We were with a group of friends recently whom we hadn't seen for a while and they were curious about our cruising over the past few years. One of them brought his son along who proved to be the most curious of them all. But whereas the parents wanted to know about the places we visited, the son kept coming back with questions about life at sea.

After a series of linking questions, he wanted to clarify something. "So is there always one of you on watch? At night as well? So one of you sleeps while the other is on deck? And sometimes you are at sea for several days?"

Neither we nor the rest of the group quite understood his fascination with this topic until he blurted out, "So you have to go several days without having sex!" Oh, to be eighteen again.

We were feeling as if we were eighteen again on Valentine's Day a few years ago, having dinner in a restaurant in St. Lucia while the local band played Simon and Garfunkel numbers, painfully badly but it didn't stop us applauding and singing along to songs we remembered from our youth. That is, until we realised that Paul Simon was sitting at the next table to us (he owned a house in St. Lucia). The band seemed unaware of his presence while they destroyed one after another of his songs.

A more successful romantic occasion was when we helped friends organise a beach wedding on a deserted island in the Tobago Cays in the Caribbean. The bride arrived by dinghy and the wedding feast was a BBQ. The priest was brought across from Union Island and the congregation was made up of friends, cruisers in the anchorage, and local people from the island.

After the ceremony, bridal costumes and the best clothing cruisers could muster were abandoned in favour of swimsuits and snorkel gear. Children could run around and play as much as they liked, and it was probably the most relaxed wedding we have ever attended. Because when you live on a boat, you give up many of the trappings of land life. It is perhaps easier to take a liberal view of what is truly important with a special event like a wedding, easier to remember perhaps that it is the spirit of the event rather than the formalities that matter. And when the boat is your home and your way of life, you don't feel the need to go elsewhere to capture the spirit of romance.

Friends of ours discovered that too late when they booked a hotel to spend the night of their wedding anniversary while they were in Galapagos. They had always marked their anniversary that way and felt they ought to do the same this year. But they had a miserable evening worrying about their boat at anchor despite the fact that their friends had undertaken to keep an eye on it. With hindsight they couldn't think of any more romantic way to have celebrated their wedding anniversary than on a yacht watching a Pacific sunset, safely anchored, and within earshot of honking sealions. How much more romantic could you hope for it to be?

Happy Valentine's Day.