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