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….