Voyages, battleships, storms, hilarity….

Roger Taylor sails north of Svalbard in a tiny boat:

There is nothing on this planet comparable to sailing its oceans. Nothing else can take a man so far, into so many varied and obscure regions of the globe, with so little input of internal or external energy. In no other enterprise can he remain in motion, totally self-sufficient, for so long. Nothing else can bring him so uncompromisingly face to face with elemental Nature. The closest parallel is, I think, climbing high mountains; but there is no greater apartness and primal vulnerability to be found than that of being a thousand miles offshore in a raging storm.

Clarity of purpose invites purity of form. In an Essex smack under full sail, or a Thames barge, or a trading dhow, or a Chinese junk, naked functionality seems to converge with expressive form to produce something transcendent of the underlying prosaicness. My own heart and eyes were biased, of course, but I had always found something felicitous in Mingming II’s crude utilitarianism. She was rebuilt from a semi-derelict Achilles 24 hull for a specific purpose, with no thought whatsoever for visual appeal, except for an overall colour scheme of black combined with several shades of grey. The guiding principles were no more than strength and total practicality.

Gordon Davies tells the story of the Great Storm of 1881:

On the morning of 14th October 1881, Sir Thomas Brassey ordered his yacht Sunbeam to leave Middlesbrough on passage to Portsmouth. The barometer was very low and falling rapidly.Between dawn and 9 a.m. the wind veered from south to west-northwest and the barometer plummeted as a depression approached. As they were towed down the Tees, the pilot agreed with Brassey that at present there was no reason for Sunbeam to stay in port, but hinted that he thought a severe gale was brewing, and the wind would veer to the northwest, giving the sea an increasing fetch as Sunbeam ran down to Flamborough Head. Brassey ordered the topmasts to be struck and the yacht to be secured for bad weather, and sailed on.

At Saltburn, eight miles down the coast from Middlesborough, the lifeboatmen were on standby....

Max Liberson has a busy day:

The faint glimmer in my watch told me it was half past two in the morning. I couldn’t sleep. My mind was going over the rapidly approaching day. So many things could go wrong. So many people to depend on....

It had started last year, when I brought my much-loved and well-travelled yacht Sarah to the yacht club, nestled in the soft and viscous mud of a creek in the Thames Estuary and so cheap I could almost afford it. Sarah draws 1.6 metres, and the price was so low because there were not many days when she would actually float, and when she did it was not for long. Still, you can’t have everything.

It was in that creek that I lost my heart and senses to a beautiful 1936 Gaff cutter called Wendy May, and did a deal. Sarah would have to go. Eventually a Lithuanian drove down from somewhere near Liverpool and (against my advice) bought her.

Penny Minney sails into trouble in the Cyclades:

Keith and Jim were our new crew members. Usually our crew were long-standing friends. This time, though, our friend Simon had found himself and his fellow crew-member unable to come. He had enterprisingly gone to Victoria Station, found Keith and Jim waiting for the boat train he would have caught, and offered them the chance to join us. Seduced by the chance of free places on a boat sailing among the Greek islands, they had agreed on the spot.

The new crew were surprised to find that because of the difficulty in keeping things dry we had no radio on board, relying on neighbouring fishing boats for our forecasts. We told them that our neighbours said there was a gale warning for tomorrow, but that gale warnings were very frequent and somewhat unreliable, and we were keen to set out....

John Crockatt's war:

I left school in the summer of 1938 and went up to Cambridge that autumn. In spring 1939 a friend and I went to the Royal Artillery depot and volunteered. The chap in the recruiting office said, ‘Come back next term and we’ll talk to you then.’ But next term never happened. We had a family holiday which was planned for September 1. We went to the Broads, and that year instead of hiring a boat we hired a house on the river near Horning and a couple of dayboats for sailing. We had two days of that, then the war broke out.

I was nineteen, so the question was what to do. I talked it over with my father, and we decided I should volunteer for something. I felt that since I was already a sailor I wanted to go to sea rather than go into the army.

John Blake delves into the career of a famous cruiser:

If you saunter along the River Thames, you will come across a grey lady who has just celebrated her eightieth birthday. She is HMS Belfast, the only surviving World War Two cruiser – an improved version, along with HMS Edinburgh, of ten light cruisers of the `Town’ class. She was ordered from Harland and Wolff in Belfast on 21 September 1936, and laid down on 10 December 1936. After fitting out and builders’ trials she was commissioned on the 5th August 1939.

Wyl Menmuir cruises Svalbard:

RS Linden is unlike the other vessels moored in Longyearbyen harbour. Her three wooden masts tower above the whaling ships repurposed as tourist vessels, the yachts and RIBS that operate out of here to explore the wilds of Svalbard. I have been waiting for her to arrive for three days, in a state of increasing agitation, and it is a relief to see the tips of her masts come into view over the huddle of buildings that make up the centre of the small Arctic town. She is a reproduction of a 1920 schooner of the same name, and looks like a product of a bygone age - though in fact she is one of the most recently-built ships in the harbour, having been launched in 1996 in the Åland Islands.

Linden is an experiment in small-scale ecotourism. She will spend her summer taking groups of up to twelve to explore the fjords of Svalbard. I am not a guest, but embedded as one of the seven-strong crew.

Peter Padfield crosses the Atlantic on Mayflower II:

After being used to dropping lights behind one at a steady 15 knots or more it is rather disconcerting to come on watch in the morning and find the same lighthouse as last night in approximately the same position. We are on doubled watches, four on and four off, and sleep is difficult to come by in sufficient quantities. A reporter came aboard from a white launch early in the morning and watched us at our tasks of making anti-chafing gear. He disappeared with some letters to post and then we were visited by aeroplanes and coastal vessels, some of whom circled us several times as if in complete astonishment before making off. On occasions the reality suddenly strikes one, the absurd situation as crew of an antique looking vessel over three centuries out of date calmly sailing the waters of the Channel as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Peter Allen unravels the mystery of the French Captain Cook:

This flood of discoveries [made by Cook] arriving in London was viewed with envious eyes by the scientific community across the Channel. Why, Louis XVI demanded to know, was his great nation not participating in this bonanza? The honour of France required that she too should send an expedition to the Pacific. A hasty search for a suitable leader was instituted; the man who was chosen to be France’s answer to Captain Cook was Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de La Pérouse.

Chris Howard has navigational problems in the Philippines:

Dusk was falling. Around us the squid boats were switching on their floodlights and Corregidor's regular flash grew steadily brighter. The wind had been fading since sunset, and we slipped with hardly a ripple from the bow across the pink mirror of the Bay. Soon we would need the engine; but for now we enjoyed the quiet of our first evening at sea, talking quietly in the cockpit, getting to know our shipmates....

A E Copping runs into trouble in Rye:

Barely eight miles now separated us from the haven I had chosen for the night - Rye harbour; and, keenly enjoying a glorious evening, we sped on in constant view of a beach whereof the monotony was only broken where half-submerged nets and posts formed some automatic apparatus for catching fish. In the gloaming we had a glimpse of the cliffs of Fairlight, dimly purple.

Meanwhile the amateur pilot had been consulting his book and chart, though with no very urgent sense of responsibility. The new mate's practical experience extending to Rye, there was no need at present for printed knowledge. My book made it abundantly clear that, what with shallows, currents, and the narrow dimensions of the Channel, the task of entering Rye harbour was not to be lightly essayed; and thus I had judged that Cole did wisely when, on coming abreast that inlet at nightfall, he put the Betty about, to wait for high water before running in.

Ian Nicolson converts a coaster into a yacht:

She was a typical old short-voyage vessel, with a vertical bow and an old-fashioned counter stern, shallow-drafted so that she could get into small harbours. Her rudder was extra large so she could work up narrow winding rivers without going aground. She had been built with a triple-expansion steam engine located amidships. After years of service a diesel engine had been installed.

Foxey was a hard bargainer, and took possession for very little money. The architect he used to design the houses he built was told to redesign the accommodation. The girlfriend insisted the day saloon and the owner’s sleeping cabin must be high up, well above sea level. The architect planned it over the engine room, as he knew nothing about diesel engine noise and vibration. A team of housebuilders moved on board. The first weekend at sea showed up the many faults in the architect’s design....

And as always there are North Sea News, Flotsam and Jetsam, books, seamanship, eccentricity, extracts from the classics, and the thoughts of tugmaster and tobacco smuggler Ray Doggett – all decorated with the fine drawings of Claudia Myatt. Welcome aboard once more.