Hurricanes, cod, lifeboats….

Anthony Gurnee crosses the Atlantic:

In the summer of 2006 the family moved to Ireland, and I decided to make my way there by sea. The route would be from Jamestown, Rhode Island non-stop to Kinsale. The plan was to drop down to the Gulf Stream and ride it all the way over. What we had in mind was a relaxing broad reach in the warm following current. We were advised that to avoid tropical storms and maximise our chances of settled weather, June was the best time to go. We sailed from Jamestown on 11 June 2006.

The official hurricane season runs from 1 June for six months. Most hurricanes, and their junior cousins, the marginally less powerful tropical storms, occur in August and September. Examination of the statistics showed that storms form in the first half of June only about once every three years, and that most of these tend to head inland, away from the Atlantic.

Tropical Storm Alberto was just such a one-in-three.

Julian Blatchley, blockade-runner:

Swan’s accommodation consisted of cabins on the upper deck with a large saloon and bar below, and did rather disguise her classic line; yet the fairly compact addition to her aft end did not much detract from the pugnacious, businesslike thrust of her high, solid bow. In white livery with crimson trim, and flaunting an enormous ensign, she looked a neat and purposeful little ship. She had spent her active service with the Royal Australian Navy, earning battle honours in the Borneo campaign, and had then been used as a trawler before her passenger conversion that was intended to take her into the dive charter market; but therein lay a problem, for Greece, ever sensitive about the risk to her antiquities, had as good as banned leisure diving, and kept a monopoly over passenger shipping. Swan, with fifty sets of diving gear on board and her Australian ensign, was about as welcome as Lord Elgin driving a backhoe.

Mrs Brassey crosses the Pacific in ‘Sunbeam’:

Friday, January 5th 1878. The fresh fair breeze still continues. At noon we had sailed 240 knots. The head-sea we could dispense with, as it makes us all very uncomfortable. Muriel, Baby, the three maids, and several of the crew, are ill to-day with influenza, and I have a slight touch of it, so I suppose it will go right through the ship. Towards the evening the breeze increased to a gale.

Saturday, January 6th. The gale increased during the night, and the head-sea became heavier. There was a good deal of rain in the course of the day. The wind dropped about sunset, and was succeeded by intervals of calm, with occasional sharp squalls. Baby was very poorly all day, but seemed better at night. We have now regularly settled down to our sea life again, and, if only the children recover, I hope to get through a good deal of reading and writing between this and Japan.

Gordon Davies investigates the ‘Great Eastern’:

In 1851 Isambard Kingdom Brunel began to consider the possibility of travelling non-stop to Australia by steamship. What stimulated his thoughts is not recorded, but he was aware that the Liverpool-based shippers Gibbs, Bright & Co were modifying the Great Britain for use on the run. At that time steamships could not reach Australia without the considerable expense of refuelling en route, so the Great Britain had been converted into a fast sailing ship. With an auxiliary steam engine for use in adverse or negligible wind she could reduce the passage time to two months, compared to the three or four months of a sailing ship.

Brunel had a strong interest in the Great Britain — he had been closely involved in building her, and also in the salvage operation after she had run ashore in Dundrum Bay. Perhaps it was her conversion that led him to wonder if, instead of sailing with an auxiliary engine, it would be possible to steam non-stop to Australia. Coal was hard to find and expensive in Australia; but why not carry enough to get there and back? A rough calculation suggested that 13,500 tons would be sufficient. That would require ‘a large ship, certainly’; but his experience with the Great Britain convinced him in his usual true style that ‘the use of iron . . . removes all difficulty in the construction’.

The opportunity to build his ‘large ship' arrived very quickly.

Keith Muscott visits Frank and Margaret Dye:

The 1963 London International Boat Show at Earls Court ran for eleven days with 500 exhibits. Wooden dinghies were scarce and included the cheapest boat there, a ‘seagoing sailing dinghy’ that an unnamed hero had built from an old wardrobe for under ten pounds. Margaret Ann Bidwell made her way through the crowd, dispirited by the ‘shiny faceless grp boats’. She decided to escape and spend the rest of her day in a London art gallery. She was a teacher from Norfolk, now aged 31, a sturdy outdoor sort of lady despite being small in stature. She could not resist the allure of sailing, but her experiences on board yachts had not been happy ones; they were simply too big. She decided to leave the Boat Show by a side door. On her way out ‘I walked by this wooden, scruffy 16-foot dinghy. Her varnished decks were salt-crusty and scarred. . . On the thwarts sat a small, dark-suited man reading a book; he barely glanced up as people crowded around . . . and he answered questions in a shy, diffident manner.’

The man was Frank Dye, and the boat was Wanderer, Wayfarer #48.

Tom Cunliffe on blocks:

The need to raise the power of human effort by mechanical means has been recognised since Odysseus sailed his hollow ship on the wine-dark sea from Ithaca, bound for the plains of Troy and eternity. Long before gear wheels and hydraulics were a dream on the horizon, sailors understood the obvious benefits of a rope purchase.

Basic lanyards passing between two eyes of some sort would have come first ─ we have all used these on small traditional dinghies and on lashings aboard bigger craft. Next on the scene would be the dumb sheave, a chunk — or ‘block’ — of wood with a sculpted, lubricated hole through which rope can render. Sometimes the hole would be chamfered to allow several parts of rope to lead around it without fouling one another. If kept tallowed this operated surprisingly smoothly, as anyone who has used a well-designed deadeye system for setting up shrouds will confirm. Such arrangements can still be seen on faithful replicas of nineteenth and early twentieth-century sailing craft whose forestay passes through the stem to be set up against the bitts.

Emily Painter follows the Portuguese cod fleet:

The Torre de Belém stands on the margin of the Tagus just to the west of Lisbon. It was built of silvery stone in the sixteenth century, and is a beautiful thing; but not as beautiful as the boats anchored beyond it in the river in the 1950s. They are schooners and ketches, painted white, with the elegance of the truly workmanlike. Around them swarms a throng of small boats. The supplies are on board — food, wine, coffee, huge quantities of salt from the pans up and down the Atlantic coast — and now their people are boarding from crowded punts. There are families in the punts, women and children waving, some weeping, some stone-faced as the men climb up the sides of the schooners: small men, wearing striped trousers and check shirts, with bundles over their shoulders. Sails rise on masts. Anchors come up. Families wave. The fleet slides away westward, down the tide to where the evening sun is glittering in the western sea. They will be gone for six months.

Far to the northwest, in the dark water of the fishing grounds, the cod move over the seabed in an enormous sheet, shoulder to huge shoulder, kept together by an instinct that is more like the behaviour of a herd than a shoal.

A J E Haslett builds a dory:

On the Grand Bank of Newfoundland, for a long time has flourished a fishery employing schooners, which carry dories on deck. The actual fishing is done from the dories which are launched overboard each day from the schooners, and each moves off with one or two men who fish with lines for Cod.

For a schooner to carry a relatively large number of small boats on deck, the necessity arose to design these boats to be piled up, and so the dory came into being. In order to pile these boats one on top of another, without making the stack too high, they were made to fit one inside the next, and this was achieved by making them have flat bottoms, raked stems and sterns and flared out sides; it was essential that the hollow shells were free from projections and cross members such as thwarts.

In most small boats, thwarts are an essential part of the vessel’s strength, and in dories, this has to be compensated for by increasing the rigidity of the framing, so they have relatively few frames, but they are of heavy construction and the thwarts movable. This form of boat was (and in some cases, still is) used by the Americans, Canadians, French and Portuguese.

I am employed aboard a specialised vessel working on short voyages from Plymouth, and having gleaned as much information about dories as possible, decided to build one for my own use.

Henry Martin follows the RNLI:

A cat was spotted trapped under a pontoon at East Cowes Marina. On arrival the lifeboat crew and marina staff managed to reach the beleaguered feline by partially dismantling the wooden structure. The cat duly sprang to freedom, to continue its prowl of the surroundings; and the lifeboat crew — with not a scratch between them — was able to return to station, arriving at 2.32pm. Later the station was contacted by the grateful woman owner of the cat, who said she had been looking for the cat all night before hearing plaintive mewing from under the pontoon. An rnli spokesperson said: ‘We’re glad to have reunited this missing cat with his owner.’

Chris Scanes starts his seafaring:

One summer when I was in my mid-teens the motorised barge Oxygen came alongside the wharf at Leigh-on-Sea to discharge her cargo of timber. She still had her mainmast and a very tatty-looking mainsail, tightly brailed; but the mizzen had been replaced by a turtle-back wheelhouse, and she certainly looked as if she was struggling to make a living.

I got the skipper into conversation. He was Chub Horlock, a wiry little man, quietly spoken, with a soft north Essex accent, who came from a long line of barge owners and skippers. The Oxygen had been delayed in Leigh, he explained, while he waited for a relief mate to join so he could proceed to London for orders. ‘It’s only a short trip,’ he said. ‘Would you like to stand in for him?’

Richard Crockatt and the adventures of ‘Sopranino’:

It is hard not to be in awe of Patrick Ellam, less for the length or scope of his voyaging, which was not remarkable by the standards of some of the sailors of his generation, but rather for the clarity of purpose he brought to it. From the moment he resumed sailing after his war service he had a plan and a point to prove which he pursued with extraordinary skill and vigour. His point was that a small and light boat, not much bigger than a dinghy, could be as capable of ocean passages as larger, heavy displacement craft.

Between September 1951 and February 1952 he completed a 5,000-mile Atlantic voyage from Falmouth to New York via the Caribbean in the Laurent Giles designed Sopranino. For the bulk of the voyage he was accompanied by Colin Mudie, a Laurent Giles employee who had been given the task of producing the detailed drawings of the boat. At just under twenty feet overall, Sopranino was not merely small but at only half a ton remarkably light.

…and of course there are books, Flotsam and Jetsam, the brilliant illustrations of Claudia Myatt and the reprehensible musings of Ray Doggett, tugmaster and tobacco smuggler extraordinary.