Grounding, electricity, copra….

Simon Britten starts a race he doesn't finish:

After a brisk spring series of inshore races in the waters around Granton Harbour we prepared our boat for the longest challenge in the club’s calendar. The Farne Islands are a bunch of rocks a mile off the Northumberland coast just south of Lindisfarne. We set off on a Friday evening in June, with a reasonable shipping forecast and a coolbox containing a weekend's worth of food and liquid refreshment for the five of us. The race officer started our group of six yachts at around 6.30pm, giving us a few daylight hours to get eastwards out of the Firth of Forth. The weather was kind, with a southwesterly breeze around force three. Spinnaker hoisted, we settled down to a pleasant west northwesterly run, sufficiently gentle for early sandwiches, after which I went below to check the position against the Fidra light and the Isle of May, a mile-long sliver of rock guarding the entrance to the Firth of Forth. We had planned two watches of two people; as skipper I would chip in where required.

Charlie Webb is fouled by the Kaiser:

Imagine this here. You are the secret weapon, eighty feet up in the armpit of a gaff sail in the armpit of the Baltic. Out there on the horizon the thin ghosts of Fyn and Lolland mark the place where the windy sky meets the battleship-grey sea. Down the white river of the wake stand the bristling masts of Kiel regatta, with the canal locks and the funnels of the Kaiser Barbarossa in attendance on Kaiser Wilhelm, bless his mad heart.

That was what David Davies was seeing, the secret weapon, youngest of the thirty men in my crew, perched between sea and sky. He was getting the view. I was getting the white man's burden, down on the deck with my heart in my mouth and my hip on ten feet of coachwhipped iron tiller, driving the Doria through the Kieler Fjord.

A racing cutter, Doria. One hundred and twenty feet of black hull with an axe stem and a gold-leaf coving line; bowsprit, mainmast and topmast carrying 11,000 square feet of Egyptian cotton sails; below, staterooms, bathroom and ladies' cabin, saloon panelled in best Honduras mahogany all complete; and in a button-leather armchair in that saloon Sir Alonso Cummings, the owner, banker and strict Methodist, reading the Court Circular in the Times and breathing hard through his moustache.

Julian Blatchley in the South Seas and elsewhere:

I was fortunate to be assigned to the Exebank for my final voyage as a cadet. This close to sitting my exams for the second mate’s certificate, I urgently needed bridge time. Exebank, however, was a copra boat, and they were not famous for affording watchkeeping time to trainees. Bank Line vessels were all hard workers, forever in and out of ports, cleaning and preparing holds when in ballast and caring for cargo when loaded. Much of this fell to the cadets, to the detriment of their bridge time. The company acknowledged this, and promised to give plenty of bridge time on one’s last ship before examinations. But this was 1980, and the decline of the British Merchant Navy had begun. Ships were becoming fewer, recruitment was slowing drastically, and some high jinks ashore on a previous voyage, ending with a night in a Chilean calaboose, might not have helped my case.

Max Liberson gets compensation:

We settled down to a regime of fishing all the time the weather was good and fixing the boat and gear when it was not. One fine morning a frigate steamed past us and out to sea until the flashes of its radar could just be seen over the horizon. It was such a lovely day that the whole fishing fleet was out. We were shooting away the gear, Dave on the port side winch drum and me on the starboard, when there was a loud explosion and we were covered in smoke. Because we were shooting we could not leave the winch and Tommy could not shut the throttle or change course, so we had to carry on. As soon as the marks were out Tommy shut down the throttle and we had time to wonder what the hell was going on. Channel 16 was going mental, and Tommy joined in, taking the opportunity to yell at the coastguard that we had been shelled.

Jim Lawrence starts a career as a bargeman:

Minnie, my best pal and mentor, got a job as a mate on a barge called the Flower of Essex. He was nicknamed 'Minnie' because we did a school play called Hiawatha. He got the part of Minnehaha and the name stuck with him all his life. Everyone seemed to have a nickname in those days. One chap I heard about was called Hackney Joe; well, I could work that out. If Stratford Jack came from Stratford, then Hackney Joe must come from Hackney, but that wasn't the case. When I met him I found he was a young boy from Ipswich who simply had a faceful of pimples.

At last the time came for me to leave school. It could not come soon enough for me. It was the start of the summer holidays in 1948. They let us school leavers out a bit earlier, saying ‘We can't teach you any more’ which I thought meant that we knew everything. I had fixed up to go as third hand in a barge called Gladys belonging to Horace Shrubsall.

Chris Scanes joins the Merchant Navy:

I had been a sailmaker for around ten years, sailing with the top yachtsmen of the day. I was in my late twenties, and began to feel I needed a bit of a sabbatical. Then one day I spotted an advert placed by Manchester Liners, a company that ran container ships out of Manchester docks. They had vacancies for uncertificated third officers, foreign-going. One of my work colleagues suggested, not at all seriously, that as I had an RYA yachtmaster’s ticket I might as well apply for the job. So just for fun I sent in an application, and to my utter surprise was offered an interview.

The first question was, 'What on earth is a yachtmaster’s certificate?' I explained, thinking crikey, they must be desperate. It turned out that navigationally the ticket was equivalent to a mate’s Home Trade Certificate, and to my complete shock I was offered a job.

Hans Unkles, creel fisherman, goes electric:

I have just completed the conversion of a 1978 Cygnus GM21 to all-electric and solar power. The Cygnus 21 is a fairly substantial boat for its size but, in reality, not much bigger than an open dinghy. It is the grey Fergie of the fishing industry – a small, reliable, manageable and solid workhorse. I have done forty years of scallop diving, lobster, crab and prawn fishing. For a long time I have been drawn to the concept of generating energy with natural resources. A quarter of all the power we use at home and work is powered by our own solar. My neighbour and ex-fishing partner has been operating a five-metre all-electric open boat for about seven years, using wind and solar to keep it going, and we often discussed the possibility of scaling the idea up to a commercially viable scale. I was watching battery tech improving and costs dropping for both batteries and the motors. I was also watching no active attempt by the fishing industry to adopt or even investigate the huge developments in no-emission vessels taking place in the leisure industry and in the rest of the world – even poor African countries have fishing boats that don’t burn fuel.

Mike Smylie investigates the history of Billingsgate:

The Billingsgate Market Act of 1846 reflected a powerful increase in the amount of fish being landed. Oddly, the public taste for cod seems not yet to have developed. In 1850 only 1,800 tons of the species were brought through the market. This tonnage was only equivalent to the weight of sprats sold, many of them presumably from the stow-net smacks around Brightlingsea, and was dwarfed by a throughput of 10,000 tons of mackerel. The market developed a reputation as a lively place, famous for drinking, boisterous behaviour and general insalubrity, controlled by its army of porters and featuring exotica like the fish-women boxers who fought in the public houses holding coins in their palms so that they were unable to pull their opponent’s hair.

Jim Crossley explores the lethal world of mines:

In both world wars mines were simultaneously the most cost-effective and deadly of naval weapons, sinking more warships than torpedoes, bombing or gunfire. The final and most feared type deployed in wwII was the pressure or 'oyster' mine. Unlike other types[1], oyster mines were held back by the Germans – and indeed the British, who had successfully developed a similar device – for some months after they had been developed, so that they could be deployed in significant numbers right from the start. By May 1944 over 2,000 German 'oysters' were stored in France and kept carefully concealed, ready to guard against the invasion force that Hitler was rightly convinced would be used against his continental empire.

Nicholas Gray investigates a tragic life:

When Thomas Tangvald was young he believed that most people lived on boats and that only a few strange people lived in houses on the shore. He was born on 23 May 1976 on board his father’s yacht, L’Artemis de Pytheas, in the middle of the Indian Ocean some distance from the Strait of Malacca, en route from the south of France, via the Red Sea, to Taiwan. The only other people on board were his father Peter and his mother Lydia.

Emily Painter on the private life of the stormy petrel:

It has been blowing hard all month. The swells are long and black and steep, gnarled with cross-seas. Their tops rise and sharpen and topple down their leeward fronts in grey drifts that would make a great roar if there was anyone to hear them. But there is no-one to hear them –

Wait.

Just under a steepening crest is a tiny black bird. Out here, a thousand miles from land, there is crashing and roaring, big, violent movement. But the bird is fluttering, and delicately: pittering at the black upslope of a wave, whose crest topples, ten feet of grey ruin, while the creature, no bigger than a swallow, flits casually backwards out of reach of disaster.

Malcolm Turner tells the story of Uffa Fox:

At fourteen Uffa Fox became an enthusiastic Sea Scout, and by the age of twenty-one he had been appointed Scoutmaster. One of his duties was to organise and lead short sailing expeditions, sometimes as far afield as Poole or Weymouth. Uffa, however, yearned to sail further, and began to hatch a plan with his fellow scouts. The boys’ parents would be told that they were going to Poole. The real plan, however, was to sail their whaler across the Channel and up the Seine to Paris. On the voyage the boys took turns to sleep across the thwarts. Several of them, including Uffa, were seasick; but they recovered their health and spirits, and soon found themselves sailing gently across a calm sea under a blue sky.

At dawn after their second night at sea they sighted Cap de la Hève with Le Havre in its shadow. They spent a day in Rouen, then continued up the non-tidal Seine. At Meulan, thirty miles short of Paris, Uffa decided that time was running out and reluctantly turned for home. A friendly steamer, the Swallow of Grimsby, towed them back as far as Le Havre, from where a southwesterly breeze wafted them back to the Island. Uffa counted the adventure as a great success. The parents, however, were furious.

… and of course there are flotsam and jetsam, Near Seas News, books, the reprehensible musings of tugmaster and tobacco smuggler Ray Doggett, and the luminous illustrations of the Claudia Myatt