The Sea: “Big blue wobbly thing that mermaids live in” (Baldrick – Blackadder III)

It’s worth thinking for a minute about the emotional tug that draws us human beings off towards the sea, because quite simply it is not the most logical place for us to spend our time. The majority of us wouldn’t survive much more than a minute under water; we can only propel ourselves through liquid at a fraction of the speed that we can travel on land, and, most pressing of all, once we are any more than twenty metres from the shore we become part of the food chain in a most distressing way.

Despite these realities we flock to the world’s oceans in swarms. We like to swim in it, float on top of it, go diving deep within it and sit on sandy beaches and gaze lovingly out at it. The sea is our great mystical treasure, and if someone happens to get gobbled up once in a while the best we can do is commiserate and carry on regardless.

I suppose that much of our fascination with the sea is nurtured during childhood, as we are fed numerous stories of cheerful turtles, cheeky dolphins, clumsy whales and forgetful mermaids. Then, of course, there is Popeye, the great champion of the juvenile, who just needs to chew his way through a tin of spinach before he can jump in his boat and charge off imperiously into the blue.

I had my own brief fixation with the sea when I was about five or six years old and ITV broadcast a biopic of Captain James Cook. He was portrayed as a quiet but ambitious man, with a talent for avoiding sandbanks and judging the strength and direction of the wind. Cook, I learnt for myself, started off in the grimmest corner of North Yorkshire which after his success on the high seas he was able to substitute for the sun-bitten beaches of Tahiti, the beautiful landscapes of New Zealand and the Great Barrier Reef. Not a bad exchange.

The idea of setting off around the world in search of adventure, surrounded by soldiers in blood red tunics with muskets appealed to me, and I suppose summed up the draw of the sea. It offered the possibility of adventure, the chance to do a dangerous dance with nature – it was a way of taking on the unpredictable.

The prizes might be chests brimming with gold or silver or lazy days in the South Pacific under the eucalyptus trees, or it might be the discovery of something fantastic like a North West Passage, anything was possible. But something engaged the spirit, almost as if the sea was floating there with two fingers up to us all on terra firma goading us to take it on if we dare.

And that’s exactly what we continue to do. Sailing is undergoing a boom in popularity, so are diving and snorkelling, our top sailor Ellen MacArthur is so popular that we’ve made her a dame and more people are swimming The Channel than ever. By 2008, we’ve put men on the moon and a Blur single on Mars, but we still remain fascinated by the seas – attracted primarily by a cocktail of danger, adventure and unpredictability.

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