Birvidik

For my next trick I am going to link Frigyes Karinthy (1887 - 1938), a Hungarian polymath, with the study of animal behaviour and modern day cruisers' anchoring techniques in under six hundred words.

Karinthy was a journalist, author, playwright, satirist, translator and poet. Among his many achievements was translating Winnie the Pooh into Hungarian, which resulted in it becoming a cult book in the country.

He also came up with the theory of Degrees of Separation, which is a concept associated with network theory and commonly applied to social networks. The idea was subsequently taken up by mathematicians, sociologists and internet dweebs. It refers to the number of person-to-person links that would be needed to connect any two randomly selected people. The popular figure for the smallest number of links that would, on average, be necessary to connect any two random people on the planet is held to be six, hence six degrees of separation. This idea has been popularised with the parlour game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

Obviously, for members of a smaller and more linked group the number will be smaller. For twitter users (still a pretty large group) the figure was calculated as 3.43. For cruising yotties the average degree of separation appears to be about one point diddlysquat, which means that every time you meet other cruising yotties you either know them already or you have at least five acquaintances in common.

This should not, perhaps, be too surprising. There are likely to be considerably fewer cruising yotties than there are twitter users. It is difficult to be precise though. Due to their somewhat unconventional lifestyles, full time cruising yotties tend to fly under the official radar. Although this is generally a good thing, it makes it difficult to get reliable statistics on them. Nevertheless, in comparison with most other lifestyles, there aren't that many of us and those that do exist are spread out across the globe. Estimates I have seen range from around 15 000 boats to 50 000 boats. This still only accounts for about 100 000 people tops, which means you could get every cruising yottie on the planet into Wembley Arena and still have room for the entire population of the Falkland Islands. Mind you, you could get the latter in the penalty boxes and still have space left over.

Although we are spread across the globe we are far from evenly distributed. There aren't a great many of us in the Barents Sea or Lake Titicaca for example. There aren't even that many in the lush, tropical paradises of the South Pacific. I'll let you into a little secret here. All in all, most of us aren't really that adventurous. We tend to stick to areas with relatively clement climates and reasonably easy access to the decadent benefits of civilisation. Marathon oceanic voyages are also contraindicated. This effectively puts about 97 percent of us in either the Mediterranean or the Caribbean.

As a result, most cruising areas tend to be considerably more crowded than the uninitiated would expect. The beautiful, isolated anchorages of the popular imagination are about as common as rocking horse shit. This results in a good example of what ethologists call flocking. Animals display a range of behaviours when threatened and they all begin with 'F' - Fight, Flight, Freezing and Flocking. Humans can exhibit all four, but yotties tend to go for flocking. If things start to look a bit iffy they all huddle together.

Even within the confines of the Med, most of us still exhibit flocking behaviour, on both the large and the small scale. This is a result of geography, especially in the winter, and human psychology.

Most Mediterranean harbours and anchorages are usually open to the weather in at least one direction. If there is anything of a blow forecast (which is a lot of the time in most of the Med and almost invariably in the Aegean) then all the boats in the immediate area home in on the relatively restricted number of protected spots like wasps on a picnic. In the winter, choices are even more limited as the chosen spot needs to be protected from all points of the compass. If you also take into account the other wintering hole requirements then your choices are limited to a couple of hundred possibles, fifty or so preferables and around twenty favourites over the whole of the Med. Indeed the most desirable wintering holes are becoming so popular that more and more of them are refusing to allocate a place for the next winter unless you give them a hefty deposit before you even set off for the summer.

There is also an even smaller scale flocking behaviour evident amongst yotties. Consider the occasional, but rare, occurrence that a boat arrives in an anchorage or harbour which has plenty of space and few boats in it. The etiquette, as has been discussed elsewhere, is that boats arriving later have to keep out of the way of those already ensconced.

The ideal position under these circumstances is to be the first to arrive in an empty anchorage. First of all you look at the chart and the weather forecast to judge which areas of the anchorage are likely to be best protected from the forthcoming weather. After that you take a mooch around the place determining where there are suitable depths and good holding. Secondary factors, such as accessibility to shore and restaurants, distance from eyesores such as the local cement works and whether you are downwind from the overloaded sewage farm can then applied. Eventually you pick your spot and drop your hook.

Subsequent arrivals are progressively exiled to the less and less attractive options until eventually there are none left and the hapless latecomers either tie up to the sewage works or circle the anchorage forlornly looking for an available spot while territorially aggressive skippers glare at them from their foredecks. Any attempt to drop an anchor is met with wild gesticulations and sympathetic cries of "Not there you bloody moron! That's right over my chain! I've got eight anchors out and they've all got 200 metres of chain on them. Bugger off!"

If the latecomer is British he will usually meekly go off and anchor off some horribly exposed headland and spend a miserable night rolling about and whinging about arrogant tossers hogging all the best anchorages. If he is German he will anchor wherever he wants and ignore the stream of invective coming from Mr & Mrs Yottie standing on their bow which is now about fifteen centimetres from his transom.

If, on the other hand, he is Italian he will do the same, except that once anchored he will produce a bottle of Chianti, a tray of glasses and proceed to charm the pants off Mrs (and preferably Miss) Yottie. Mrs. Yottie will then giggle girlishly, coyly lower her eyelashes and turn to her glowering husband saying "Oh Lionel, don't be such an old killjoy. I'm sure Signor Plentiflanelli's boat will be alright there for one night". Mrs. Yottie's point of view will prevail.

It does occasionally happen, however, that a new arrival will turn up in an anchorage to find a solitary boat at anchor. The interloper will frequently assume that the boat already in place has bagged the best spot. This is not necessarily so. It may be that there is no significantly best place in the anchorage and that more or less anywhere will do. It may be that the sitting tenant was a late arrival the day before and all those boats already there when he arrived have gone. He might be an idiot and not know where the best sites are likely to be. He might be a charter boat, which is similar to the previous example.

Whatever the case may be, the logical thing for the latest arrival to do is to go through the same procedures as would the first boat to arrive. Does he Hell. Rather than go through the strain of thinking he just assumes that the existing boat is in the best spot and proceeds to park as close to it as is humanly possible without triggering actual physical violence. The next skipper to arrive assumes that, if there are two boats in that spot, it absolutely must be the best place and parks his boat between the two of them. This continues throughout the day until you end up with thirty boats packed cheek by jowl in one small corner of the bay while the rest of a beautifully protected anchorage, big enough to take the entire US Pacific Fleet, lies empty.