In which John Clarke recalls a battery top-up tip from an old soldier he’d prefer his charterers not to follow

Having run a sailing school for 18 years I can honestly say that the instructors I have worked with have all been larger than life characters.
And none more so than Sticky Stapylton. Sticky is a retired Lt-Col in the army, now in his late seventies but as fit as a fiddle. He comes complete with monocle and a very crisp accent, and is an excellent sailor. He is also good fun, and one year when out with fellow instructors for a few days playing in the Solent, he reduced us all to tears of joy watching him illustrate the use of his home-made handy-billy.
Anyway, a few years ago he rented one of my boats (a Bavaria 38 as it happens) for seven days to take some clients across the channel in March. He duly returned and handed back the boat to Lee, my Chief Instructor at the time. Lee asked if there were any problems on the boat and Sticky replied in the negative, saying that everything was working fine.
Over the next couple of months we had a few complaints that the boat was smelling a bit, which because I have lost all sense of smell, I couldn’t perceive.
Oh and I forgot to mention that at the time Sticky used to write an article for All at Sea, a freesheet magazine, which he entitled Sticky’s Tips. So one Friday afternoon in May Lee and I were having a coffee in the office, having prepped the boats for the weekend charterers; Lee with his feet up on the desk, and reading said magazine. Suddenly he yelled out “oh no, f***ing hell, what’s Sticky done!?” “What?” I cried. “Read this,” said Lee.
And there in Sticky’s Tips was the tale of his rental of a Bavaria 38 in March, which he took across the Channel. He mentioned that one of the domestic batteries was low on distilled water, so he had gone to the chandlery to buy some. Unfortunately the chandlery had been closed, so he had remembered an old trick from his army days in the desert. He topped up the battery with his own urine – and that was his tip!
Of course Lee and I went legging it down to the pontoon and went on the boat of which we had complaints about the smell. We lifted up the saloon seats, opened the battery bay and unscrewed the caps off a domestic battery –fine. Okay, let’s try the engine battery – also fine. Well it’s down to the other domestic… and PHEW, the whiff was vile.
The charterer was due any minute, so we quickly unscrewed it, and were lugging it onto the pontoon when Richard, who had chartered the boat for the weekend arrived at the boat (he was a regular and knew where we would be).
“What are you doing?” he asked. “Well, you’ve only got one domestic battery for the weekend” was our riposte. “Though you can have this one as well, if you like, but take a whiff of it first”. “I’ll settle for just the one” he said, not surprisingly.
Of course I got straight on the phone to Sticky, telling him that I had just read his article. He sounded quite chirpy on the phone, very pleased with his initiative. I pointed out to him that there was one commodity in short supply in the desert, and that was water. However the boat had two water tanks full and he could easily have boiled a kettle and used that water for the battery.
“Ah but John, boiled water isn’t as pure as distilled water.” “It’s a darned sight purer than your p***” was my reply. Needless to say we remain good friends.