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