Do you fish?

It’s one of the perennial questions.

Well, I do have a fishing line – with a huge, murderous-looking hook. It was on the boat when I bought her, and I’ve never opened it.

Then I became a vegetarian. The reasons were complicated – mostly too much time on the internet.

This started years ago when Tamsin asked me to carve the boiled ham at Christmas. Have you ever smelled boiled him? It’s disgusting. It smells of rotting flesh. Why is that, when it tastes so good?

Maybe there was a good reason so many religions ban pork. I looked it up. It turns out the pig is a true omnivore. It will eat absolutely anything – its own excrement, the rotting flesh of other pigs…

I stopped eating pork.

And that was the start. Next, I fell into the argument that there is enough food-production capacity in the world to feed the whole world – if only we stopped growing grains to feed to animals so we could eat the animals instead.

I watched Cowspiracy on Netflix and stopped eating meat altogether.

Then, I watched Seaspiracy and stopped eating fish (I’m very easily swayed).

For three or four years I ate neither meat nor fish. I ate a lot of kidney beans and nuts. I would have an egg occasionally with a full English (vegetarian) breakfast, but I didn’t buy eggs when I went shopping. I didn’t even buy butter or cheese.

And I thought I must be tremendously healthy.

But I did wonder where my muscles had gone.

This became a particular concern when it came to the outboard: When I had my first Rival 32, Largo back in the 1980s, she came with a Suzuki 2hp two-stroke outboard. I used to pick up this thing in one hand, swing it over the rail, climb down into the dinghy and clamp it to the transom – all the while holding it in the one hand and thinking nothing of it.

When I bought Samsara, I bought another little Suzuki, just the same.

So why couldn’t I pick it up in one hand, swing it over the rail, etc?

Come to that, when I looked at photographs of myself with my shirt off, why did I see this little old man with tiny stick-thin arms? What had happened to those powerful shoulders I remembered from 40 years ago?

I brooded and ate more kidney beans.

And then, on the family skiing holiday in Austria, picking the invariably unimaginative vegetarian option (Austrians – like Germans, Hungarians and so on, don’t really “get” vegetarianism), I found myself backed into a corner by the family insisting that “as you get older, you need more protein”.

It came to a head when the youngest, Hugo, joined me in the Caribbean and (under instructions?) conducted an inventory of my daily protein intake.

It was abysmal – honestly – hardly more than a third of what I should be getting; and I couldn’t see an easy or palatable solution.

So, just like that, I started eating meat. By the time I got to Barbuda and Robert de Niro’s “Nobu” beach restaurant, I allowed my grandson Ben to introduce me to wagyu steak.

So, for the voyage from Plymouth to Sydney, I have 30 tins of corned beer, 57 tins each of mackerel, sardines and herring (except there’s a shortage of sardines in Europe because of the global warming effects on the Moroccan fishing industry, so even more mackerel to make up…)

I don’t have fond memories of tinned stewed steak, but I did throw in some meatballs in tomato sauce because I think I was given them as a childhood treat – now I’ve opened one, I can’t think why.

So the obvious solution is to catch fresh fish. YouTube sailing channels are full of attractive young people wearing not many clothes posing with mahi-mahi, wahoo and tuna.

My first problem is that when I used to get becalmed in the old days (I don’t get becalmed now I have Hawkins the Hydrovane) I would lean over the side and watch the fish nibbling at the growth around the rudder – wonderfully coloured fish in the tropics: yellow and blue and lime green…

The idea of putting a hook over the side seemed uncomfortably like planning to eat my neighbours.

Then there is the practical side: If you are towing a big hook behind a boat doing five knots, any fish you are going to catch is likely to be a big fish. Once you get it into the cockpit (presuming you can get it into the cockpit), it is going to thrash about for all it’s worth. Even a full crew finds this stage a challenge. A singlehander – particularly the sensitive type who doesn’t actually want to hurt the fish in the first place – is going to find himself on the losing side.

Of course, you could argue that the thing to do is, when you first suspect you have a monster on the end of the line, just cut him loose – but then the poor thing has to spend the rest of its life with a hook in its mouth and trailing 15metres of line around behind it.

I once moored next to a fishing boat in a Scottish harbour. The fisherman had left two lines over the side. He came back as I was having breakfast in the cockpit, reeled in the lines and had two little fish. One at a time, he held them down on a slab and gutted them while they were still alive.

No, I’d rather reach for a can of sardines and comfort myself in the knowledge that the sardine had no qualms about eating crustacean larvae and baby barnacles…