We were never going to beat the lifelong lugger sailors who lead the Looe Lugger Regatta fleet but we worked hard and came away with fourth place in all three races. The Committee awarded us a trophy for ‘Best Endeavours’ which means trying hard.

Guide Me won every race in May’s Regatta, of course, because she always does. She has no engine, so she’s a little lighter for the amount of sail she carries than other boats, and Jude and Jono Brickhill and their family and friends sail her superbly. Her hull shape is very similar to Guiding Star’s but she just seems to hiss through the water as if she’s blown by a wind of her own.

Nick Gates’s Ocean Pearl and Graham Butler’ s Reliance battled it out for second and third places. We managed to keep in touch with them except in one race when we mis-read the strength of the flood tide sweeping round Looe Bay. Ocean Pearl went far out to sea, Reliance went right inshore, and we went down the middle and lost ground to both of them. The two community association boats, Barnabas and Happy Return, brought up the rear.

The day before the Regatta when the boats had dried out against the West Looe wall, Nick and I spent some time splashing around in the mud comparing hulls. Nick quoted an old fishing skipper as saying that if the first ten feet of the boat were hollow, she’d be fast; if they were straight, she’d be all right; and if they were bluff, she’d be slow. Guide Me and Guiding Star are both slightly hollow. Ocean Pearl doesn’t look like she should sail fast at all and in fact she was built as a motor fishing boat but Nick converted her and she sails like a dream.

The cloudless, almost windless weather was perfect for sunbathing and ideal for the larger sail plan which Chris Rees designed four years ago to make Guiding Star faster in light airs. We had an experienced crew who knew the boat well so the new, bigger topsail set beautifully (or at least as well as it ever will with a bendy windsurfer mast as the yard) and the genoa pulled strongly into the wind as well as off. If the skipper had been brave enough to hoist the genoa before the beginning of each race rather than after, we would have gone even better.

Many many thanks to Chris and Paul, Adrian, and Francoise and Peter for a wonderful two days on the water.

We had nearly as much fun on land. The Polperro Fishermen’s Choir were superb. They’ve been going since 1923 and are in a different league to many shanty groups. I was glad that the Regatta organisers decided they should stand on Ocean Pearl rather than Guiding Star, though, because there were quite a lot of them. Then we had rock till late in the West Looe Quayside Centre.

We had Friday free before the racing on Saturday and Sunday so I had the chance to see the Looe Harbour Heritage Centre in the old Sardine Factory a little further down West Looe Quay for the first time. I was excited to find two photos of Guiding Star and a paragraph on her designer and builder, Jim Angear. I learned much about Looe: that her fishermen fished off the Newfoundland Grand Banks in the 17th and 18th centuries; and that the port did big business exporting granite and copper and importing coal for mining engines. The Heritage Centre cafe also does extremely good tea and cake.

Fishing has always had booms and busts. Paul Greenwood, the co-founder of the Regatta and author of two very funny and informative memoirs of working on the old luggers, told me that one of the worst years was 1935 after Italy invaded Abysinnia and the League of Nations imposed trade sanctions, cutting off Looe’s exports of dried pilchards which used to be sent to Italy as pilgrim food.

“It caused a lot of poverty,” Paul said. “Five boats were sold in one day.” So it’s no surprise that Jim Soady sold Guiding Star out of fishing in 1936.