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….