I recently updated my page on sailing watches, and it reminded me of something we used to do on those long drives to Optimist open meetings and regattas.

You would think that these long drives were a lot of fun.

Especially for the adult or adults driving us.

Two or three hours in a car (each way) with bored teenagers is a barrel of laughs for all concerned, and I’m sure, if you were asked to guess, you’d predict that my parents (or my friend’s parents) looked forward to these journeys with great anticipation.

Surprisingly, this wasn’t the case. Arguments over music, elbow room, noisy breathing, whether Craig Johnson was better than Paul Walsh, who got the biggest banana, and so on, seemed to annoy them.

And even though we very regularly interspersed these arguments with queries about how much longer the journey was going to last, the adults in the car still did not seem to be enjoying themselves.

Then, one magical day, all this changed. Well, it changed a little bit.

All sailors have a sailing watch (or at least all sailors should have a sailing watch), and we were no different. And, in those days, all sailing watches had a stopwatch which timed to a hundredth of a second. On one particular journey we were travelling with a friend, and he came up with arguably the greatest game ever created – Stopwatch Nationals.

This Timex watch (or something very like it) was the pinnacle of Optimist sailing arm-wear at the time – it even had a high tide display (if you took the necessary hours to figure out how to program it)

Stopwatch Nationals is a game of elegant simplicity.

Each player has to start their stopwatch and then stop it as close to exactly one second as they can.

If you stop it at 0.99 seconds, 1.01 seconds, or exactly at 1.00 seconds then you get a first place.

If you stop it at 0.98 seconds or 1.02 seconds then you get a second.

0.97 seconds or 1.03 seconds equals a third place.

And so on.

(Try it now, on your sailing watch or on your phone’s stopwatch – it is very addictive).

We would generally do seven race championships, with one discard, but over time we found that we could do the Nationals, Europeans, Worlds, Inlands, Regional Championships and every Open Meeting in a calendar year in one single car journey.

Occasionally, in a moment of reflection, I wish I’d shown as much commitment to my actual sailing as I did to Stopwatch Nationals.

I’m sorry to say that Stopwatch Nationals didn’t usher in a golden age of car-based harmony.

If my memory is correct this was because other people kept cheating and, as this is my website, that will be my official stance on the matter. But it did keep us (relatively) quiet for a lot of car journeys, and also gave me my first (and, to date, only) World Championship victory.