Whales, gales, war at sea….

Meurig Evans cruises the northwest of Ireland:

The wind had gone round to the north and was blowing across the bay – a good force 8. However, the holding ground was good and the CQR anchor held. An attempt was made to communicate with those on board, first by signal lamp and then by semaphore, but they could not understand us. Eventually we wrote in six-foot letters on a patch of sand, 'Put second anchor down.' They got this, for we saw them disappear down below and bring up the fisherman anchor and using the engine, put it out in a more or less seamanlike fashion to seaward. With reasonable confidence that, having ridden it out so far, she could survive what else might come, we adjourned to the hotel once more and successfully overcame any remaining apprehensions under the influence of good food and wine. Later reading of the log showed that they had another sleepless night on board, keeping two-hour anchor watches, with the engine warmed up and the echo sounder showing only seven feet when they were in the trough of the swell.

The Humber lifeboat in wartime:

Even with its road and railway Spurn Point still seems very far from the world, and those who went to it during the war – it was an hour's journey by road from Hull – felt at the end of it that they had reached remoteness absolute. But they were then only another hour's journey, by air, from the enemy's flying fields in Holland.

The point and the waters of the estuary were closely defended. Guns, searchlights and mines were hidden in the dunes. Iron hedgehogs were set on the sand below high water ready to rip up aeroplanes should they attempt to land at low tide. The mouth of the estuary was guarded by its two steel forts, built on piles above the sandbanks, its anchored Phillips defence units looking like huge iron buoys with their anti-aircraft guns, Belgian trawlers flying balloons, and the great defence-boom itself stretching across the estuary from shoal to shoal, a three-mile line of iron buoys, holding, chained between them, massive baulks of timber, close-set with yard-long steel spikes, and from the baulks the steel nets to trap submarines hanging to the seabed. The house and slipway of the lifeboat were just outside the boom.

Tom Cunliffe learns wisdom in the tail of a hurricane:

As dawn crawled through the scud we were treated to a view of mast-high seas making whoopee with the current. There wasn't a lot we could do other than hang on tight and find a volunteer to crawl forward and make sure the sheet of the handkerchief-sized headsail wasn't chafing. The rest of us had breakfast, then played a game of Scrabble while the level in the whisky bottle sank steadily and the seas climbed all over us. I was skulking in the deep cockpit, clipped on firmly and trying to drink my lunchtime soup before it blew out of the mug when I noticed a ship ploughing very slowly to windward a couple of miles off. ‘Aha!’ I thought. ‘She’ll have a proper forecast. But do I really want to know?’

James Boswell and Dr Johnson at sea:

The old skipper still tried to make for the land of Mull, but then it was considered that there was no place there where we could anchor in safety. Much time was lost in striving against the storm. At last it became so rough, and threatened to be so much worse, that Col and his servant took more courage, and said they would undertake to hit one of the harbours in Col. 'Then let us run for it in God's name,' said the skipper; and instantly we turned towards it. The little wherry which had fallen behind us, had hard work. The master begged that, if we made for Col, we should put out a light to him. Accordingly one of the sailors waved a glowing peat for some time. The various difficulties that were started, gave me a good deal of apprehension, from which I was relieved, when I found we were to run for a harbour before the wind.

Julian Blatchley's first tanker:

My first tanker was a 40,000-tonne deadweight product tanker called Adirondack. We were sent out to her in a launch as soon as she arrived in the approaches to Willemstad, the port capital of Curacao in the Netherlands Antilles. I was somewhat disgruntled to be joining a tanker in the first place, especially as third mate - I had been chief mate in my last cargo ship. My mood was not improved by being abandoned in a rundown beach hotel for several days before joining, nor by the discovery that a menacingly silent bunch of saturnine characters with whom I had shared the hotel were boarding the same launch, and so were presumably my new shipmates. They made no attempt to introduce themselves but conversed in what sounded like a Slavic tongue. Whatever gruntle I still possessed disappeared completely when I saw the pilot ladder we had to climb to get on board.

Adirondack appeared unreasonably rusty and abnormally high. Her cankered hull plates lowered uninvitingly over the launch, and a scruffy-looking pilot ladder, well over the nine-metre rope-ladder limit, hung crookedly and entirely illegally from her rail; but obviously no one was going to object.

Paul Deacon and the vanishing skipper:

The skipper's name was Craddock. He had been in the company for some time, and loved to be addressed as Captain Craddock. He was supposed to be ex-RN, and dwelt in a haze of company gossip about his bizarre behaviour and unwise decisions. Rumour had it that he had been involved in covert naval activities against Colonel Gadaffi on the Libyan coast some years previously, and he let it be known that he possessed information on the dictator so secret and damaging that he was now being pursued by Gadaffi's hitmen. He had wanted, he claimed, to continue his glittering naval career, but had been advised by the Secret Service to pursue it elsewhere; so he had joined the merchant navy, though it was hard to understand why he had sought to continue his career on clapped-out coasters, on which the only glitter was the frost on the hatch covers. 

Clifford Ashley is fast to a whale:

Tony stood by the sternsheets; from time to time he threw a turn of the line over the loggerhead. And so we held our speed without let-up; for though, after a while, the whale slackened his first mad pace, the line also went out slower. And we, crouching in the bottom to steady her, bailed constantly to keep from filling with the influx over the bows. Slower and slower the line surged, but the stern tub was emptied and the waist tub was being drawn on heavily. Then came a moment when it ceased running through the chocks, and the boat began to lag. 'Stand by to haul in line!' came the order, and getting out of our cramped positions, we grasped the now inanimate rope and hauled and strained with feet braced on the thwarts, winning it back inch by inch, painfully and slowly. Tony held what we made with his turn on the loggerhead. Span by span, fathom by fathom, the line crawled in.

Henry Feather inspects a restoration project:

HMS Pickle was built in 1799, and bought by the Royal Navy to serve on the Jamaica station. She was a Bermuda sloop, though the term is misleading, as she was schooner-rigged, with a square topsail on her foremast. The weatherly qualities of this rig made her a natural choice as a carrier of despatches; and in 1805 she found herself off Cape Trafalgar as the Royal Navy sailed to cut the line of the French and Spanish fleets.

Most accounts mention her as keeping some miles to the north northwest of the line of battle - a reasonable assumption, as a single ball from a ship of the line, let alone a broadside, would have been in a fair way to sink her; though there are claims that during the battle she was instrumental in landing her surgeon on the Victory to take some of the pressure off Beatty, the flagship's hideously overworked surgeon. Be that as it may, she rescued some hundreds of French seamen (and a few women), and suppressed an attempt by the prisoners to take her by force and sail her into Cadiz.

The news of the Trafalgar victory would usually have been brought home by a frigate. After the battle and the gale that succeeded it, however, frigates were in short supply. So Admiral Collingwood entrusted the news to the notoriously fleet-footed Pickle, and Lieutenant Lapenotiere. It was not an easy voyage. The month was November, and the weather had turned. The seas were too high for Plymouth, so Lapenotiere put in to Falmouth, where he was greeted by worried crowds eager for information, and boarded a post-chaise for London. Here his news was greeted with mingled delight at the victory and sadness at the death of Nelson, who had combined the roles of brilliant commander and popular celebrity. Lapenotiere was made post. He was awarded £500, a Lloyd's Patriotic Fund sword worth £100, and a muffineer from the King's own hand, and disappears from the story. Pickle, however, sailed on until in 1808, still carrying despatches for Collingwood, she ran aground off Cadiz and became a total loss.

Jim Crossley on early destroyers:

The second half of the nineteenth century saw dramatic developments in naval technology. Steel hulls replaced oak and cast iron, rifled guns mounted in turrets replaced broadside barbettes, and steam power gradually eliminated the need for masts and sails. These revolutionary developments made the British Admiralty distinctly nervous. Suppose one of their enemies, especially France or Russia, got a commanding technical lead and used it to challenge Britannia's ruling of the waves. How could Britain catch up? What would happen to our maritime commerce?

The navies of the future:

The era of unmanned surface vessels (USVs) in naval combat began in 2016, during the Yemeni Civil War, when Houthis made use of remote-controlled boats full of explosives to attack vessels of the Saudi-led coalition as they operated off the coast of Yemen. This approach was further developed from 2018 to 2020, when Iran employed USVs and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to harass shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. But it is Ukraine's use of unmanned vessels, ranging from explosive-laden surface craft to stealthy underwater vehicles, that has revolutionised maritime combat strategies in the region – and probably beyond, and caught the attention of military planners worldwide.

Colin Dunlop makes a delivery:

Blue Lagoon Cruises has been one of the principal tourist attractions of Fiji since the 1960s, offering four-day cruises to the Yasawa, a group of islands and reefs scattered over seventy miles north of the Fijian city of Lautoka. By the 1980s some of the original ships of the Blue Lagoon fleet were no longer up to modern standards of comfort, reliability and fire protection. They had been built cheap, and were showing it. New ships were ordered and the old ones sold, one being bought by an Australian tourist operation, which intended it for inshore work after a major refit. The new owner asked us to deliver the ship to Adelaide in South Australia. At that time Carol and I were both Fiji citizens, had a good idea of the characteristics of the boat, and possessed RYA Yachtmaster Ocean Certificates, which satisfied the insurance company; so we agreed to make the delivery.

Jo Stanley remembers Langston Hughes:

The African-American poet Langston Hughes was one of the towering figures of the Harlem arts renaissance. Hughes was more than an urban dreamer; he worked on ships as a steward from 1922-24, and his 1940 autobiography The Big Sea uses this poem as its epigraph.

His main ship, the Malone, cannot now be traced, so he must have disguised its name. He described it as an ‘old freighter, smelling of crude oil and garbage.’ The important thing about it is where it went – ‘back’ to Africa, on what turned out to be part of Hughes's quest for identity. As a lad, Hughes's estranged father took him briefly to Mexico, where the sea made a big impression on him. After WWI he began looking futilely for a job, any job – ‘It was not easy. Want ads, employment offices, the Y...the shoeshine stands. No luck. But...I’d kept remembering the smell of the sea on my first night in Veracruz. And it seemed to me now that if I had to work for low wages at dull jobs, I might just as well see the world, so I began to look for work on a ship.

A song from the rivers of Australia:

There’s some as goes a-sailing where the seas is wide an’ deep,

Pluggin’ on for weeks an' weeks without a sight o’ land,

Knowin’ naught but wave an’ sky, an' rounds of work an’ sleep:

If they find the life a pleasure — well, it’s hard to understand!

I like the sound o’ waters as we chug along all day.

An' to hear the throb of engines as the noisy paddle grips;

But I’d miss the good old gum-trees an’ the townships by the way

If I drifted on the ocean with the coves who man the ships.

Julia Jones explains her new book:

Writing Stars to Steer By has brought me in contact with defiant women of every generation. In the early 1960s Diana Beach went as far as to take her parents to court in order to marry the man she loved. Several years later she sailed home with him and two small daughters on the cutter Mjojo, built on the Islamic island of Lamu. Ivy Carus-Wilson (b 1886) was just a little younger than Marian Carew, but equally determined. She discovered her skill at rowing when her divorced mother moved to Shaldon on the River Teign in 1904. Soon Ivy was competing in the local regattas against working women such as an ‘ancient cockle-scraper’ from Teignmouth and a gang of women from Dittisham, ‘all screaming like parrots’. Ivy’s mother’s family were respectable middle-class publishers of Crockford’s Clerical Directory, but money was a problem, especially when Ivy discovered that she loved sailing as well as rowing. She bought an 18 foot open boat, but couldn’t afford to pay anyone to look after it and sail with her. Instead she made an arrangement with a local whereby he could use the boat to take trippers out when Ivy wasn’t racing, and that he could have the cash part of any prizes they won together. She regularly had to pawn her watch to afford the entry fees.

… and of course there are flotsam and jetsam, Near Seas News, books, the reprehensible musings of tugmaster and sanctions-buster Ray Doggett, and the luminous illustrations of the inimitable Claudia Myatt.