from the jolly start to a trip that visiting a busy harbour once was

During a chilly autumn week we had to do a 36-hour round trip to Calais – we were foot passengers on one of the few ferries that still tolerate such car-free lowlifes. The word ‘spooky’ hardly covers the experience: an echoing terminal at Dover with only three other passengers, herded into a minibus and driven round in circles, herded out with passports to satisfy the French immigration authorities. Then back in the van, rolling last into the car-deck behind the lorries, and then up to the lonely spaces of an off-season ferry.

For alas, gone are the old days of exciting crew-changes, running off the train along a busy quay and up the gangway just in time, feeling the bustle of a port around you. Aboard the P&O ferry only the lorry-drivers’ section had life in it; otherwise it was us, a couple of carloads, and the flat sea and distant cliffs.

It prompted the reflection that nowadays everything in travel has become a soulless airport terminal, and every soul a cowed, obedient cargo-unit. So actually, sailing your own boat is the last available way to feel that old-fashioned traveller buzz of independent derring-do.

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Homeward the same bus discipline applied but Calais port is even more vast, weird and disconnected from normal life than Dover (where, from the bus, you can actually see trees, and real human houses below the cliff).

Calais, apart from the welcome sight of the Phare de Calais lighthouse, is mile after mile of razor wire and containers, concrete depositories and a passenger terminal building laced with peculiar orange decorative struts and, in a valiant effort to cheer it up and return to the romance of travel, containing two life-size Blériot plane models and an incomprehensible coffee machine.

In the strange emptiness, with barely a soul in sight for miles, I rather wished that in the long waits I had brought along my favourite jigsaw, entitled ‘The Busy Harbour’.

It had everything a child’s picture of exciting harbour life could want. There were bollards and fishing-nets, a liner’s bow just in view overlooking it all; there’s a little crane, and some bundles and crates for it to work on. A couple of sailors in baggy trousers stride along, clearly on the lookout for gamesome trollops built with Beryl Cook proportions, probably in tight striped sweaters.

There is some kind of office in the picture with a man in an officer’s hat stepping out. Some distant figures with suitcases are heading for the liner, and a nice little fork-lift. There’s even, if I remember rightly, a distant square-rigger lying offshore in the top right hand corner. Harbour romance in 1,000 pieces, every one part of a story.

Since there is unlikely to be a Campaign For Real Harbours any time soon, I thought I would ask YM readers where, in their view, there still exist the romantic, busy, populated, exciting harbours of jigsaw world. There used to be more of them available to yachts; I have happy memories of lying alongside Poole Town Quay tied to a trawler opposite the chippie, and at least in Rosslare you can be snugly close enough to the big ferry to be kept awake all night by the ‘bing-bong!’ of announcements.

But giant marinas set apart from the real port can make you feel as bleak as Calais. You don’t get that romantic sense of being part of the great floating global city of seafarers, travellers, fishermen, cargoes: John Masefield’s poetic brotherhood that links dirty British coasters with a salt-caked smoke stack with Drake’s galleons and exotic quinqueremes of Nineveh. Even convenient yachting harbours, alas, are usually lined with all the same clothing brand names and coffee-shop fake-nauticalia.

So where are the characterful, bustling harbours that still spark that universal magic? Proper ships, proper fishing-boats, humble amateur yachts able to lie respectfully hugger-mugger with professionals, whether in safety hi-vis or officer-class gold braid. Let’s hear it for the few real romantic harbours left to us. Alternatively, since it’s winter, so it has to be time to get back to that jigsaw…

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