Gales, sails, merchant shipping….

Uffa Fox sails to Le Havre regatta in a 14-footer:

Once clear of the Island, we shipped water faster than two could bail it out on this course, so I let her off a point to leeward of Havre, this easing the wind and sea enough to enable one man bailing to keep pace with the water shipped, while the other two sat her up.

About four miles outside the Wight we saw a cutter with three reefs in her mainsail running back for the shelter of the Island. She had only just put to sea bound for Havre, where she finally arrived two days after us, her crew explaining that the day upon which they sailed was too rough for her.

Phil Weld sails Moxie in the OSTAR:

The gates to the Milbay Dock swung open about ten in the morning to permit a procession of launches to take in tow those competitors without engines. A smart crew aboard a navy vessel took Moxie's line. On both sides of the lock, I could pick out the smiling faces of the many British friends we'd made over the past ten years of racing from this historic port. As we passed into the harbour, the volume of handclapping and decorous cheers gave clear recognition that the beauty of Moxie's three slender hulls made her a favourite.

Jon Tucker confronts the terrors of the deep:

I remember being scared as a child. I was in the bow of a smallish centreboarder, and as the tall grey-green waves marched towards me I suddenly became aware of the great depths extending far below. It did not last. I realised that the boat's buoyancy would overcome each approaching wave, and that if I put my trust in the vessel it would carry me safely back to harbour.

This epiphany of buoyancy has carried me confidently through a voyaging adulthood that has contained wider concepts of perils at sea. It has come in handy when we have been running before a Roaring Forties gale under bare poles and drogue, with spume-laden greybeards astern hinting at overwhelming us, and a firmly closed companionway hatch and a Thermos of tea have allowed skipper and crew to think rationally on Archimedes’ laws of displacement.

Julian Blatchley parks a supertanker:

Seatank Kestrel, a two-million barrel capacity oil tanker, has arrived at the Munsaab oilfield in West Africa. She has already loaded a standard 950,000 barrel parcel of crude at a nearby field, and now requires to load a further similar amount at Munsaab Alfa. The Kestrel is over 330 metres long, and sixty wide. Her hull is thirty metres from keel to deck, her nine-cylinder engine can deliver 38,000hp to her single propeller. In her partially loaded state she draws 14.2 metres, weighs 210,000 tonnes, and as pilot it is now my job to attach her to the stern of the terminal for loading. Better get on with it.

Daniel Jessel takes a hard look at shipping:

It is curious how so many people are oblivious of our island’s proud maritime traditions, particularly as its Brexit future supposedly depends on trading with the whole world. For if trade is the beating heart of the global economy, then the sea lanes used by shipping are its vital arteries. Between 80 and 90 per cent of internationally traded tonnage travels by sea, and at any one time more than 50,000 cargo ships are plying the oceans, carrying twelve billion tonnes of the world’s economic lifeblood to its furthest corners.

Libby Purves on Mission to Seafarers:

We may be tiring of tales about being mewed up at home with family, wi-fi and slightly restricted shopping opportunities. I do not exempt myself from the grumblers but today I am preoccupied by another cribbed and confined population, whose conditions are rarely mentioned. Consider the merchant seafarers: provisioning the globe but largely invisible behind the tossing seas and the massive secure terminals. It is never an easy life, but now harsher and more alarming in the coronavirus crisis.

Adrian Morgan, Daily Mail newshawk turned wooden boatbuilder, reminisces about yacht journalism:

The history of yachting abounds with tales of salt-drenched derring-do – survival against the odds, epic races with no side giving an inch, flaxen sails strained to the limit of triple stitching. These stories often came to light thanks to the pens of a largely forgotten tribe of nautical scribes, who brought them alive, on occasion with the help of a little journalistic licence.

Julia Jones tells the story of three intrepid amateurs in WWII:

In June 1940 the evacuation from Dunkirk had been completed. An unexpectedly high proportion of the British Expeditionary Force and some of their allies were home. But tons of equipment had been left behind, and two bef divisions were trapped south of the Somme. The Channel ports were now inaccessible. If French resistance collapsed the only way out for British troops and remaining civilian evacuees would be via the Atlantic ports from Brest to Bayonne. By 14 June General Alan Brooke felt certain that France was about to collapse. He rang Winston Churchill to ask for a new evacuation to begin. There were material assets to be salvaged as well as people.

Mike Clark serves an apprenticeship in a Suffolk boatyard:

I was fifteen years old in 1953 and just about to leave school, not quite sure what I wanted to do. I was good with my hands and thought engineering might be a good idea. Then the headmaster came over to me in woodwork class one day and said: ‘Clark, would you like to be a boatbuilder?’ I said, ‘No, not really. I want to be an engineer.’ But later, a family friend advised me that if a job was going I should take it if I could.

Ernie Nunn’s boatyard was at Waldringfield on the banks of the River Deben in Suffolk. On a summer’s day I cycled to the boatyard for my interview and asked to see Ernie. ‘He’s not here’, they said. ‘He’s at home with a broken ankle. Better go on up to the house to see him’.

That was the first and the last time I was interviewed by a man in bed.

Penny Minney's wild and watery childhood:

My family moved to a solitary house on the shores of the Dwyryd estuary in the spring of 1948. My father, a writer, had gone ahead to buy supplies, and had been lent a little car which ran on bottle gas.

The house had been built around 1912. A rough road along the shore had been strengthened and improved to facilitate the work of building, but had been washed away by a tidal wave in 1927. The only route to our house was a grass track across two fields – not easy for delivery vans in wet weather. We children were given the job of fetching the laundry and the boxes by boat, going up on the rising tide and returning on the ebb. I was fourteen, my brother fifteen.

Graeme Rigby tells the story of the herring:

In the beginning were the proto-herrings (Paraclupeidae), which appeared roughly 110 million years ago in the Second Sea of Tethys, between the tectonically shifting continents of Laurasia and Gondwanaland. They were small, but 91.5 million years ago enough of them survived the Cenomanian-Turonian anoxic extinction event, which did for 27 per cent of marine invertebrates. Herrings are adaptable fish.

When they became euryhaline (tolerant of a range of salinity) is uncertain, although an oceanic extinction event would seem to have been a good time. This adaptability may explain why Knightia, a freshwater herring from between 56 and 34 million years ago, is the State Fossil of Wyoming.

Jonathon Green discusses William Falconer, poet and lexicographer:

Sea dictionaries have a long and distinguished history. The first in English would appear to be that of Captain John Smith (of Pocahontas fame) in Sea Grammar (1626), which focused on rigging and gunnery. A succession of equivalents followed, many of them written in the nineteenth century. The flow has continued: the current state-of-the-art volume is the late naval doctor and Falklands veteran Rick Jolly’s Jackspeak.

The heyday of sea dictionaries was certainly the age of sail. The champion, the nautical equivalent of Johnson’s English Dictionary of 1755 and almost as long-lived as an authority, was published in 1769: William Falconer’s Universal Dictionary of the Maritime.

…and of course there are Flotsam and Jetsam, North Sea News, books, inspiration, and the impeccable drawings of Claudia Myatt. Welcome aboard once more.