As keen as...
But then, Barry Keen, is not your average sort of landlubber.
The 85-year-old has been in the thick of things, from an engineering perspective that is, for a significant chunk of his long life.
And when he's not been working on jet aircraft and the like, he's been using his spare time to build wonderfully detailed models of ships from another age. A number, quite rightly, have become museum pieces, while others reside in their glass cases at Barry's home. And one is about to come under the auctioneer's hammer at a sale in Bristol.
His captivating model of The Danemark, for example, could, until recently, have been viewed in the Bristol Industrial Museum, but the place is being rebuilt and revamped so Barry got his boat back. He's now decided to sell it and this magnificent vessel (a training ship which is still sailing the high seas) comes under the hammer at Bristol auctioneers Dreweatts in October.
Models of all manner of things spill out of some of Barry's rooms but it's his nautical creations which stop you in your tracks. Creations such as the Amerigo Vespucci, a fully rigged Italian boat which has participated in the Round The World Talls Ships Race, is one. The Seeadler (or Sea Eagle), a World War I German boat is another. They are miniaturised perfection whose painstaking creation takes years.
Mind you, Barry has always known he possessed modelling skills, as he explains: "The first time I carved a piece of wood I would have been between five or six years old. I used a piece of firewood and had the knack of seeing things in three-dimension (I could always draw) and envisaged the model of a fuselage."
This first venture didn't have a happy ending, though, Barry adds: "I ended up cutting myself badly with my dad's pocket knife."
Modelling misadventures aside, however, Barry grew up to be a chap at the sharp end of Britain's aeronautical engineering breakthroughs down through the decades.
"I worked as a designer on the Gloster Javelin during the late Forties and early Fifties. At that time, for security reasons, we were hidden in the countryside."
Barry stayed with the plane's makers, the Gloster Aircraft Company for about nine years ("a great nine years").
It was that breaking of the sound barrier and the aircraft which could achieve it which always intrigued and fascinated him.
Which is how in the spring of 1946 he was in Somerset – at Henstridge airfield near Yeovil – to witness an extraordinary attempt to do just that.
The aircraft in question, he recalls, was a SeaFire (a supermarine Spitfire with a hook to land on an aircraft carrier) which had been stripped down to the bare essentials to save as much weight as possible. It was a propeller-driven plane. The pilot went as high as he could and then dived the plane in a bid to hit that magical Mach 1 moment.
Barry says: "It was the first time I had ever heard anyone go through the sound barrier. But the next day something awful happened and it blew up.
"Every time I hear someone say something about this I cringe. It definitely went through. It was a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine."
The pilot was killed, but Barry believes the moment has disappeared from history books because of the tragedy, adding: "It is one of my regrets this has not been recognised. The pilot is buried just outside Sherborne. But that was the first time I had ever heard a sonic boom."
It would not be the last.
Years later, during Britain's famous "white heat of technology" period, Barry arrived in Bristol to work on Concorde. Here he worked on projects affecting the supersonic passenger jet's wing and its flight deck.
Barry retired when he was 62, and has made something of a name for himself as a model-builder with those ships, dating from an era when travelling was rather slower than those aircraft he worked on.
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