Now some clubs do flag etiquette and some do not. I am told that there are clubs which take a signed certificate from members that they will fly that club’s burgee whenever at sea. This causes slight embarrassment when its members are also members of an even more senior club. Oh dear me, what are they to do? Some clubs will only let their burgee be flown from the truck, which causes untold damage to the knife, fork and spoon kit that most modern yachts seem to have poking out of the masthead. So the local boat yard does a wonderful trade in ridiculously long burgee poles. And what do you do with your lightning inhibitor? Do you put this little stainless steel inverted Christmas tree on top of a lead burgee pole welded to the mast, or do you rely on the electron discharge given off from the end of a wildly flapping burgee to ward off lightning strikes? Those in the know about lightning inhibitors tell me that, though it is possible to hoist the masthead burgee beside the bristles of this device, it behaves rather like the trap on a lobster pot and resolutely refuses to let the burgee be taken down again. The only practical solution is to shift berth to keep the burgee downwind of everything else. I am sure this is why many OCC members rely on a self-adhesive Flying Fish affixed to their transom to avoid all this nonsense.

There seem to be a few simple rules of flag etiquette that most of us try to obey. You should only fly one triangular burgee – or if you are a flag officer, a swallow-tailed pendant (pronounced pennant). In the good old days this had to be at the truck, and pedants still insist on this, but nowadays it generally seems to be flown from the senior available spreader. The starboard spreader is the more important and your burgee or pendant should be there, unless you are visiting a foreign country and so flying a courtesy flag, when this goes to starboard and the burgee to port.

The courtesy flag should be the maritime ensign of the nation concerned – for instance, in Fiji this is the red Fiji ensign rather than the pale blue national flag. The courtesy flag should be flown close to the sheave on the spreader and not halfway down the halyard. It is sometimes considered polite to fly a regional flag under the courtesy flag, but beware of flying the regional flag on its own – you may find yourself the centre of attraction in some long running quest for autonomy. Many of us cannot be bothered with this senior spreader stuff and always fly the burgee from the port spreader.

If you want to fly the flag of a second or third club or organisation, or your own house flag or whatever, these form a string of rectangular flags below the burgee if that is flown from the spreader, or on their own from the senior available spreader if you are a traditionalist and your burgee is at the truck. You should, of course, fly these in order of seniority from the top, but the invariable rule is one triangular flag and the rest square.

Thus we are left with my dilemma on the BC Rally – how do you signify that the crew of a Canadian charter yacht are Brits and New Zealanders? I asked a senior member of the Admiralty Court when I returned to the UK. His response was not quite as succinct as my précis of his comments which is: “You don’t”. Try telling the Irish that there is nowhere to rig the tricolour on a chartered yacht.

The point is that legally a ship wears the ensign of the country in which she is registered (I am not going to be drawn into the issue of the Scottish Ensign and exact date of the Act of Union here). Maritime authorities are just not interested in the nationality of the crew – that is the province of immigration. My legal friend did concede that you might fly a house flag that happened to be the same as your national flag amongst the string of rectangular flags you are permitted to fly from the spreader. But beware if you are a Brit – there are laws about who may fly the Union Flag, so if you fly that abroad the local consular official will be after you like a hawk. You could probably get away with the Red Ensign flown in this way on the port signal halyard as a sort of un-courtesy flag, but if you fly it to starboard, inferior to the courtesy flag of another nation, this means you are a Prize of War. I would not try this on with the Blue or White Ensign (or a defaced Red which I have always thought was the smartest of the lot) as you will probably have to resign from the club which let you have a warrant for it in the first instance. Therefore, if you really want to carry colours which show the nationality of the master and crew, your only real option is to go to sea in a vessel registered in your home country.

Vessels of many nations, when in harbour or at anchor, have by tradition lowered ‘colours’ at sunset or 2100 local time (whichever is the earlier) and hoisted at 0800 in summer and 0900 in winter. When I was a lad we used to raise and lower the ensign and burgee to this routine, but the practice of lowering the burgee at night seems to have lapsed, much to the relief of those with lightning inhibitors. I am told that the reason the Royal Navy implemented this routine was a clever idea from a civil servant at the Admiralty that it would reduce annual expenditure on bunting. The practice is now surrounded by some ceremony and it may be construed a bit disrespectful if a yacht in the presence of a man of war ignores this custom. This aside, most ensigns seem now to be worn permanently when the yacht is in use, but it is ‘bad form’ to leave the ensign flying when the vessel is unattended for more than a day or so. However you do need to heed local custom, as I am told that some port captains get a bit shirty if a foreign vessel does not display her national identity 24 hours a day.

The concept of permanent attachment, which seems to permit the ensign to be fastened to the backstay or topping lift with sticky tape, can have disadvantages. All yachts are under the obligation of good manners to dip ensigns to royal standards and to the ensigns of ships of war. We on The Repose went through quite a palaver involving sailing knives and rubber bands to dip the Red Duster, which we were in any event flying illegally, to a passing Canadian frigate. Modern day warships suffer ridiculously low manning levels, which may well be the reason that no look-out seemed to notice the four inches of dip we were able to achieve and report this to his Captain so that he could make the appropriate response.