What is it about the sea that so captivates us? For captive, as a nation, we are. If we're not sailing, or surfing, or swimming, we might just as easily be gig-rowing, or fishing, or walking some of Britain's 7,723 miles of coastline. Or we'll be diving, peering at wrecks off the coast of Cornwall, or perhaps kitesurfing, the latest adrenalin-heavy sport to hit the beach. Maybe - for there is equal joy in a gentler pace - we'll be ambling along a promenade, or building sandcastles with the kids. And when we're not by the sea, we'll be dreaming that we could be.

Our collective fascination with all things marine makes John Masefield's Sea Fever one of the most popular poems in the English language. “I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,” wrote the young Masefield. For the Hertfordshire-born Poet Laureate, “the call of the running tide” was “a wild call” but a clear one “that may not be denied”.

For those lucky enough to spend their formative years on the coast, the urge to return is often overpowering. Certainly it was for me. Having left a quiet seaside town in southeast Devon for a career in London, I would often gaze at the Thames and tell myself that a river's romance is as profound as that of the sea. It was a slice of self-delusion, one that did the trick for a few years, but it was only a matter of time before I upped sticks and went back. I missed the sound of waves, the sight of seals and dolphins; I yearned to marvel at the outsize but benign basking sharks that visit Cornwall in the summer, to stare to the grey-blue sea's horizon and feel overwhelmed by its immensity, to witness again the power of a winter storm.

Here, a couple of miles from Land's End, the sound of waves is with me again, but so, too, is the sense of being part of a rich maritime heritage. Everyone here is connected in some way to the ocean, from the fisherman who lives up the road to the artists who paint the sea; from the surfers, such as my sons and myself, to the yachtsmen; all the way to all of us in Britain, living in an island where, as Nicholas Crane noted in the BBC series Coast, we are never more than 72 miles from the sea.

The sea's allure may well be as enigmatic as that of a burning fire: we stare at it, spellbound, but cannot say why. My feeling is that romance, not logic, is key. But whether casting around the rocks on a dropping tide for flotsam, or walking the dogs at Porthcurno, I know Masefield was right. There's nothing better than “a windy day with the white clouds flying, And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.”

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