Did Noël Coward ever write anything lovelier than “Sail Away”? “When you feel your song/Is orchestrated wrong/Why should you prolong your stay?/When the wind and the weather blow your dreams sky high/Sail away, sail away, sail away.” Clammy heat, the dulling din of news headlines: whose mind at this time of the year doesn’t turn to the sea? Isn’t water the antidote to all that ails us?
English filmmaker Huw Wahl thinks so. His new feature Wind, Tide & Oar is a gorgeous exploration of engineless sailing. It’s a subject that sounds anachronistic and niche, no? Didn’t the 20th century mark the triumph of the motor? Engines certainly made sea travel faster, safer, cheaper. Passengers and precious cargo were now less exposed to the elements. But Wahl’s subjects—men and women, young and old—are time travellers with deeper memories, muscle memories, pre-industrial memories. They’re kindred spirits to the mariners of ancient poetry, more beholden to the rhythms of nature than to the modern mantra of profits and efficiency.
The film itself is gentle, unhurried, attentive. The sailors, whether they’re travelling across rivers or seas, are shown working without the prostheses of digital technology. All is touch and texture. They twine, rig, sand. They wield poles, hooks, ropes. Their arms are briny and toned. Engines, they say, make humans think they can dominate nature; they, by contrast, see themselves as being in conversation with nature.
One of the most potent images in Wind, Tide & Oar is that of a Stena Line ferry whose size makes it look like an extraterrestrial machine. It’s hard not to think of commerce, containerisation, fast fashion, globalisation. Of what counts as progress—and the damage done to nature in pursuit of that form of progress. The engineless sailors here are not eco-activists, but they believe in the politics of scale—that bigger is not always better, that we would do well not to rely on opaque devices and operating systems. They talk, modestly but eloquently, about the value of teamwork, of being in the world, of the boats as sites of floating experimentation.
These are themes anticipated by Wahl’s earlier films such as Action Space (2016), which told the story of his parents who brought inflatable art into working-class public areas in the late 1960s. They are also expressed in the director’s use of a 1960s hand-wound camera; analogue photography, he says, allows him to experience time intimately: “I can feel the pulse of film as it runs through the gate, I can hear the spring winding down, and unless I want to waste the expensive material, I must really tune into the event occurring in front of me.”
The sea offers darker lessons in Deep Water (2006), Louise Osmond and Jerry Rothwell’s portrait of the life and death of Donald Crowhurst, who, in the autumn of 1968, competed in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, a competition to sail non-stop and single-handedly around the world. It’s a story that has been told many times—by playwrights, musicians, historians and psychiatrists—but has never lost its sad, haunting power.
In this telling, it becomes a postcolonial allegory. Crowhurst was born and grew up in India but moved with his parents to England in the wake of independence. His father, whose retirement savings were invested in a factory that burned down after partition, died when he was just 15. He left school early, was asked to leave the army and reinvented himself as a navigation equipment salesman. The Golden Globe Race gave him a chance not just to earn a hefty cash prize, but a shot at a glory that would otherwise be out of reach.
By the late 1960s, Britain’s shipyards were in decline, its maritime achievements in the past. At the same time, the Cold War had triggered a space race, a search for fresh frontiers and pathways. Decolonisation produced its own winds of change. New technologies and cheaper forms of travel led to a heightened planetary consciousness.
Crowhurst heard the call of the sea, but in many ways he was an English amateur—an Eddie the Eagle-style enthusiast—as much as he was a new Elizabethan. He sported a sweater and tie like a character out of a suburban sitcom. One interviewee describes him as “a weekend sailor”. The Teignmouth Electron, his trimaran, looked state of the art, but was far from ideal for such an epic voyage.
Crowhurst struggled on the ocean and entered false information in his logbook to give the impression he had completed the circumnavigation. He was lonely, afraid of failure, experiencing mental breakdown. Deep Water features footage of him on the boat, extracts from his journal that document his unravelling, desperately sad interviews with his widow and children. The race, anything but golden, had turned into a slow burial. The Teignmouth Electron itself ended up on a Caribbean island, beached and rotting away.
The merchant sailors in From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf (2013) by CAMP (the duo Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran) mostly hail from the Kutch district in western India. These marine invisibles make a living by ferrying goods from the Persian Gulf to the Somali coast. In their dead time they watch films on their phones. They make little films, too—of their friends dancing or playing card games, of sea animals they spot, of a burning ship they pass by. They’re both cosmopoles and proletariats.
The ocean is a place of spectacle and of toil. Dangers exist: falling sick, falling overboard. Boredom is common. Weeks smudge into months into seasons. Ports are clocked—Sharjah, Dubai—but they seem like mirages, not quite as tangible as the social worlds on deck of which they’re members. Perhaps Hilaire Belloc got it right when he described how those on land look to those at sea: “If you remember their arrangements of wealth and poverty and their ambitious follies, they seem not tragic but comic to you.”
Anand and Sukumaran themselves are editors more than they are directors, stitching together the footage that the sailors themselves have shot. While it’s not an exposé or a plea for help, it does spotlight a wholly unexpected archive of the modern world. “It will haunt you!” claims a sailor about the film. A touch boastful? He’s right, though.
How best to get youngsters, especially those who’ve been weaned on screens and on video games, to be curious about sailing in the first place? Nearly a century after Arthur Ransome published the first in his 12-volume Swallows and Amazons series, the adventures of the Walker children while holidaying in the Lake District are still gladsome and glorious. The most recent film adaptation, from 2016, was directed by Philippa Lowthorpe and has a new twist: drawing on Ransome’s own past as an M16 spy, it features Andrew Scott as a secret agent.
While this John Buchan-esque element is fun, the real pleasure remains seeing the boys and girls on their dinghies, trying to steal each other’s boats, gung-ho with piratical glee. They catch and gut their own fish, enjoy being free of helicoptering parents, explore newfound islands in the moonlight. “Sail away,” enjoined Noël Coward. How enchantingly these children do.
