They’re in danger of becoming devalued, and if you suspect I am referring to the old, small, wooden boat I am trying to pass on to new ‘custodian’ and that I’m using this column shamelessly to push the Vertues [sic] of classic boat ownership, as my old friend Roger Robinson claims, you’d be right.

Seems like the bottom is falling out of little wooden boats, so to speak, for reasons I can imagine, but cannot fully understand. Why would one not aspire to be the guardian of a fine collection of firmly fastened lengths of timber, of the quality boatbuilders can only dream of these days? Why would one not want to spend hours with a scraper, sandpaper and finally – after many hours – a varnish brush of finest badger bristle every spring? Why, lastly, would anyone prefer to be polishing a white wall of fading glassfibre, a slave to the latest miracle gel, guaranteed to restore the shine to even the most jaded of hulls?

I have seen at first hand the effort, cost and skill needed to have your glassfibre hull cut and polished by a professional, compared to the simple, quick pleasure of applying a top coat of Hempel’s Polar White to a wooden topside. It also takes a lot longer than you think; sprucing up glassfibre, that is.

I’ve long banished any thought of perfection when it comes to looking after an 87-year-old five-tonner. Life is too short. Leave that to the crew of those mighty Fifes poncing about the Mediterranean regattas, pampered under umpteen coats of Epiphanes, and every surface swathed in the winter with bespoke canvas. What satisfaction you get from working on your own boat comes from knowing every inch of her. At the risk of repeating myself, it is only when you have cast your hand all over her bottom that you can truly feel bonded with this extraordinary, precious maritime artefact that might, if you are intrepid enough, still take you safely around the world, to the admiration of all. Or if less intrepid, down channel to Falmouth where, I can guarantee you will find those who will ask you the age-old question: “What is she?” followed by: “She’s very pretty.” Followed by: “I bet she’s a lot of work”, to which you reply: “Well actually, no.”

But they won’t believe you. Wooden boat owners are at risk of losing the battle to convince the sceptical. The future belongs to a material that promised to be indestructible and unlike most promises, turns out to be true. That picturesque fishing boat on the shore, paint flaking, whose ribs and a section of deck are providing endless photo opportunities, will in a few years have all but disappeared into the mud leaving just a few Instagram-worthy bones reaching poignantly into the sky.

Meanwhile, that abandoned 1970s cruising yacht, brown-stained and growing mould, head lining peeling, will be the subject of endless town council meetings as to how to contact the owner or find someone to buy or dispose of it, without harming the environment. This is a tough ask. Your little old wooden boat is quite content to retire into the mud, her lead keel and every scrap of bronze long since looted by the ever-present gang of mudlarks or vultures, aka wooden boat owners, on the lookout for that rare Simpson Lawrence windlass or galvanised bottle screw. And there she will lie, possibly to catch the eye of a penniless dreamer, whose hopeless ambition will be to restore her or, more likely, the lens of a wandering photographer, Canonius peregrinus, whose brooding composition will win second prize in Practical Photographer, or even, dare I say Classic Boat, because romantic shots of deteriorating wrecks are always popular, as are whitewashed croft houses (or Highland cows) in the windows of Highland art galleries.

The only hope then, for those looking to pass on their irreplaceable boat – well, not for less than £100,000 or more, if you can find the timber – is to let them go for a song, to one of a dwindling band of kindred spirits, someone who will appreciate what they have and, one hopes, be as adept as you have been to lay on another coat of varnish next spring.

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The post Is Owning a Wooden Boat Worth It? Adrian Morgan’s Classic Boat appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

Have you tackled bad weather at sea?

When will it stop? The wind, the wind! It’s August, mid summer in the Highlands, a time of gentle breezes, moist warm days and, OK, midges, absent largely this year as only a midge capable of flying upwind in a Force 7 westerly would stand a chance here (and also the reason perhaps why the East of Scotland is no longer midge free.)

The club’s summer cruise was more like what is traditionally the end of season storm cruise. Sally and I wisely ducked out of the thrash up to the Summer Isles, despite the welcome promised by their owner. Instead she lay on a pontoon in the new harbour until the berth’s owner required it for his own use. Actually the conditions weren’t too bad, until that is Sally was moved on to a mooring outside the harbour. As if on cue, the forecasts began to show gusts of 40-50 knots, and from the South, the worst direction for Ullapool’s anchorage. 

What is it about her that she prefers to lie to a buoy in a gale than alongside a fully serviced pontoon? This time last year, with her mooring in Loggie Bay snarled and unusable, we moved her to the harbour until it could be sorted. Again, within a day the forecast was giving storm force winds from the south east, of a precise direction – the only direction – to cause mayhem in the otherwise snug haven. I woke to find a video taken at 3 am, posted in the local paper, of the scene that night. There she was, hanging to the pontoon at a crazy angle. I knew the ropes would hold, as did the pontoon. But it’s not the kind of sight you wish to wake up to. It was back to Loggie as fast as possible. She likes it there. Even in a gale.

Humphrey Barton, Laurent Giles partner, he of Vertue XXXV fame, was once asked what he advised when faced with bad weather at sea. “Avoid it.” Only lifeboats on trials go out voluntarily when it’s ‘orrible. I like the story of Pete Goss, in mid Atlantic getting knockdown beyond horizontal, cabin windows showing green, sails flat in the water. Before getting round to righting the boat, he finds his camera to record the experience, in case it ever happens again. Now that’s coolness in the face of. But then he was in Special Forces, I believe. 

It reminds me of the time I managed to reach a friend by satellite phone on a yacht in the Southern Ocean taking part in a round the world race years ago. Reefed down, storm spinnaker up, they were charging through the night en route to New Zealand. Craig was his usual self, until he stopped me with the immortal words. “Got a bit on.” And the line went dead.

I didn’t speak again until he arrived back in the UK, and one of the first things I asked was: “what was ‘on’ and was it really a ‘bit’.”? Well no, he explained. At that moment the call had come from the deck that two small icebergs, close together, had appeared on the radar, and were just emerging from the murk, and that it would be a case of threading the gap between them, for to deviate to port would mean a knockdown, to starboard, a gybe. In 40 knots. I love the understatement of “a bit on”, and occasionally employ it when I’m preparing a meal that needs maximum concentration and the juggling of precise ingredients. Well, no, that’s a lie. I’m a Heinz All Day Breakfast type of cook. Mmmm! I can just taste the beans, egg and sausage (in the form of a Scotch egg) on a blue enamel plate in the cockpit of Sally, riding (at anchor) in a secluded, Highland sea loch.

My round the world chum, by the way, is also the owner of a venerable and slightly older Harrison Butler, winner of many a classic race, driven as she was meant to be: hard by a seasoned ocean sailor. We first met on board the yacht from which he spoke that day, Intrum Justitia, trialling headsails in the Solent. It spawned a small piece in this magazine under the headline “My other boat’s a Butler”, a title that infuriated the designer’s daughter, Joan Jardine-Brown. Too late to batten the hatches I faced the storm: “She’s a HARRISON Butler, not a Butler!”

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Thinking of Buying a Smaller Yacht?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that… the smaller the [wooden] boat the greater the pleasure, and I would add, just as important, far less of a chore to fit out. It takes time enough to sand, fill, prime and paint Sally’s topsides, then I look to my right where stands, propped up in the yard, a yacht not many feet longer than my modest 25 footer, and I thank goodness for small boats. Z4s, Hillyards, Debens of various kinds, et al, the list is long.

Those hardy souls who camp in dinghies under ingenious tents, heating their rations on portable gas stoves, get even more of my admiration. It’s great to be invited aboard a big wooden classic, and I treasure my time racing the McGruer Kelana, or squatting on the aft deck of Moonbeam, but would not envy her owners the task of maintaining them every year to the highest standards. That’s like grooming an elephant, when all you really have the energy for is to stroke a kitten. One is exhausting, the other is relaxing. Up to a point.

I reckon 25ft is about as much as one person can maintain, allowing a day for each of the annual chores. A day to sand the topsides, another to strip the varnish, one to antifoul, and so on. Sally comes into that category, but even so, after a week which begins with despair at the task facing me, then satisfaction in seeing the work list slowly shrink, towards the final push to complete all by the time the yard want to launch her, I have lost much of the enthusiasm and just want to see her floating to her waterline again at her mooring in Loggie Bay, a spit opposite the yard where she has been for a couple of weeks.

That 34 footer alongside Sally is more like a three- or four-day per chore boat, and I would not want to be the one to have to tackle the towering wall of gleaming white enamel every few years. Besides, you’d need staging, not the wooden ladder up and down which I clambered these past weeks. And I can just about reach much of Sally’s topsides from the ground, and the higher bits by standing on a few keel blocks placed around her. 

Adding a few feet to a boat’s length increases the work at fitting out exponentially. I used to long for the day when, flushed with cash from a series of best selling nautical murder mysteries I could scribble a list of what needed doing and let the experts at the yard get on with it. I would write cheques, and appear at launching. In fact last year I tentatively asked if anyone might be free to lay on a perfect coat of Hempel’s Polar White, as I’ve seen the difference between my efforts and those of a professional. I was once given a badger haired – I think it was, or perhaps Madagascan squirrel – laying off brush, something I’d not come across before, by a painter of superyachts. Apparently you apply the paint, then quickly caress the surface with the fine. I tried it once, but never again. It’s hard enough to keep a wet edge without stopping to caress what you’ve just achieved with the neck fluff of an exotic creature. Nope, Sally’s topsides are again this year flawless… from a distance, and that’s the way they will stay, until a new owner familiar with the techniques of laying on brushes, and (the correct) thinners takes her on.

Don’t get me wrong; maintaining a small wooden yacht as best you can, given sunny days and plenty of time is a vital and mostly pleasurable component of ownership. Once a year you get the chance to pore over every inch of her, stroke her flanks intimately in a way that is more akin to the grooming rituals of the animal world. For fleas, read flaking paint and tangles, small divots. And this year, annus mirabilis, I may finally have managed to achieve what I am hoping will be the perfect waterline. Hoping, as she has yet to be launched as I write this. After nearly thirty years of ownership, perhaps this time…

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The post Advantages of Owning Smaller Yachts: Adrian Morgan’s Boat Scale appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

The Schooner America’s Triumph

Should any racing yacht deserve immortality on the strength of one victory? Forgive the bee that has been buzzing in my bonnet ever since I came across a pamphlet* claiming that the schooner America was a phoney, but the author’s argument is strong albeit all arguments leading to a foregone conclusion tend to leave out the counter arguments. America clearly did win the £100 Trophy, put up by the Royal Yacht Squadron in 1851, despite the fact a much smaller yacht finished just eight minutes later, a time that would have given her a clear handicap victory. But the story goes to the winner, as in any battle, and America’s win lead to the event bearing her name which takes place again this year, 173 years after that famous, and still disputed, first race around the Isle of Wight.

The schooner America may have won this one, but subsequently very little, despite the praise heaped upon her supposedly radical shape and flat sails by starstruck admirers. The stories need not be repeated here. Many historians have tried to find new ways to explain why Queen Victoria may have been told: “M’am, there is no second.”

Actually there was: Aurora, a 47-ton cutter which slipped around the Needles as light was fading, all but unnoticed by the Press, keen to get back ashore and file their sensational story, and as is any journalist’s second priority, drink their expenses dry in the nearest public house.

A sparrowhawk among pigeons, was how she was memorably described. A fine seaboat, America made an exceptionally fast passage over from the States, an exotic immigrant the public came in droves to see, as any birders would having spotted a red backed shrike, for example, in Wester Ross (yup, we did a few years ago.)

Having caused a sensation, captured the prize, her owners, who had commissioned her in order to make money from wagers, couldn’t wait to flog her, which they did, but not with the profit they had hoped. Thereafter America’s career slowly fell apart, as did her fabric, constructed from a mixed selection of none too durable timbers, never destined for longevity.

I have at least four books staring down from my bookshelf charting her career from superstar to Civil War blockade runner to scuttling to national neglect and ignominy, crushed under a weight of snow on her shed roof during a winter storm in 1942. And this year another, called There is No Second joins their ranks, written by Cup aficionado and lifelong devotee, Magnus Wheatley. 

But before I read what could well be the definitive work from a fine writer, with new facts from extensive original research, can I pose again that opening question: can a yacht that has won just a single race, albeit one that spawned the oldest sporting event, be called great? Does a one trick pony deserve a rosette, let alone immortality?

Which is where last month’s column comes in, after which this one is perhaps better labelled Britannia Part II. The Kings’ yacht was the subject, arguably greater than any racing yacht before or since, having won many more races, in much harder conditions, whether on the waters on which America overcame the best Britain could muster, as well as cross Channel, notably against Navahoe, the best America could send, in a gale, for the Brenton Reef Cup, during which, incidentally, both yachts housed topmasts mid Channel – an astonishingly risky feat  in those conditions –  before turning in Cherbourg harbour for the race back. It was seamanship of the highest order in an epic, 120-mile struggle Britannia won by under 3 seconds.

And fine sportsmanship by the royal yacht. After a mix up over the finishing line, blameless Britannia bowed to the visitor’s churlish protest, reducing by one what would have been 232 wins, in 635 races over 40 years. Now that in my book is a better gauge of a yacht’s immortality than a single race where a corner may have been cut, opponents were either hobbled by damage, ran aground, ludicrously outclassed or simply overlooked. 

The remains of Britannia lie 40 fathoms deep off St Catherine’s. Who knows how many New England homes have chairs with brass plates claiming timbers from America: the pride of a nation, languishing to rot under a dodgy roof; Britannia, mourned by multitudes, sunk on the orders of a dying king, Lloyds A1 to the last.

*The Phoney Fame of the Yacht America and the America [sic] Cup 1980 E Reynolds Brown

There is No Second Magnus Wheatley 2024 Seahorse Publications

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The post Was the Schooner America a One-trick Pony? appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

Where is Britannia?

Racing alongside the revived J Class, Fifes and Herreshoffs gracing the classic circuit, a reincarnation of the most famous yacht of them all is conspicuously absent: K1, Britannia, the Kings’ yacht, the remains of which lie, according to HMS Winchester’s log, 40 fathoms down in the deeps off St Catherine’s Point on the Isle of Wight, at Lat 50 34 18 N, Long 1 1 0 W’, swept by fierce currents for nearly 90 years.

Her stemhead was recovered by a lobster fisherman, and sonar traces appeared to show a considerable portion of the hull remained intact in a natural hollow on the sea bed, but that was a long time ago. A replica, built in Russia, languishes, unfinished.

Britannia’s History

Launched in 1893, in a career spanning over 40 years and 635 races, Britannia won 231 firsts out of a total of 360 prizes, a record unlikely ever to be rivalled. In contrast to any of the original or replica Js, of which Ranger and Endeavour won only a handful of races, notably in the rarefied, light wind arena of the America’s Cup, Britannia excelled in strong weather albeit once, under an overly tall new bermudan rig, hit by a violent squall,  she took charge, threatening to drive herself ashore. The King’s sailing master, Sir Philip Hunloke, managed to wrestle her back and she was retired for the season. 

I have a soft spot for K1, having found the log entry at the records office in Kew of that destroyer – a fitting name for her final escort – and spoken to one of the last men to have been aboard her that July night in 1936 off the Wight. It was torpedoman Cyril Bodsworth, satchel of explosives over his shoulder, who placed some of the shaped charges in her bilge and deckhead that sent her to the bottom. Hunloke: “It was grim.”

She didn’t go down quite as planned, to the dismay of those tasked with her sinking, and a considerable time was spent collecting debris that might have been washed ashore as royal souvenirs. Finally Bodsworth recalled hearing a ‘gentle pop’ as  a piece of polished pine deck planking shot up Excalibur-like from the depths, ‘carving a gentle parabola’ before splashing away to starboard, caught in the beam of Winchester’s searchlight. They never found it. He however had managed to “salvage” a mahogany pin from the bottle cabinet in the panelled saloon before leaping for Winchester’s decks. 

Of the three half models I have, one is America, the other Sally, my old boat, launched a year after the third, Britannia, was scuttled, all made by Peter Ward in Poole. Britannia’s hull was carved out of reclaimed Honduras mahogany from the table at the old Lloyd’s building, still bearing the marks of the pins that once held the plans down for the likes of Britannia to be laid out for scrutiny. Naturally Lloyds’ A1, she was, in the words of her biographer, John Irving, built light and strong, her structure as if “woven together… a better balanced and better built vessel never crossed the starting line.”

Fit for a King

Designed by George Watson, and launched at Henderson’s yard on the Clyde for George V’s father King Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, 121ft 6in overall, as a gaff cutter she originally carried 10,000 square feet of racing canvas on a lofty 142ft 3ton Oregon pine mast. Never a J, she was altered in the last of her seven iterations to comply with a class against which she raced in her final years. 

The story of her career is told in poignant style by Irving in The Kings’ Britannia, the apostrophe reflecting her ownership by three successive kings, the last of whom, Edward VIII was more interested in golf than sailing, famously using her elegant stern to tee off into the The Solent. 

A Britannia Replica

How would any replica fare today against Shamrock, Ranger, Velsheda, Svea, Rainbow, Lionheart, Endeavour, Hanuman and Topaz? It seems a pity that the most famous of the so-called Big Class, immortalised by Beken racing alongside her peers, remains just a memory and a collection of artifacts, donated to various yacht club under whose flag she raced in her heyday. There can be no shortage of millionaires with the wherewithal. Maybe her racing record and royal pedigree are just too daunting. 

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The post The King’s Yacht Britannia: Adrian Morgan delves into the Big Class appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

The First Boat

Many a reader’s first experience of a boat would have been a small, glassfibre dinghy, tender perhaps to a small glassfibre cruising yacht, a Corribee, or something grander, depending on parental income. For others, slightly older, a Mirror dinghy, home built, and those of a generation born in the fifties it would have been a clinker pram or, in my case, Greenfly, my naval grandfather’s 15ft pride and joy, wrecked when a hurricane lifted it from the garden and deposited it some miles away (well, miles may be an exaggeration but I was five when it happened and a mile may well have been a few metres or yards in those days.)

Old School Wooden Boatbuilding

Greenfly, which I can remember helping to paint, upside down on the grass in front of that modest house in Bedhampton, overlooking Portsmouth Harbour, was my earliest idea of a boat, aside from the pirate ships I read about. And when it came to my own first boat, inevitably it was wooden: a Gull that we built in father’s garage in Hampstead, and a Mirror, and finally when I was about 16, I bought a National 12 called Fesquie, named after a dark haired girl of my dreams, but forever out of my reach.

Mirror, Gull and National 12 were followed by another wooden boat, a Waarschip 570, which again we built together, me and my father, this time in a garage in our new home in Dorset. Yellowhammer, named by my mother for her colour and the noise we made at all hours of the day and night building her, remains a favourite. Light, best Bruynzeel plywood, fast and pretty, she would be with me still if I had not fallen for the charms of a 25ft (wooden) Laurent Giles 5 tonner called Sally II. I remember Yellowhammer disappearing off down the road to Devon with sadness, for she had taken us everywhere from Portsmouth to Portland in the years I had her, moored first up the River to Wareham, later in a creek on the Hamble by Mercury, site of the old training ship whose mast in those days still protruded from the mud.

So Far, So Classic

By then I had acquired my first glassfibre boat, a Laser, also yellow and called Fesquie, although it carried a Whale sticker, for by then I was working as a salesman for the pump maker in Belfast. So far, aside from the Laser, so classic. That’s not to say I had any romantic affinity to wood, it just happened that all my boats from that era happened to be wooden. It was natural for the boats I owned to be traditional, whereas the ones in my writing job would all be glassfibre. Boat shows rarely exhibited anything other and for good reason. On a stand at Earls’ Court one day I asked the designer of so many plywood cruisers, Maurice Griffiths, what he thought of all that plastic. He replied, to my surprise that if the material had been available, rather than cheap, post-war plywood, he would never have designed slab-sided boats but the kind of round bilged carvel ones he had drawn pre war.

My credentials as a wooden boat owner are therefore pretty impeccable; my criteria variously cost, looks and availability. Having an architect father who loved nothing better than translating plans into reality, albeit wood rather than concrete and steel, helped. When it came to a second career, after years of scribbling, building wooden boats came naturally. Then it was all about elegance and line, something that a clinker boat either has or does not. I may have been too obsessed with line, but I don’t think so. If the human eye can spot a picture hung a millimetre off level, it sure can wince at a plank line that sweeps up from the stern encouragingly, before disgracing itself at the shoulders. I can’t make myself look at that dinghy I built for Mr and Mrs X, but most were pretty good, although I say so myself.

The Survival of Wooden Boatbuilding

Wooden boatbuilding is now classed as threatened, so I read. Not in my experience. My generation were reared on wood, but a young generation of new aficionados – witness the extraordinary appeal of the Tally Ho restoration – is taking our place. Wood, unlike oil, will last forever as will the skills to fashion it into boats.

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The post The Survival of Wooden Boatbuilding: Adrian Morgan’s Column appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

When Technology Dies

Oh the silence in the cockpit, when the bleeping ceased, as the battery died, and the instrument that once showed where I was, and how far I had to go and in what direction cut to black. I still had a compass, analogue speed, depth, or rather height, and a 150,000 chart. All now was quiet save for the rushing of the wind and a gentle creaking sound. The distracting dials and warning tone gone, a peace came over me. I realised that much of what we call essential was in fact dispensable. Could I not still find where I was, feel the strength of the wind and judge my drift or leeway with reference to land marks? Bring her safely home? Crucially, I was still in touch with the forces that dictated my progress. I could feel the rise and fall in the seat of my pants, and compensate with a slight correction of hand on stick, not tiller, for this was a glider, 9,000ft above the Moray countryside. And yet the same would be true for any yacht deprived of chartplotter and autopilot, her skipper forced to stream the Walker log and keep track of where they were by reference to an Admiralty chart, for altimeter read leadline and compass. 

In my years sailing yachts, and occasionally racing them, it was always a given that on stepping up to any strange wheel I would be warned that the wind instruments were not working, or showing apparent  angles that differed port to starboard, or that the autopilot was unreliable, and so on. Adding to the frustration any yacht owner feels when his gadgets go down is that manufacturers bring out new and ever-better bits of kit every year, it seems, with less thought about all the old bits of kit that now need new bits inside to keep them working. Could you get a NavMarine CourseMate 45 remote wind sensor, four years after it was replaced by the “new, totally upgraded CourseMate 60”? Could you heck, perhaps on eBay.

They do say that yachtsmen are fair game.  A stainless shackle for a an engineering project is £x, the same for a yacht is £x+50%. In fairness chandlers have a hard time keeping stock of the, er stock. Fellow comes in wants a 3/8 twist shackle, with captive pin. “Ah, now we’ve got a 3/8 but not twisted, sir.”  In fairness, the inability to replace a shackle on a yacht, to use a cliché, “is a First World problem”.

The Good Old Days

Lucky those who went sailing in the old days when the catalogue from Simpson Lawrence, the venerable, much missed purveyors of bronze and galvanised stuff in Glasgow, remained much the same year in year out. There was certainly a huge selection from complete fold down vanity units, with copper basin and spigot, to an assortment of anchor windlasses, porcelain and gunmetal loos, bronze hatch cover hinges, shackles etc, but all were common to pretty much every yacht in any harbour you might care to drop anchor in (no marinas then). Today you’ve a choice of hatches from twenty companies, all with their own hinges, seals and fittings.

Torn Towards Technology

Today the average yachtsman with an eye on the racing scene is torn between emulating the outrageous, French foiling mob, who flash around the world in weeks, monitoring screens, with powered winches to trim sails,  and without ever touching the tiller, as against the other lot, attempting to turn back the clock and circumnavigate with only the instruments Sir Robin would have used on his solo circumnavigation in 1968. Which way do you turn? Embrace technology for all its expensive, sometimes temperamental worth, fill your cockpit with screens and readouts, and let the autopilot do the steering, or KISS? Instinctively the owner of a classic yacht will tend towards the latter, (whilst not chucking the chartplotter out with the bathwater.)

As to seats of the pants sailing, which is essentially what happens when the screens go blank, blank or not, the best advice once given to the skipper of an America’s Cup helmsman was to keep his head out of the boat, and make only passing reference to the instruments. And it is the same advice given to pilots: keep your eyes outside the cockpit. Watch the instruments but stay in touch with the elements. Isn’t this what sailing is all about? An autopilot may be able to steer better than you, but is it having any fun?

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The post ‘True’ Vs Technology: Adrian Morgan on Sailing Gadgets appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

Sailing and Social Media Misinformation

You may have noticed how every large, old, possibly wooden, gaff-rigged (maybe) sailing yacht is now a J Class, judging by the reactions on social media to a splendid photo of any large, old, possibly wooden yacht. Why do we go there? It only makes us angry! Invariably after the first, wearisome, predictable exclamation of “Awesome!”, you will be forced to endure posts from those who claim the photo is “definitely a J Class”. 

Occasionally, and politely, I will intervene and point out that it is not a J Class, but an America’s Cup contestant; Reliance, Valkyrie or perhaps even a schooner, but life is too short. Social media these days has touched the world of classic boats, as it has every aspect of our lives, and the accompanying misinformation, though seldom disinformation, is here to stay.

Sailing Films and Books

It is the same when we eagle-eyed sailing types watch any film with a boat in it, whether Swallows and Amazons (“that’s never the Lake District”) or something starring a Hollywood A-lister involving a storm, shipwreck or murder at sea. “He’s got the rope on the winch wrong! That’s never a Force 10,” etc. Books can be just as bad, when the author talks of prows not bows and insists on tying up, not making fast, although in truth some of the subtleties of nautical terminology and jargon can be and confusing. Belaying, anyone? And is it a bow, as in bow-and-arrow sprit, as my grandfather, a naval officer would say, or bowsprit, ie a sprit at the bow? 

Bamboozling Nautical Terminology

You cannot fault Herman Melville when it comes to describing ships and their ways. In fact you’d be so bamboozled with nautical terminology and arcane whaling terminology in particular, as to lose the thread of much of where Ahab’s stream of consciousness was going, just grateful to swim free at last of the entangling, interminable paragraphs of rambling, ranting, repetitious and entirely captivating soliloquy; for Moby Dick is, in my opinion at least, one of the finest, deepest, most impressive books ever written, not just about the sea and an obsessive captain hunting a murderous white whale, but life, American politics at the time and much besides. Phew!

Time was when every child in the land could tell by the cut of its jib if that were the King’s Britannia leading off Southend pier, or Astra; neither, as they would also have known, a J-Class, although schoolboys would have been well aware that K1 had been configured to rate as a J during one of her many reiterations in a career whose racing record will never be equalled.

Likewise there was a time when I would know every competitor in that year’s Admiral’s Cup, just as I would the differences between a Triumph Herald and a Vitesse. Aircraft enthusiasts are the same and will point out the longer nose of the Eurofox with the 140hp Rotax, compared to the 100hp version.

Ropes Jargon

Is it important to know which string does what, or the difference between a barque and a barquentine? Don’t ask me, not without reference to that bible, The Lore of Ships. On a recent long, wet and at times very windy delivery trip I was faced with a bewildering set of names for new bits of string in order to raise, lower and set the sails on an old gaff-rigged fishing ketch, heading south via Tenerife to Antarctica. There are those who can tell their jiggers from their topping lifts by feel, and can find the relevant belaying pin in the pitch black. I couldn’t, and probably never will, at least I hope not, for the rig, though magnificent with topsails filled, is cumbersome and at times back-breaking. I take my salt-stained hat off to the square-riggers that plugged against the prevailing winds to weather Cape Horn, often for months on end, for which you must read Alan Villiers, one of those writers who, like Melville and Joseph Conrad – try Mirror of the Sea – really can spin a tale whose description and accuracy of nautical terminology you could not fault. 

Perhaps, when I first took Rona to sea I overdid the “don’t use yachtie words” bit by referring to the various ropes as string, as in “grab the red and white flecked one”. When it came to crewing on a racing yacht in Tobago, Jamie Dobbs’ command to “crack the genny sheet”, rather than “ease the big white rope attached to the big white sail a bit”, left her baffled. But she soon picked it up and Lost Horizon went on, with her help, to win the regatta.

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The post Adrian Morgan: Nautical Terminology, Ropes & Social Media appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

Call yourself Ishmael, if you really must go down to the sea again… it’s a common theme in literature; a romantic appeal that strikes us all from time to time, but is it realistic? Should we feel guilty if the last thing we crave is a long, wet, windy sea voyage rather than a flotilla holiday in Greece to restore the balance of life? Or better still, a deckchair under a parasol on a beach in Thailand, for that matter.

Of course not. A crash diet of Eric Newby, Shackleton or Alan Villiers and a dozen Mariner’s Library books and literature should be enough to cure many of those with salt in their veins of a misplaced longing for the North Atlantic or Southern Ocean, and yet the appetite for cold latitude adventure increases exponentially by the year. Arctic, North West Passage, Antarctic… icebergs, polar bears and penguins.

This I know, having returned in mid November from a delivery trip from Ullapool in the wintery far north to Tenerife in the balmy south, via the North Atlantic and Biscay at its grumpiest. I should have known better but the old Ishmael in me was whispering in my ear, a wild call that I could not deny, but perhaps should have (peer pressure and the promise of warm seas and sunny skies also had a lot to do with my decision at the last minute to ship aboard a 1915 Dutch ketch for an 1,800nm trip on the cusp of winter).

The motivation was as old as Ishmael’s, the itchy-footed narrator of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick which, incidentally, I had enough off-watch time to read on the 14-day passage, along with Erskine Childer’s spy thriller Riddle of the Sands, an antidote to the whale oil, blubber and disaster. In both books the main characters were motivated by a desire to get away to sea; Ahab’s obsession with finding the white whale, however, contrasts with Ishmael’s simple desire to escape the surly bonds of land, while for civil servant Carruthers, the Riddle’s reluctant at first addition to Davies’ crew on the Dulcibella, it was a chance to flee the ennui of a stiflingly hot London during the height of the Edwardian “Season”.

Both must have wondered, as I did at times, whether trading boredom for adventure, in my case at the wheel of a magnificent old steel trawler, plugging very slowly into a series of gales, in leaky oilskins, had been a wise decision. Carruthers learned to cope, and Ishmael survived, thanks to Queequeg’s coffin, as did I, without recourse to coffin – albeit nursing a hernia from an abrupt change of diet and much straining on strange ropes. Alas poor Ahab whose obsession had no happy ending. And he didn’t even get the satisfaction of killing his bête blanc!

This is as much to say that anyone with a love of the sea can find adventure, without shame, suited to their taste closer to home. There is no need to spend two weeks in the North Atlantic to scratch an itch. Anyone can be cold, wet and miserable on a boat; it takes only an ability to endure the tedium of long watches, and the promise of good hot food and a warm bunk when the long trick is over. Does it build character? Possibly in the admirable youngsters who crew aboard these Tall Ships, and who know no better; not for those whose characters are formed, and who may well have faced greater hardships, but of a different calibre: bereavement, close encounters with death or debilitating illness, and already possess the stoicism needed to plug on regardless.

By all means tap into your inner Ishmael, when life becomes a chore, if your chums are all having fun and you’re stuck in the office, just take a moment to reflect. To adapt the old saying: be careful what you hanker for. Is it really a life on the ocean wave you crave? Or the end of a trapeze on a fast dinghy off a beach in the Caribbean, washed down by a rum punch, to the sound of a steel band and sparkling table talk? Have the sirens of the deep stuffed your head with fantasy, or is it all about the promise of penguins?

Illustration by Charlotte Watters

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There was a time when, possibly as a legacy of dinghy sailing and some youthful offshore racing, I would strap Sally’s long, heavy wooden boom down and attempt to get it as close to parallel with her waterline as I could, without ripping the toerail from its fastenings. It was a legacy of “Vang on!”, a call we used to hear all too often on those interminable triangles to nowhere which comprised RORC racing in the 1980s. On a flighty racing boat the vang is used, among other things, to control twist and keep the forces acting on the fin keel in balance.

Long-keeled Sally, or Sally II, is an altogether different creature, the second
of what later became the Vertue class, Jack Laurent Giles’s best known design. She is 25ft and a bit long, 78 years old, and last summer managed to clock 8.7 knots on the chartplotter she had for a 75th birthday present three years before.

Let no one tell you that old long-keeled yachts are slow, or don’t point worth a damn. Sally knows her limits, for sure; try and push her upwind closer than she wants, or her sails permit, and she sulks. Sally’s  sails – Simon Richardson on the Hamble knew his stuff after cutting his teeth, and sails, on 12-Ms in Newport Rhode Island in the old America’s Cup days – are cut to suit her hull’s ability upwind. That is, not too flat. Crucially, they’re powerful enough to drive her hull (just shy of 5 tons) at the angle it prefers to assume to the wind.

Simon once told me that it is largely the hull that defines how close to the wind a boat can sail, so there’s no point in cutting sails that do not match that angle. Get Sally in the groove – an easy matter, as she’s better at steering herself than the helmsman; just peg her tiller and put the kettle on – and she will set her perky nose to the horizon and go. But try and make her do what she was not designed to do, viz knife-edge to windward at 30 degrees off, and forget it.

Like most old boats of her era, she has this longish, heavy boom, prevented from taking out the backstay (or preventer as Giles called it) in a Chinese gybe by the addition of a boomkin, a jaunty little appendage that can be forgotten when paying harbour dues, but which adds character (and carries the backstay well out of reach of any sky-ing boom).

Thank goodness then for a boomkin, for Sally does not have a kicking strap. But I soon realised that for a quite separate reason its lack was a positive advantage, although occasionally I would bowse the boom down on a broad reach to the rail with a handy billy, if it wasn’t too windy.

And that is the key. The heavy boom alone is enough to keep the mainsail drawing, but if the breeze pipes up the absence of a kicker allows the boom to rise and fall naturally, spilling wind from the top of the sail, while still allowing it to fill the lower portion. It serves as a natural depowering process, while reducing the strain on the rig.

And that is exactly the scenario that we faced as we charged past Rhubh Reidh lighthouse on a broad reach, after a weekend jaunt to Gairloch last September. Vicious bursts of heavy air fell from the clifftop. With far too much sail up (that is, a full main and staysail), and little inclination to reef, we simply let the natural rise and fall of the boom regulate our sail area. The top of the sail was aligned almost dead into the wind, pressed flat against the top spreaders, but the lower half meanwhile was pulling like a train.

Truth be told, when we did get around to rolling up a good portion of the mainsail, the speed remained in the high 7s, and occasionally low 8s, apart from that tremendous burst which had the GPS peaking at 8.7 knots, unheard of in all the time I have owned Sally.

When I ran all this past a vastly experienced old friend, John Simpson, former skipper of Jolie Brise, he told me that his old Dutch boat Blauwe behaved in exactly the same way with her mainsail. However he pointed out that sails on older boats don’t want to be sheeted in too flat, particularly in light to moderate winds. “If they are cut full; let em’ work full to develop the power necessary to drive older heavier boats.”

Being a cautious kind of sailor, he was glad that we reefed and just let the mainsail spill for only a shortish amount of time. A mainsail flat against the spreaders might have caused chafe on a long passage.

If the gust that drove us to that heady speed had encountered a full mainsail, kickered down to the rail, I suspect something would have given. Instead, the boom rose, the sail flattened against the spreaders, the gust spilled and the power in the lower half was quite enough to have Sally break a record that will probably stand until we next storm down to Gairloch. As my friend Craig Nutter once told me (he owns the Harrison Butler, Sabrina, a Round the Island Race winner): “Adrian, you must let twist be your friend.”

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The post How to sail without a vang: let twist be your friend appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.