Shipwrecks, ferries, shellfish, lifeboats…..

A night to remember for Tony Higgins:

The night had become very dark and cloudy, with both wind and sea rapidly rising. The Northeast Providence Channel was narrowing as it approached its western apex, with coral-headed banks closing in on both sides. By that time we were sailing hard on the wind, holding a dr course that I hoped was somewhat to weather of the still invisible Northwest Channel light. I was concerned that our leeway, combined with the beam-on wave action, might have pushed the boat well to leeward of the course, possibly pushing us in on the edge of the bank to the south, just out of range of the light. My forebodings were soon proved correct.

We hit hard, were lifted by the beam seas, and dropped hard again as they rolled under us.

Nicholas Gray explains how he acquired his sextant:

The u-boat was badly shaken and suffered near-terminal damage,including a cracked pressure hull, which began to leak badly. Oberleutnant Gengelbach, realising the boat's plight was hopeless and refusing to countenance a surrender, decided to go down bravely and honourably with his crew. Engineer Oberleutnant Laurenz, however, thought otherwise. Drawing his Mauser pistol he faced his commander and told him that while there was indeed severe electrical and hull damage, the diesel engines were still operational and there was still compressed air available. He believed it would be possible to surface and get away in the remaining darkness.

Julian Blatchley copes with dirty work at the crossroads:

When I was a lad dreaming of a life at sea, Britain had aspirations to marine excellence, and Britons were conscious and proud of their country's maritime history. I grew up with merchant seaman role models – Carlsen of the Flying Enterprise; Parker and Dancy of the Turmoil; Lightoller of the Titanic and Rostron of the Carpathia; Pollard and Hawkins of the San Demetrio, Mason of the Ohio. Then there were Coxswain Evans of Moelfre and Coxswain Blogg of the Cromer Lifeboat, both bywords for courage and initiative. The staunch obduracy of the convoy men still resonated. The sea was still a frontier, where law was not yet absolute, nature only partly tamed, and manly deeds rose above knavery and ill circumstance. Ships were expected to come to grief from time to time, and sharp practice was deplored but expected. There were heroes, and there were villains, and a seaman perhaps had to be a bit of both.

It is not so today.

John White builds a half-model of his old boat:

I remember scouring boatyards with my girlfriend Mary in 1966, looking for a modest sailing cruiser. After a few weeks it was becoming clear that we could not afford any yacht that could stay afloat outside a mud berth, and we were becoming dispirited. On the way to a boatyard in Lymington to view a particularly drab plywood cruiser, however, we saw laid up in a garden the most beautiful yacht I had ever set eyes on, long and lean, with a beautiful sheer. Her name was Alpenrose. Pausing only to dismiss the plywood firewood at the boatyard, we enquired about the boat in the garden. They told us that it was owned by Roger Pinckney, a well-known yachtsman who had previously owned the famous Dyarchy, in which he had pioneered Channel cruising in the years after the war. Now, it seemed, he was swallowing the anchor and had put Alpenrose up for sale.

The Cox'n answers a shout:

One breezy summer’s day the duty lookout at a coastal observation station observed a thirty-two-foot sailing yacht, all sails set, apparently sailing round in small circles. As the boat came up into the wind the sails would flutter; then it would continue its turn and bear away. With the wind now on the beam it made rapid progress, only to continue its turn until it was again heading into the wind, where almost all motion halted and the process began all over again.

This was not a usual activity. Binoculars, brought up to get a better view, revealed the skipper seated in the cockpit, making no signs of distress and thus apparently happy with the situation. The watch monitored the craft for some time as it continued these slow gyrations. After discussion, it was agreed that the coastguard should be notified, and a telephone call was duly made.

Puggy Dimmond gets afloat:

A man of simple philosophy, old Puggy Dimmond hadn't really a care in the world. Although by modern standards his material comforts were few, there was little he had to worry about. A convenient tide line provided him with firewood in addition to the occasional yacht's dinghy, timber, kegs, oars, spars, fenders, lifejackets and other sundry flotsam and jetsam, which he bartered or sold. This, together with a modest income derived from fishing and wildfowling in their seasons, supplied his frugal wants – mainly tobacco and rum. Blessed with a strong constitution, he was a contented, robust old man who enjoyed an independent, happy-go-lucky, rates-free existence aboard Sea Witch, the rotting hulk that was his home.

And then one day a letter arrived, which threw this even tenor into sudden confusion and alarm.

Jack Pelorus becomes a smuggler:

Talk of smuggling in England is usually of Kent, and Sussex, and the west country; but nowhere in the realm has it lasted so long nor bloomed so freely as on the margins of Lakeland, where the tides are fierce, villages scarce and the coast unpeopled. Folk were sparse outside Whitehaven, Maryport, Ulverston and Workington, and those there were did not see it as crime to avoid duty set in Whitehall. They also knew each other, so that no riding officer or gauger could hope to gather a whisper or move unseen. And a bare ten leagues over the water lay Man, the Warehouse of Fraud.

I grew up among the barge-sloops on Windermere and Coniston. From a child I knew that the free trade flowed around me – and at times, when my father was prevailed upon to lodge a cargo in our cellar, even beneath me. This he did as a favour to Captain John Cobb, master of the famous smack Ardent. It seemed to me the finest thing imaginable to sail in such a ship, so when I turned eighteen I followed a packhorse train over Wrynose and Hardknott to Whitehaven, where I found both man and boat in a drying berth on Bransty Beach.

Anthony Dew joins his ship:

I joined Roybank in the Port of London in late March 1969 and we sailed a week later, on April Fool’s Day. I was fresh from apprenticeship, and this was my first proper job as third mate. The first person I met on board was the second mate, Colin, a good-natured chap about the same age as me. It would have been his first trip as Third Mate too, but he had been bumped up when the previous Second Mate quit after an argument with the Mate, during which he was reported to have said, ‘I’m not sailing with that twat.’ He had then flounced off the ship, leaving behind a terrible mess.

Alastair Robertson explains Scotland's ferry disasters:

It probably doesn’t matter in the long run who is responsible for the Scottish ferries fiasco. By the time the inevitable public inquiry is over, apologies made, names named and 'lessons learned', it will have assumed much the same status as the Schleswig-Holstein Question, of which Lord Palmerston sighed: 'Only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor, who became mad. I am the third, and I have forgotten all about it.' None of which is much help to 45,000 Hebridean islanders beset by ferry breakdowns in an ageing fleet and deep uncertainty over suitable replacements.

Ian Dear investigates some of the history of the RYS:

Rivalry amongst members as to the speed and design of their yachts came to influence the Navy’s design of its vessels. Three years after William iv became King in 1830 he stated the Club was of ‘national utility’ and directed it be known as The Royal Yacht Squadron. This rivalry led members to acquire some notoriously speedy smugglers’ boats, and the equally speedy revenue cutters that chased them. Lord Uxbridge went one further when he sought out Philip Sainty of Wivenhoe – described by one source as ‘a man of unknown origin, polygamous habits, and a confirmed smuggler, but very expert as a boat-builder’ – to build him a cutter. He found Sainty was in gaol for smuggling, and immediately procured a royal pardon for him. Sainty, however, refused to cooperate until royal pardons were also procured for his brother and brother-in-law, who were under lock and key for the same offence.

Martin Llewellyn investigates shellfish farming:

In 2006 researchers dredged up an ocean quahog clam (Articus icelandius) from the chilly waters around Iceland. They called her Hafrún. Her life was cut short when a graduate student flash-froze her little body in liquid nitrogen and neatly sliced her shell, whose growth rings held a fabulous secret: Hafrún had settled out of the plankton to begin her modest but tenacious existence in the year of our Lord 1499. Think of her next time you tuck into a clam chowder.

Not all shellfish grow so old or so slowly, nor, thank goodness, is there a convention to give each of them names. A lot of bivalves actually grow surprisingly fast. A king scallop (Pecten maximus) reaches ‘commercial’ size in about 4-5 years, and the same is roughly true for oysters. Mussels can grow even faster – from spat (the miniature version of themselves that leaves the plankton to adhere to surfaces) to parsley, onion, muscadet and optional dash of cream in fifteen short months. Fortunately, many of our most appetising bivalves are fast-growing. Furthermore they feed on plankton, which keeps feed costs remarkably low; in fact, zero. There is some shellfish farming. But why is there not more? Perhaps because the question is not as simple as it might at first appear.

Richard Crockatt explores the life and writings of Ann Davison:

Her skipper and husband Frank had fallen unconscious and lost his grip on the float and soon after that his life. Ann had resigned herself to a similar fate when a wave that should have been the end of her ‘thundered down on the float’ and woke her ‘from oblivion to anger’.

Still clutching the float, she was entirely at the mercy of wind, waves and tides. She was dragged far out to sea, then back towards the shore on the west side of the Bill, where in one of those unaccountable miracles of survival a huge wave picked her up and deposited her on a rock by the shore. Crawling to a neighbouring rock as yet another wave broke over her, she worked towards a cavern she had glimpsed, whose floor was above the level of the water. ‘Then,’ she recalled, ‘I was standing in the cave.’ After some moments of dazed indecision she found a way along the coast to a point where she could scale the cliffs. Her ordeal was over.

… and of course there are Flotsam and Jetsam, an interview with an oligarch in which he reflects on the joys or otherwise of yacht ownership, books old and new, the beautiful illustrations of Claudia Myatt, excitement, reflection and blasts of salt spray and fresh air….