Tony Dixon on Sailing

With my brothers and brother-in-law we built our own Flying Fifteen, but I’d be honest, I really never liked sailing much.

Uffa had taken me out early on, on a very windy, rough day when I was about ten, and I held onto the gunnels like ‘one-oh’ and didn’t really like it. But Uffa used to try and get me back into sailing and I did take one or two boats out.

One in particular, which was being built for a guy called Douglas-Home who was the nephew of Lord Howden Home, who was our Prime Minister at one time. And, just finished the boat and Uffa said, “Come on, you must go out and race ‘cos the Flying Fifteens out there.”

So one Tuesday night, I sailed the boat and that was a very strong wind and I got up to East Bramble buoy and tried to jibe round it but the boat wouldn’t respond and I hit the buoy head on and that took about 18 inches off the bow which was just short of the foresail where the…so we managed to limp back to Cowes and Uffa who hadn’t been able to go out in another boat.

We went over the ‘Duke of York’ with my brother and Murray who’d raced our boat…and Uffa turned up and Murray said to him, “Tony retired from the race ‘cos he hit the buoy.”

And I got a lecture from Uffa saying, “If you hit a buoy don’t worry, just carry on racing ‘cos it makes it look better with more boats.”

And Murray turned round and said, “Uffa you haven’t seen the bloody boat”.

Anyway, instead of…I thought he’d have kicked up no end, Uffa got his best craftsman on and remoulded the stem ‘cos Dougie-Home was coming down that next day and when Uffa told him I’d taken the boat out, Dougie-Home thanked me for taking the wrinkles out of the boat.

But then later on when I’d…’cos I really liked playing cricket, I sort of said to Uffa, “Look I don’t really want to go sailing, I want to play cricket.”

He said, “That’s alright, that’s alright.” And he picked the phone up and he rang Hampshire Cricket Club and got me over there for some practising and that was good of him.