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.