Extracts Spring 2025

 Storms, SSBNs, beam trawling...

Colin Dunlop signs on as a paid hand:

Captain Watchlin, who had been the last master and owner of a square-rigged ship working in the Tasman Sea, now lived on an old schooner called the Margot Ann in Sydney's Rushcutters Bay. He was in his late seventies or early eighties. I was twenty-four, so to me he looked very old. He told me that he had been accepted by Shackleton to go south in 1914, but the Royal New Zealand Navy Reserve had refused to release him. He treasured the letter from Shackleton expressing regret that he could not go. I used to row out and visit him on weekends and listen to his tales of the days of commercial sail, and when he told me that he wanted to return to Picton in his native New Zealand and needed a crew to help him, I jumped at the job.

 Rozelle Raynes cruises the Netherlands:

We motored into the great sea-lock at Flushing, where we moored alongside a pilotage vessel. Margaret, who was busy making fast our bow-line, smiled sweetly at the Dutch pilot on the other end of the line and said; ‘Dank u wel, Mijnheer. Hoe ver is het van hier naar Vere, als’t u blieft?’

     She was answered by a huge grin and a deluge of long guttural words from several men who had suddenly appeared on deck. Quite unruffled, she extracted a little book entitled Dutch in Six Easy Lessons from the pocket of her bell-bottomed trousers and began to ask them detailed questions about the canals in Holland.

     ‘You never told me that you could speak Dutch?’ I remarked rather jealously, once we had cleared customs and passed through the lock.

     ‘I’ve never tried before!’ she laughed. ‘But I wouldn’t dream of visiting a new country without being able to utter a word.’

 Clifford Ashley goes whaling:

The crew pulled jerkily and unevenly; it was a far cry to the long, whippy stroke of the later season. Someone stood up in the sternsheets. 'A short and greasy voyage!' he called, and the boat and the sloop gave us three rousing cheers. Then we turned to the open sea. The crew gathered in a silent group at the forecastle, and watched the narrow strip of headland fade slowly away.

     Toward nightfall Cooper screwed up the deadlights; and later, the wind freshening from a new quarter, the last vestige of land quickly dropped from our horizon. The steerage that night was not an inviting place in which to sleep. On a clutter of chests and dunnage the boat-steerers sprawled, drinking, wrangling, smoking. The floor was littered with rubbish, the walls hung deep with clothing; squalid, congested, filthy.

 Commodore John Milnes on SSBN patrol:

After negotiating the upper reaches of the Clyde on the surface, heading down to the Cumbraes Gap, one could relax just a little and muse on being the Captain of one of the most powerful warships Britain has ever built, sitting on top of a reactor, a forest of nuclear missiles, a quiverful of torpedoes and around two hundred crew. Such romantic moments are short-lived, however, and the reality of diving and getting underwater takes over. Diving the submarine for the first time after an off-crew and a period alongside is an exciting event...

 Jono Dunnett goes windsurfing:

There are many sensible ways of going round Japan. A bicycle would be a pleasant way to see the country, for example, and would avoid most of the headaches I am about to explain. The trains are fun, too. A few intrepid folks have sea-kayaked round it. Mine is the first (and possibly the last) attempt to windsurf round Japan. By 'round Japan' I mean round the four main islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu and Shikoku. The crossings between these islands are easy, at least in terms of distance, and the many smaller islands to the south are so far away that we can pretend we didn’t see them.

     The advice comes with the caveat that at present I am only halfway through my voyage. This slower-than-expected progress means that I have failed to evade the winter. It is only December, but the cold northeast winds are relentless and it snows every day. The first tip I can offer is to have an empty diary for the next year or two.

 Julian Blatchley threads the Malacca Strait:

I was twelve days out of Ras Tannurah. I had guided the 330,000-ton Sorrento out of the political and navigational complexities of the Persian Gulf, rolled across the Arabian Sea with the southwest monsoon on my beam, then followed the traffic lane from Dondra Head to the tip of Sumatra. I had used this last stage to complete my paperwork and bank as much rest as possible for the task now facing me – to take Sorrento through SOMS, the Straits of Malacca and Singapore. These two contiguous waterways, laced with shallows, studded with wrecks, scoured by strong tides and subject to poor visibility in torrential rain or forest fires, carry a quarter of the entire trade of the planet.

 Max Liberson goes beam trawling:

A beam trawler tows two trawls, one on each side. To keep them apart on the seabed they are worked from a derrick or beam, one each side, pivoting from the base of the main mast. The trawls themselves are protected from big rocks getting into them by a stone mat, a big sort of grid made up by links of chain shackled together to make squares, attached to a trawl beam with huge steel shoes. On the Pieter the trawl weight on each side was about five tonnes. Because of this enormous weight the gear could be towed at five knots on the seabed without lifting off. Additionally, the stone mat being dragged across the ground would dig out the fish that liked to hide, such as the highly desirable Dover sole, and the gear would cover twice as much ground as a normal trawler. Beam trawlers could catch a lot of fish; but there were drawbacks.

     In spite of all the attempts to bring the world of health and safety to the fishing industry, there is something the landbound bureaucrats in their warm offices don’t seem to be able to grasp. While these small ships are wonderfully stable with gear down and beams horizontally deployed like a tightrope walker’s pole, when it comes time to get the gear on deck the physics changes. Topping up the beams is the equivalent of placing a five-ton weight on the top of the mast. Just when you need the maximum stability because you have to stop fishing as the wind and waves have increased, the boat becomes about as stable as a pig on a pogo stick.

 Gordon Davies on inventions necessity is not necessarily the mother of:

Innovation at sea has always been a slow process.  Occasionally, though, an old problem is seen in a new light when talented people bring insight from other fields.  Sometimes their ideas are successful, sometimes less so.

     Speed and comfort have long been a selling point for passenger ships, and much enthusiasm and considerable finance have been poured into their pursuit. In the 1850s Ross Winans, a successful and innovative American multi-millionaire manufacturer of railway locomotives and rolling stock, believed that a fast transatlantic ship should have a cylindrical central part, streamlined by the addition of long conical ends. This shape was in vogue for submarines, though a hull with circular cross-sections seems a strange choice for a surface ship operating half in water and half in air. In 1858 he had two prototype ‘cigar ships’ built in his home city of Baltimore.

 Martin O'Scannall visits the Cape Verdes:

La Gomera, Valle del Gran Rey, slowly faded. The wind-shadow played its expected tricks. There is an acceleration zone between the islands, and once again there came one of those out-of-nowhere winds. You see it coming, the sea upwind dark and agitated, spume whipped off nascent whitecaps. You know all too well what that means – more hanging on somehow, that here-we-go-again feeling. We struck all sail and forged our way southwards under bare poles, rolling abominably, one step short of trailing warps. Below was sheer torture, the simplest task a nightmare. Watches clipped on, wedged in, thank goodness for windvane steering. Scan the horizon. Nothing but hundreds of miles of empty sea, watch after watch. The one consolation is the speed, which is phenomenal, and in the right direction.

 Alan Stoney runs an ad-hoc ferry service:

A couple of days later on a flat calm afternoon we motored into Greatman’s Bay. There was a wide slick of oil on the water, and occasional floating pieces of charred timber. It seemed that earlier that morning one of the boats ferrying tourists from Rossaveel to Inishmore had caught fire a minute out from the pier. The skipper, standing in the wheelhouse, had smelt smoke and lifted the engine-room hatch under his feet. Almost immediately the wheelhouse was engulfed in flames. Fortunately there were other boats in close proximity, and these took off the passengers and crew without incident or injury; had it happened outside in the North Sound the outcome might have been very different. The ferryboat burned to the waterline and sank later that morning. (It has to be said that all this took place just over forty years ago, before much of the MSO’s certification and mandatory safety standards had been introduced. As far as I remember the only constraint then was ‘no more than twelve skulls aboard’, and this was only occasionally overseen, let alone enforced, by Gardai on the quay.)

 Jon Tucker reports from the Boatyard at the Bottom of the World:

This is not a typical profit-driven boatyard. The owners, Murray and his wife Jo, have arranged for a yard worker to empty the trimaran’s wastewater drums now that David is too ill to do this unpleasant task, and the office ladies ensure that Cynthia’s needs are catered for. Their considerate ethos seems to pervade the yard, where the employees all seem cheerful in their work.

     Murray and Jo are in their mid-seventies. They have owned the land here since Murray gave up fishing and began a sand-mining business, towing barges along the coast, in aid of which he bought fifteen acres of mangrove-lined industrial waterfront to build a slipway for the huge barges. When the market for sand collapsed, the land behind the slipway ramp morphed into a boatyard, sprouting random covered structures – useful huts and outhouses, augmented by rusting containers and the occasional garden shed. Boats came and went. Some stayed, and continued to stay.

 Andrew Darwin takes to the canals:

Harold Hemming had a burning ambition to explore the European waterways. But he was a tall man, and every boat he looked at had limited headroom and was a pretty tight squeeze all round. He reckoned that spending weeks in such a restricted space would be pretty miserable. He had, however, been comfortable in caravans. One day in the cinema he happened to see an episode of Look at Life featuring houseboats on the Norfolk Broads, one of which was clearly a conventional caravan sitting on pontoons, which not only raised the actual caravan right out of the water but made it completely stable. Harold immediately bought one, and set about adapting it to his needs.

… and of course there are flotsam and jetsam, Near Seas News, books, the reprehensible musings of tugmaster and tobacco smuggler Ray Doggett, and the luminous illustrations of the inimitable Claudia Myatt.

Extracts Autumn 2024

Grounding, electricity, copra….

Simon Britten starts a race he doesn't finish:

After a brisk spring series of inshore races in the waters around Granton Harbour we prepared our boat for the longest challenge in the club’s calendar. The Farne Islands are a bunch of rocks a mile off the Northumberland coast just south of Lindisfarne. We set off on a Friday evening in June, with a reasonable shipping forecast and a coolbox containing a weekend's worth of food and liquid refreshment for the five of us. The race officer started our group of six yachts at around 6.30pm, giving us a few daylight hours to get eastwards out of the Firth of Forth. The weather was kind, with a southwesterly breeze around force three. Spinnaker hoisted, we settled down to a pleasant west northwesterly run, sufficiently gentle for early sandwiches, after which I went below to check the position against the Fidra light and the Isle of May, a mile-long sliver of rock guarding the entrance to the Firth of Forth. We had planned two watches of two people; as skipper I would chip in where required.

Charlie Webb is fouled by the Kaiser:

Imagine this here. You are the secret weapon, eighty feet up in the armpit of a gaff sail in the armpit of the Baltic. Out there on the horizon the thin ghosts of Fyn and Lolland mark the place where the windy sky meets the battleship-grey sea. Down the white river of the wake stand the bristling masts of Kiel regatta, with the canal locks and the funnels of the Kaiser Barbarossa in attendance on Kaiser Wilhelm, bless his mad heart.

     That was what David Davies was seeing, the secret weapon, youngest of the thirty men in my crew, perched between sea and sky. He was getting the view. I was getting the white man's burden, down on the deck with my heart in my mouth and my hip on ten feet of coachwhipped iron tiller, driving the Doria through the Kieler Fjord.

     A racing cutter, Doria. One hundred and twenty feet of black hull with an axe stem and a gold-leaf coving line; bowsprit, mainmast and topmast carrying 11,000 square feet of Egyptian cotton sails; below, staterooms, bathroom and ladies' cabin, saloon panelled in best Honduras mahogany all complete; and in a button-leather armchair in that saloon Sir Alonso Cummings, the owner, banker and strict Methodist, reading the Court Circular in the Times and breathing hard through his moustache.

Julian Blatchley in the South Seas and elsewhere:

I was fortunate to be assigned to the Exebank for my final voyage as a cadet. This close to sitting my exams for the second mate’s certificate, I urgently needed bridge time. Exebank, however, was a copra boat, and they were not famous for affording watchkeeping time to trainees. Bank Line vessels were all hard workers, forever in and out of ports, cleaning and preparing holds when in ballast and caring for cargo when loaded. Much of this fell to the cadets, to the detriment of their bridge time. The company acknowledged this, and promised to give plenty of bridge time on one’s last ship before examinations. But this was 1980, and the decline of the British Merchant Navy had begun. Ships were becoming fewer, recruitment was slowing drastically, and some high jinks ashore on a previous voyage, ending with a night in a Chilean calaboose, might not have helped my case.

Max Liberson gets compensation:

We settled down to a regime of fishing all the time the weather was good and fixing the boat and gear when it was not. One fine morning a frigate steamed past us and out to sea until the flashes of its radar could just be seen over the horizon. It was such a lovely day that the whole fishing fleet was out. We were shooting away the gear, Dave on the port side winch drum and me on the starboard, when there was a loud explosion and we were covered in smoke. Because we were shooting we could not leave the winch and Tommy could not shut the throttle or change course, so we had to carry on. As soon as the marks were out Tommy shut down the throttle and we had time to wonder what the hell was going on. Channel 16 was going mental, and Tommy joined in, taking the opportunity to yell at the coastguard that we had been shelled.

Jim Lawrence starts a career as a bargeman:

Minnie, my best pal and mentor, got a job as a mate on a barge called the Flower of Essex. He was nicknamed 'Minnie' because we did a school play called Hiawatha. He got the part of Minnehaha and the name stuck with him all his life. Everyone seemed to have a nickname in those days. One chap I heard about was called Hackney Joe; well, I could work that out. If Stratford Jack came from Stratford, then Hackney Joe must come from Hackney, but that wasn't the case. When I met him I found he was a young boy from Ipswich who simply had a faceful of pimples.

     At last the time came for me to leave school. It could not come soon enough for me. It was the start of the summer holidays in 1948. They let us school leavers out a bit earlier, saying ‘We can't teach you any more’ which I thought meant that we knew everything. I had fixed up to go as third hand in a barge called Gladys belonging to Horace Shrubsall.

Chris Scanes joins the Merchant Navy:

I had been a sailmaker for around ten years, sailing with the top yachtsmen of the day. I was in my late twenties, and began to feel I needed a bit of a sabbatical. Then one day I spotted an advert placed by Manchester Liners, a company that ran container ships out of Manchester docks. They had vacancies for uncertificated third officers, foreign-going. One of my work colleagues suggested, not at all seriously, that as I had an RYA yachtmaster’s ticket I might as well apply for the job. So just for fun I sent in an application, and to my utter surprise was offered an interview.

     The first question was, 'What on earth is a yachtmaster’s certificate?' I explained, thinking crikey, they must be desperate. It turned out that navigationally the ticket was equivalent to a mate’s Home Trade Certificate, and to my complete shock I was offered a job.

Hans Unkles, creel fisherman, goes electric:

I have just completed the conversion of a 1978 Cygnus GM21 to all-electric and solar power. The Cygnus 21 is a fairly substantial boat for its size but, in reality, not much bigger than an open dinghy. It is the grey Fergie of the fishing industry – a small, reliable, manageable and solid workhorse. I have done forty years of scallop diving, lobster, crab and prawn fishing. For a long time I have been drawn to the concept of generating energy with natural resources. A quarter of all the power we use at home and work is powered by our own solar. My neighbour and ex-fishing partner has been operating a five-metre all-electric open boat for about seven years, using wind and solar to keep it going, and we often discussed the possibility of scaling the idea up to a commercially viable scale. I was watching battery tech improving and costs dropping for both batteries and the motors. I was also watching no active attempt by the fishing industry to adopt or even investigate the huge developments in no-emission vessels taking place in the leisure industry and in the rest of the world – even poor African countries have fishing boats that don’t burn fuel.

Mike Smylie investigates the history of Billingsgate:

The Billingsgate Market Act of 1846 reflected a powerful increase in the amount of fish being landed. Oddly, the public taste for cod seems not yet to have developed. In 1850 only 1,800 tons of the species were brought through the market. This tonnage was only equivalent to the weight of sprats sold, many of them presumably from the stow-net smacks around Brightlingsea, and was dwarfed by a throughput of 10,000 tons of mackerel. The market developed a reputation as a lively place, famous for drinking, boisterous behaviour and general insalubrity, controlled by its army of porters and featuring exotica like the fish-women boxers who fought in the public houses holding coins in their palms so that they were unable to pull their opponent’s hair.

Jim Crossley explores the lethal world of mines:

In both world wars mines were simultaneously the most cost-effective and deadly of naval weapons, sinking more warships than torpedoes, bombing or gunfire. The final and most feared type deployed in wwII was the pressure or 'oyster' mine. Unlike other types[1], oyster mines were held back by the Germans – and indeed the British, who had successfully developed a similar device – for some months after they had been developed, so that they could be deployed in significant numbers right from the start. By May 1944 over 2,000 German 'oysters' were stored in France and kept carefully concealed, ready to guard against the invasion force that Hitler was rightly convinced would be used against his continental empire.

Nicholas Gray investigates a tragic life:

When Thomas Tangvald was young he believed that most people lived on boats and that only a few strange people lived in houses on the shore. He was born on 23 May 1976 on board his father’s yacht, L’Artemis de Pytheas, in the middle of the Indian Ocean some distance from the Strait of Malacca, en route from the south of France, via the Red Sea, to Taiwan. The only other people on board were his father Peter and his mother Lydia.

Emily Painter on the private life of the stormy petrel:

It has been blowing hard all month. The swells are long and black and steep, gnarled with cross-seas. Their tops rise and sharpen and topple down their leeward fronts in grey drifts that would make a great roar if there was anyone to hear them. But there is no-one to hear them –

     Wait.

     Just under a steepening crest is a tiny black bird. Out here, a thousand miles from land, there is crashing and roaring, big, violent movement. But the bird is fluttering, and delicately: pittering at the black upslope of a wave, whose crest topples, ten feet of grey ruin, while the creature, no bigger than a swallow, flits casually backwards out of reach of disaster.

Malcolm Turner tells the story of Uffa Fox:

At fourteen Uffa Fox became an enthusiastic Sea Scout, and by the age of twenty-one he had been appointed Scoutmaster. One of his duties was to organise and lead short sailing expeditions, sometimes as far afield as Poole or Weymouth. Uffa, however, yearned to sail further, and began to hatch a plan with his fellow scouts. The boys’ parents would be told that they were going to Poole. The real plan, however, was to sail their whaler across the Channel and up the Seine to Paris. On the voyage the boys took turns to sleep across the thwarts. Several of them, including Uffa, were seasick; but they recovered their health and spirits, and soon found themselves sailing gently across a calm sea under a blue sky.

     At dawn after their second night at sea they sighted Cap de la Hève with Le Havre in its shadow. They spent a day in Rouen, then continued up the non-tidal Seine. At Meulan, thirty miles short of Paris, Uffa decided that time was running out and reluctantly turned for home. A friendly steamer, the Swallow of Grimsby, towed them back as far as Le Havre, from where a southwesterly breeze wafted them back to the Island. Uffa counted the adventure as a great success. The parents, however, were furious.

… and of course there are flotsam and jetsam, Near Seas News, books, the reprehensible musings of tugmaster and tobacco smuggler Ray Doggett, and the luminous illustrations of the Claudia Myatt

Extracts Summer 2024

Hurricanes, cod, lifeboats….

Anthony Gurnee crosses the Atlantic:

In the summer of 2006 the family moved to Ireland, and I decided to make my way there by sea. The route would be from Jamestown, Rhode Island non-stop to Kinsale. The plan was to drop down to the Gulf Stream and ride it all the way over. What we had in mind was a relaxing broad reach in the warm following current. We were advised that to avoid tropical storms and maximise our chances of settled weather, June was the best time to go. We sailed from Jamestown on 11 June 2006.

The official hurricane season runs from 1 June for six months. Most hurricanes, and their junior cousins, the marginally less powerful tropical storms, occur in August and September. Examination of the statistics showed that storms form in the first half of June only about once every three years, and that most of these tend to head inland, away from the Atlantic.

Tropical Storm Alberto was just such a one-in-three.

 Julian Blatchley, blockade-runner:

Swan’s accommodation consisted of cabins on the upper deck with a large saloon and bar below, and did rather disguise her classic line; yet the fairly compact addition to her aft end did not much detract from the pugnacious, businesslike thrust of her high, solid bow. In white livery with crimson trim, and flaunting an enormous ensign, she looked a neat and purposeful little ship. She had spent her active service with the Royal Australian Navy, earning battle honours in the Borneo campaign, and had then been used as a trawler before her passenger conversion that was intended to take her into the dive charter market; but therein lay a problem, for Greece, ever sensitive about the risk to her antiquities, had as good as banned leisure diving, and kept a monopoly over passenger shipping. Swan, with fifty sets of diving gear on board and her Australian ensign, was about as welcome as Lord Elgin driving a backhoe.

 Mrs Brassey crosses the Pacific in ‘Sunbeam’:

Friday, January 5th 1878. The fresh fair breeze still continues. At noon we had sailed 240 knots. The head-sea we could dispense with, as it makes us all very uncomfortable. Muriel, Baby, the three maids, and several of the crew, are ill to-day with influenza, and I have a slight touch of it, so I suppose it will go right through the ship. Towards the evening the breeze increased to a gale.

Saturday, January 6th. The gale increased during the night, and the head-sea became heavier. There was a good deal of rain in the course of the day. The wind dropped about sunset, and was succeeded by intervals of calm, with occasional sharp squalls. Baby was very poorly all day, but seemed better at night. We have now regularly settled down to our sea life again, and, if only the children recover, I hope to get through a good deal of reading and writing between this and Japan.

 Gordon Davies investigates the ‘Great Eastern’:

In 1851 Isambard Kingdom Brunel began to consider the possibility of travelling non-stop to Australia by steamship. What stimulated his thoughts is not recorded, but he was aware that the Liverpool-based shippers Gibbs, Bright & Co were modifying the Great Britain for use on the run. At that time steamships could not reach Australia without the considerable expense of refuelling en route, so the Great Britain had been converted into a fast sailing ship. With an auxiliary steam engine for use in adverse or negligible wind she could reduce the passage time to two months, compared to the three or four months of a sailing ship.

Brunel had a strong interest in the Great Britain — he had been closely involved in building her, and also in the salvage operation after she had run ashore in Dundrum Bay. Perhaps it was her conversion that led him to wonder if, instead of sailing with an auxiliary engine, it would be possible to steam non-stop to Australia. Coal was hard to find and expensive in Australia; but why not carry enough to get there and back? A rough calculation suggested that 13,500 tons would be sufficient. That would require ‘a large ship, certainly’; but his experience with the Great Britain convinced him in his usual true style that ‘the use of iron . . . removes all difficulty in the construction’.

The opportunity to build his ‘large ship' arrived very quickly.

 Keith Muscott visits Frank and Margaret Dye:

The 1963 London International Boat Show at Earls Court ran for eleven days with 500 exhibits. Wooden dinghies were scarce and included the cheapest boat there, a ‘seagoing sailing dinghy’ that an unnamed hero had built from an old wardrobe for under ten pounds. Margaret Ann Bidwell made her way through the crowd, dispirited by the ‘shiny faceless grp boats’. She decided to escape and spend the rest of her day in a London art gallery. She was a teacher from Norfolk, now aged 31, a sturdy outdoor sort of lady despite being small in stature. She could not resist the allure of sailing, but her experiences on board yachts had not been happy ones; they were simply too big. She decided to leave the Boat Show by a side door. On her way out ‘I walked by this wooden, scruffy 16-foot dinghy. Her varnished decks were salt-crusty and scarred. . . On the thwarts sat a small, dark-suited man reading a book; he barely glanced up as people crowded around . . . and he answered questions in a shy, diffident manner.’

The man was Frank Dye, and the boat was Wanderer, Wayfarer #48.

 Tom Cunliffe on blocks:

The need to raise the power of human effort by mechanical means has been recognised since Odysseus sailed his hollow ship on the wine-dark sea from Ithaca, bound for the plains of Troy and eternity. Long before gear wheels and hydraulics were a dream on the horizon, sailors understood the obvious benefits of a rope purchase.

Basic lanyards passing between two eyes of some sort would have come first ─ we have all used these on small traditional dinghies and on lashings aboard bigger craft. Next on the scene would be the dumb sheave, a chunk — or ‘block’ — of wood with a sculpted, lubricated hole through which rope can render. Sometimes the hole would be chamfered to allow several parts of rope to lead around it without fouling one another. If kept tallowed this operated surprisingly smoothly, as anyone who has used a well-designed deadeye system for setting up shrouds will confirm. Such arrangements can still be seen on faithful replicas of nineteenth and early twentieth-century sailing craft whose forestay passes through the stem to be set up against the bitts.

 Emily Painter follows the Portuguese cod fleet:

The Torre de Belém stands on the margin of the Tagus just to the west of Lisbon. It was built of silvery stone in the sixteenth century, and is a beautiful thing; but not as beautiful as the boats anchored beyond it in the river in the 1950s. They are schooners and ketches, painted white, with the elegance of the truly workmanlike. Around them swarms a throng of small boats. The supplies are on board — food, wine, coffee, huge quantities of salt from the pans up and down the Atlantic coast — and now their people are boarding from crowded punts. There are families in the punts, women and children waving, some weeping, some stone-faced as the men climb up the sides of the schooners: small men, wearing striped trousers and check shirts, with bundles over their shoulders. Sails rise on masts. Anchors come up. Families wave. The fleet slides away westward, down the tide to where the evening sun is glittering in the western sea. They will be gone for six months.

Far to the northwest, in the dark water of the fishing grounds, the cod move over the seabed in an enormous sheet, shoulder to huge shoulder, kept together by an instinct that is more like the behaviour of a herd than a shoal.

 A J E  Haslett builds a dory:

On the Grand Bank of Newfoundland, for a long time has flourished a fishery employing schooners, which carry dories on deck. The actual fishing is done from the dories which are launched overboard each day from the schooners, and each moves off with one or two men who fish with lines for Cod.

For a schooner to carry a relatively large number of small boats on deck, the necessity arose to design these boats to be piled up, and so the dory came into being. In order to pile these boats one on top of another, without making the stack too high, they were made to fit one inside the next, and this was achieved by making them have flat bottoms, raked stems and sterns and flared out sides; it was essential that the hollow shells were free from projections and cross members such as thwarts.

In most small boats, thwarts are an essential part of the vessel’s strength, and in dories, this has to be compensated for by increasing the rigidity of the framing, so they have relatively few frames, but they are of heavy construction and the thwarts movable. This form of boat was (and in some cases, still is) used by the Americans, Canadians, French and Portuguese.

I am employed aboard a specialised vessel working on short voyages from Plymouth, and having gleaned as much information about dories as possible, decided to build one for my own use.

Henry Martin follows the RNLI:

A cat was spotted trapped under a pontoon at East Cowes Marina. On arrival the lifeboat crew and marina staff managed to reach the beleaguered feline by partially dismantling the wooden structure. The cat duly sprang to freedom, to continue its prowl of the surroundings; and the lifeboat crew — with not a scratch between them — was able to return to station, arriving at 2.32pm. Later the station was contacted by the grateful woman owner of the cat, who said she had been looking for the cat all night before hearing plaintive mewing from under the pontoon. An rnli spokesperson said: ‘We’re glad to have reunited this missing cat with his owner.’

 Chris Scanes starts his seafaring:

One summer when I was in my mid-teens the motorised barge Oxygen came alongside the wharf at Leigh-on-Sea to discharge her cargo of timber. She still had her mainmast and a very tatty-looking mainsail, tightly brailed; but the mizzen had been replaced by a turtle-back wheelhouse, and she certainly looked as if she was struggling to make a living.

I got the skipper into conversation. He was Chub Horlock, a wiry little man, quietly spoken, with a soft north Essex accent, who came from a long line of barge owners and skippers. The Oxygen had been delayed in Leigh, he explained, while he waited for a relief mate to join so he could proceed to London for orders. ‘It’s only a short trip,’ he said. ‘Would you like to stand in for him?’

 Richard Crockatt and the adventures of ‘Sopranino’:

It is hard not to be in awe of Patrick Ellam, less for the length or scope of his voyaging, which was not remarkable by the standards of some of the sailors of his generation, but rather for the clarity of purpose he brought to it. From the moment he resumed sailing after his war service he had a plan and a point to prove which he pursued with extraordinary skill and vigour. His point was that a small and light boat, not much bigger than a dinghy, could be as capable of ocean passages as larger, heavy displacement craft.

Between September 1951 and February 1952 he completed a 5,000-mile Atlantic voyage from Falmouth to New York via the Caribbean in the Laurent Giles designed Sopranino. For the bulk of the voyage he was accompanied by Colin Mudie, a Laurent Giles employee who had been given the task of producing the detailed drawings of the boat. At just under twenty feet overall, Sopranino was not merely small but at only half a ton remarkably light.

…and of course there are books, Flotsam and Jetsam, the brilliant illustrations of Claudia Myatt and the reprehensible musings of Ray Doggett, tugmaster and tobacco smuggler extraordinary.

Extracts Spring 2024

Ship launches, magnetic mines, coffee pots…

 Don Street finds new uses for the ship's coffeepot:

We stormed along under staysail, which was fairly small and happily loose-footed. The wind increased and the seas built up. How hard it blew and how big the waves were I do not know, but when we were surfing on the biggest seas the 40hp gasoline engine was turning over against compression. Catalina was a well-designed Casey ketch, built in 1938, with a full keel. We had no trouble steering; the difficulty was that she would surf down a wave, the engine would rumble, she would stick her nose into the wave ahead, and the wave astern would break on board. She had a bridgedeck, the washboards were in place, and her self-bailing cockpit had two big inch drains. Unfortunately she also had footlockers, the doors of which were in the sides of the cockpit. We thought these doors were close-fitting: wrong. Every time a wave came aboard and filled the cockpit, water drained through the leaky doors and went below, filling the bilge to the floorboards, and one of the watch below would crawl out of his bunk and get to work with the big brass 2 1/2" up-and-downer bilge pump. This worked fine until the boat took a bad roll when the pump handle was in the up position and the crew fell against the handle and bent the shaft. End of pump.

Julian Blatchley in the Patagonian Channels:

The tall pilot spoke quietly to the master, who ordered an increase to half ahead and a small course correction. Then he went into the chartroom to divest himself of his jacket and lifebelt. As he left the bridge the third mate beckoned me. He was a Hebridean, and disseminated a caustic wit which would have been unseemly in someone old enough to have some justification for it, which he was not. He did not much like his fellow islanders, deprecated mainland Scots, deplored the English, and seemed to consider anyone from further afield barely human; why he had chosen to make his living travelling a world he seemed to despise I could never make out. His antagonism towards the tartan apparel of the pilot was instant and palpable. As that rangy figure returned to the bridge, his jacketless state revealing a pullover of yet another noisy tartan, the third mate gave an audible sigh of contempt. Throwing me the movement book, he said, 'Go and get f*****g Pedro’s name.'

He spoke too loud. The pilot’s head whipped round, and he said, forcefully and in a marked Scots accent, 'F*****ing Pedro comes frae Edinburgh!'

 Max Liberson laments the passing of a lady:

In 1976, when I started work as a fisherman in Sutton Harbour, one trawler stood out from all the others. She was called the Flete Lady. She was about seventy feet long, and rigged as a sidewinder – she worked her trawl off the starboard side, with a spare on the port side, rigged and ready to go in case the starboard gear was smashed or lost. She was built in 1958 by Mashfords yard, next to Mount Edgcumbe just across the river from Plymouth. After the War the grounds off Plymouth were fair teeming with fish, and Mashfords was putting together a fleet to take advantage of the stocks. One of the other boats was the Pentille, a similar-sized Admiralty-built trawler, which had been sold off after hostilities had ceased. At first glance the two boats looked the same, but they were as different as chalk and cheese. I once saw them close together at sea. The Pentille was rolling heavily, but the Flete Lady was just going up and down. Closer inspection revealed many other differences. The poor old Pentille was thrown together in wartime with whatever wood the boatbuilders could get their hands on. The Flete’s timbers were lovingly crafted from the very best oak, supplied for free from the Flete estate (the agreement was that while she fished the estate was supplied with a box of lemon sole every month). The Flete was then planked up in iroko, with galvanised nuts and bolts instead of the Pentille's iron spikes. As the years went by, the Flete Lady became the top landing boat in Plymouth.

Jim Crossley discusses magnetic mines:

Much has been written about the Battle of the Atlantic, and the struggle to fight convoys through the u-boat 'wolf packs' and round the North Cape. Before these campaigns commenced, however, an equally bitter struggle had to be fought and won closer to home, in the North Sea. Tirpitz had put it well. ‘Germany,’ he said, 'must control the seas from Heligoland to the Thames.’ The High Seas Fleet he built singularly failed to achieve this objective in World War i; but in 1939 the Royal Navy faced a more alarming threat. Germany could close the North Sea to British shipping by using a relatively simple and economical device: the mine. In those days the Thames was the world’s busiest waterway and the backbone of the British economy. Hundreds of ships every day steamed up and down the east coast, and they were pitifully vulnerable to mines. If this traffic was halted, Britain would last only a few weeks.

 Joe Henderson gets his first job:

We went down to the loft in St Mary’s Road. The building was called Empire Buildings, after the old theatre that used to occupy it. Harry had taken it over when the loft moved from Bank Chambers, and had simply put a set of offices on the dress circle balcony, and installed the rotary hammer swaging machine and Talurit presses on concrete plinths that stood about a foot above the varnish-and-Stockholm-tar-stained chipboard-over-concrete floor. I followed my Dad into the darkish interior, to the back corner of the loft floor where Harry was putting the finishing touches to some lignum vitae deadeyes for the rig of Mohamed al Fayed’s schooner Dodi, named for his son. Harry shook the lignum dust off his shoulders and said to my Dad, ‘Hello my love, come up to the office.’

We went up the stairs and into his office. He sat us down and said, ‘So you want to be a rigger?’

I said, immediately, ‘Yes!’

 Mike Bender explains Guy de Maupassant:

Maupassant’s Sur L’Eau was published in France in 1888. The author, who was born in 1850, was brought up in Étretat on the Normandy coast, whose spectacular cliffs were much painted by the Impressionists. He became an accomplished sailor and rower, and in 1868 was somewhat helpful in saving the poet Swinburne, by all accounts dead drunk at 10am, from drowning.

 Cruising with de Maupassant:

'Fine morning, sir.'

I rise and go on deck. It is three in the morning; the sea is flat, the sky an enormous vault of shadow broadcast with little specks of fire. A zephyr of breeze blows off the land. The coffee is hot, we drink it, and so as not to lose a minute of this favourable breeze, set sail. And there we are, sliding over the waves towards the open sea. The coast disappears; all around us nothing can be seen except darkness. It is a feeling, an emotion, troubling but delightful; to plunge into this empty night, in this silence, on this water, far from everything. It is as if we have left the world, that we will never arrive anywhere, that there will be no coast, that there will be no day. At my feet a little lamp lights the compass which shows me the way. We must run at least three miles out to sea to be certain of rounding Cap Roux and the Dramont, whatever wind we will have once the sun has risen. I have caused the running lights to be lit, red to port and green to starboard, to prevent accidents, and I take a pleasure amounting almost to intoxication in this dumb, steady and peaceful flight.

 Evan Evans cruises British style:

It was hot, hot, hot as we dropped the mooring pennant in the West Kyle of Bute. We pointed Dahlia's nose south, with a bit of west in it, and proceeded with majestic slowness on the broadest of reaches. A couple of porpoises rolled. We saluted them, and picked up a buoy in Lochranza, and poured a libation to the sea god while the sun lit the jagged crags of Arran above the castle. It was a biggish libation, because tomorrow was Kilbrannan Sound.

The Sound is the southern extension of Loch Fyne. On its eastern side Arran heaves itself out of the sea, and on its western side Kintyre trudges south. It has a richly-justified reputation for either no wind or too much wind, with the refinement that what wind there is funnels either up or down it, arriving on the nose or, as today, dead aft. I hauled up jib and main, goosewinged them, and bowled south at an encouraging five knots. But the herd of white horses ahead faded, and soon we were motoring. In the evening we arrived at Campbeltown.

Edgar Allen Poe, drunk, goes sailing:

It was blowing almost a gale, and the weather was very cold – it being late in October. I sprang out of bed, nevertheless, in a kind of ecstasy, and told him I was quite as brave as himself, and quite as tired as he was of lying in bed like a dog, and quite as ready for any fun or frolic as any Augustus Barnard in Nantucket.

We lost no time in getting on our clothes and hurrying down to the boat. She was lying at the old decayed wharf by the lumber-yard of Pankey & Co, and almost thumping her sides out against the rough logs. Augustus got into her and bailed her, for she was nearly half full of water. This being done, we hoisted jib and mainsail and started boldly out to sea.

 George Hodgkinson explains how to launch a ship:

The safe transfer into water of a ship built on land has been a challenge that man has striven to solve down the ages in different ways, with varying degrees of success. Noah simply waited for the rains to fall, and his Ark became buoyant of its own accord; and this technique, known as ‘float up’ is the preferred method of launch in a modern shipyard. When the ship, constructed in a cavernous dry dock under a roof, is ready for launch, water is simply let in, and once it has reached the required depth the ship is floated up and out. In a parallel but rather more hit-and-miss fashion, seventeenth-century English shipbuilders used the rise and fall of the tide to launch ships from a tidal dock. This method is, however, entirely reliant on accurate knowledge of the time and level of the tide; there were total failures due to insufficient water, and in the case of hms Boscawen in 1844, of the newly-built ship being carried off its slips at Woolwich by a tidal surge.

 Sport fishing for tunny in home waters:

The real start of big game angling in British waters came in 1930, when on 27 August Mr. Mitchell-Henry made history by landing the first Tunny ever caught here on rod and line, a fine specimen of 560lbs. This was hooked about fifty miles off the coast and was landed at Scarborough. Four other fish were taken that season with weights of 735, 630, 591 and 392lbs. It is worthy of note that the 735-pounder was only 23lbs less than the then existing world record, held for many years by the American, Mr. Zane Grey.

The Royal Cruising Club Pilotage Foundation:

In December 1880, nine Victorian yachtsmen met to form the Cruising Club (later to become the Royal Cruising Club). In the words of the club’s founder Sir Arthur Underhill, they ‘felt it an anomaly that upwards of twenty Royal yacht clubs should exist for the encouragement of racing, while the increasing class which was far more interested in cruising and navigation was left entirely unrepresented’.

 Sir Arthur drafted the new club’s rules. One of the primary objects was ‘to give the opportunity to Members who may wish to visit a coast, river or lake which is new to them, to obtain information as to harbourage, boatmen and other local matters by means of correspondence with members acquainted therewith’. This wording remains unchanged today, and Royal Cruising Club (rcc) members have been happily exchanging pilotage information with each other for 143 years.

Richard Crockatt discusses the Millars:

George Millar and his wife Isabel rarely feature in accounts of yachting in the postwar years. They never crossed an ocean, broke no nautical records, nor indeed attempted to, and knew few of the prominent names in the cruising fraternity of that era. Nevertheless, starting almost from scratch as sailors in 1946, they undertook interesting voyages in European waters over the next two decades. George Millar wrote three remarkable books about their exploits: Isabel and the Sea (1948), A White Boat From England (1951), and Oyster River (1963).

And of course there are Flotsam and Jetsam, North Sea News, the beautiful illustrations of Claudia Myatt and the musings of the tugmaster, tobacco smuggler and book reviewer Ray Doggett

Extracts Winter 2023

Trawling, Antarctica, wild submarines

Ralph Stock raises the wind for the refit of his Colin Archer ketch:

I happened to visit the local fish market and ask the price of sole. The answer caused me furiously to think. There were 150 sailing vessels in this old-fashioned Devonshire fishing fleet, each earning a handsome income, and not one of them a better craft than mine. Why not go trawling with the dream ship? This I did, and propose to give a brief account of my experiences for the benefit of those desirous of knowing one way of making a ship pay for herself.

 Julian Blatchley transits the Suez Canal:

I first experienced Suez as master in the early nineties. I was approaching from the Red Sea to transit northbound in the Solveig, a heavily-loaded Suezmax tanker, so named because she was at that time the largest class of tanker vessel that could transit fully loaded. These ships are a standard size, about 285 metres long and 48 metres beam, with a draught of about 18 metres. They can carry a one-million-barrel cargo – about 150,000 tonnes – of oil. The ship was over twenty years old and already scheduled for conversion into a floating oil storage platform; so the luxury of the new gps satellite navigation system was not for us. We did have the older Navstar system, but as it had aged the satellites had bunched in orbit, so users experienced long periods with no satellites, then received a rush of them that swamped the receiver. During the four and a half days it had taken Solveig to ascend the Red Sea from the Straits of Bab El Mandeb to the Straits of Gubal, I had so few Navstar positions that (to the utter horror of my junior officers) I had reverted to using my sextant.

Nat Benjamin meets a master shipwright:

At seven in the morning a paunchy, slack-shouldered Frenchman shuffled towards Tappan Zee. ‘That’s Jean-Claude,’ said Tim. ‘He’s the master shipwright, coming to replace the plank.’

     His face was a roadmap of purple blood vessels over putty cheeks and a vermilion nose. A blue beret stuck to the side of his head and a Gauloise hung from the corner of his mouth. ‘He’s the master shipwright?’ I asked.


     ‘Looks like he spent the night under a rock,’ said Rick.


     ‘Them bloody starbursts don’t come from one night,’ said Hobbman.


     ‘Well, that’s him,’ said Tim.

     Jean-Claude went straight to the gaping hole, inspected the back rabbet at the stem, paced off the length, gave us a nod, and returned to the carpentry shop. A few minutes later he shuffled back with several long thin boards under his arm and a hatchet in his right hand. We put down our sanders and scrapers and stood by to observe the master at work.

 James Grogono goes speed-sailing:

My obsession with flying close above the water on hydrofoils started as a teenager. It was partly due to a fascination with swooping and soaring about like a bird in the air. I imagined myself gliding about in the school chapel, where daily services were compulsory. It helped pass the time. A secondary consideration was that I also enjoyed attempting to sail fast.

     The third and final ingredient was finding a small wind tunnel gathering dust in a cupboard in the school physics lab. Using this I plotted lift-to-drag ratios, and began to contemplate the great efficiency of an underwater foil compared to the cumbersome keel of a sailing boat.

 Jon Tucker ignores a lot of advice:

My life has been full of well-intentioned advice. Had I been sensible I might have heeded it and gathered wealth and security for my dotage. But from where Babs and I now sit, basking in the glow of the little woodstove aboard the gaff ketch we call home, I can see that my obstinacy has brought us much pleasure.

‘Build small,’ they advised. ‘Only a fool would build a yacht larger than thirty feet on a first attempt.’ Since my childhood I had set my heart on building a 55ft gaff schooner. So I compromised, more through constraints of income than acknowledgement of counsel, and we settled on a 45ft Herreshoff ketch as our dream vessel.

 Gordon Davies looks at 19th-century submarines:

One problem that plagued submarines throughout the century was their lack of longitudinal stability when they were submerged. They were prone to tilt fore or aft; the propeller would then drive the vessel downwards or upwards, and maintaining a constant depth was impossible. The problem arose because in a submerged submarine, in contrast to a surface vessel, the centre of buoyancy is fixed at one point inside the hull, regardless of its orientation. Any stationary vessel is stable when its centre of gravity is directly below the centre of buoyancy. If, say, the crew moved inside the submarine, the only way the centre of gravity could stay under the centre of buoyancy was by the vessel tilting. Streamlining the hull by lengthening it exaggerated the problem by increasing the leverage caused by weights moved to the extremities. What made matters worse was the runaway effect of inclining a submarine. For example, the water in any partly-filled tank would move to its lower end when the vessel tilted, further increasing the tilt. Wilhelm Bauer’s Brandtaucher of 1850, ballasted by simply admitting water into the bottom of the cabin, gave a spectacular demonstration of this positive feedback during its first public outing. The ballast water sloshed to one end of the eight-metre craft, upending it and causing the unsecured lead ballast to follow. The vessel flooded and hit the bottom, but the crew at least had the distinction of making one of the first escapes from a stricken submarine.

 John Good's voyage to Cadiz starts badly and continues worse:

There was now much stir in the City in consequence of the Coronation of William the 4th we took a favourable spot to see this grand sight — being the first time either of us had seen Victoria our present Queen. In September I again parted with my Wife she going to Scarbro, and I on a voyage in ballast to Cadis to seek a freight for a Cargo of Wine. We had a good run down the River, and the Channel, with this promising beginning, I was ready to hope we might be favoured to make a quick, and profitable voyage, when I intended if well to have spent the winter at home with my family, but Alas! much that was troublesome, disappointing, and trying, awaited me, for soon after the wind veered round from the sw, and began to blow. We contended a day or two, and then went into Falmouth to tend winter sails, &c. and prepare for Stormy weather, thus early set in.
After we had bore up for the Harbour a Pilot hailed us, asking the usual questions where we were from, and where bound to. I replied from London a-seeking, blowing hard at that time they could not get onboard. We got safely in, without their assistance, which not requiring, I avoided, and so saved the Pilotage.

 Peter Davies gets hot and stays hot:

It was 1970, and I was working as deck crew on board an old tanker, built in the early 1950s in Germany for transporting liquid asphaltic bitumen – a cargo that required plenty of heat to keep it liquid and pumpable. The bitumen tanks had huge pipe systems that were fed with steam from the two engine-room boilers. If the cargo was not heated to around 93°C it would become semi-solid, and refuse to melt into liquid again except in a small area around the steam pipes. If the cargo tanks were full, they would at that point become solid lumps of asphaltic bitumen, rendering the ship unusable and fit only to scrap.

     When both boilers were working well they produced enough steam both to keep the cargo hot and allow the steam turbine engine to move the ship from port to port. A side-effect, however, was that the steel deck was almost too hot to walk on, so you needed substantial boots, and only seriously powerful forced-air ventilation kept the accommodation anything like habitable.

 Para Handy engages in the war between the sexes:

'Marry? I'm not sayin', mind you, that I'll not try wan some day, but there's no hurry, no, not a bit.’

     ‘But perhaps you'll put it off too long,’ I said, ‘and when you're in the humour to have them they won't have you.’

     He laughed at the very idea. ‘Man!’ he said, ‘it's easy seen you have not studied them. I ken them like the Kyles of Bute. The captain of a steamer iss the most popular man in the wide world – popularer than the munisters themselves, and the munisters iss that popular the weemen put bird-lime in front of the Manses to catch them, the same ass if they were green-linties. It's worse with sea-captains - they're that dashing, and they're not aalways hinging aboot the hoose wi' their sluppers on.’

     ‘There's another thing,’ he added, after a little pause, ‘I couldna put up with a woman comin' aboot the vessel every pay-day. No, no, I'm for none o' that. Dougie's wife's plenty.’

     ‘But surely she does not invade you weekly?’ I said, surprised.

     ‘If the Fital Spark's anywhere inside Ardlamont on a Setturday,’ said Para Handy, ‘she's doon wi' the first steamer from Gleska, and her door-key in her hand, the same ass if it wass a pistol to put to his heid.'

 Dr Jana Jeglinski investigates bird flu, and detects a ray of hope:

We are approaching the Bass Rock. The sky is eerily empty. As our boat approaches the concrete steps of the landing spot, my memory expects to see the steep granite slopes white with gannet pairs. Instead I see rock, irregularly speckled with white dots, many of which do not move. As we clamber up the steep path with our gear the extent of the damage becomes even more clearly visible. The continuous surface of nests I saw earlier in the season has fragmented into disconnected clusters. Dead gannets are piled up at the fringes of the colony and everywhere in between, and there are hardly any chicks.

 Claudia Myatt goes drawing in Antarctica:

When I told my son I was going to take my sketchbooks to Antarctica he laughed. ‘You can come back with empty pages, then,’ he said, ‘and call each page icebergs in a snowstorm.’ Other artists had more helpful advice to offer: use vodka or gin instead of water for painting, as it has a lower freezing point; wear fingerless gloves; take as many different blues as possible; work fast; take a good camera.

 Richard Crockatt reads Clare Allcard:

Clare couldn’t think of anything more fabulous than sailing away to distant horizons. Her response was to write ‘the first fan letter of my life’ to Edward Allcard, as she recalls in her enthralling memoir of her family’s adventures travelling the world in the 69ft Baltic trading ketch, Johanne Regina.

     Clare’s progress towards marriage was not straightforward. She could not meet Edward straight away because ‘she happened to be locked up in a loony bin. Would he mind waiting a couple of months till they set her free?’

And of course there are Flotsam and Jetsam, North Sea News, the beautiful illustrations of Claudia Myatt and the musings of the tugmaster, tobacco smuggler and book reviewer Ray Doggett

Extracts Autumn 2023

Steamers, invasions, suppressing the slave trade…

Simon Britten goes sailing with the Professor:

As the skipper talked, I noticed that the shadows of the sails were rotating slowly on the deck. A glance at our wake made it clear that we had been travelling in a large circle for at least five minutes. ‘Overheated autopilot transistor,' said the skipper. 'I know which one it is.’ He disappeared below, to reappear with a screwdriver, a strip of blotting paper and the gin bottle. ‘You have small hands. I’ll take the wheel. Unscrew George’s lid and look for two identical components on top of the edge of the circuit board facing you. If you look closely you will see that the one on the port side is peeling away from the board. Slide a folded layer of blotting paper under it. Leave half an inch sticking out. Pour a thimbleful of gin on to the blotting paper, wait thirty seconds, and when I say “195” switch on.'

I wedged and poured and waited. The order came. I flipped the switch, the servos whirred and the skipper cheered. It worked every time.

 John Caldwell finds out about waterspouts:

The morning of July 8 I came on deck as usual, threw my eyes into the rigging to check on things, then gazed around the horizon at the sea. There was a fresh wind up. Off to starboard was something that made me look again. It was a dense curtain of cloudlike air, arm-shaped and bent, reaching from the sea into the clouds, and marching over the water. It was a tropic waterspout.

How many waterspouts I had seen in the Merchant Marine! How many times had I leaned on the rail peering wistfully into their mystery and wishing I was captain! And now I was captain: and I did what I always said I would do, if I saw a waterspout from my own boat. I loosed the lashings from the tiller and set Pagan on a track that put her straight for the centre of the waterspout.

 Midshipman James Stoddart chases a slaver:

When we left England, we were supplied with a heavy lumbering launch, and as the boat interfered very much with the sailing of the brig, she was left behind at Ascension. Our cutter had been sent away three days before to watch a river much frequented by slavers, so we had no boats on board but a four-oared gig and jollyboat. By two o’clock with a light air aloft we had neared the chase considerably; but it again fell dead calm. We then tried sweeps, but owing to the swell made little or nothing of them. I was on the foreyard with the captain. The sky was beginning to thicken again, and if the fog came down she would be sure to escape. He shut his glass and said: ‘Go and take her.’

 Gordon Davies explores the early development of the submarine:

Submarine development began, slowly, in the seventeenth century. The builders only had natural materials to work with: hulls were predominantly wooden, and the only flexible watertight material was leather. At the beginning of the century there was also very little knowledge of conditions underwater. Robert Boyle, one the leading natural philosophers of his day, was only convinced in about 1660 that pressure increased with depth. That result, essential for the design of a submarine, contradicted the age-old doctrine of the ‘non-gravitation of water in its proper place’, ie that the pressure stayed constant with depth – obviously so, since otherwise fish would be crushed. As late as 1673 the doctrine was being justified by Sir Matthew Hale, a highly influential lawyer, who blithely ignored a paper published two years earlier by the Royal Society (of which he was a Fellow) that specifically reported the increase in pressure with depth. (Hale also believed in witches.)

 Julian Blatchley on living with steam:

When I took up my new position as the manager of Steam Yacht Gondola, I like to think I approached the job with respect. This was a passenger vessel, after all, and one designed over a century and a half ago. True, it was only twenty-five metres long, and sailed on a lake rather than the open sea; but I grew up on these lakes. I know their whimsical weather, and their cold, deep water. And Gondola had a steam engine. Still, I had over forty years of marine experience under my belt. Subconsciously I must have expected an easy transition. I can only hope that I managed to conceal the numerous surprises I received.

My first priority seemed to be learning to handle the boat. For fifteen years I made a living mooring supertankers to oil platforms, using just a propeller and a rudder. I am adept at threading ships through the Singapore and Malacca straits. I have sailed through perambulating sandbars into the Hooghly River and passed the tortuous Rada Ingles in the Magellan Strait. How hard could an eighty-four-foot boat be?

Pretty darned hard, as it transpired.

 The Editor explains how to invade Dundee:

The Mew Stone is far astern, and the ship is heading east, towards the distant Dover Strait. The bridge still has the operating-theatre seriousness, but there is sea room, and no tortuous channel to worry the mind. The true peace of God, said Joseph Conrad, is found a thousand miles from the nearest land. Albion is only ten miles from land, but you can already feel a hint of that peace; or anyway as much of it as you can sensibly expect on a ship whose business is war.

 A WWII Admiral advises a young officer on his first command:

The assumption of your first command is the greatest step that you will ever take. It carries with it not only the responsibility of a King’s ship, but the power to mould or mar the characters of a body of men. It carries with it an historic tradition of dignity and privilege, and in return makes demands on your skill and endurance, which have never before been asked, and which brook no failure.

 Max Liberson in trouble again:

It was in the Navy pub that Tattooed Vic first approached me. I had gone to sea with him when I was just starting, and he had taught me a lot in a short, and not always enjoyable time. He was handy with his fists, and his whole body, including the most delicate part, was tattooed. He was chatting up Sue, the voluptuous barmaid, who was topping his pint up for free while the landlord was in the other bar. He saw me and said, ‘Maxer, just the boy I need to see,’ in a voice made gravelly by whisky. He told me that he was taking over as skipper of the fifty-foot Fruit and Nut, a stern dragger trawler, and that he needed a skipper of his current boat, the Boy Toby. I got the job....

 Peter Cardy spends twenty-four hours watching comings and goings in Portsmouth Harbour:

Portsmouth Harbour never sleeps. There is constant activity throughout 24 hours, seven days a week, though most of it is unseen and unheard to the passing observer.

It is widely believed that the King’s Harbour Master at Portsmouth, and the Admiralty and civilian pilots, are here to keep sailors safe. Their vhf transmissions, with the careful exchange of information about course, speed, intentions, passengers embarked, dangerous goods and pilotage exemption certificates, all tend to reinforce this idea. In fact, however, their main purpose is – and has been for three hundred years – to protect hm ships and the Naval Base. khm’s pilotage, the information exchanges, reports and enforcement measures are all intended for their protection. The safety of civilian users and people around the harbour is a fortunate side-benefit.

 Andy Thomson leaks a press release from the year 2030:

There has been a significant reduction in conventional leisure yachting over the last few years, accompanied by a rapid growth in the new and largely unregulated virtual boating sector. The LYA has taken over the significantly diminished roles of the Royal Yachting Association and British Marine, both of which have outlived their relevance and usefulness. Preserving societal norms and interpersonal appropriateness for all stakeholders and practitioners is a key lya policy. Parts of society continue to express concern over terminology used afloat. ‘First Mate’, for example, is a positional descriptor that can also be seen as having hierarchical implications ('first') and societal implications ('mate'). Until societal consensus has been reached with regard to issues such as this the LYA will use, but minimise, traditional terminology.....

 Julia Jones explains her decensoring of a book by a hero:

My first encounter with Lieutenant Commander Robert Hichens DSO*, DSC**, (also mentioned three times in dispatches and recommended for a VC) was observing the effects of a cocktail he had popularised. It was called the Mark viii, and was originally poured out at ‘gin time’ at HMS Beehive, a WWII Coastal Forces base in Felixstowe, Suffolk.

Hichens, a Cornish solicitor who had become the first rnvr officer to command a motor gunboat and was then the Senior Officer of his flotilla, had initiated these lunchtime sessions as a way of bringing his fellow officers together and helping them relax sufficiently after a night patrol to be able to get some afternoon sleep before going out again when darkness fell. In his book We Fought Them in Gunboats Hichens describes the creation of the first Mark viii. They were all dead tired, too tired for choices.

  ‘“What will you have, sir?”

  ‘“Oh, anything and everything, Kelly.”

‘Kelly took me at my word. He picked up a gin bottle in one hand and a rum bottle in the other and poured in a liberal dose simultaneously. Then he picked up lemon squash and orange squash and applied them also together, finishing off with water. Thus was born the flotilla’s famous Mark viii.’

A Mark viii was also a 21ft torpedo.

My father used to serve this to our Essex neighbours on his birthday. As a young teenager it was a never-failing source of wonder just how badly the local businessmen and doctors could behave after a few tumblers of this innocent seeming drink. Later, when I read the book which Hichens had written in his last six months of life, the Mark viii made perfect sense.

And of course there are Flotsam and Jetsam, North Sea News, the beautiful illustrations of Claudia Myatt and the musings of the tugmaster, tobacco smuggler and book reviewer Ray Doggett

Extracts Summer 2023

Gales, whales, astounding tales

Nat Benjamin and the tramontana:

We took our breakfast to the cockpit. The staff at the Miramar were collapsing umbrellas and carrying chairs off the veranda. Shop owners were shuttering windows and closing doors. We were the only remaining vessel stern to the quay. ‘Where the hell is Hobbman?’ said Rick.

     We shovelled down breakfast. It was quiet: too quiet. There was no gentle lapping against the massive cut stone, not a soul walking, dog barking, bird singing. Rick and I went below to start the antique Ailsa, and after routine invocations it finally growled into life. I took in the port stern line, and Tim and Rick began hauling in the anchor rode. Hobbman would have to find his way out to the boat on his own.

     Then it hit. It was as if a giant invisible fan swept down from the mountains and drove the static air into chaos. In a few minutes we were under the hammer of a howling gale. Tim took a locking turn on the bitts, and the anchor rode stretched like bungy cord as Tappan Zee was driven back towards the breakwater. I was paying out the starboard stern line when Hobbman came running down the quay — bare feet and shorts, no shirt, his backpack wrapped in a plastic garbage bag. He took a flying leap, landed in the water a few feet from the stern, grabbed the dock line and monkeyed his dripping hulk aboard.

Paul Jones at the Glénans sea school:

The next thing I knew we were heading for a group of rocky islands ten miles off the coast. It felt like exile. Home was a fort built in 1756 on the island of Cigogne. Water was collected in a cistern fed by rain that percolated through the sod roof. During the days we were thrashed around on thirty-foot cutters in full Atlantic conditions; during the nights we curled up on cots, trying to recuperate. It was cold, desolate, and windswept. With us were several dozen stagiaires – students – who were also reinforcing basic keelboat skills. The only bath I took during that first two-week course involved running down a slipway into the frigid Atlantic.

    I would lie on my cot at night with my hands outside the sleeping bag to get some relief from the heat and throbbing caused by all the bruises, lacerations, and blisters. We learned that long sculling oars are blister-making machines, and so are wet lines and galvanised chain. The school's boats had no motors, and there was not a winch or windlass to be found anywhere.

Jack Pelorus dices with death:

Hides are the very devil to load, and their stink is not to be credited. It took three days to cram Ardent's hold with them, and every evening we dallied long at the Kings, the famous old inn in Donaghadee, sleeping in the tap, with a watchman left to brave the stench. But at last we had the hatch down and battened and Ardent ready for sea. She lay head-in, and the breeze was a faint westerly. We brailed the main and hoisted the staysail. By backing the staysail to larboard, then easing away on doubled bow and stern lines, we drifted her a couple of fathoms out from the quay, then let go both lines. Once the backed staysail had blown her bows to starboard, Caleb and I ran up and backed the jib. Mulgrew and Jarge the mate let fall the main and hauled out the clew to the boom-end. The mainsheet had been overhauled and lay slack on the deck, so that the main blew out to starboard and ruffled powerlessly until the headsails had brought the wind abaft the smack's beam and the main began to draw.

Jenny goes to sea:

One of the bonuses of joining the Common Market was that for the first time ever there was a sale for the queen scallop. These had hitherto been seen as a nuisance. When they became valuable it was bonanza time. For a short period a fifty-foot boat could make £1000 per day, which was big money in the times when a pint cost 30p. Fortunes were made.

    News of this easy way of getting rich reached Jenny, and he decided he wanted in. His complete lack of any sea or commercial fishing experience did not seem a barrier to him. After all, the tree surgeon game had been easy to pick up: he and his mate Jimmy Spencer had just bought a van, chainsaws, ladders and whatnot, put on some lumberjack shirts, and pretty soon they had been making decent money. Why should this fishing malarky be any different?

 Nicolette Milnes Walker becomes the first woman to sail the Atlantic singlehanded and non-stop:

A light aircraft sped over the wave tops and passed immediately above me. I waved. It circled and came over again and continued to make passes over the boat. I guessed that it was taking photographs of me and was rather flattered by such attentions, but I soon got bored with waving and wished that he would go away so that I could be sick in private. I went below and soon he went away. I know now that he was supposed to film my departure with all the boats for television, and that he was heartily cursed for being late.

 John Greene on a family holiday in 1937:

After a total of three months spread over three years, well over a thousand miles and probably nearly as many locks, the crew in general and the Skipper in particular had become experienced amateur navigators of the canals of England and Wales. They had traversed many tunnels, both short and long, and the Skipper must have known by now that the longest canal tunnel in the country at over three miles, as well as the highest and deepest underground, was the Standedge Tunnel in the West Riding of Yorkshire.

 Julian Blatchley returns to steam:

I grew up at Windermere, and have known of Steam Yacht Gondola on nearby Coniston Water since I was a child. She is unique now, the only one of the Lakes 'steamers' still powered by steam. And unique she always has been – a quirky, elegant silhouette with a low hull, a domed cabin and a raked, spindly funnel. The graceful sheer of her deck rises smoothly to her serpent figurehead, and she trails a feather of steam as she glides beneath the glorious Coniston mountains. Magnificent! However, she measures 48 tons grt, is eighty-five feet long, and carries a maximum of eighty-six people. The last vessel I handled had been over 300,000 dwt, 335 metres in length, and carried more than 300,000 cubic metres of cargo. Take a charity wage for running a tourist attraction? And Coniston is in the old Lancashire, a strange place for people who like me are of Westmorland and Yorkshire stock! I politely and insincerely promised to think about it. When I woke next morning I was mildly surprised to find the idea had not departed overnight....

 Will Darby finally makes it to Kali Island:

A warm light was glowing through the khaki polyester wall a few inches from my nose. Slipping outside, I was surprised to see that the sun was already well up. The tide was almost high again, and the wind of the previous night had died away completely, leaving a bright smooth sea laid out to the east, a pattern of islands spread across it.

Within an hour Alex and Adie had risen, the boat had been refloated, the tent collapsed and the seven of us were back in our positions on board. This time there was no lurking fear of death on the high seas, but instead a collective unease over the fact that our guides didn’t know exactly where we were. We agreed we needed to be more to the east of our current position. We turned northeast to pick up our last course through the Strait, and I watched our beautiful pit-stop island slip from view astern.

 Captain J H A Willis joins the Navy in 1879:

It was in November 1879 that I came to London for my examination and in due course received an appointment as supernumerary assistant clerk to h.m.s. Duke of Wellington, the guardship at Portsmouth, ‘to await disposal.’

The eventful January 15th arrived, and, in the glory of my new uniform, preceded by a man wheeling my sea chest on a truck, I went down Broad Street to Point, and embarked in a wherry. In those days all liberty men were landed there, and as it was about 5 p.m., I met hundreds of bluejackets. Tall, thin, and very shy and self-conscious in my brand-new uniform, I was made more so by the sailors, who, all seeing my chest on the truck, realised what a greenhorn I was. The first group called to the rest, in a terrifying voice, 'Attention! Salute!' and this diversion was repeated by all the subsequent ones. To all I lifted my hat and bowed, as to a lady acquaintance, with as much self-possession as I could assume.

 John Cameron commands the last MTB to leave Dunkirk:

My boat was ‘experimental’, possessing one propeller, no reverse gear and a turning circle of phenomenal diameter which made manoeuvring in a confined space a matter of· extreme delicacy. In addition, our single engine had to be induced to start by compressed air. It was frequently temperamental and the air bottles leaked; consequently once this thunderous piece of marine ironmongery had been set in motion we were loath to stop it.

     As night fell we slipped from Shikari and proceeded noisily under our own power, approaching Dunkirk by the usual and now familiar route. The night was very dark and full of rushing shapes, all of which appeared to be coming directly at us. These were the last of the rescue ships completing their final task. The flames over the city did not seem so fierce as the night before, but the pall of smoke, which none who saw will ever forget, still streamed westward from the dying town, and the ring of gun-flashes had closed in in an ever-narrowing semicircle. It was plain that the end could not now be far off.

 Emily Painter follows a sperm whale into the deeps:

A rippling convulsion of the great body, a kick of the huge horizontal tail flukes, and the enormous forehead cleaves the sea. Down he flies into the deep, towing a silver plume of bubbles through a shoal of mackerel. The shoal flits away, but he pays no attention; his plan lies far below. The sunlight fades as the shadows rise to meet him....

And of course there are Flotsam and Jetsam, North Sea News, the beautiful illustrations of Claudia Myatt and the musings of the tugmaster and tobacco smuggler Ray Doggett

Extracts Spring 2023

Islands, pearling, privateers…

Nicholas Tracy goes sailing:

Waves from eighteen to twenty-five feet and wind speeds from thirty-four to forty knots were very difficult conditions for a 22-foot yacht. If the wind had increased above that there would have been great danger from breaking waves. We drove before the wind, easterly along the line of Cornish cliffs, about six miles off. Without a detailed chart east of Newquay we were unable to identify our location exactly, but I knew enough about the coast to believe there was no safe harbour. The description of the coast in the Admiralty Pilot was no help. It was then that I discovered that Philip had left the radio direction finder turned on at Ballyhack. The new battery I had put in Ireland was now flat, so there was no chance of getting a fix by taking a bearing on St. Mawgan air beacon. 

'Then was there tumult,' wrote the Anglo-Saxon author of the Andrias. 'The sea was stirred. The horn-fish played, gliding through the deep, and above circled the grey sea-mew, greedy of prey. The sun grew dark and the winds arose.

The Tucker family visits some unfrequented islands:

It was a spectacular landfall. We had chosen to make some westing north of the rhumb in an effort to avoid the widest zone of doldrums. The island rises almost sheer from the equatorial Pacific. Waterfalls cascaded down the rock faces, surrounded by the kind of green lushness we had not seen since leaving Panama a week earlier. The opening sequences of Jurassic Park give a helicopter-eye view of this spectacular jungle-clad island. Our own arrival was rather more sedate – a tentative call on Channel 16 for permission to briefly anchor to repair a masthead light.

     We were later to realise that none of the year’s cohort of Pacific skippers had any idea of the existence or location of this former pirate island, which we had randomly decided to visit en route to French Polynesia.

Billy 'Scratch' Hitchen goes fishing:

The wind had increased a bit from the west throughout the day. This made an awkward sea with the westgoing tide, but it did improve when the tide turned east. St Peter Port had given out gale warnings for most of the day, but this was not unusual, and a gale-force wind was no reason to stop fishing. We had ten days to get a trip in, and we certainly did not want to lose a day.

Julian Blatchley rides a tankerload of gasoline through a war zone:

From the sailor's perspective the tanker war had two sides. The first was the export of oil from Iran's Persian Gulf coast. This trade sailed close to the eastern shore of the Persian Gulf and was prey to the Iraqi air force, which possessed anti-ship missiles. To protect newer ships, opportunistic shipowners, a great many of them Greek, retained or bought tankers ready for the scrapheap, manned them with piratical crews and kept them in the war zone, where their condition and often dubious documentation were unlikely to attract much official scrutiny. They shuttled oil between the Iranian ports and the anchorage at Fujairah, where their cargoes were transhipped into more regulated tonnage for export. It attracted sailors who wanted money, promotion, or who were clinging to the old, unregulated days of shipping.

 Sixteen British seamen go a-privateering:

Previous to the arrival of Lord Cochrane’s fleet on the coast of Chili, privateering was nearly at its height in the South American seas, and it is to that period, viz. in 1818, that the following isolated passage of history belongs.

     Soon after Valparaiso had fallen into the hands of the revolutionary forces, a few British seamen resolved to set up as privateers on the Chilian and Peruvian coasts. With this in view, having in the first instance, procured the governor’s licence, they purchased an old West Indian drugger boat, as sorry looking a craft as ever ventured a league to sea, but the small stock of dollars which they had succeeded in scraping together did not enable them to purchase one better fitted for their purpose.

 Gordon Davies explores the history of the diving bell:

Throughout history, people have sought their fortunes on the seas, perhaps trading peacefully, perhaps exploiting the lands of other people, or perhaps by the hard graft of fishing. For those with the courage to go under the seas, wealth might be far closer, perhaps only ten metres away, but there was a formidable barrier to reaching it.  As the Ballad of Gresham College put it in 1663:

‘...gentlemen, 'tis no small matter / To make a man breath under water.’

 Jon Idriess joins the Broome pearl divers:

It was a beautiful day in August 1916. The sea was lazily rolling in light waves suggestive of dreamy coolness. The Sulituan, under jib and mainsail, drifting along with tide, seemed the only thing upon the ocean. One of Gregory's fleet, she was as pretty a picture as a pearler could wish to see.

     But Jitaro Naka the diver was not thinking about prettiness; his mind was upon the bottom of the sea and the shell he hoped to find there. For the bigger the take of shell the bigger is the diver's cheque when the lay-up season comes. And the Tables of Chance love the diver with money.

 Ian Dear on the Invergordon Mutiny:

Invergordon did not come out of the blue. In 1919 a dispute arose when inflation hit the pittance the lower deck was paid. It was eventually settled, but the Navy’s system for expressing grievances was ineffectual, and a lingering resentment and distrust remained. At the same time some ships refused to fight revolutionary Russian forces in the Baltic after the government reneged on its promise to use only volunteers.

     By 1925 inflation had turned to deflation, and the government’s decision to reduce naval pay by 25% for both officers and men meant the lowest paid suffered the most. A crisis was only averted by a compromise: seamen already serving would retain their daily rate, but those joining after October 1925 would be paid 25% less – three shillings per day instead of four. This compromise had consequences. In April 1931, when the international financial crisis was at its deepest, an Economy Committee under Sir George May began reviewing all government spending. May’s report was later condemned by the economist John Maynard Keynes as being ‘the most foolish document it has ever been my misfortune to read’.

 Ian Nicolson on fire at sea:

Wherever she sailed in the Mediterranean the ketch Greek Goddess was admired. She was nearly a hundred feet overall, her hull was low and slinky, and her slim wooden masts reached to the clouds. It must, however, be admitted that the beauty of this yacht did not stand up to a close inspection. She had been built of wood – not very long ago, but even so her topsides seams all showed. The varnishwork was yellowing and peeling, some of the stanchions were bent, and their bases were green with mould. You did not need to be a surveyor to see she needed more loving care than she was getting.

The owner, Mahmoud, combined an expensive lifestyle with a chronic shortage of money....

 Richard Beioley reviews the story of a true pioneer:

The Epic Voyage of the Seven Little Sisters by William Willis is the account or the author's 6700-mile expedition across the Pacific by raft in 1954. Self-built from seven huge balsa logs lashed together with inch-and- a-quarter manila rope, she measured thirty-three feet by twenty, and carried a square sail on a bipod foremast and a small mizzen aft. On this ungainly craft the 61-year-old Willis planned to sail from Callao on the coast or Peru northwest to the Galapagos, then westward via the Marquesas to Samoa.

… and of course there are Flotsam and Jetsam, an interview with the MQ’s favourite oligarch in which he proposes the privatisation of the oceans, books old and new, the beautiful illustrations of Claudia Myatt, excitement, reflection and blasts of salt spray and fresh air….

Extracts Winter 2022

Sea snakes, square rig, Jutland, Scilly….

Nick Skeats hits the rocks:

The yacht was doomed. But where exactly where they? As they looked around, the fog thinned just enough for them to make out the lighthouse of North Astrolabe Reef about a mile and a half away. Nick took a compass bearing and they launched their seven-and-a-half-foot pram dinghy. They could not take much stuff – some water, food, a set of oilskins and boots each, two bottles of whisky and a ukulele. Loaded down with this lot they pushed off, rowing desperately in the force six. They eventually reached the lighthouse, found a place to land and pulled the tender ashore.

According to the literature, the lighthouse was manned; but it seemed to be empty, at least of humans. The reason for this was that at this precise time of year a particularly venomous form of sea snake traditionally conducted its reproductive activities on that island, and the lighthouse keepers had found it was safer to abandon the joint than try and live with the creatures.

 Will Darby voyages in the South Seas:

The dawn sounds of the bush came softly on the air, the echoing screeches of parakeets and the hum and whistle of insects intermittently muffled by the crunch of the tiny waves on the coarse white sand. For a few moments nobody spoke. The village was invisible behind the curtain of jungle lining the riverbank. Its only giveaway was a wisp of woodsmoke that drifted skyward from an unseen kitchen house, swirling silently with the mists that were now rising from the treetops, before being lost amongst the green slopes of the extinct volcano that makes up Kolombangara Island, almost always shrouded in shifting, glinting cloud, a massive cloaked watcher peering out over the sea.

 Geoff Mellor discusses mud:

I had heard many stories of deep-laden barges sticking in the mud and failing to float on an incoming tide, but it had never occurred to me that my own meagre possessions might have the same effect as 130 tons of bricks. Casting what I hoped looked like a casual glance over the side, I saw that the tide was indeed two feet over Ethel Ada’s marks, and still rising. Keeping my face straight, I went forward and picked up the sledgehammer that is basic equipment on a barge. Then, radiating confidence as best I could, I climbed aloft and smote the top of the mainmast a mighty blow. Much to my surprise and relief there was an enormous whoosh, and Ethel Ada flew into the air, landed back alongside the Anglia, and floated happily, bang on her marks.

 Gordon Davies tells the story of the 'Great Western':

Her engines fitted and tested, Great Western steamed for Bristol on 31 March 1838. At Gravesend the vips on board were rowed ashore to return to London. The Great Western continued for Bristol. The machinery had now run for longer than on test, and it transpired that there was a problem. The boilers had been lagged to conserve heat, and there was some grease on the lagging. The Great Western’s chief engineer, George Pearne, recorded in his log ‘a fire broke out in the region of the chimney, from the oil in the felt on the steam chests having ignited, which threatened destruction to the ship . . . the steam was generating fast from the flames round the upper part of boilers’. The boilers, designed for very low excess pressure, were now at risk of exploding. A few boilermen fled in a dinghy, but most of the crew, led by Christopher Claxton, fought back, and ‘all hands bailing, pumping, etc, succeeded in extinguishing the fire.’

 Wilfred Thesiger goes to sea:

I had read Eothen and other tales of Eastern travel and my imagination endowed Constantinople with all the magic of the East. Samarkand, Merv and Bokhara were inaccessible but Constantinople was within my reach. I went there during my first summer vacation from Oxford, working my passage in a tramp steamer bound for the Black Sea.

 Julian Blatchley solves a pipeline problem:

Peering aft into the grey of the dawn I could see the orange-striped main section of the hose lying docile and straight astern, undulating gently in the long ocean swell. The marker buoys which allowed the retrieval of the hose-end lifting chains were floating normally. The restraining wire connected to the hose where it touched the water was in place and lightly tensioned. All seemed well.

I was about to turn away when I noticed a splash erupt from one side of the hose about five sections out from the stern. As I watched it happened again, then again. I went back to my office for my binoculars; but I knew what it was before I focussed. There was a marlin stuck in the hose.

 George Fairhurst takes command of a square-rigger:

We set about turning the Phoenix round. The dock is about 110 feet wide and Phoenix is 112 feet long, so given the overhang of the bowsprit and a full dock to get her up as high as possible it should be simple enough – though she weighs eighty tonnes, so if our gentle manoeuvre went wrong the bowsprit would snap like a carrot. Quietly and with little fuss, ropes were singled up, springs laid out and inflatable engines started in case we needed a push. I imagined we might start the main engine, but Pete the mate gently suggested it would not be needed, and quietly walked forward to manage the bow lines. With minimum fuss and even less noise, her bow swung into a great arc out in the dock. Lines were surged and hauled. The huge wicker fender creaking under her stern to keep her rudder off the wall was persuaded to stay engaged by heavy kicking. Ninety degrees came and went; a little nudging from the dotty boat, and round she came.

 Neil Munro runs into Para Handy:

The Vital Spark, I confessed, was well known to me as the most uncertain puffer that ever kept the Old New Year in Upper Lochfyne.

‘That wass her!’ said Macfarlane, almost weeping. ‘There was never the bate of her, and I have sailed in her four years over twenty with my hert in my mooth for fear of her boiler. If you never saw the Fital Spark, she is aal hold, with the boiler behind, four men and a derrick, and a watter-butt and a pan loaf in the foc'sle. Oh man! she wass the beauty! She was chust sublime! She should be carryin' nothing but gentry for passengers, or nice genteel luggage for the shooting-lodges, but there they would be spoilin' her and rubbin' all the pent off her with their coals, and sand, and whunstone, and oak bark, and timber, and trash like that.’

‘I understood she had one weakness at least, that her boiler was apt to prime.’

‘It's a lie,’ cried Macfarlane, quite furious; ‘her boiler never primed more than wance a month, and that wass not with fair play. If Dougie wass here he would tell you. I wass ass prood of that boat ass the Duke of Argyll, ay, or Lord Breadalbane.

 Rozelle Raynes goes to sea with the WRNS:

On Monday afternoon Winkle and I set to work on the cutter with the Kelvin engine. It was in a filthy condition and we spent several hours scrubbing the decks and thwarts, cleaning out the bilges, mending the bilge pump and polishing all the brasswork. It was suppertime by then, and we felt it wiser to give evasive answers to the others, who showed a certain curiosity about our disappearance.

Having made the cutter shine and sparkle with soap and polish, we could hardly contain ourselves until we came on duty again. It would then be up to me to plumb the depths of my meagre knowledge to get the engine running. Back in our boat, my brain felt like a vaporous whirlpool. Treating engines like human beings seemed to me of paramount importance. As a first step, for this one had obviously been neglected and maltreated over a long period, Winkle cleaned down the outside with cotton-waste soaked in paraffin while I changed the oil in the sump, cleaned the jets, took the sparking-plugs to a garage to be sandblasted and examined the magneto with a morbid fascination. Electrics were a closed book to me, so I telephoned to Margaret and she promised to meet me at the dance at the Guildhall that night and unfold some of the mysteries of what induces an engine to spark.

It turned out to be an uproarious evening, with half the crew of Abatos inviting us to take the floor in quick succession. As a result I only gained some fragmentary hints about the interior of a magneto, and it was nearly the end of my first week at Squid before I considered the engine in a fit state to respond to the starting-handle.

 John Muir visits a director tower at Jutland:

He ran up the bridge ladders and finally reached the upper bridge, where the captain and navigating officer, officer of the watch, and signalmen were busy getting ready to go down to the armoured conning-tower. Above him towered the foremast, a central thick steel tube supported by two smaller steel tubes running down and outwards to the deck. On the after side of the central tube steel rungs were let into the mast. Seizing hold of these, he climbed rapidly upwards until he reached the trapdoor communicating with the top. Pushing up the door, he pulled himself bodily upwards and at last stood on the platform, 120 feet above the level of the sea.

He was in a circular box about ten feet in diameter, covered with a roof and with bulwarks rising breast-high all the way round. His duty was spotting for the secondary armament. To assist him there were two other officers and eight men acting as range-takers, messengers, timekeepers, and in charge of deflection instruments. He gave the range for the guns to the transmitting station, watched the fall of the shot, estimated its distance over or short of the target, and supplied the necessary corrections. As it was useless to expect that firing the secondary guns would be of any value until the range came down to about 12,000 yards, or to repel destroyer or light cruiser attack, there would be a long interval of waiting before he would have anything to do. Meanwhile, he went round the instruments and saw that they were all in working order, tested the voice-tubes, and gave hints and instructions to his subordinates.

The sky was rapidly becoming more overcast and the clouds were lower, although the horizon was still plainly visible. A message came up the voice-tube from the conning-tower, warning him to keep a sharp lookout on the port bow, as the enemy battlecruisers should be shortly sighted proceeding in a northerly direction.

 Vyvyen Brendon describes her Scillonian ancestors:

In 1680 Trinity House had commissioned the building of St Agnes lighthouse on the highest point of this low-lying island, the last inhabited landfall before America, to warn ships of rocks which sent in ‘more wrecks of ships by the sea than to any other of the Scilly Islands’. Despite objections that such a beacon would deprive Scillonians of the salvage which made ‘some amends for the forlornness of their abode’, the round white tower was erected by the end of the year. Its light was provided by a coal fire in an iron brazier, which required ‘much care . . . to keep a good light’ – there are possibly apocryphal stories that the first keeper, Samuel Hocken, let it die down deliberately on the approach of a Virginia trader, and even took part in the subsequent plunder. Whether this was true or not, the Elder Brethren of Trinity House in their wisdom resolved never thenceforward to appoint a Scillonian to the post on account of the islanders’ ‘former piracies’.

 The Cox'n bails a whaler:

The weekend had started bright and clear, but as the day progressed the weather deteriorated and it was now blowing hard and pouring with rain. At this point the coxswain of the local pilot boat reported that just off the Forts was a Royal Navy whaler sitting full of water with its gunwales awash, and what appeared to be eight persons on board trying to bail it out. The pilot boat was escorting a supertanker, and could not abandon his duties to render assistance; so he informed the coastguard, who notified the Queen's Harbour Master, who dispatched a police launch to investigate and tasked our lifeboat to render assistance.

… and of course there are Flotsam and Jetsam, an interview with an oligarch in which he reflects on the joys or otherwise of yacht ownership, books old and new, the beautiful illustrations of Claudia Myatt, excitement, reflection and blasts of salt spray and fresh air…. 

Extracts Autumn 2022

Shipwrecks, ferries, shellfish, lifeboats…..

A night to remember for Tony Higgins:

The night had become very dark and cloudy, with both wind and sea rapidly rising. The Northeast Providence Channel was narrowing as it approached its western apex, with coral-headed banks closing in on both sides. By that time we were sailing hard on the wind, holding a dr course that I hoped was somewhat to weather of the still invisible Northwest Channel light. I was concerned that our leeway, combined with the beam-on wave action, might have pushed the boat well to leeward of the course, possibly pushing us in on the edge of the bank to the south, just out of range of the light. My forebodings were soon proved correct. 

We hit hard, were lifted by the beam seas, and dropped hard again as they rolled under us.

 Nicholas Gray explains how he acquired his sextant:

The u-boat was badly shaken and suffered near-terminal damage,including a cracked pressure hull, which began to leak badly. Oberleutnant Gengelbach, realising the boat's plight was hopeless and refusing to countenance a surrender, decided to go down bravely and honourably with his crew. Engineer Oberleutnant Laurenz, however, thought otherwise. Drawing his Mauser pistol he faced his commander and told him that while there was indeed severe electrical and hull damage, the diesel engines were still operational and there was still compressed air available. He believed it would be possible to surface and get away in the remaining darkness.

 Julian Blatchley copes with dirty work at the crossroads:

When I was a lad dreaming of a life at sea, Britain had aspirations to marine excellence, and Britons were conscious and proud of their country's maritime history. I grew up with merchant seaman role models – Carlsen of the Flying Enterprise; Parker and Dancy of the Turmoil; Lightoller of the Titanic and Rostron of the Carpathia; Pollard and Hawkins of the San Demetrio, Mason of the Ohio. Then there were Coxswain Evans of Moelfre and Coxswain Blogg of the Cromer Lifeboat, both bywords for courage and initiative. The staunch obduracy of the convoy men still resonated. The sea was still a frontier, where law was not yet absolute, nature only partly tamed, and manly deeds rose above knavery and ill circumstance. Ships were expected to come to grief from time to time, and sharp practice was deplored but expected. There were heroes, and there were villains, and a seaman perhaps had to be a bit of both.

It is not so today.

 John White builds a half-model of his old boat:

I remember scouring boatyards with my girlfriend Mary in 1966, looking for a modest sailing cruiser. After a few weeks it was becoming clear that we could not afford any yacht that could stay afloat outside a mud berth, and we were becoming dispirited. On the way to a boatyard in Lymington to view a particularly drab plywood cruiser, however, we saw laid up in a garden the most beautiful yacht I had ever set eyes on, long and lean, with a beautiful sheer. Her name was Alpenrose. Pausing only to dismiss the plywood firewood at the boatyard, we enquired about the boat in the garden. They told us that it was owned by Roger Pinckney, a well-known yachtsman who had previously owned the famous Dyarchy, in which he had pioneered Channel cruising in the years after the war. Now, it seemed, he was swallowing the anchor and had put Alpenrose up for sale.

 The Cox'n answers a shout:

One breezy summer’s day the duty lookout at a coastal observation station observed a thirty-two-foot sailing yacht, all sails set, apparently sailing round in small circles. As the boat came up into the wind the sails would flutter; then it would continue its turn and bear away. With the wind now on the beam it made rapid progress, only to continue its turn until it was again heading into the wind, where almost all motion halted and the process began all over again.

This was not a usual activity. Binoculars, brought up to get a better view, revealed the skipper seated in the cockpit, making no signs of distress and thus apparently happy with the situation. The watch monitored the craft for some time as it continued these slow gyrations. After discussion, it was agreed that the coastguard should be notified, and a telephone call was duly made.

 Puggy Dimmond gets afloat:

A man of simple philosophy, old Puggy Dimmond hadn't really a care in the world. Although by modern standards his material comforts were few, there was little he had to worry about. A convenient tide line provided him with firewood in addition to the occasional yacht's dinghy, timber, kegs, oars, spars, fenders, lifejackets and other sundry flotsam and jetsam, which he bartered or sold. This, together with a modest income derived from fishing and wildfowling in their seasons, supplied his frugal wants – mainly tobacco and rum. Blessed with a strong constitution, he was a contented, robust old man who enjoyed an independent, happy-go-lucky, rates-free existence aboard Sea Witch, the rotting hulk that was his home.

And then one day a letter arrived, which threw this even tenor into sudden confusion and alarm.

 Jack Pelorus becomes a smuggler:

Talk of smuggling in England is usually of Kent, and Sussex, and the west country; but nowhere in the realm has it lasted so long nor bloomed so freely as on the margins of Lakeland, where the tides are fierce, villages scarce and the coast unpeopled. Folk were sparse outside Whitehaven, Maryport, Ulverston and Workington, and those there were did not see it as crime to avoid duty set in Whitehall. They also knew each other, so that no riding officer or gauger could hope to gather a whisper or move unseen. And a bare ten leagues over the water lay Man, the Warehouse of Fraud.

I grew up among the barge-sloops on Windermere and Coniston. From a child I knew that the free trade flowed around me – and at times, when my father was prevailed upon to lodge a cargo in our cellar, even beneath me. This he did as a favour to Captain John Cobb, master of the famous smack Ardent. It seemed to me the finest thing imaginable to sail in such a ship, so when I turned eighteen I followed a packhorse train over Wrynose and Hardknott to Whitehaven, where I found both man and boat in a drying berth on Bransty Beach.

 Anthony Dew joins his ship:

I joined Roybank in the Port of London in late March 1969 and we sailed a week later, on April Fool’s Day. I was fresh from apprenticeship, and this was my first proper job as third mate. The first person I met on board was the second mate, Colin, a good-natured chap about the same age as me. It would have been his first trip as Third Mate too, but he had been bumped up when the previous Second Mate quit after an argument with the Mate, during which he was reported to have said, ‘I’m not sailing with that twat.’ He had then flounced off the ship, leaving behind a terrible mess.

 Alastair Robertson explains Scotland's ferry disasters:

It probably doesn’t matter in the long run who is responsible for the Scottish ferries fiasco. By the time the inevitable public inquiry is over, apologies made, names named and 'lessons learned', it will have assumed much the same status as the Schleswig-Holstein Question, of which Lord Palmerston sighed: 'Only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor, who became mad. I am the third, and I have forgotten all about it.' None of which is much help to 45,000 Hebridean islanders beset by ferry breakdowns in an ageing fleet and deep uncertainty over suitable replacements.

 Ian Dear investigates some of the history of the RYS:

Rivalry amongst members as to the speed and design of their yachts came to influence the Navy’s design of its vessels. Three years after William iv became King in 1830 he stated the Club was of ‘national utility’ and directed it be known as The Royal Yacht Squadron. This rivalry led members to acquire some notoriously speedy smugglers’ boats, and the equally speedy revenue cutters that chased them. Lord Uxbridge went one further when he sought out Philip Sainty of Wivenhoe – described by one source as ‘a man of unknown origin, polygamous habits, and a confirmed smuggler, but very expert as a boat-builder’ – to build him a cutter. He found Sainty was in gaol for smuggling, and immediately procured a royal pardon for him. Sainty, however, refused to cooperate until royal pardons were also procured for his brother and brother-in-law, who were under lock and key for the same offence.

 Martin Llewellyn investigates shellfish farming:

In 2006 researchers dredged up an ocean quahog clam (Articus icelandius) from the chilly waters around Iceland. They called her Hafrún. Her life was cut short when a graduate student flash-froze her little body in liquid nitrogen and neatly sliced her shell, whose growth rings held a fabulous secret: Hafrún had settled out of the plankton to begin her modest but tenacious existence in the year of our Lord 1499. Think of her next time you tuck into a clam chowder.

Not all shellfish grow so old or so slowly, nor, thank goodness, is there a convention to give each of them names. A lot of bivalves actually grow surprisingly fast. A king scallop (Pecten maximus) reaches ‘commercial’ size in about 4-5 years, and the same is roughly true for oysters. Mussels can grow even faster – from spat (the miniature version of themselves that leaves the plankton to adhere to surfaces) to parsley, onion, muscadet and optional dash of cream in fifteen short months. Fortunately, many of our most appetising bivalves are fast-growing. Furthermore they feed on plankton, which keeps feed costs remarkably low; in fact, zero. There is some shellfish farming. But why is there not more? Perhaps because the question is not as simple as it might at first appear.

 Richard Crockatt explores the life and writings of Ann Davison:

Her skipper and husband Frank had fallen unconscious and lost his grip on the float and soon after that his life. Ann had resigned herself to a similar fate when a wave that should have been the end of her ‘thundered down on the float’ and woke her ‘from oblivion to anger’.

Still clutching the float, she was entirely at the mercy of wind, waves and tides. She was dragged far out to sea, then back towards the shore on the west side of the Bill, where in one of those unaccountable miracles of survival a huge wave picked her up and deposited her on a rock by the shore. Crawling to a neighbouring rock as yet another wave broke over her, she worked towards a cavern she had glimpsed, whose floor was above the level of the water. ‘Then,’ she recalled, ‘I was standing in the cave.’ After some moments of dazed indecision she found a way along the coast to a point where she could scale the cliffs. Her ordeal was over.

 … and of course there are Flotsam and Jetsam, an interview with an oligarch in which he reflects on the joys or otherwise of yacht ownership, books old and new, the beautiful illustrations of Claudia Myatt, excitement, reflection and blasts of salt spray and fresh air….

Extracts Summer 2022

Cruising, boatbuilding, fighting....

Tom Cunliffe reconsiders ocean cruising:

Two weeks out from Nantucket Shoals. Noon. Running hard with a couple of reefs in the main, full staysail and spitfire jib. Westernman is in the North Atlantic Drift, still over a thousand miles from Falmouth. In the reasonable weather since the last gale we have sighted Portuguese men-of-war, turtles and the occasional flying fish drastically astray from his proper place. This morning a male orca stormed by, powering to windward at twelve knots in the direction of a group of smaller killer whales we passed at dawn. Right now, however, things are turning to the bad.  

 Julian Blatchley tells the story of the Copra Run:

Loading between 15,000 and 18,000 tons of highly varied cargo in between five and ten ports so that it could be discharged without being obstructed in another five or ten ports was no simple matter, and it was perhaps here the true lost art of the cargo ship was to be found. Outward cargoes were almost inconceivably varied, since they comprised absolutely anything that could be imagined to be needed in the remote vastness of the South Pacific. Motor cars, trucks and tractors were lashed in the tweendecks together with stationery, machinery of all sorts, spare parts, batteries, rolls of newsprint, tinned foods, household goods and materials. The special cargo lockers bulged with tobacco, wines and spirits, and the latest fashions. The ships had strongrooms where currency minted in London for the outposts of Empire was secured behind steel doors which were then welded shut and sealed by grim officials. There were also the personal effects of people being posted to or from the Islands, including on one occasion a grand piano, which led to a lively discussion in the bar about how far out of tune it would be after being loaded in sub-zero Hamburg and discharged in tropical Lae, and how far the nearest piano-tuner would have to travel to attend to it.

 Augustine Courtauld goes to war:

My crew always said that if we ever picked up a German airman there was nothing they wouldn’t do to him. One day we did pick up a German near Dungeness. He was an officer who had commanded a bomber which was brought down on its way back from a raid on London, and he was wearing the Iron Cross. I gave my revolver to Jock Lamont, telling him to take the man for’ard and bring me anything he had got. When we got back to Dover I handed over to my coxswain and went down to the forecastle to have a look at the prisoner. I asked Jock how he was doing. The answer was, 'Ssh, sir! We’ve given him a nice cup of tea and he’s just gone off to sleep.' When we had landed our officer, he was marched off by an armed guard of soldiers with fixed bayonets. My crew thought it was very cruel.

 Max Liberson, in Carriacou, sets sail for England:

The water was coming in from a place near the mainmast compression post. I put on a mask and slipped over the side. The first place I went to was the flaw in the keel I had noticed halfway between the Canaries and the Cape Verdes. It had never leaked; but now I put my hand in and a fish swam out.  I went ashore. The first person I met was Paul O’Reagan. ‘You look a bit stressed, Max.’

     ‘Yeah, the boat's sinking.’

   Gus showed up and towed us in. The big lifting rig got us out in short order, and hoisted Gloria high in the air. Jerry looked at the hole and put his hand up inside. His fingers came out covered in mud. He sniffed it. ‘Essex mud,' he said. 'It's the only thing that's kept you afloat all this time.’ My legs went a little wobbly.

Gordon Davies on the development of the propeller:

Two types of propeller had been talked about for centuries. One was based on the windmill or its domestic cousin, the smoke-jack – a miniature windmill inside a kitchen chimney, using the updraught from the fire to rotate a spit. The other was derived from the helical Archimedes screw, which had been used for centuries in irrigation systems. In theory, a screw thread fixed to a boat would pull it forwards when it was rotated. It was not, however, until the late 1700s that either type was actually demonstrated on real vessels.

 Ian Nicolson gets round postwar timber shortages:

The tiny drawing office were I worked at was next door to the manager’s office. I often made sure this door was ajar so I could hear Fred Parker, the manager, on the phone or talking to a foreman – I learned a lot about the boat business in that way. When I arrived that morning Fred sent me round the yard to get all the foremen to his office right away. When all five of them were standing round Fred’s desk (there were only two chairs), Fred asked for ideas. Don Farwell, the senior foreman, started right away. He said that when he was taking his greyhounds for country walks he often met farmers, and was friendly with several. 'They’ll sell us trees,' he said.

Gwyn Pugh, the Welsh foreman painter, was a man of few words, but those he used tended to count. 'I know a fellow with a big lorry. He will shift cut-down trees at night if he gets paid in cash.' 

Doug Stratton, the foreman rigger, said: 'I know a few policemen. We can make sure a friendly one is on duty the night we need to move the timber.'

W S Gilbert sings of cannibalism:

'Twas on the shores that round our coast
From Deal to Ramsgate span,
That I found alone on a piece of stone
An elderly naval man.

His hair was weedy, his beard was long,
And weedy and long was he,
And I heard this wight on the shore recite,
In a singular minor key:

‘Oh, I am a cook and a captain bold,
And the mate of the Nancy brig,
And a bo'sun tight, and a midshipmite,
And the crew of the captain's gig.’

 The Scilly postal service is born:

In the nineteenth century, the wildness of Scilly and the remoteness of its position made tasks that would have been daunting on the mainland positively Herculean. One of the labours undertaken by the mighty Augustus Smith, after he had acquired the lease of the islands from the Duchy of Cornwall and set about their reorganization and improvement, was the securing for Scilly of a decent postal service.

     This had nothing to do with the sending of holiday postcards. In the age of sail, ships would arrive suddenly and without warning out of the wastes of the Atlantic, wishing to know to which European port they should carry their cargoes. During the early years of Smith’s tenure, there was no postal service. He complained that this was crippling the islands’ usefulness as a port and therefore their economy, preventing ‘up to two hundred ships’ at a time communicating with their owners. The Post Office refused to supply a service.

 Peter Davies works with superyacht folk:

We arrived at the yacht at the same time as the Customs officers. It took a little while for the owner's wife to remove her four-inch heels, fur coat and Gucci handbag, all of which she left with the stewardess. We crowded into the master cabin while she dialled the combination, opened the safe and took out a blue velvet bag containing a large collection of her jewellery. The grumpy customs officer peered into the now empty safe, thanked her and left. Pocketing the velvet bag, she climbed down the ladders, gathered fur, heels and handbag, and asked me to take her back to the airport, where her jet was waiting to take her home to Germany.

     As we drove back to the shipyard the stewardess said bluntly that British customs officers were stupid. When I asked her why, she said the safe they had inspected was all very well, but they had missed the real safe, which was hidden behind it.

 Graeme Rigby explores the uses of the herring:

There was a time in Britain when the uses of the herring were seen as all-encompassing. The traditional song What'll We Do With The Herring's Head? has as many dialect versions as there are fishing community dialects. Herring's head, loaves of bread / Herring's fins, needles & pins / Herring's eyes, puddings & pies / Herring's belly, jams & jelly (or colour telly)... With at least nine verses, it celebrates the scale of the wealth the herring once created, and the degree to which they underpinned the social order. In one version from the northeast of England, the singers shake hands with the audience between verses: How are ye the day? How are ye the day? / How are ye the day me hinny-o? Herring was the glue which held the community together. Over the centuries, though, the uses of the herring have always gone beyond mere food and wealth creation.

… and of course there are Flotsam and Jetsam, an interview with an oligarch in which he reflects on the joys or otherwise of yacht ownership, books old and new, the beautiful illustrations of Claudia Myatt, excitement, reflection and blasts of salt spray and fresh air….

Extracts Spring 2022

The Gulf Stream, the Barrage, boatyard skulduggery….

Edward Allcard has a spot of bother in the Gulf Stream:

Sights of the sun checked my week’s run through the Horse Latitudes. It was surprising that it was as much as 225 miles, considering the often glassy conditions. Ominous squalls passed me on either side, enabling me to carry light canvas all day. At dusk the boat was snugged down, and she plunged along on her own. Away to the south, uneasy flickering lightning and black clouds gave rather an ominous air to the night, and it looked as if another storm was brewing. I went to tap the barometer, which promptly shot down in an unpleasant manner. What was coming?

 Julian Blatchley navigates in the Doldrums:

In the days of gps the vastness of the Pacific has become a casual metaphor, but in the time before satellites the sheer mind-bending size of that body of water was not underestimated by anyone who knew anything about it. In the Second World War, lines of high-flying patrol aircraft hundreds of miles long searched for days for fleets occupying fifty square miles of sea, and sometimes failed to find them. Majuro is an isolated atoll. Atolls are dreadful radar targets – the human eye sees them well before the radar does. From a low bridge like the Fetuilelagi's you won't see them at anything more than eleven miles. If they are in the glare of a low sun you won't see them at six miles. In rain it might be two miles, and at night not at all.

 Stephen Crane attempts to run guns to Cuba:

On the decks of the Commodore there were exchanges of farewells in two languages. Many of the men who were to sail upon her had intimates in the old Southern town, and we who had left our friends in the remote North received our first touch of melancholy on witnessing these strenuous and earnest good-bys. It seems, however, that there was more difficulty at the custom house. The officers of the ship and the Cuban leaders were detained there until a mournful twilight settled upon the St John’s, and through a heavy fog the lights of Jacksonville blinked dimly. Then at last the Commodore swung clear of the dock, amid a tumult of goodbys. As she turned her bow toward the distant sea the Cubans ashore cheered and cheered. In response the Commodore gave three long blasts of her whistle, which even at this time impressed me with their sadness. Somehow, they sounded as wails.

 Mike Smylie goes fishing along the coasts of Britain:

Clovelly, like Amsterdam, was built upon herring. The shoals came close to the little harbour’s quay end to lay their eggs on the gravelly seabed. It was easy fishing - if there is such a thing - for Clovelly men with their drift-nets and open boats. Nearly three hundred miles to the north, Tarbert sits a neck of land across which Magnus Barefoot, King of Norway was carried in his longship to claim Kintyre as his. This was the birthplace of the ring-net, a seine towed a short distance by a pair of trawl skiffs, then closed to encircle a shoal - not unlike a purse seine, but with no drawstring to close its bottom. This was a deadly method of fishing for Loch Fyne's famously abundant herring, and replaced the older Scottish drift-nets.

 MGBs rescue agents and evaders from occupied France:

From the sea the first indication of approaching land was (with luck) a sudden lessening of the echo-soundings as the mgb passed over the western tip of Le Libenter bank; and then (given more luck) the appearance of La Petite Fourche buoy marking the seaward end of the Aber-Benoit Channel – left there by the Germans to guide local fishing boats, though night fishing was not allowed and the buoy was not lit. From the buoy the gunboat had to make its way into the Aber-Benoit Channel, in some places only a hundred yards wide, and often with breaking water on either side, to the rendezvous anchorage ninety yards off the south-west tip of Île Guennoc.

Aside from the natural dangers, the area selected for the pinpoint was in the middle of a very heavily defended part of the coastline, featuring two batteries of heavy artillery firing seaward from blockhouses, and numerous smaller pillboxes with heavy machine guns.

 Graeme Stones helps build the Thames Barrier:

After several years earning a living as a diver in the coastal waters of the Hebrides, I was hungry for work offshore in the North Sea oilfields - for the challenge, the money, the kudos, the girls in port. Competition to get out there was intense. You couldn't get work offshore unless you had already worked offshore, or unless you made such a nuisance of yourself that someone in the offices finally wearied and threw you a bone, in which case you could be sure it would be a bone that no-one else wanted. I had had good advice from the old hand who had spun the seductive tales about the challenge, the money and the kudos: ‘You keep your bag packed and you sit by the phone. When it rings you just say, "Yes. Yes, I've done that before. Yes, I know all about that. Yes, I can be there yesterday." Don't ask questions, don't be late’. Which is why I found myself one afternoon in Greenwich, with a slippery hint that if I came up to scratch in the Thames the firm might, just might, have something for me offshore. Later. Sometime. Maybe.

 Henry Faire discusses John Clerk of Eldin:

The remarkable change of outcomes of British naval battles that began in  the early 1780s could simply be a result of general experience and the individual inspiration of individual brilliant commanders. One man, however, a less well known figure, has a strong claim to be the originator of this change of tactics: John Clerk of Eldin. Clerk was truly a man of the Enlightenment. He is remembered chiefly as a geologist, anatomist and topographical artist. Arguably, though, his greatest claim to fame is as a naval tactician, although by his own admission his longest sea voyage was a ferry ride to Arran.

 Robert Johnston decides that revenge is a dish best eaten cold:

People must think that owning a small boatyard is an idyllic lifestyle – playing with boats all day long, and on the river when you feel like it. Forget the days when it is pouring with rain and a cold north wind is blowing, or there is a heavy frost on anything you touch. An even worse thing sometimes is the customers.

 Nicki Faircloth tells a story of the wartime canals:

In 1941 the Ministry of Information took an extensive series of photographs of women's war work in this country to send to Russia to show the contribution of British women to the war effort.[1] They are of two slight, often smiling women. One is white-haired, usually in the tiny cabin of a canal boat preparing some food. The other is at the tiller or heaving hundredweight sacks of cargo. They are Margaret and Daphne March, a mother and daughter from Worcester, who worked their boat, the Heather Bell, the length and breadth of the canal system, carrying coal, flour and anything else that could be transported by boat. Margaret, the widow of a Worcester solicitor, was 61, Daphne 25. After reading French at Oxford, she taught in London and drove an ambulance in the Blitz. They were my grandmother and mother.

 Captain Massam takes a shipful of refugees to Russia in 1914:

I had 5 first class, 79 second & 457 third class total of 541 passengers & a crew of 54. After breakfast was over I went on my official visit & was not much impressed with the 3rd class for they appeared to be very poor & almost destitute chattering and gesticulating in Russian & nearly scared to death, however I spent a long time amongst them & my presence certainly quieted them somewhat. I then went through 2nd class who appeared to be mostly students & a more unmannerly lot of young men it has never been my lot to meet. They were almost ruffians; not one of them would speak anything but Russian although there were many that could speak English & German as I fully proved later during the voyage. The Doctor came along and told they were saying all kinds of insulting things so I left them.

 Jo Stanley tracks down the first woman yachtmasters:

‘I believe the first lady owner to pass the Board of Trade examination for yacht-master was Lady Ernestine Hunt’, wrote the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News. Ernestine Brudenell-Bruce was ‘neither handsome nor beautiful, but if . . . [Scottish] would be called "sonsie" as . . . [she had] bright eyes, a clear skin, and a look of much intelligence’ the Tatler later announced. The eldest daughter of the Marquess and Marchioness of Ailesbury, '[Her] ability in handling a yacht is said to be almost equal to that of the most experienced "old salt" who ever went to sea’, marvelled one of the many articles extolling her as part of the new breed of huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ females.

 … and of course there are Flotsam and Jetsam, the musings of the ghastly Captain Ray Doggett, the beautiful illustrations of Claudia Myatt, excitement, reflection and blasts of salt spray and fresh air….

Extracts Winter 2021

Cape Horn, Madeira, the Beast and early steam...

 Captain Klebingat rounds the Horn:

I will try to give you an account of Beating around the Horn bound westward. Basil Lubbock says, that the winter of 1905 was especially bad, as I was deakboy in a full rigged ship, and my first trip to sea, allow me to talk about that winter on the Horn.

     The preparation made in any ship making a westward passage are worth recording. Somewheres off the River Plate as we call it we would run into the doldrumms, that is the time, all your old patched and quilted sails you had used in the trades had to come down and replaced with the best set, mostly brand new. Of course you carried at least 3 suits ot sails, and probably of lower topsails about 4 suits. That is in a well fitted out ship as the one I was in. In the trades all footropes and blocks had been overhauled, new gear was rove off. All Spare spars all ships carried some, were doubly secured with extra lashings. All hatches had an other layer of 3 by 12 planks lashed on top, to make doubly sure that no hatch could be stove in. All hatch wedges were secured by sowing them in canvass, that no sea could wash them away, and free the hatch battens. And last on either side along the maindeck, a wire manrope was stretched tight from foreward to aft.

W E Sinclair goes looking for Madeira:

We timed our watches from the chronometers of two British steamers that we boarded in Vigo Bay. The first of these was a respectable boat and therefore took but a mild interest in us. The second was a disreputable collier from Cardiff and the crew took us to their hearts and blacked us all over. The captain gave us the time and some biscuits and he sold us some lime juice and tobacco. He showed us his book in which he worked out the ship’s position day by day and pointed out a method of shortening our work. This method we soon adopted.

     The first mate spent a couple of hours in the Joan’s cabin one evening giving us tips and yarns. He wondered how we ever got to Vigo and did his best to frighten us out of our wits.

‘Look here, my boys, I’m going to talk straight to you two and I shall be very blunt about it. You spoke about going to Madeira. Don’t you attempt it. It’s not like finding your way to Vigo. That was a straightforward proposition because you had only to sail east and you were bound to strike your port. But Madeira is an island and it’s generally covered with mist so that you can’t see it ten miles away. What are you going to do if you miss it? And you will miss it. Finding an island isn’t an easy job.’

Julian Blatchley makes a handbrake turn:

The last thing that went smoothly in my taking command of the Procyon was my arrival in Singapore. My plane landed fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. ‘Captain Blatchley’ said an electric sign in the hand of a dapper chap in short-sleeved shirt and knife-edge trousers in the Arrivals Hall at Changi Airport. ‘I am Lee,’ said the dapper chap. 'Agency runner. Please come with me.’

     Seconds later I was in the first-row seat of the shipping agency's van, racing along the East Coast Parkway towards the ECG-trace skyline of Singapore City, Mr Lee's serious face peering back at me from the front passenger seat.

     ‘I was expecting the chief engineer to be on the same flight,’ I said. ‘Didn’t he arrive?’

     Lee nodded. ‘He arrive, but go another car. They make a change. You not go to Cymbeline anymore. You go to Procyon.’

     ‘Procyon? What’s that?’

     ‘I not so sure. We go office. Mr Chang explain.’

     Mr Chang did. They had changed my ship.

Keith Muscott discusses survival at sea:

Alain Bombard, a French biologist and physician, and Hannes Lindemann, a German doctor given to crossing oceans in canoes, shared the same ostensible objective: to increase the chances of survival of those cast away at sea. Both men were inspired by a report written by Prince Albert I of Monaco in 1888, asserting that survivors in ships’ lifeboats or on rafts could last until help arrived if they had the right attitude and equipment.

The equipment suggested by the Prince included fine mesh nets for scooping up plankton; several fishing lines of about 150 feet with wire casts, large hooks and artificial lures for big quarry like tuna; a small harpoon to spear the little fish that congregate around flotsam; a larger harpoon for bigger fish; and a number of short traces made up of feathered hooks for use on handlines. Less clear-cut was the need to suppress panic and encourage a determined and practical approach to surviving day by day; the mind must never succumb before the body.

Richard Crockatt on a terrible voyage:

In September 1740 Commodore George Anson left the Solent with six ships to sail round Cape Horn to ‘arrive on the Spanish coast of South America to annoy and distress the Spaniards...by taking, sinking, burning, or otherwise destroying all their ships.’ They were also to take any port belonging to the Spaniards that they deemed suitable for repairing and provisioning HM ships and take the Spanish galleon making its annual voyage from Acapulco to Manila carrying treasure from the silver mines. Anson succeeded in seizing the galleon’s treasure and returning home, completing a circumnavigation and in the process securing a fortune, but at an enormous cost in men and materiel. Of his six ships only one, his own flagship the Centurion, returned; of the 1900 men who had embarked over 1400 died. It was one of the most disastrous successes in British naval history.

     En route, however, the Wager, Captain Cheap, a former Indiaman acting as the fleet's storeship and modified for naval work with the addition of 28 guns, was wrecked on the ironbound coast of the Guayaneco archipelago in Patagonian Chile. The crew were ashore for five chaotic months during which many men died, a few were murdered, and the rest endured unimaginable hardship. Finally, a group of the survivors decided to sail to safety.

Max Liberson brings home the Beast:

On the 18th June 2021 I was sitting in the comfortable saloon of my ancient gaff cutter Wendy May. I looked around at the brass cooker and the oil lamps, the varnished mahogany panels and the small table at which I had read and written for months, and said a temporary goodbye to my old friend. Then I flew to Portugal.

     My mission was to get a 50-foot trimaran from Portimao to Cornwall. The boat was half-designed and unfinished, with experimental electric drives powered by a new system that I didn’t understand and which was already failing. The task was to get this beast into a condition to sail safely the 900 nautical miles home, against the Portuguese trades and across the Bay of Biscay, with a crew that had never sailed together before. I had thirty days before I ran out of permitted time to be in Europe.

Gordon Davies discusses early steam:

For centuries, becalmed sailing ships were towed behind their boats, and smaller vessels were poled or rowed up difficult rivers. The introduction of steam power in the late 1600s offered the possibility of escaping from these labours. The successful use of steam was not, however, simply a matter of developing the engines; it was also necessary to find ways of using their power to propel the ship. Here, though, the steamship pioneers could draw on methods that had already been invented for moving ships without using their sails.

One such method was jet reaction. In 1661 two Englishmen, Thomas Toogood and James Hayes, suggested ‘Forceing Water by Bellowes...through the Bottome or Sides of Shipps belowe the Surface’, the bellows being worked by men. A jet boat using man-powered bellows was actually demonstrated in 1730 by John Allen, a medical doctor based in Bridgewater; it achieved walking pace. Not only was jet power simple to use, it was the only propulsion mechanism that was easy to analyse in theoretical detail, as Daniel Bernoulli, the founder of the science of hydrodynamics, established in 1753.

James Hayes on the wreck of the 'Herschel':

We had a valuable cargo of fine goods, would take more on in Lisbon, and we had such a full passenger list that my deck cabin was given up. It was taken for the Condo d’Eu, husband of the Princess Isabella of Brazil, heiress to the throne.

The passage to Lisbon was stormy, a perfect ‘dusting’ through the Bay of Biscay in southwest gales, but after getting to leeward and rounding Cape Finisterre, the wind backed to northwest and we made good sail down the coast to Lisbon. The Herschel’s rig was that of a heavily rigged brigantine, the sails greatly helped in side winds, at twelve knots heavily dragging the screw; the engine power alone made nine or ten knots in smooth water. Flue boilers, jet condenser, two large cylinders of equal size on about eighteen pounds boiler pressure explained the coal consumption of thirty-five tons daily. She loaded about 2000 tons deadweight of coal and cargo on twenty-one foot draught, her main deck about two feet above water with high bulwarks, the forecastle, bridge and poop aiding much buoyancy. Coal on the main deck, supplementing the bunkers, was a great nuisance for half the voyage, the dust always about, and this defect in passenger steamers remained long unremedied.

How Hurricane Jack got his name:

I very often hear my friend the Captain speak of Hurricane Jack in terms of admiration and devotion, which would suggest that Jack is a sort of demigod. The Captain always refers to Hurricane Jack as the most experienced seaman of modern times, as the most fearless soul that ever wore oilskins, the handsomest man in Britain, so free with his money he would fling it at the birds, so generally accomplished that it would be a treat to be left a month on a desert island alone with him.

    ‘Why is he called Hurricane Jack?’ I asked the Captain once.

    ‘What the duvvle else would you caal him?’ asked Para Handy. ‘Nobody ever caals him anything else than Hurricane Jeck.’

Mano a mano with Bill Tilman – Julia Jones explains:

Recently I came across a line in a brochure which identified Janet Vera-Sanso as ‘probably the only woman to have sailed with Bill Tilman’. It’s not enough. She ought to be described as ‘probably the only person to have told Tilman what sailing was actually about while offering him a lesson in good manners.’

and of course there are Flotsam and Jetsam, books, the inimitable drawings of Claudia Myatt, the reprehensible musings of Ray Doggett, fresh breezes, salt air, peace, violence, and the rest of life at sea….

Extracts Autumn 2021

Storms, sinkings, the South Seas….

Lord Stanley of Alderley embarks on an autumn cruise:

In the midst of this shrieking, dark inferno the mainsail came down with a run, giving me a smack on the side of the head from the gaff which made me reel. By the time I had struggled clear of the wet, heavy folds of canvas which covered the cockpit and were trailing over the side, I saw, by the light of my torch, O'Neill on his knees, clinging to the starboard rigging in an attitude of prayer.

 Max Liberson wonders what he is doing:

The scene was breathtaking. My peaceful anchorage of a few hours before was now a maelstrom of white water. My lovely brass riding lamp (with a cheap LED camping light inside) was nicely illuminating the foredeck of Wendy May, my 1936 gaff cutter. I had a very few moments to get the jib down before it bust the furling line and unfurled, which could only cause severe damage. I managed it, and the potential disaster was averted.

     As I stood there naked with the bullets of rain bouncing off my cold skin, I had a profound realisation: I was happy to be there.

 Julian Blatchley prepares for his mate's ticket:

I came to the rite for my Second Mate's 'ticket' on the 21st of July, 1981. I was a very nervous young chap. The anxiety and my ability to remember the date are linked, because it was the last day of the third test against Australia, and I had wasted my last full day of revision watching Ian Botham plunder the bowling for 149, and my last morning of revision watching Bob Willis start to go through the Aussie top order. I had another reason to be queasy, too: an unknown examiner.

     There were two examiners. One was supposed to be a good guy, and the other an ogre. In 1981 we were all much bucked to hear that the Ogre was stuck on a casualty investigation in the Caribbean, and expected the Good Guy. When the Monday of the first orals dawned, the examiner turned out to be a complete unknown. Examiners took four exams a day. On the Monday this chap failed all four candidates.

Jon Tucker falls asleep::

I discovered an uncharted island once. It was shortly after launching our home-built gaff ketch, back in the days when the sky wasn’t littered with satellites, and when hand-steering by compass was the norm on dead-reckoning passages.We had spent a busy sixty hours beating our way across a huge bight a hundred-odd miles offshore. With two waterspout sightings, and both mastheads glowing with St Elmo’s fire during the second night, sleep had been virtually impossible. By the third night I was exhausted to the point where I was beginning to have serious doubts about the reliability of my course and position. It seemed entirely obvious that the ship which crossed our path shortly after midnight must surely have been bound for the same destination as us. Navigation would now be simple, although a serious course alteration would be essential to follow its track, as our compass had obviously developed a startlingly big deviation.

Kit Africa delivers a ship – just:

The vibration was there in the background, like the buzzing of a very big fly on an enormous window. The captain and the first mate both had a fairly good idea of what was causing it. It had been a visiting engineer, who had repeatedly shifted the big Caterpillar engine ahead and then astern to clear the Tyne debris out of the propeller aperture while they lay at the quay. Soon they would be rid of him and under way across the Atlantic. But there was a series of little nicks out of the leading edge of one blade of the massive bronze propeller. As with most cascading problems at sea, this one started small. By the time it was noticeable, the ship was a long, long way from help.

Captain Klebingat reminisces about he Pacific in his own words:

The 5 mast schooner Crescent, now. The masters name was Theordore Olsen a long lanky man more of a Downeaster than a Norwegian. Hungry Olsen he was known by, and he would have been a hard case if he dared to. He had a glass eye, and if I did not produce enough, he used to stare at me, but it may have been with the glass eye, at that. 'Labor Day you say it is? So we labor to-day,' he said, when we drew his attention to the fact that it was a holiday. Mrs Olsen had only contempt for the man before the mast, she it was who had the keyes to the Store-Room, you can imagine what an ordeal it was to her, when she had to obey the call of nature in front of the crew. They held a blanket in front of her, in a case like that. But at any rate it affected her mind, and she was a patient in a sanatorium off and on. She was known amongst seafarers in general as the Norwegian Queen.

Nicholas Gray tells the story of the Hillyard:

As in any multi-faceted operation, individuals could get very jealous about their contribution and there was, at times, real rivalry between different sections. It tells us something about Hillyard as a man that he was able to hold them all together to produce the results that they did. They worked hard in those days and enjoyed it. Tom Jeffers remembered that when two men had to rip a plank with handsaws they would begin at each end, putting a sixpenny piece in the middle. The first one there pocketed it. Or two pairs, working each side of a boat, would vie with one another as to how many planks they could fit in a day, with the apprentices trying to run the skilled men into the ground.

Dave Johnston rescues a famous pilot cutter from dereliction:

Keith, Jack and I were sitting in a pub looking at pictures of Major H W Tilman's yacht Mischief and planning adventures. After the third pint we decided to get a boat and go off sailing the seven seas. We started scanning the 'for sales' in the back pages of the yachting magazines and driving around the boatyards. In one yard in Portsmouth – a breaker's yard, really - we found tied up to the jetty a 52ft yacht. She was flush-decked in pitch pine, with a deep cockpit just big enough for two or three. Down below was like stepping back into the 1900s. Against the main bulkhead where the mast came down to the keelson was a potbellied stove. Forward of this was the sleeping cabin with three bunks, and a tiny compartment with the oldest loo I had ever seen. Beyond the forward bulkhead was a workbench with a vice and tool racks along the sides.

We clambered all over her, falling in love.

H V Morton sailed with Hilaire Belloc:

Belloc had a second boat, an extraordinary sort of tub, which he occasionally took out. It was said that when the wind blew this strange craft moved sideways across the water. She was at this time at Littlehampton, and one  Sunday at King's Land after Mass, Belloc said: 'We'll go to Littlehampton and bring the Dreadnought - that was her proud name - 'up river to Arundel. There's a man there who will look after her.' So off to Littlehampton we went, found the Dreadnought, hoisted sail, and set out to negotiate the tricky reaches and curves of the Arun. I tried to do what I was told, but somewhere near Ford we ran aground. We got overboard and endeavoured to push her clear, but she was firmly wedged in the mud, so we sat in a meadow and smoked, waiting for the tide to lift her off. Towards evening we grew tired of waiting. We set off across the fields, and went to Benediction in St Philip Neri, and then to the hotel by the bridge in Arundel, after arranging with a man in the town to rescue the Dreadnought and bring her up the river.

Ian Nicolson discusses the 'Six':

The Berthon Boat Company, then as now based in Lymington, designed and started to build the West Solent One Design. These yachts, slightly shorter than a typical ‘Six’ at 34ft 4 inches, were intended to give the superb racing enjoyed by the ‘Sixes’ at far less cost. They were one-designs, all identical, so one set of moulds and patterns could be used for every yacht in the class. In contrast, every ‘Six’ had to have its own set of building moulds and its own ballast-keel pattern, a large, oddly-shaped chunk of wood used to cast the lead keel. The patterns and moulds were useless once the ‘Six’ was built, so they were cut up and used to stoke the wood-burning stoves in the building sheds in winter.

     The West Solents' relative cheapness was attractive to owners, and to wives and girlfriends because they had basic accommodation. There was a loo in the rather small cabin and even a simple galley, so they could be used for weekend cruising as well as racing.

     The loos were made by the famous wholesale chandlery firm of Simpson Lawrence, based in Glasgow, a city with its own patois. The Glasgow for loo is 'cludgy', and it was not long before jealous people soon started to call the West Solents the Cludgy Class.

James Long investigates new age wind power:

As the world has become aware of the pressures of climate change and pollution, international shipping companies have faced unpalatable truths. Perhaps the most startling formulation appears in a 2009 report which revealed that just fifteen very large container ships were producing the same total emissions as every car in the entire world. Mounting international pressure is pushing shipowners towards a rethink. A fresh look at wind as a power source ranks high in their list of new approaches.

Richard Crockatt remembers the Hiscocks:

Hiscock had spent the previous winter planning a cruise to Scotland. Inspired by the adventures of John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, he proposed to sail from his home port of Yarmouth, Isle of Wight, to the wild and remote Loch Scavaig in Skye, location of key scenes in Mr Standfast. He was thirty years old, single, already an experienced cruising sailor, an established contributor to the yachting press, and author of a cruising guide to the southwest of Ireland. His boat was the 24ft engineless gaff-rigged cutter Wanderer II, designed in 1937 by Laurent Giles with lines very similar to those of the slightly bigger Vertue, whose first incarnation, Andrillot, was already under construction. Hiscock could not afford the bigger boat, so Giles drew a smaller version to suit his pocket. He had four months cruising time ahead of him. He could just as well work on the book he was writing on board as ashore. Thus began a pattern as cruising sailor and author which carried him through till the end of his life in 1986.

and of course there are Flotsam and Jetsam, books, the inimitable drawings of Claudia Myatt, the reprehensible musings of Ray Doggett, fresh breezes, salt air, peace, violence, and the rest of life at sea….

Extracts Summer 2021

Iron ships, gales, stars….

Nat Benjamin encounters a bit of weather:

A morbid reddish gloom consumed the eastern sky, and to the west the few remaining stars vanished in murk. I relieved Rick at the helm, finding no balance or groove, like sailing in a bad dream. Soon all traces of colour dissolved into a darkening grey. A gust from the northeast rattled the sails, followed by a patter of rain, then more wind, quickly building to a steady moan through the rigging.

Ben Jefferies and friends sail to Guyana:

Tim and Marcus had had their offer for the boat accepted some six weeks previously, and were especially pleased not to have spent money on a survey. They were somewhat surprised on the afternoon of purchase day to be presented with a three-page work list by the yard. In the end all they could afford was a new mast. The rest of the work they would have to do themselves. The yard's owner did not want them working on the boat during the day, so Tim smiled at him and told him they would work at night. For the next six weeks they had worked from dusk till dawn, helping themselves to offcuts from the floor and pots of glue and paint which had not been put away. The French saw two boys with a big dream, and were keen to help. At the end of a night’s work they would hit the local bakery, then roll into their berths on board. While the chantier went to work around them they slept like logs.

William Norris encounters Olympians from another era:

The story begins with a pantomime villain of sorts, William Lancelot Dawes, always known as Slotty. We first meet this giant, then aged 57 and the owner of an improbably large Bentley 4¼ litre saloon, when he was selected with James Ramus to represent Great Britain in the Mixed Two-Person Heavyweight class (Flying Dutchman) at the 1960 Olympics in Italy. This seems to have been a selection that owed more to the fact that Slotty was a jolly good egg and that this would be his last chance to go to the Olympics so it was really his turn (I paraphrase, but I think it captures the spirit of the selection meeting) than to his potential as a medallist.

Max Liberson goes fishing:

It was autumn 1977. I was twenty years old, Elvis was dead, the miners were on strike and the wind had been blowing hard from the sw for what seemed like an eternity. I was a share fisherman, I had spent all my money, and there wasn’t anything coming in until we could get to sea again. Tommy Paul, the skipper and owner of the 50ft wooden French-built trawler JB, on which I was mate, had a plan, based on a fifty-yard walk from Stanley Drake's café on the Barbican to look at what was being landed at the fish market. The Looe boats were still bringing in fish and buyers were pushing prices sky-high as they fought to secure what supplies there were.

Julian Blatchley goes foreign:

It is difficult to say where the urge to become a seaman began. I grew up largely on the shores of Windermere and have a hazy memory of being introduced to Arthur Ransome in Coniston churchyard, possibly when I was about five. That started me off on Swallows and Amazons, and from there I cannot remember ever seriously considering any other path than the dustless one. The only decision I ever had to make was whether it would be Royal or Merchant.

     I cannot remember when or how I first took to the water, but I quickly became just about the most indiscriminate waterman imaginable. I went afloat whenever and however I could – rowing, sailing, motorboating or precariously balanced over the icy green depths of Windermere on a succession of lethal rafts. I managed to get myself a sort of job helping out on a wonderful old launch called Velia, skippered by a World War Two Atlantic convoy veteran who took my nautical education seriously in hand, gleefully saluting my every transgression with a triumphant cry of ‘Navy-style? Whose navy? Not ours!’

David Baston in the Falklands:

That evening the weather was grey and a bit forbidding with a fairly low swell. We stood there looking out at all those warships getting very excited indeed – helicopters flashing around dropping chaff, rockets going off in all directions, and us not knowing what the hell was going on. Personally I had no fear at all at that point – as my army officer father used to say, 'where there is no sense there is no feeling’.

     I have even now no idea of the time-frame of what happened next. We chatted about the dramatic scenes unfolding with no idea that there were two Exocets on their way towards us. Apparently decoyed away from several targets, they finally fixed their beady little eyes on us, and as we had (a) no idea they were coming and (b) there was nothing we could do about it, we watched events in blissful ignorance.

     Then the amazing W-WHUMP.

G R G Worcester goes rafting in China:

Bamboo consists of the hollow stems of a gigantic grass, cultivated in groves throughout China. It grows best in damp places, sometimes attaining a foot in diameter and 100 feet in height. A valuable feature is its great tensile strength in proportion to its weight. The many uses to which the Chinese apply the bamboo are amazing. It is pressed into service both on water and on land. It is used for building a house and for clothing its inmates. It is used, too, for making buckets, brooms, kitchen utensils, mats, baskets, hats, pillows, musical instruments, bridges, bows and arrows, token money, chopsticks, ropes, pipes, fences, combs, walking sticks, carrying poles, furniture, fishing rods, tool handles, containers, fans. It is indispensable in the school-room and in the police station. Its young shoots, too, are used as a vegetable in many ways. On the Ya river, however, it is used to provide one of the most interesting and perhaps the most efficient forms of raft to be found in China.

Gordon Davies discusses the iron ships era:

In 1751 Isaac Wilkinson built an iron foundry in the Lake District with the intention of heating it with peat carried by barge from a nearby deposit. His son 'Iron-mad' John – later a leading ironmaster in Staffordshire – persuaded him to use the foundry's own iron to make the barge, which was possibly the world's first iron vessel. Little or nothing is known about this pioneer of an industry in which Britain would become the world leader. We do, however, know about the Trial, a barge ‘Iron-mad’ Wilkinson built in 1787 for use on the expanding inland waterway network. It was a narrowboat made of 5/16th inch wrought-iron plates over a wooden frame, with a capacity of some thirty tons. ‘Iron-mad’ declared it ‘exceeded all my expectations’ and it certainly surprised the cynics, who thought that iron would infallibly sink. By 1808, when ‘Iron-mad’ died and was buried in his cast-iron coffin, it was recognised that iron barges were lighter than wooden barges, their thinner sides gave more internal space, and they had a longer life.

Dave Johnston builds a couple of boats:

I was chatting to my old friend Bill, who had a boatyard across the pathway from my own small yard. We were sitting on my waterfront watching the tide make when up the river rushed a police boat, light flashing. As it passed us we watched its wash, which was like the Severn bore or a small tidal wave. You could see the river bank suffer as it rolled by, and one or two boats on their moorings took a bashing.

     Bill pointed at the wash. ‘They've got no idea how to build a fast boat anymore.’

     ‘It's all out of proportion,’ I said. ‘It's not been built for speed on the river. It should be at least five to one, with a hard chine hull.’

     Bill nodded. ‘Fifty feet at least, with about a ten-foot beam.’

     There was an empty matchbox on the hard standing. Bill picked it up and broke it open. He felt in his breast pocket, where he always kept a pencil, and drew a rough outline of a hard chine cruiser with a sharp-pointed stem and flat, slightly raked transom. ‘What do you think?’ he said, handing it to me. 'I'll finance it and you build it.'

Neil Calder restores a Norfolk Gypsy:

Black Beauty is the story of a horse that has an idyllic youth, much loved and doted on by her master. The master dies; there follow many years of degradation, misery and pain. At last she is rescued, and passes her later life gambolling happily in green pastures. Her story is the same as my boat’s, except that you have to exchange the green pastures for the azure seas of Okinawa, Japan.

Jim Crossley outlines the history of naval tactics:

The efforts of nations to impose their will on each other by deploying more and better warships have been accompanied by the evolution of strategic and tactical doctrines as to how they should be deployed.

     In 480bc Xerxes of Persia invaded Greece with a powerful army supported by a fleet of a thousand ships. Led by Athens, the Greek city-states rapidly assembled nearly four hundred triremes to meet the Persian armada. The trireme’s main weapon was a submerged ram, but it also carried marines armed with spears and swords who would board an enemy ship once it had been disabled by ramming. The task of the Persian fleet was to ferry an army from the mainland to the Peloponnese, and it assembled in the small bay of Salamis to await the embarkation. Themistocles, the Greek commander, launched a surprise attack. Closely bunched together, the Persian ships were unable to support each other or to manoeuvre. The Greeks rammed and sank them one by one, and Xerxes was forced to abandon his campaign. Then as now, superiority in numbers was useless if the bigger fleet’s weapons could not be brought to bear.

Dr Will Perry explores the wilder shores of fish farming:

Aquaculture is nearly as old as people. It had its beginnings in the Neolithic age, when men trapped wild aquatic animals in lagoons. The ancient Egyptians bred Nile tilapia in their irrigation channels, the Chinese grew carp for the dinner tables of their emperors, and in the Middle Ages European monks used their stewponds to supply protein for fast days. Until the mid-twentieth century, however, fish farming was an unsophisticated business, largely focused on freshwater species. Then in the 1960s Japan and Norway began growing fish in floating cages; and now more than 200 marine species, from Japanese kelp to the humpback grouper, are being reared in a diverse range of aquaculture facilities.

Paul Jones sails the cosmos:

Day after day the boat surged ahead with all sails set: jib, staysail, mainsail, topsail, mizzen staysail and mizzen. Some days we would climb out on the bowsprit and swing ourselves under it so we were sitting on the bobstay, and get a dousing of foamy water as the bow dipped into a wave under the press of a gust of wind. I recall an entire week when we didn’t even trim a sail. Night after night we would watch our starry companions as they rose from the ocean in the east and coursed their way across the sky.

And of course there are Flotsam and Jetsam, books, the incomparable illustrations of Claudia Myatt, the entirely reprehensible opinions of Ray Doggett, tugmaster and tobacco smuggler….

Extracts Spring 2021

Ice, ghosts, the sextant…

Max Liberson has a vision on Ushant:

In passages under sail as in many other endeavours, preparation is the key to success. This is doubly true when the vessel in which the passage is to be made is eighty-four years old, built of wood, and only 25ft on deck; and when the passage itself is across the Bay of Biscay during the equinox, when it can be a bit draughty.

Last September, the owner of a 50ft trimaran I had sailed down to Portugal eight years previously rang to tell me that the vessel was nearing completion and that he wanted me down there to help with the work. Several reasons why this was something I should pass on came to mind. One, the world was shut down – there was allegedly a killer virus on the loose – and air travel was unreliable. Two, my little business repairing roofs and gutters was slowly starting to bear fruit. And three, my boat Wendy May was in dire need of a refit, and a winter of Welsh rain would do her immense harm in her current state. I went over this with my wife, who said the dog would miss me horribly, as would she. She looked at me. I looked at her. And we knew I would go.

Nick Waite explores the wreck of the 'Pindos':

The Pindos was a four-masted barque built of steel in 1890 at the Williamson yard in Workington, Cumberland. Over three hundred feet in length with a gross tonnage in excess of 2,500t, she was one of the last great windjammers – respected for being a well-built ship capable of making fast passages to all parts of the globe via the great Capes. After a brief spell with Fisher and Sprott in the uk she was sold in 1896 to the Hamburg-based firm of B. Wencke und Söhne.

In the early spring of 1911 she was towed by steam tug out of Hamburg for a short passage to Port Talbot in South Wales, where her holds were filled with coal. She put to sea again on a Friday some six weeks later, bound for Chile. Friday departures are notoriously unlucky, and this one was no exception.

Ben Lowings on David Lewis:

David Lewis lived from 1917 to 2002. He sailed twelve boats, wrote thirteen books, and by my count received twenty-eight awards. The editor of The Faber Book of The Sea, Captain John ‘Johnny’ Coote, himself a maverick, described Lewis as having been possessed by ‘an insatiable compulsion for sailing to the furthest frontiers of human experience.’ As his biographer I completely agree.

David Lewis is beset:

The familiar Penola Strait landmarks had vanished. It took a moment to recognise the island to seaward as Hovgaard and to realise that the whole pack must have drifted quite a few miles northeastward during the night. Not only had the last three days' painful efforts been wiped out, but we had lost as much ground again as had so laboriously been won. The steadily changing bearings of the land confirmed that the drift was still continuing. There was only one possible decision. As the log stated: 'In view of the drift of pack, am abandoning Argentine Islands objective. Will try to return north along Le Maire and on to Almirante Brown’ [the Argentinian station at Paradise Bay on the mainland side of Gerlache Strait]. Worries pack, motor, petrol.'

     With such an inauspicious start opened a most memorable day.

Julian Blatchley begins a relationship with a sextant:

On 21 October 1981, Trafalgar Day, I emerged from the Mercantile Marine Office in Hull with my brand-new second mate's ticket in my jacket pocket and my beaming father at my side. We made directly for the doorway of B Cooke & Son, a venerable firm specialising in nautical instruments, where my father wanted to mark my success in the exams by buying me my first sextant.

The commonplace exterior of the shop opened on to a crowded treasure-house of glass-fronted counters and wall displays in which reposed every nautical instrument known to the trade. There were the logs I had streamed, the hydrometers with which I had tested dock water densities, the hygrometers I had whirled to check moisture levels in cargo holds. The unchanging nature of marine artefacts gave the shop the feel of a museum; but a museum it absolutely was not. It was a thriving workshop, manned by time-served craftsmen trusted by seamen for over a century to make, supply, repair and calibrate marine instruments. It was a place where a sailor was not pressured into buying unnecessary fripperies, but soberly listened to, advised, and provided with practical tools that would get the job done.

Ed Wheeler signs on as a deckie on the slowest boat to China:

It started in the winter of 1967, when Winkie Nixon was doing a comprehensive refit of the little 25ft Vertue Icebird. We finally got her launched, resigned from our dead-end jobs and set sail on 29 June, utterly broke. We called into Falmouth, then made our way in one long passage to a village on the north coast of Spain and then into La Coruña (no nonsense in Franco’s day of calling it A Coruña). The port was filthy with oil. We lay just ahead of a Dutch botter, the De Vries. Her skipper was a nautical wanderer called Tony Rodgers. A party ensued and it became apparent to him that we were not exactly flush with cash. ‘See that old Liberty ship on the far side of the harbour? She’s going to Shanghai and they are looking for crew.’ I accosted the captain, Warren, on the quay. He hadn’t time for the likes of me then, but I was to call on him on board next day. Next morning, Winkie laid Icebird alongside and I climbed a pilot ladder. Warren agreed to take me on as an ordinary seaman at £3 per diem, which in my present state seemed like untold wealth.

Andrew Linington penetrates the peculiar world of flags of convenience:

International law requires ships to fly the flag of a single nation to signify which state has jurisdiction over them. For centuries shipowners have flown a national flag to gain the protection of the country to which it belonged; and the flying of its flag has allowed the country to control the trade being carried to, from and within its waters. In Navigation Acts dating from as long ago as 1651, Britain led the way in developing a regulatory framework to promote the use of its own ships and seafarers and to restrict the access of foreigners to its mercantile trade. Other nations followed. Since then, however, flags of convenience, flags of necessity, flags of inconvenience, runaway registers, open registers and a thesaurus of other such terms have diluted the original intention.

 Sam Doncaster on a long short tall ship cruise:

It seemed that on the passage from Bideford to Gloucester, as they were passing under the two Severn bridges at some sixteen knots, pilot on board and propelled by the highest spring tide of the year, nasty noises had commenced emanating from below. Somehow they got through the lock into the Sharpness Canal and moored safely in Gloucester. Here it transpired that the bearings on both prop shafts had disintegrated, the cages carrying the ball bearings having been reduced to powder.

Edwin D Morgan masterminds the NYYC challenge in the 1901 America's Cup:

With the prospect of an international race in the coming September the Constitution had been built by a syndicate to defend the Cup. Mr Thomas Lawson of Boston built a 90-footer called the Independence. Butler Duncan was put in charge of the Constitution and as first choice he had taken for sailing master Captain Rhoades. As it is always necessary to give the defender as much racing as possible, Commodore J P Morgan wished to have the Columbia act as a trial horse against the Constitution, and he asked me to take charge of her for the coming summer. And now comes what proved to be the realisation of my greatest ambition. I accepted with much pleasure and proceeded at once to engage Charles Barr as skipper.

 Doug Logan on the perils of living aboard:

I didn't have much trouble with rats when I lived aboard at City Island, the Bronx, back in the early ’80s. I'd see them once in a while in the boatyard when I came home late on a summer night, hardly ever in the winter. A rat faced me down once when I was on the gangway headed to the dock. He was already on his way up. We both stopped. I took another step forward, then he took another step forward. He was a big rat, as well-nourished dock rats tend to be, and after a short standoff I backed away and let him come up. He was pretty stately about it, too.

Richard Crockatt on Adlard Coles the man:

Among mid-twentieth-century yachtsmen Adlard Coles is something of an enigma. His name is everywhere, not only by virtue of his formidable record as a cruising and racing sailor, but because the company he founded after the war, Adlard Coles Nautical, became a leading publisher in the field. Coles also acquired and edited The Yachtsman for over ten years and wrote fifteen books in his own right, including sailing guides to the south coast and northern France, accounts of his own cruises and races, and not least a compelling autobiography, Sailing Years (1981). Yet despite the range of his activity and the amount he wrote, he gives away very little of himself in his writings.

Martin Llewellyn discusses cleaner fish farming:

Humans eat an awful lot of fish – according to the fao figures for 2016, more than twenty kilograms per capita per annum. And there are seven billion of us. That makes 140 million tonnes a year, and means an awful lot of fishing. The brave fishermen need to work their nets, pots and longlines pretty hard to keep up, but they are doing their best, or possibly worst; which is why there are supertrawlers a quarter of a kilometre long raking up the wealth of the oceans, assisted by fishfinders with next-generation sonar, pulse gear to electrocute fish and crustaceans right into the nets, and rockhopping trawls to claw the shoals out of their stoniest refuges.

Julia Jones explains a great novelist:

At the end of the First World War Nevil Shute Norway was surprised to find that he was still alive. He had been born in 1899, part of the generation whose schooldays were overshadowed by the ever-growing Roll of Honour as younger schoolmasters and older contemporaries died in the War. His earliest years were spent attending – or not attending – a prep school in Hammersmith, where his stammer and unsympathetic teachers made existence intolerable. He began to truant, finding the Science Museum a glorious refuge. When they found out, Nevil’s parents sent him to the Dragon School, then known as Lynam’s, in Oxford, where he boarded with family friends and learned the pleasures of rowing, canoeing and sailing dinghies on the Cherwell and the upper Thames.

Lynam’s was unusual in many ways, not least because it was co-educational. It was marked by the personality of its eponymous headmaster, the ‘Skipper’, famous as a cruising yachtsman.

And of course there are Flotsam and Jetsam, books, the incomparable illustrations of Claudia Myatt, the entirely reprehensible opinions of Ray Doggett, tugmaster and tobacco smuggler….

Extracts Winter 2020

Sails, salvage tugs, mackerel….

Max Liberson writes a love letter:

As in many great love affairs, my first meeting with Wendy May did not go too well. It was a damp morning, about 0400, nearly high water at Smallgains creek on Canvey island. Dick Durham, the man last charged with your care, wanted to sail in the Maldon regatta. Smallgains creek is not the ideal place for a boat with a keel, even if the draught is a mere four foot three inches. You would only be afloat for about half an hour. Then the ebb would start, and there would be a race to reach deeper water five miles away near Southend pier. Time was not on our side.

     Dick opened your hatch and went below. He opened the cooling water seacock, went to turn on the battery switch and discovered that it was on already, and had been for several weeks. He put the key in the ignition, lit up the glow plugs, and tried to turn your engine over. It said 'waah waaah waaaa' and ground to a halt.  The sky to the East brightened slightly and it started to rain. Dick looked embarrassed, and said, ‘I guess that’s that then.’

     I have always been an optimist, and besides, you were not at that point my boat. So I said, ‘Let's give it a go under sail.'

‘Imagine' heads west:

In October 1972 three of us were in the Australian pub in London, 22 years old, talking about how unadventurous our lives were. Antony said he had always wanted to sail to Australia. Jamie said he thought that was a good idea. I had never sailed, so I kept quiet. There was a pause. Then one of them said, ‘Tim had better come along too. He can deal with the engine and all that.’ We stared at each other a bit. Then Jamie said that he had had plenty of conversations like this after a few pints, so we should shake on it. So we shook on it.

A year later on a cold wet October afternoon we set sail from Portsmouth. We were waved off by various bedraggled friends and supporters with shouts of what we thought were farewell but were actually ‘Fenders!’

 James Wharram and Hanneke Boon build 'Spirit of Gaia':

In 1985 an eccentric American explorer called Gene Savoy contacted us. He was an ‘Indiana Jones’ type character who had been discovering ancient cities in the Peruvian jungle. He had also made a double canoe out of bundles of reeds and made an experimental sailing voyage up the western coast of Peru to Central America. He wrote that he had found some ancient petroglyphs in the Peruvian jungle that would indicate there had been double canoes in South America. Could we design him such a double canoe? He gave us little detail of any original Peruvian design, so I designed him a pair of 63ft Polynesian style hulls on which he planned a bamboo platform and reed hut.

I became fascinated by the big slim hulls, and could see them as a large ocean-going catamaran with which we could study dolphins out in the open ocean for long periods. We would no longer have the interference of shore people upsetting the delicate interaction with the creatures.

Tim Cowley goes hunting with his salvage tug:

We passed through the Straits of Dover with our tow barely in sight in the fog that had been thickening during the course of the day. This was unpleasant; as it transpired, though, we hadn’t seen anything yet. Once we had cleared the Straits the Chief Engineer and I decided to shut down the port main engine and proceed on one engine only, there being little point in consuming fuel unnecessarily. When I was satisfied that all was in order I handed over to the chief mate and took the opportunity to get my head down, having been on the bridge since leaving Rotterdam.

     I had no sooner drifted off when I was jerked awake by the sound of the port main engine firing up and a commotion on the bridge, (which was immediately above my cabin). I arrived on the bridge to discover that our tow was about to run us down while the mate took avoiding action with both bow and stern thrusters. We managed to get the tow back where it should have been, and I set about trying to establish just what had happened.

Julian Blatchley follows a tanker from launch to breakers' yard:

When first I met Max she was barely a year old. Her hull coating was still glossy and her funnel blazed with the emblem of the world-renowned shipping company that had brought her into being. It was a company founded by seafarers, men (and later women) who profoundly understood the financials but kept in touch with the realities of the sea. They did not shrink from the harshness that a harsh business demanded, and no one ever thought them sympathetic; yet they retained an empathy with their ships and their seafarers. The company forged on in the ever-evolving world of commercial shipping, still predominantly family-owned but run by a new generation, university-educated and modern, but raised in the business and counselled by their vigilant forebears. These executives had never become detached from the realities faced by their vessels and crew, and knew the difference between a short-term saving and a true economy. That was why they had built Max to last.

The 'Vital Spark' pauses for a spot of festivity:

It was a dirty evening, coming on to dusk, and the Vital Spark went walloping drunkenly down Loch Fyne with a cargo of oak bark, badly trimmed. She staggered to every shock of the sea; the waves came combing over her quarter, and Dougie the mate began to wish they had never sailed that day from Kilcatrine. They had struggled round the point of Pennymore, the prospect looking every moment blacker, and he turned a dozen projects over in his mind for inducing Para Handy to anchor somewhere till the morning. At last he remembered Para's partiality for anything in the way of longshore gaiety, and the lights of the village of Furnace gave him an idea.

     ‘Ach! man, Peter,’ said he, ‘did we no' go away and forget this wass the night of the baal at Furnace? What do you say to going in and joining the spree?’

 Gordon Davies examines the history of meteorology:

By 1859, meteorological knowledge was developing rapidly – perhaps too rapidly for Taylor. All the same, it was two centuries since the link had been made between the behaviour of the mercury and likely changes in the weather, so it was extraordinary that he ignored his barometers. As early as 1703, the connection was so well-known that when Daniel Defoe saw that ‘our Barometers inform'd us that the Night would be very tempestuous’, he was remembering early warning of a storm that killed 10,000 people.

 Dave Johnston remembers his apprenticeship:

Sixteen next birthday. Up at five, make my lunch. Flask and sandwiches stowed in my duffel bag, a quick cup of tea. I get to work at least fifteen minutes early.

     Usually I would go to John Rigden my mate's place, where his toolbox was, and wait for his instructions for the days' work. Sometimes I would have to go to the stores for a particular tool we might need. If we were starting a new job on the boat it was my job to go to the large table outside the foreman's office. On the table was a large bundle of drawings. Fixed to the drawings was a list of items called a schedule – every nut and bolt, screws, nails, cups of glue, or paint. Anything to do with that boat had been written into the schedule. I had to find my boat number on a schedule, then find the page referring to the deck.

     I would copy out what my mate wanted onto a stores chit which I took into the foreman's office to get him to sign it; and off I would run to the stores, book the items out and take them to my boat and my mate. All this could easily take up to tea break time, so I had to watch it, for I still had to go and get his two cheesecakes from the van man in the mill. Hell hath no fury like a man without his cheesecake.

 Jim Crossley on small ships in the Navy:

In Nelson’s day there was a pretty clear hierarchy of ships. Battleships fought each other either singly or in formation. Frigates might fight other frigates or occasionally get caught (and probably destroyed or captured) by a battleship; but they would play no part in a fleet action other than to pick up casualties or tow disabled ships. The host of other vessels – bomb ketches, cutters, sloops, gunboats, etc – which might accompany a battle fleet would stay well away from a fight between greater vessels. In no circumstances were they any threat whatever to the great ships of the line.

     The invention of the moored mine and the locomotive torpedo – ‘those damned sneaky weapons’ according to the Old Navy harrumph – drastically changed this situation.

 Jo Stanley discusses swoonings in square rig:

In January 1934 the British mathematician, engineer and polymath Ray Strachey received a cable from Port Germein in South Australia. Her headstrong daughter, Barbara, had just arrived there on the beautiful four-masted barque L’ Avenir, which in 1930 had been transformed from a neglected Belgian cargo-cadet ship into a 3,650-ton grain clipper. It is possible that the crew included Cupid, if he had not minded chipping rust and worrying about rotting canvas; and he would have found plenty of his traditional work to do. Barbara, however, seemed oblivious of the ship's problems. She wired her mother in England: ‘Delicious trip. Have fallen unmistakeably in love. Intend marrying here immediately. No conceivable misgivings. Everything perfect.’

 Emily Painter reports on the private life of the mackerel:

There is safety in numbers.

     Once upon a time the eggs flowed out of the mackerel mothers in a mighty tide, a couple of million of them per fish, spewed into the blue shifting sunrays of the Atlantic. Then there were the vast billows of fry wriggling under a sea surface frazzled with wind and rain, lengthening, growing, naive in their vast schools, eating anything that moved, and here came the creatures that eat them, the porpoises grinning and rolling down from the mirror of the surface, the gannets hammering down out of the clouds and flying through the water and the seals sliding sleek and sinuous out of the great bright nowhere to scatter the shoals.

……and of course there are Flotsam and Jetsam, North Sea News, books, inspiration, and the impeccable drawings of Claudia Myatt. Welcome aboard once more.

Extracts Summer 2020

Gales, sails, merchant shipping….

Uffa Fox sails to Le Havre regatta in a 14-footer:

Once clear of the Island, we shipped water faster than two could bail it out on this course, so I let her off a point to leeward of Havre, this easing the wind and sea enough to enable one man bailing to keep pace with the water shipped, while the other two sat her up.

About four miles outside the Wight we saw a cutter with three reefs in her mainsail running back for the shelter of the Island. She had only just put to sea bound for Havre, where she finally arrived two days after us, her crew explaining that the day upon which they sailed was too rough for her.

Phil Weld sails Moxie in the OSTAR:

The gates to the Milbay Dock swung open about ten in the morning to permit a procession of launches to take in tow those competitors without engines. A smart crew aboard a navy vessel took Moxie's line. On both sides of the lock, I could pick out the smiling faces of the many British friends we'd made over the past ten years of racing from this historic port. As we passed into the harbour, the volume of handclapping and decorous cheers gave clear recognition that the beauty of Moxie's three slender hulls made her a favourite.

Jon Tucker confronts the terrors of the deep:

I remember being scared as a child. I was in the bow of a smallish centreboarder, and as the tall grey-green waves marched towards me I suddenly became aware of the great depths extending far below. It did not last. I realised that the boat's buoyancy would overcome each approaching wave, and that if I put my trust in the vessel it would carry me safely back to harbour.

This epiphany of buoyancy has carried me confidently through a voyaging adulthood that has contained wider concepts of perils at sea. It has come in handy when we have been running before a Roaring Forties gale under bare poles and drogue, with spume-laden greybeards astern hinting at overwhelming us, and a firmly closed companionway hatch and a Thermos of tea have allowed skipper and crew to think rationally on Archimedes’ laws of displacement.

Julian Blatchley parks a supertanker:

Seatank Kestrel, a two-million barrel capacity oil tanker, has arrived at the Munsaab oilfield in West Africa. She has already loaded a standard 950,000 barrel parcel of crude at a nearby field, and now requires to load a further similar amount at Munsaab Alfa. The Kestrel is over 330 metres long, and sixty wide. Her hull is thirty metres from keel to deck, her nine-cylinder engine can deliver 38,000hp to her single propeller. In her partially loaded state she draws 14.2 metres, weighs 210,000 tonnes, and as pilot it is now my job to attach her to the stern of the terminal for loading. Better get on with it.

Daniel Jessel takes a hard look at shipping:

It is curious how so many people are oblivious of our island’s proud maritime traditions, particularly as its Brexit future supposedly depends on trading with the whole world. For if trade is the beating heart of the global economy, then the sea lanes used by shipping are its vital arteries. Between 80 and 90 per cent of internationally traded tonnage travels by sea, and at any one time more than 50,000 cargo ships are plying the oceans, carrying twelve billion tonnes of the world’s economic lifeblood to its furthest corners.

Libby Purves on Mission to Seafarers:

We may be tiring of tales about being mewed up at home with family, wi-fi and slightly restricted shopping opportunities. I do not exempt myself from the grumblers but today I am preoccupied by another cribbed and confined population, whose conditions are rarely mentioned. Consider the merchant seafarers: provisioning the globe but largely invisible behind the tossing seas and the massive secure terminals. It is never an easy life, but now harsher and more alarming in the coronavirus crisis.

Adrian Morgan, Daily Mail newshawk turned wooden boatbuilder, reminisces about yacht journalism:

The history of yachting abounds with tales of salt-drenched derring-do – survival against the odds, epic races with no side giving an inch, flaxen sails strained to the limit of triple stitching. These stories often came to light thanks to the pens of a largely forgotten tribe of nautical scribes, who brought them alive, on occasion with the help of a little journalistic licence.

Julia Jones tells the story of three intrepid amateurs in WWII:

In June 1940 the evacuation from Dunkirk had been completed. An unexpectedly high proportion of the British Expeditionary Force and some of their allies were home. But tons of equipment had been left behind, and two bef divisions were trapped south of the Somme. The Channel ports were now inaccessible. If French resistance collapsed the only way out for British troops and remaining civilian evacuees would be via the Atlantic ports from Brest to Bayonne. By 14 June General Alan Brooke felt certain that France was about to collapse. He rang Winston Churchill to ask for a new evacuation to begin. There were material assets to be salvaged as well as people.

Mike Clark serves an apprenticeship in a Suffolk boatyard:

I was fifteen years old in 1953 and just about to leave school, not quite sure what I wanted to do. I was good with my hands and thought engineering might be a good idea. Then the headmaster came over to me in woodwork class one day and said: ‘Clark, would you like to be a boatbuilder?’ I said, ‘No, not really. I want to be an engineer.’ But later, a family friend advised me that if a job was going I should take it if I could.

Ernie Nunn’s boatyard was at Waldringfield on the banks of the River Deben in Suffolk. On a summer’s day I cycled to the boatyard for my interview and asked to see Ernie. ‘He’s not here’, they said. ‘He’s at home with a broken ankle. Better go on up to the house to see him’.

That was the first and the last time I was interviewed by a man in bed.

Penny Minney's wild and watery childhood:

My family moved to a solitary house on the shores of the Dwyryd estuary in the spring of 1948. My father, a writer, had gone ahead to buy supplies, and had been lent a little car which ran on bottle gas.

The house had been built around 1912. A rough road along the shore had been strengthened and improved to facilitate the work of building, but had been washed away by a tidal wave in 1927. The only route to our house was a grass track across two fields – not easy for delivery vans in wet weather. We children were given the job of fetching the laundry and the boxes by boat, going up on the rising tide and returning on the ebb. I was fourteen, my brother fifteen.

Graeme Rigby tells the story of the herring:

In the beginning were the proto-herrings (Paraclupeidae), which appeared roughly 110 million years ago in the Second Sea of Tethys, between the tectonically shifting continents of Laurasia and Gondwanaland. They were small, but 91.5 million years ago enough of them survived the Cenomanian-Turonian anoxic extinction event, which did for 27 per cent of marine invertebrates. Herrings are adaptable fish.

When they became euryhaline (tolerant of a range of salinity) is uncertain, although an oceanic extinction event would seem to have been a good time. This adaptability may explain why Knightia, a freshwater herring from between 56 and 34 million years ago, is the State Fossil of Wyoming.

Jonathon Green discusses William Falconer, poet and lexicographer:

Sea dictionaries have a long and distinguished history. The first in English would appear to be that of Captain John Smith (of Pocahontas fame) in Sea Grammar (1626), which focused on rigging and gunnery. A succession of equivalents followed, many of them written in the nineteenth century. The flow has continued: the current state-of-the-art volume is the late naval doctor and Falklands veteran Rick Jolly’s Jackspeak.

The heyday of sea dictionaries was certainly the age of sail. The champion, the nautical equivalent of Johnson’s English Dictionary of 1755 and almost as long-lived as an authority, was published in 1769: William Falconer’s Universal Dictionary of the Maritime.

…and of course there are Flotsam and Jetsam, North Sea News, books, inspiration, and the impeccable drawings of Claudia Myatt. Welcome aboard once more.

Extracts Spring 2020

Voyages, battleships, storms, hilarity….

Roger Taylor sails north of Svalbard in a tiny boat:

There is nothing on this planet comparable to sailing its oceans. Nothing else can take a man so far, into so many varied and obscure regions of the globe, with so little input of internal or external energy. In no other enterprise can he remain in motion, totally self-sufficient, for so long. Nothing else can bring him so uncompromisingly face to face with elemental Nature. The closest parallel is, I think, climbing high mountains; but there is no greater apartness and primal vulnerability to be found than that of being a thousand miles offshore in a raging storm.

 Clarity of purpose invites purity of form. In an Essex smack under full sail, or a Thames barge, or a trading dhow, or a Chinese junk, naked functionality seems to converge with expressive form to produce something transcendent of the underlying prosaicness. My own heart and eyes were biased, of course, but I had always found something felicitous in Mingming II’s crude utilitarianism. She was rebuilt from a semi-derelict Achilles 24 hull for a specific purpose, with no thought whatsoever for visual appeal, except for an overall colour scheme of black combined with several shades of grey. The guiding principles were no more than strength and total practicality.

 Gordon Davies tells the story of the Great Storm of 1881:

On the morning of 14th October 1881, Sir Thomas Brassey ordered his yacht Sunbeam to leave Middlesbrough on passage to Portsmouth. The barometer was very low and falling rapidly.Between dawn and 9 a.m. the wind veered from south to west-northwest and the barometer plummeted as a depression approached. As they were towed down the Tees, the pilot agreed with Brassey that at present there was no reason for Sunbeam to stay in port, but hinted that he thought a severe gale was brewing, and the wind would veer to the northwest, giving the sea an increasing fetch as Sunbeam ran down to Flamborough Head. Brassey ordered the topmasts to be struck and the yacht to be secured for bad weather, and sailed on.

     At Saltburn, eight miles down the coast from Middlesborough, the lifeboatmen were on standby....

 Max Liberson has a busy day:

The faint glimmer in my watch told me it was half past two in the morning. I couldn’t sleep. My mind was going over the rapidly approaching day. So many things could go wrong. So many people to depend on....

     It had started last year, when I brought my much-loved and well-travelled yacht Sarah to the yacht club, nestled in the soft and viscous mud of a creek in the Thames Estuary and so cheap I could almost afford it. Sarah draws 1.6 metres, and the price was so low because there were not many days when she would actually float, and when she did it was not for long. Still, you can’t have everything.

     It was in that creek that I lost my heart and senses to a beautiful 1936 Gaff cutter called Wendy May, and did a deal. Sarah would have to go. Eventually a Lithuanian drove down from somewhere near Liverpool and (against my advice) bought her.

 Penny Minney sails into trouble in the Cyclades:

Keith and Jim were our new crew members. Usually our crew were long-standing friends. This time, though, our friend Simon had found himself and his fellow crew-member unable to come. He had enterprisingly gone to Victoria Station, found Keith and Jim waiting for the boat train he would have caught, and offered them the chance to join us. Seduced by the chance of free places on a boat sailing among the Greek islands, they had agreed on the spot.

     The new crew were surprised to find that because of the difficulty in keeping things dry we had no radio on board, relying on neighbouring fishing boats for our forecasts. We told them that our neighbours said there was a gale warning for tomorrow, but that gale warnings were very frequent and somewhat unreliable, and we were keen to set out....

 John Crockatt's war:

I left school in the summer of 1938 and went up to Cambridge that autumn. In spring 1939 a friend and I went to the Royal Artillery depot and volunteered. The chap in the recruiting office said, ‘Come back next term and we’ll talk to you then.’ But next term never happened. We had a family holiday which was planned for September 1. We went to the Broads, and that year instead of hiring a boat we hired a house on the river near Horning and a couple of dayboats for sailing. We had two days of that, then the war broke out.

     I was nineteen, so the question was what to do. I talked it over with my father, and we decided I should volunteer for something. I felt that since I was already a sailor I wanted to go to sea rather than go into the army.

 John Blake delves into the career of a famous cruiser:

If you saunter along the River Thames, you will come across a grey lady who has just celebrated her eightieth birthday. She is HMS Belfast, the only surviving World War Two cruiser – an improved version, along with HMS Edinburgh, of ten light cruisers of the `Town’ class. She was ordered from Harland and Wolff in Belfast on 21 September 1936, and laid down on 10 December 1936. After fitting out and builders’ trials she was commissioned on the 5th August 1939.

 Wyl Menmuir cruises Svalbard:

RS Linden is unlike the other vessels moored in Longyearbyen harbour. Her three wooden masts tower above the whaling ships repurposed as tourist vessels, the yachts and RIBS that operate out of here to explore the wilds of Svalbard. I have been waiting for her to arrive for three days, in a state of increasing agitation, and it is a relief to see the tips of her masts come into view over the huddle of buildings that make up the centre of the small Arctic town. She is a reproduction of a 1920 schooner of the same name, and looks like a product of a bygone age - though in fact she is one of the most recently-built ships in the harbour, having been launched in 1996 in the Åland Islands.

     Linden is an experiment in small-scale ecotourism. She will spend her summer taking groups of up to twelve to explore the fjords of Svalbard. I am not a guest, but embedded as one of the seven-strong crew.

 Peter Padfield crosses the Atlantic on Mayflower II:

After being used to dropping lights behind one at a steady 15 knots or more it is rather disconcerting to come on watch in the morning and find the same lighthouse as last night in approximately the same position. We are on doubled watches, four on and four off, and sleep is difficult to come by in sufficient quantities. A reporter came aboard from a white launch early in the morning and watched us at our tasks of making anti-chafing gear. He disappeared with some letters to post and then we were visited by aeroplanes and coastal vessels, some of whom circled us several times as if in complete astonishment before making off. On occasions the reality suddenly strikes one, the absurd situation as crew of an antique looking vessel over three centuries out of date calmly sailing the waters of the Channel as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

 Peter Allen unravels the mystery of the French Captain Cook:

This flood of discoveries [made by Cook] arriving in London was viewed with envious eyes by the scientific community across the Channel. Why, Louis XVI demanded to know, was his great nation not participating in this bonanza? The honour of France required that she too should send an expedition to the Pacific. A hasty search for a suitable leader was instituted; the man who was chosen to be France’s answer to Captain Cook was Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de La Pérouse.

 Chris Howard has navigational problems in the Philippines:

Dusk was falling. Around us the squid boats were switching on their floodlights and Corregidor's regular flash grew steadily brighter. The wind had been fading since sunset, and we slipped with hardly a ripple from the bow across the pink mirror of the Bay. Soon we would need the engine; but for now we enjoyed the quiet of our first evening at sea, talking quietly in the cockpit, getting to know our shipmates....

 A E Copping runs into trouble in Rye:

Barely eight miles now separated us from the haven I had chosen for the night - Rye harbour; and, keenly enjoying a glorious evening, we sped on in constant view of a beach whereof the monotony was only broken where half-submerged nets and posts formed some automatic apparatus for catching fish. In the gloaming we had a glimpse of the cliffs of Fairlight, dimly purple.

     Meanwhile the amateur pilot had been consulting his book and chart, though with no very urgent sense of responsibility. The new mate's practical experience extending to Rye, there was no need at present for printed knowledge. My book made it abundantly clear that, what with shallows, currents, and the narrow dimensions of the Channel, the task of entering Rye harbour was not to be lightly essayed; and thus I had judged that Cole did wisely when, on coming abreast that inlet at nightfall, he put the Betty about, to wait for high water before running in.

 Ian Nicolson converts a coaster into a yacht:

She was a typical old short-voyage vessel, with a vertical bow and an old-fashioned counter stern, shallow-drafted so that she could get into small harbours. Her rudder was extra large so she could work up narrow winding rivers without going aground. She had been built with a triple-expansion steam engine located amidships. After years of service a diesel engine had been installed.

     Foxey was a hard bargainer, and took possession for very little money. The architect he used to design the houses he built was told to redesign the accommodation. The girlfriend insisted the day saloon and the owner’s sleeping cabin must be high up, well above sea level. The architect planned it over the engine room, as he knew nothing about diesel engine noise and vibration. A team of housebuilders moved on board. The first weekend at sea showed up the many faults in the architect’s design....

 And as always there are North Sea News, Flotsam and Jetsam, books, seamanship, eccentricity, extracts from the classics, and the thoughts of tugmaster and tobacco smuggler Ray Doggett – all decorated with the fine drawings of Claudia Myatt. Welcome aboard once more.

Extracts Winter 2019

Sailing, supertankers, ballads, Elizabethan stunts…..

Philip Marsden heads for the Summer Isles:

I had never skippered a boat to anywhere I couldn’t reach by lunchtime. Now I was due to sail up the Irish coast to the top of Scotland, singlehanded, aiming for a small group of islands that, more than twenty years ago, I’d vowed to reach in memory of someone I loved. I was thinking: What, in God’s name, have I taken on?

Sam Fortescue takes a giant multihull for a sail:

Big multihulls demand a special sort of sailor. First, it really helps to be French. No one is quite sure why, but the majority of cutting-edge racing multihulls are designed and built in France – more precisely Brittany, and to be exact, Lorient and Vannes. They are sailed by a hardy breed of (mostly) men who are more comfortable being tossed about the Southern Ocean on their own than running into a neighbour at the boulangerie, and they would sooner eat vegetable protein rehydrated with water from the desalinator than tuck into a nice poulet fermier.

     For the purposes of this expedition, we have pulled together MOD70s, AC45s and a bevy of third-generation Ultim-class trimarans fresh out of the moulds, and here are the keys for a day. Now let's go sailing.....

Alfred, Lord Tennyson tells the story of the Revenge:

AT Flores, in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay,
And a pinnace, like a flutter’d bird, came flying from far away;
‘Spanish ships of war at sea! we have sighted fifty-three!’
Then sware Lord Thomas Howard: ‘Fore God I am no coward;
But I cannot meet them here, for my ships are out of gear,
And the half my men are sick. I must fly, but follow quick.
We are six ships of the line; can we fight with fifty-three?’

David Pyle sails a Drascombe eastwards from the Gulf:

A thousand miles of unwelcoming sea lay ahead of us before we were to reach Karachi. The coastline of Muscat, South Iran and West Pakistan had little to offer in the way of refuge. Back in England I had been warned of this coastline by a BOAC captain who had often flown high above it. 'It's about the most barren and inhospitable area I have ever seen,' he informed me one evening a few days before we were due to leave. Now we were about to see it for ourselves. His words echoed in my thoughts as we set the sails and headed northeastwards along the Trucial Oman coast.

Ian Tew fights the flames of a burning supertanker:

It was dark as we approached the burning tanker. The Al Ahood was well down by the stern, which was under water. Flames were shooting up the starboard side of the accommodation, through which the missiles had entered, and the Iranian mountains dark against the sky made a spectacular backdrop to the flames and smoke. I wondered if I had bitten off more than I could chew. The Al Ahood was a huge potential bomb, especially if the fire spread forward to the undamaged tanks loaded with crude oil. I thrust such negative thoughts aside. Forget about the Iraqis, the Iranians, war zones, and missiles. Concentrate on the salvage.

Julia Jones tells the story of British submarines early in WWII:

Twelve little S-boats ‘go to it’ like Bevin,

Starfish goes a bit too far — then there were eleven.

Eleven watchful S-boats doing fine and then

Seahorse fails to answer — so there are ten.

Ten stocky S-boats in a ragged line,

Sterlet drops and stops out — leaving us nine.

Nine plucky S-boats, all pursuing Fate,

Shark is overtaken — now we are eight.

Eight sturdy S-boats, men from Hants and Devon,

Salmon now is overdue — and so the number's seven.

Seven gallant S-boats, trying all their tricks,

Spearfish tries a newer one — down we come to six.

Six tireless S-boats fighting to survive,

No reply from Swordfish — so we tally five.

Five scrubby S-boats, patrolling close inshore,

Snapper takes a short cut — now we are four.

Four fearless S-boats, too far out to sea,

Sunfish bombed and scrap-heaped — we are only three.

Three threadbare S-boats patrolling o'er the blue

Two ice-bound S-boats...

One lonely S-boat...

James Cable goes to sea:

In March 1871 we left Saint Katharine's Dock, and were towed to the Downs, where we anchored. While there, a gale came up and we had to slip our anchors and run for Weymouth Roads. Then we saw our captain for the first time. He was drunk all the time. We shipped one big wave, which broke the carpenter's leg. This was my first turn at a ship's wheel, and it took all my time to keep the ship on her course. The pilot, who was a Deal fisherman, made it harder for me, because he would talk to me about fishing all the time. I did my turn at the wheel for two hours and had not left it for ten minutes when the mate had me back again because I was the only one in his watch who conld understand English.

 Adrian Morgan writes a love letter to the Vertue:

‘I honestly believe,’ wrote Humphrey Barton in 1950 of Vertue XXXV ‘that she is the best designed, built and equipped small ocean-going yacht that has yet been produced. Her ability to stand up to bad weather, her remarkably high performance under sail and the comfort of her accommodation are outstanding.’ But then he would say that, as a partner of the man who designed her, and having sailed her across the Atlantic to win orders from wealthy Americans at a time when Britain was hungry for postwar dollars.

Penny Minney goes cruising in a ship's lifeboat:

The year was 1955. We had been looking for more than a year for a vessel within our means in which we could sail among the Greek islands during our long vacations from Oxford, investigating the trade routes of the Greeks and Romans. At that time there were almost no yachts in the Eastern Mediterranean. We tried various options. Then, unexpectedly, we heard from a sailing friend’s father who was stationed in Malta. He wrote that he had noticed two seventeen-foot ship’s lifeboats for sale in the Valetta garage where he bought his petrol. He offered to have them surveyed and buy us the better of the two – extraordinary kindness. They looked new, he said, and were built of Welsh oak.  It seemed to us an easy proposition to sail coastwise in such a boat till eventually we reached Greece. Our plan for the first season, however, was to sail across to Sicily and back, laying the boat up in Valetta.

Philip K Allan explores the appalling sequel of Trafalgar:

On 21st October 1805, HMS Victory famously led a column of ships of the line into the heart of Vice-Admiral Villeneuve’s Franco-Spanish fleet off Cape Trafalgar for the climactic battle of the age of sail. At the moment of his greatest triumph, Lord Nelson was struck down by a sharpshooter stationed in the rigging of the French ship Redoutable. The hero fell and was carried below. The faithful Hardy delivered his kiss; Lord Nelson murmured, ‘Thank God I have done my duty,’ and died. Many accounts of the battle end at this point. For many of those involved, though, the story was only just beginning.

Richard Ferris, Queen's Messenger at the court of Elizabeth 1, goes dinghy cruising to Bristol for a bet:

The boate wherein I determined to performe my promise was new built, which I procured to be painted with greene, and the oares and sayle of the same collour, with the red crosse for England and her Majesties armes, with a vane standing fast to the sterne of the sayd boate which being in full readinesse, upon Midsommer day last, my selfe with my companions, Andrew Hill, and William Thomas, with a great many of our friends and welwillers, accompanyed us to the Tower Wharfe of London, there wee entred our boate, and so, with a great many of our friends in other like boates, rowed to the court at Greenewitch, where before the court gate we gave a volley of shot: then we landed and went into the court, where we had great entertainment at every office, and many of our friendes were full sorie for our departing. And having obtained leave before of the Right Honorable the Lord Chamberlaine, the Lord Admirall, and M. vize Chamberlaine, for my departure, I tooke my leave and so departed.

Peter Cardy watches the world of Portsmouth Harbour go by:

Portsmouth is HM Naval Base, so unlike most other VTS it does not offer advice to captains, but issues firm instructions, backed up by muscle if necessary. The ten-knot speed limit is enforced. Exclusion zones are permanently in place around the naval quayside and any naval vessel alongside. And such a variety of naval vessels: in recent months the national ensigns flown at the yardarm on the semaphore tower have been Belgian, US, Korean, French, Canadian, Japanese, Italian....

     When the aircraft carrier Queen Elizabeth arrives or departs she is surrounded by a swarm of small craft - tugs, Defence Police launches, shadowy RIBs full of Men In Black. On top of the ski-jump at the carrier’s bow stand several sailors. In the middle of the group stands the chaplain, and below it is a drop of fifty metres to the sea. I am happy about all the protection, because even a modest explosion would blow in all my windows. When salutes are fired from the South Railway Jetty a quarter of a mile away they rattle my teeth…..

and of course there are Flotsam and Jetsam, books, sage advice, the writings of Ray Doggett, tugmaster and international entrepreneur, and a salty world of other stuff. Welcome aboard!