Ship launches, magnetic mines, coffee pots…

Don Street finds new uses for the ship's coffeepot:

We stormed along under staysail, which was fairly small and happily loose-footed. The wind increased and the seas built up. How hard it blew and how big the waves were I do not know, but when we were surfing on the biggest seas the 40hp gasoline engine was turning over against compression. Catalina was a well-designed Casey ketch, built in 1938, with a full keel. We had no trouble steering; the difficulty was that she would surf down a wave, the engine would rumble, she would stick her nose into the wave ahead, and the wave astern would break on board. She had a bridgedeck, the washboards were in place, and her self-bailing cockpit had two big inch drains. Unfortunately she also had footlockers, the doors of which were in the sides of the cockpit. We thought these doors were close-fitting: wrong. Every time a wave came aboard and filled the cockpit, water drained through the leaky doors and went below, filling the bilge to the floorboards, and one of the watch below would crawl out of his bunk and get to work with the big brass 2 1/2" up-and-downer bilge pump. This worked fine until the boat took a bad roll when the pump handle was in the up position and the crew fell against the handle and bent the shaft. End of pump.

Julian Blatchley in the Patagonian Channels:

The tall pilot spoke quietly to the master, who ordered an increase to half ahead and a small course correction. Then he went into the chartroom to divest himself of his jacket and lifebelt. As he left the bridge the third mate beckoned me. He was a Hebridean, and disseminated a caustic wit which would have been unseemly in someone old enough to have some justification for it, which he was not. He did not much like his fellow islanders, deprecated mainland Scots, deplored the English, and seemed to consider anyone from further afield barely human; why he had chosen to make his living travelling a world he seemed to despise I could never make out. His antagonism towards the tartan apparel of the pilot was instant and palpable. As that rangy figure returned to the bridge, his jacketless state revealing a pullover of yet another noisy tartan, the third mate gave an audible sigh of contempt. Throwing me the movement book, he said, 'Go and get f*****g Pedro’s name.'

He spoke too loud. The pilot’s head whipped round, and he said, forcefully and in a marked Scots accent, 'F*****ing Pedro comes frae Edinburgh!'

Max Liberson laments the passing of a lady:

In 1976, when I started work as a fisherman in Sutton Harbour, one trawler stood out from all the others. She was called the Flete Lady. She was about seventy feet long, and rigged as a sidewinder – she worked her trawl off the starboard side, with a spare on the port side, rigged and ready to go in case the starboard gear was smashed or lost. She was built in 1958 by Mashfords yard, next to Mount Edgcumbe just across the river from Plymouth. After the War the grounds off Plymouth were fair teeming with fish, and Mashfords was putting together a fleet to take advantage of the stocks. One of the other boats was the Pentille, a similar-sized Admiralty-built trawler, which had been sold off after hostilities had ceased. At first glance the two boats looked the same, but they were as different as chalk and cheese. I once saw them close together at sea. The Pentille was rolling heavily, but the Flete Lady was just going up and down. Closer inspection revealed many other differences. The poor old Pentille was thrown together in wartime with whatever wood the boatbuilders could get their hands on. The Flete’s timbers were lovingly crafted from the very best oak, supplied for free from the Flete estate (the agreement was that while she fished the estate was supplied with a box of lemon sole every month). The Flete was then planked up in iroko, with galvanised nuts and bolts instead of the Pentille's iron spikes. As the years went by, the Flete Lady became the top landing boat in Plymouth.

Jim Crossley discusses magnetic mines:

Much has been written about the Battle of the Atlantic, and the struggle to fight convoys through the u-boat 'wolf packs' and round the North Cape. Before these campaigns commenced, however, an equally bitter struggle had to be fought and won closer to home, in the North Sea. Tirpitz had put it well. ‘Germany,’ he said, 'must control the seas from Heligoland to the Thames.’ The High Seas Fleet he built singularly failed to achieve this objective in World War i; but in 1939 the Royal Navy faced a more alarming threat. Germany could close the North Sea to British shipping by using a relatively simple and economical device: the mine. In those days the Thames was the world’s busiest waterway and the backbone of the British economy. Hundreds of ships every day steamed up and down the east coast, and they were pitifully vulnerable to mines. If this traffic was halted, Britain would last only a few weeks.

Joe Henderson gets his first job:

We went down to the loft in St Mary’s Road. The building was called Empire Buildings, after the old theatre that used to occupy it. Harry had taken it over when the loft moved from Bank Chambers, and had simply put a set of offices on the dress circle balcony, and installed the rotary hammer swaging machine and Talurit presses on concrete plinths that stood about a foot above the varnish-and-Stockholm-tar-stained chipboard-over-concrete floor. I followed my Dad into the darkish interior, to the back corner of the loft floor where Harry was putting the finishing touches to some lignum vitae deadeyes for the rig of Mohamed al Fayed’s schooner Dodi, named for his son. Harry shook the lignum dust off his shoulders and said to my Dad, ‘Hello my love, come up to the office.’

We went up the stairs and into his office. He sat us down and said, ‘So you want to be a rigger?’

I said, immediately, ‘Yes!’

Mike Bender explains Guy de Maupassant:

Maupassant’s Sur L’Eau was published in France in 1888. The author, who was born in 1850, was brought up in Étretat on the Normandy coast, whose spectacular cliffs were much painted by the Impressionists. He became an accomplished sailor and rower, and in 1868 was somewhat helpful in saving the poet Swinburne, by all accounts dead drunk at 10am, from drowning.

Cruising with de Maupassant:

'Fine morning, sir.'

I rise and go on deck. It is three in the morning; the sea is flat, the sky an enormous vault of shadow broadcast with little specks of fire. A zephyr of breeze blows off the land. The coffee is hot, we drink it, and so as not to lose a minute of this favourable breeze, set sail. And there we are, sliding over the waves towards the open sea. The coast disappears; all around us nothing can be seen except darkness. It is a feeling, an emotion, troubling but delightful; to plunge into this empty night, in this silence, on this water, far from everything. It is as if we have left the world, that we will never arrive anywhere, that there will be no coast, that there will be no day. At my feet a little lamp lights the compass which shows me the way. We must run at least three miles out to sea to be certain of rounding Cap Roux and the Dramont, whatever wind we will have once the sun has risen. I have caused the running lights to be lit, red to port and green to starboard, to prevent accidents, and I take a pleasure amounting almost to intoxication in this dumb, steady and peaceful flight.

Evan Evans cruises British style:

It was hot, hot, hot as we dropped the mooring pennant in the West Kyle of Bute. We pointed Dahlia's nose south, with a bit of west in it, and proceeded with majestic slowness on the broadest of reaches. A couple of porpoises rolled. We saluted them, and picked up a buoy in Lochranza, and poured a libation to the sea god while the sun lit the jagged crags of Arran above the castle. It was a biggish libation, because tomorrow was Kilbrannan Sound.

The Sound is the southern extension of Loch Fyne. On its eastern side Arran heaves itself out of the sea, and on its western side Kintyre trudges south. It has a richly-justified reputation for either no wind or too much wind, with the refinement that what wind there is funnels either up or down it, arriving on the nose or, as today, dead aft. I hauled up jib and main, goosewinged them, and bowled south at an encouraging five knots. But the herd of white horses ahead faded, and soon we were motoring. In the evening we arrived at Campbeltown.

Edgar Allen Poe, drunk, goes sailing:

It was blowing almost a gale, and the weather was very cold – it being late in October. I sprang out of bed, nevertheless, in a kind of ecstasy, and told him I was quite as brave as himself, and quite as tired as he was of lying in bed like a dog, and quite as ready for any fun or frolic as any Augustus Barnard in Nantucket.

We lost no time in getting on our clothes and hurrying down to the boat. She was lying at the old decayed wharf by the lumber-yard of Pankey & Co, and almost thumping her sides out against the rough logs. Augustus got into her and bailed her, for she was nearly half full of water. This being done, we hoisted jib and mainsail and started boldly out to sea.

George Hodgkinson explains how to launch a ship:

The safe transfer into water of a ship built on land has been a challenge that man has striven to solve down the ages in different ways, with varying degrees of success. Noah simply waited for the rains to fall, and his Ark became buoyant of its own accord; and this technique, known as ‘float up’ is the preferred method of launch in a modern shipyard. When the ship, constructed in a cavernous dry dock under a roof, is ready for launch, water is simply let in, and once it has reached the required depth the ship is floated up and out. In a parallel but rather more hit-and-miss fashion, seventeenth-century English shipbuilders used the rise and fall of the tide to launch ships from a tidal dock. This method is, however, entirely reliant on accurate knowledge of the time and level of the tide; there were total failures due to insufficient water, and in the case of hms Boscawen in 1844, of the newly-built ship being carried off its slips at Woolwich by a tidal surge.

Sport fishing for tunny in home waters:

The real start of big game angling in British waters came in 1930, when on 27 August Mr. Mitchell-Henry made history by landing the first Tunny ever caught here on rod and line, a fine specimen of 560lbs. This was hooked about fifty miles off the coast and was landed at Scarborough. Four other fish were taken that season with weights of 735, 630, 591 and 392lbs. It is worthy of note that the 735-pounder was only 23lbs less than the then existing world record, held for many years by the American, Mr. Zane Grey.

The Royal Cruising Club Pilotage Foundation:

In December 1880, nine Victorian yachtsmen met to form the Cruising Club (later to become the Royal Cruising Club). In the words of the club’s founder Sir Arthur Underhill, they ‘felt it an anomaly that upwards of twenty Royal yacht clubs should exist for the encouragement of racing, while the increasing class which was far more interested in cruising and navigation was left entirely unrepresented’.

Sir Arthur drafted the new club’s rules. One of the primary objects was ‘to give the opportunity to Members who may wish to visit a coast, river or lake which is new to them, to obtain information as to harbourage, boatmen and other local matters by means of correspondence with members acquainted therewith’. This wording remains unchanged today, and Royal Cruising Club (rcc) members have been happily exchanging pilotage information with each other for 143 years.

Richard Crockatt discusses the Millars:

George Millar and his wife Isabel rarely feature in accounts of yachting in the postwar years. They never crossed an ocean, broke no nautical records, nor indeed attempted to, and knew few of the prominent names in the cruising fraternity of that era. Nevertheless, starting almost from scratch as sailors in 1946, they undertook interesting voyages in European waters over the next two decades. George Millar wrote three remarkable books about their exploits: Isabel and the Sea (1948), A White Boat From England (1951), and Oyster River (1963).

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