Volume One of “Man and the Sea”

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Floating around the Maritime

“Scavenger”

Volume One of “Man and the Sea”

Nick Walker Printing, Kingsbridge, Devon

ISBN 978-0-9576087-5-7 (change)

In this book, the author, an experienced yachtsman, recalls his voyages around the South and West of England and the many places he visited.

Floating around the Maritime, highlights the record of Britain and Ireland as maritime nations, as seen from the sea and sailing to ports and harbours.

Because of his interest in maritime history, he noted the evidence of seafaring as a way of life; and the places in which that history was recorded.

Although this book records the events of the last ten years, it already turns out to be a memorial – often the museums have now closed, the housing around the harbour bijou residences for second-homers.

So it seems important to show that maritime history is, or can be fascinating, and that a little wandering around coastal towns and calling in at their museums or sites of interest invariably unearths some interesting facts about our maritime past.

Maritime History is often seen as an old persons’ hobby, and that it creates little resonance for younger generations.

This book is a series of perceptive, sometime humorous, always serious, pieces. I hope it will be enjoyed by all persons interested in maritime history, wherever they are, and whether their study is formal or informal.

Readers who enjoy this book may like to look at Floating About Maritime History, a more academic investigation into why maritime history has become so marginalised in British culture; and what might be done to improve the situation.

These books will achieve its purpose if it helps all these people, and all these kinds of people. feel that they have a vital role in keeping maritime history alive.

My thanks as ever to Alison, Kay Harding and Ron Burns

For the sea represents all: beauty, power, quest, redemption, searching, life, healing, soothing, conquering.

Cynthia Behrman. Victorian Myths of the Sea

XXXX CONRAD quote

Floating about the Maritime

Mike Bender

Floating around the Maritime
1
CONTENTS
3
Introduction
7
Chapter
Year

1
2013
Going West: Floating around South Cornwall

Plymouth

Looe Bay

Polperro

Fowey

Polkerris

Mevagissey

Falmouth

The Helford

Mullion

Newlyn

Lamorna

Floating around the North Coast of Cornwall and Devon

St Ives

Hayle

Padstow

(Floating about Hampshire)

Bude

Hartland, Clovelly and Bideford Bay

Appledore

Northam Burrows

Barnstaple

Braunton

Arlington Court and the Chichesters

Ilfracombe

61
3

Floating around the Bristol Channel

Lundy

Watchet

Bristol

Portishead

Lydney

82
4

Floating around Wales

Cardiff

Swansea

Milford Haven

Skomer

Aberystwyth

Aberdovey

Bardsey and Porthmadog

Barmouth

100

102

104
5

Passage to the Scillies

Going Home

Newlyn

107

113

113
6
2014
Passage to Lancashire

The Longships

To Maryport

Preston

Floating around Pwihelli (Discovery of a Valuable Historical Document)

The Welsh Shore

115

119

123

127

133
7
2015
Winter in South Devon

Salcombe

135

137
8

Heading East

Start Bay

Dartmouth

Totnes

Stoke Gabriel

Teignmouth

Exmouth

Lyme Regis

West Bay

Portland

Poole

Floating about the Back of the Wight

145

147

149

152

155

160

162

167

168

171

Floating around the Channel Islands and the French coast

Guernsey

Ploumenac’h

Ushant

Dielette

Guernsey

Cartaret

Braye, Alderney

179

180

181

183

185

190

192

10
2020
Floating about Hear and There
197

Sea Dog Days
204

Sailing in the Plague Years
215

13
2021
Floating about Dartmouth
229

Addendum
239
On the Cabin Shelf (Books Referred to in the Text)
243

Index
249

The Author
255

It is interesting to see how my thoughts about the maritime changed over time and what I wanted to communicate. These early entries, more in the form of a diary, chart my sailing destinations, and their history. At that time, investigating the nature of maritime history did not feature nearly as large.

I have described the places I visited in the order that one would enter them in a voyage. So the chronology may jump a bit, but, since I like variety, had I used my sailing logs as the basis, some places, like Falmouth and Padstow, would have come up multiple times, which could have become rather confusing.

I have also removed ephemera, repeats, and rewritten articles that were originally published in Topmasts and Soundings.

I want to thank Dave Hills, long-time webmaster of the South West Maritime History Society, for helping me get started on this venture. I scribbled away, using my logs and diaries. He put my efforts on the website, a major publishing event that unfortunately went completely unnoticed.

2013

Going West:

Floating Around South Cornwall

PLYMOUTH

Up past the Tamar Bridges for a night at Cargreen, so, of course, past the Royal William Yard.

This amazing site of 16 acres, created 1825-1832, designed by Rennie, provided the complete range of supplies for the Navy and is architecturally amazing. It is far more coherent than Portsmouth, which is a mixture of buildings built and demolished over centuries. Chatham is perhaps as remarkable as Plymouth and larger and much older – the Dutch nearly reached it during the Second Dutch War in 1667, during their raid up the Medway. But there is plenty of room for a major naval tourist centre in the West Country as well as Kent. I’ve heard that the cladding was falling down and it would have cost a fortune for the council to maintain. But some things you hang onto.

Of course, access by car would be a problem. Which of course doesn’t stop park-and-ride or park-and sail, as in Falmouth. A coherent plan of regular sailings –a ferry service on a regular time table say every half hour – to eight or so places of interest: say Drake’s island, Devil’s Point, Royal William, South Dockyard, North Dockyard, Saltash, Torpoint, Cremyll and Edgecombe, each with attractions would be perfectly feasible. And running regularly, you could just stay on if all you wanted was a river trip. It might even get some commuters, fed up with crawling across the bridge.

Plymouth City Council – the longest group suicide in British history. A city chock full of history being served by people with no sense of the history of the city they are supposed to be serving. Absolutely tragic.

On a lighter note, I used to love night sailing – the isolation, the blackness broken only by the nav. lights. On this particular night, a Friday or Saturday, at least twenty years ago, I didn’t get into Sutton Marina on the Barbican till 1130 pm. When the night watchman came along, I said I could do with a pint, but, of course, at that time, all the pubs would had closed. ‘Don’t worry’ he said ‘The Plymouth Sailing Club and said “Terry sent you”’. Well, obviously, the Sailing Club was some kind of nautical establishment, so I re-dressed in my oilies and headed off in the direction he’d told me. The man at the desk seemed a bit surprised. I thought it was Terry’s recommendation that had got me in and anyway my money was good, so he let me in. It was only when I was ordering a pint, I found out that I was in a disco and was some forty years older than anyone else in the place!

LOOE BAY

I am using an expanded meaning of ‘Looe Bay’ for the area between Rame Head and the Dodman

The shoreline is usually a lee shore in the prevailing Southwesterlies, but a period of settle weather gives a spell of Easterlies. A chance to anchor off Mullion Cove on the west side of Lizard but that is a four or five day trip, if one is being civilised.

A couple of days before, Ally and I had visited the Monkey Sanctuary at East Looe, a gentle place, where the monkeys are treated considerably better than the residents of most old people’s homes, and since many of the monkeys have been mistreated before getting there, more apt than might appear. I remember, when I was working as a psychologist, being sent to an innovative old people’s home. ‘We treat people here as individuals’ said the matron showing me round, before walking straight into a resident’s room without knocking. A few weeks later, I was at the Monkey sanctuary, watching a keeper calling out to the monkeys that he was about to enter their cage.

After a lunch in the restaurant in the trees at the Sanctuary, we had gone onto Looe, so that I could check out the second hand bookshop up the hill, doing a dog leg from the East Looe carpark (Old Hall Bookshops, Shutta Rd.) [now closed, see In Memoriam]. It was always worth visiting book-wiseand, even if you make no purchases, go upstairs to see the old Methodist chapel it was). Driving over to Hannaford West – the road along and into the cliff was a major piece of Victorian engineering – I had noticed two moorings off Looe Beach.

To which I now headed on a very gentle breeze. On arrival, I found they were only in two metres of water at near high water which wasn’t enough.

I had also noted that patches of water boiling and gannets diving. One trolling line, sent out twice as I drifted across such a patch, gave me 8 small mackerel (‘joeys’), my supper.

POLPERRO

In the early evening, I sail over to Polperro. The harbour entrance is scarily narrow, and once in, you are advised to moor fore and aft, but the mooring buoys must be at least 100 yards apart, so getting lines round them and equalising the distance between the two buoys is no mean feat, and I am both wet and hot when I get it done. But it allows me to sleep well.

I dinghy ashore for a pint at the ‘Blue Peter’ and then walk to the jagged cliffs at the harbour mouth. For large cliffs, one cannot beat Salcombe’s Bolt Head, leaving soon after dawn, so you have the dawn and the view to yourself as the other boats sleep; but for small cliffs, one cannot beat Chapel Cliff, Polperro, with its jagged edges pointing to the sky.

On a summer’s evening, the walk on the other side of the harbour to the small lighthouse is very pleasant, the plants and bushes adding their aroma to the warmth of the setting sun. Polperro also boasts an impressive museum on the quay.

FOWEY

The South Cardinal guarding Udder Rock, was flashing 6+ a long flash, so onto Fowey, and a convenient stop alongside the second, up-river pontoon, allowing a much Seadog 2 a chance to run ashore.

Such was his eagerness that at Caffa Mill carpark, he shoots through a gate as a fisherman comes out. On going up to it, I find it has a keypad and is locked. I rush after the fisherman and he shows the button with which to call security at Fowey Docks, which I do and after a bit of explanation, the gate opens and Seadog 2 shoots back out.

Fowey Docks is the major china clay port. In 2010, 750,000 tons of the stuff went through the port. If you come by car, you might see a boat come in on the tide, but the loading quays are upriver round the corner from Fowey, so you’ll need to hire a ‘motor’ boat to see it.

In the morning, I walk to town to visit the second-hand bookshop, Bookends, which is quite strong on maritime, but famous for its Daphne Du Maurier books and the knowledge of succeeding generations of shop owners about her.

Round Gribbin Head, with its striking banded red and white day mark. Necessary, because since square riggers could not sail anywhere near the wind, they were at risk of becoming embayed if they came too far into a bay to find out where they were/ had guessed wrong. Hence day marks at such places as Darmouth, Fowey, St. Martin’s on the Scillies. Du Maurier used the Gribbin Head Peninsula for the setting for her short story, ‘The Birds’, made into a famous film by Alfred Hitchcock.

On the Cabin Shelf

To learn about the history and development of day marks, consult John Naish. Seamarks. London: Stanford Maritime, 1985.

POLKERRIS

To Polkerris, anchored off and ran in for lunch at the pub with Bob and Pat, who had come over from Newlyn. Hot day, so pleasant sitting outside. Attentive service, ordinary food.

From Polkerris beach, you can hear the drying ovens of the china clay works across Tywardreath Bay at Par. The top half of the bay dries, there is a rock in the middle of it, and it is on a lee shore. It must have claimed a few wrecks in its time. The bay was called Polkerris Bay, when Polkerris was a major pilchard port. You can still see the pilchard palace (fish pressing house) by the beach. (Another good example is at Kingsand, on the west side of Plymouth Sound).

MEVAGISSEY

After a siesta to let the day cool down, across the bay to Mevagissey. The mackerel are still shoaling, but in addition, there are plenty of large jelly fish. ‘Barrel’ jelly fish have been common off the Cornish coast this summer. A fisherman told me that they’re harmless but they do gum up the outboard if they get inside the propellers …

Mevagissey used to be a kiss-me-quick hats and rock place. Now like almost all Southwest harbour towns, the shops are split into two – fast food outlets for the day trippers, and expensive clothing and jewellery shops for the second homers and self-caterers. But at this time of year, though, the only activity is fishing boats of various sizes.

You can moor against the wall at Meva in deep waters, but you’re likely to find a fishing boat coming alongside day or night. Better to use the three fore and aft moorings provided. Bit of a fiddle to pick up, as you’ll be lucky, if there is any wind, to drift back onto the aft mooring, but quite secure once you have.

Later, a French boat, a rather sleek effort, comes in quietly and without fuss, picks up the last set of moorings. They are better sailors, and more adventurous and nerve-less than we are. When an English boat leaves St Mary’s in the Scillies for the thirty mile crossing to the mainland, they’re dressed like Michelin men. I have seen a French boat take off for home over a hundred miles away, with the crew in their pyjamas.

I walk over to the Rising Sun at Porthmellon for lunch. You can sit outside just above the beach. Percy Mitchell had a boatyard here, building fishing boats but also yachts. The yard ran from 1901 to 1983, and launching was over the sea wall. And they must have been careful with the tides, for the harbour dries for a long way out.

In the morning, I walk Seadog along the coastpath. There are visually striking rocks, similar to those at Polperro, especially to the east of the town. In the morning, I watch a fisherman mends nets. Actually, he’s making them, for bottom trawling for monkfish and turbot. He ties the top of the net to a post and draws the net across the carpark, then inserts the orange top line, which is stronger than the net; then the bottom line weighted with lead.

Newlyn seems to have fewer large trawlers each time I visit; but Mevagissey has 60 boats, 40 full-time and seems to be flourishing as a fishing port. They are much smaller vessels, whose size seems to allow them to avoid the catch limits put on the larger vessels.

On the cabin shelf

After the war, Kenneth Shearwood, an ex-public school boy, on being demobbed, bought a fishing boat and fished inshore out of Meva., for a year and a half before being accepted for Oxford, and eventually becoming a house master at Lancing College. His account of his time in Meva., Whistle the Wind (Hart-Davis, 1947) is a very warm-hearted book and nicely illustrated with pen and ink drawings. He also wrote Evening Star, the story of Cornish fishing lugger. Truro: D.Bradford Barton, 1972, about offshore fishing from the Wolf to the Start, before being sunk by German fighters with the loss of her crew.

On a happier note, David Weston, noted artist, has a shop in the town, where his prints are quite reasonably priced. He sailed round Cornwall in his mirror dinghy, Epic, and describes it in words and fine pictures in three volumes (‘Epic’ Voyage: Tamar to Truro; Epic Onwards –Falmouth, Penzance, St Ives; and Over and Out – where he drags the dinghy 25 miles over land from Welcombe Mouth to the Tamar and the end of his circumnavigation (David Weston, 1992, 1995 and 1998, available in his gallery).

On leaving Mev, the headland of the Dodman soon looms large to starboard. The Dodman has a massive cross at its summit, put there in 1896 by Reverend G. Martin, vicar of Caerhayes to the West. The villagers of nearby Gorran thought him odd – read Anne Treneer’s lovely account of her childhood up to 1906 around the Dodman in her Schoolhouse in the Wind. Behind the cross, is the signal station and Coastguard lookout, built 1794.

The Dodman offers panoramio views – on a clear day, you can see the Bolt to the East and the Lizard to the West.

FALMOUTH

I know Falmouth well from visiting my friend Paul who was on the fishing out of Flushing in the eighties. He used to talk about sailing through “motorways of mackerel”. He died young of cancer and his ashes are scattered in Carrick Roads. But when he was alive, he was my regular crew, so voyages would start with me singlehanding down to Penryn to pick him up.

I am here to swing my new compass with Alan Hopton, one of only 12 compass swingers left in the country. He got his mate’s ticket with Elder Dempster. The work done, he asked permission to smoke a cigarette. Granted, out came a rolly. You can take a merchant seaman from the sea, but you can’t take the sea out of a merchant seaman.

25/4. To Falmouth Art Gallery to see the work of Christopher Wood. He and Ben Nicolson discovered Alfred Wallis, the “naïve” St Ives painter whose perspectives were all “wrong”. Both were heavily influenced by this ex-merchant seaman who never received an art lesson in his life and painted on bits of wood and cardboard.

Wandering back up the main street towards the Moor, found the Beerwolf Book pub off on the left. A room of remaindered books with two shelves of maritime; and a table for you to put your beer on while you browse. You may need to hurry. There was a notice up saying that the Licensing Department had issued a formal warning to decrease the noise on leaving. (Amazingly, as I edit this in February, 2021, it appears still to be open.)

But the bestest in enjoyment was to sit outside the Front pub on Custom House Quay. Once safely moored in Pendennis Marina, just behind the National Maritime Musuem, I would link up with Peter Skidmore, fine maritime scholar, to discuss the state of the maritime history world; and after a pint or two, head off the short distance to get fish and chips from the excellent Harbour Lights on the floor above, and bring them back, to sit in the evening sunshine looking out on the view across the Carrick Roads.

But the bestest in enjoyment was to sit outside the Front pub on Custom House Quay. Once safely moored in Pendennis Marina, just behind the National Maritime Museum, I would link up with Peter Skidmore, fine maritime scholar, to discuss the state of the maritime history world; and after a pint or two, head off the short distance to get fish and chips from the excellent Harbour Lights on the floor above, and bring them back, to sit in the evening sunshine looking out on the view across the Carrick Roads.

I had called in at Falmouth for some repairs, and they are done by lunchtime, so I decide to go up to Malpas for the evening. The Fal estuary, especially higher up where it joins the Truro river, is very beautiful; and the Heron Inn at Malpas has what is essentially a viewing platform where you can sup your beer and look down the beautiful valley. And it’s only a couple of miles from Truro city centre.

There is a bi-annual Cornish Maritime History Conference and in 2013, I heard an excellent presentation about the prestigious development of horticulture around Falmouth, by Megan Westley, which made sense of the large number of exotic gardens in the area – think of all those varieties of rhodendrons at Trellisick.

The Trellisick estate has over a hundred different types of rhodendron (once again, botany as a prestige hobby for the wealthy Victorians around Falmouth). The King Harry Ferry runs from Trellisick to the other side of the river. This must be one of the most isolated car ferries around. Then down stream one finds parked coasters, small tankers and, on this visit, a small cruise ship, the Dona Amelia.

On the cabin shelf

There are two second-hand bookshops in Falmouth, one in the main street and one opposite the Italian restaurant, below the Moor. Both expensive but carry extensive maritime stock.

A nice read about Falmouth is The Levelling Sea: The Story of a Cornish Haven and the Age of Sail. For example, I never knew there was a Jewish cemetery at Ponsharden.

I had paid a ridiculous price for C.J.H. Mead’s History of the Royal Cornwall Yacht Club 1871-1949 (Plymouth: Underhill, 1951). in Mevaggisey. Mead refers to HMS Ganges as one of the racing marks. The Ganges was launched in Bombay in 1821 and was the last warship under sail to carry the flag of a Commander in Chief. Withdrawn 1861, it became a training ship, anchored at Mylor till in 1899 it was moved to the River Stour. The boys moved ashore in 1905, the training establishment keeping the name. It closed in 1976. I used to go up to Harwich quite often and well remember seeing the huge flagpole across the water. It was said that on ceremonial days, a boy would shin up and stand on the button on the top!

I leave Malpas at 0630 and make fast progress down the ebbing river, having passed the splendidly named Maggoty Bank.

Once clear of the lighthouse at St Anthony’s, the Helford beckons to starboard.

The HELFORD

Whit Bank Holiday Monday: I nearly got my anchor ready, thinking that it was highly unlikely I could pick up a visitors’ mooring. As I came abreast the Sailing Club, there were four visitors’ mooring and three were empty. In Whit week! Which was always a cruising man’s ‘book a year ahead’ week as you only had to take four days’ leave. I thought I should visit the Helford Sailing Club as it recently has had an extension and boasts 1200 members. I got there on Bank Holiday, Whitsun and there weren’t that many people, and those that were, were pretty clearly social members, as I suspect the majority are.

That’s not to say the facilities for sailors aren’t good – the pontoons, the laundry, the showers but the ‘Sailing’ as in a number of out-of-way places, makes the club desirable and provides a meeting place.

I took my drink and went onto the balcony. There was no movement on the water at all. No dinghies buzzing back from the pub or a friend’s yacht to the mother ship. When I got back to Salcombe, I was told the same story: busy weekend, quiet week. Cruising is dying.

There is a terrible rottenness about the Helford, like the rhododendron drive that starts Du Maurier’s Rebecca. Beauty and injustice.

Mawgan Porth has mainly architect designed bungalows, but the remaining farm cottages are spotless. Helford Passage is dark in winter, so the ferryman told me. Even more disturbing is that the fishermen want to improve their quay and also make it more user-friendly for people with mobility problems. The absentee second homers have objected, and having barristers in their midst, have successfully blocked this development for a number of years.

In the morning, I sail over to Durgan, the bottom of Trebah gardens. It must have been quite a sizeable fishing harbour with warehouses behind the quay. I want to walk to Mawgan old church as Fishwick’s Southwest pilot says that the great yacht writer, Claude Worth, and his son, a circumnavigator, are buried there.

To get to the church quickly, you have to keep to the beach. It is badly signposted so I end up going up the Carwinnion valley. The vegetation of tree ferns and massive rhodendron bushes is almost tropical.

Despite looking at almost every grave, I cannot find Worth’s. As I walk back, I observe to myself that the Helford is almost chocolate box maritime beautiful. It’s partly because it’s quite wide but mainly because being sheltered and in the far West, Monterey pines and full size oaks line the river banks, not the scrubby little trees you find along the Dart or Devonshire Avon.

MULLION

I decided to make the passage to Newlyn more interesting by passing the Victorian harbour of Mullion, built for pilchard fishing in 1891; and although it has survived last winter’s storm, the National Trust, who own it, will only do minor repairs, so it may well disappear in time.

NEWLYN

Nowadays, now that you can get a pontoon berth at Newlyn, and not tie up alongside a crabber, quite a lot of the sweat has been taken out of the passage. I used to prefer to leave from Falmouth or better the Helford, and be at the Lizard as the tide started to ebb. Fine, but that meant a very early start and two major headlands.

Previously, at Newlyn, you tied up alongside the fishing boats on the quay. You tried to guess which one was out of commission. You couldn’t leave the boat for very long in case a crabber came in on your outside and, having unloaded, went off for God’s know how long. You also had to do some pretty big leaps up or down to the quay if you tried to get ashore when the tide had dropped …

Some years ago, there was a Fisheries deal, whereby some vessels were scrapped and facilities for the remainder improved by building a long pontoon with arms either side. The maths, of course, didn’t add up, as if there were fewer fishing boats, they didn’t need extra room.

But the development allowed yachts to use the bottom end of the pontoon, and made Newlyn much more useful. (Penzance, with its lock gates, is much less useful as it only opens near High Water, so you miss half of the up tide and are too early for the down tide; and when the Scillies got a weekly cargo ship that docks inside the harbour (the ferry is parked outside alongside the quay), there wasn’t much space left for anyone else.

I was there one year and ahead of us, was a lovely, old-fashioned, graceful old white yacht. The male skipper went off and a crabber came alongside. A well-dressed woman in a sweeping long white cardigan – very elegant – came up on deck and watched helplessly as the crabber’s crew marched across the teak foredeck with their catch … Had her husband done his job properly, he would have taught her how to manoeuvre the boat so that she could have slipped it outside the crabber.

And the arrival of the pontoons changed my habits ashore. I used to go to a pub on the hill on the road to Mousehole, so that one could slip out from time and time to see that one’s guess that no crabber would come alongside was still correct; or swallow one’s pint and hare down back to the harbour, before the crabber had finished unloading if it wasn’t.

So, once round the Lizard and safely installed on one of the yacht pontoons, to the renovated Tolcarne Arms, Newlyn. This is being turned into a gastro pub, a breed I am not too fond of, but good food is hard to find in Newlyn …

Thence, as for every visit, to Penlee Gallery. Great photographic exhibition: Then and Now –old photographs and their modern counterpart. And the old paintings of old Newlyn and Penzance. A lovingly put together exhibition.

But, in the Cornish History gallery, I note down that the Penzance National History and Antiquarian Society ran from 1839-1961. What happened then?

On the cabin shelf:

While there, I bought Paul Broderick’s Henry Scott Tuke: His ‘Other’ Life, making the rather obvious point that he was gay. He wasn’t ashamed of it, but his sister was, and burnt 10 out of the 12 volumes of his diaries. Tuke of course was a very keen sailor. Clearly, there have been many gay sailors, but I only know of Tristan Jones, who was outed by Anthony Jones in Tristan Jones: The Wayward Sailor, and an obituary in Classic Boat for the brilliant yacht designer, Kim Holman (1925-2006). The editor was criticised for mentioning this rather central feature of Holman’s life. Besides, Rabbi Blue had already described his long relationship with Kim in Hitchiking to Heaven (2004). But it is nice that someone has ‘come out’ about Tuke. I once had a discussion on this point with Katherine Wallace – well, it wasn’t a discussion as she wouldn’t discuss it; and the next week, I was in London, wandering around Bloomsbury, when I came across the Gay and Lesbian bookshop, and in the centre of the window, was her Catching the Light: The Art and Life of Henry Scott Tuke open at the two page spread of ‘August Blue’, with its naked boys. If I had had her telephone number, I could have rung her to say that there had been a terrible mistake …

Finally, to Maldron. I had known for years that Alfred Wallace had ended his days in the Penzance Workhouse at Maldron, but never searched it out. Fortunately, Alison had used her phone to find that more recently, it had been the site of the Madron Meat Company. Unable to find it, we got rather strange directions from a local: ‘past the Volkswagen Polo and then red Audi and turn right at the chickens’. The Audi was not in sight, so how he knew … Anyway, the workhouse is there, derelict, but like the old asylums, massive as it had workshops. Spooky. Sadly, it’s all locked up and there was no obvious way to get closer.

In the T.V. lounge

One of the unpredicted pleasures of having a one year grandson is that around 18.15, we gather around the television to watch In the Night Garden, which concerns Higgle Piggle and his friends. I observed that they seemed to be overweight, perhaps to prevent the increasing number of obese babies from feeling discomforted, and Higgle Piggle seems to suffer from some motor disorder as he frequently falls over. My wife tells me sharply that they appear large in order to empathically wear nappies, like their watchers; and that one year babies do frequently fall over.

But I am also concerned that this group of characters show absolutely no concern to learn or to work. Nor are they being assessed for their proper development.

More alarming from the maritime perspective, is that the opening and closing sequence have Higgle Piggle in an open, small boat at sea, with a regular but pronounced swell.

In the opening sequence, he takes down the mainsail and uses it as a blanket. Throughout the programme, it also serves as his comforter. This suggests poverty and the question arises: how can Higgle Piggle afford a leisure sailing vessel? Is he claiming benefits illegally? Is the vessel his? These questions concerned me so much that I ring the Prime Minister’s Office. A very nice lady answered and told me that he couldn’t talk to me as he is in conference with his accountant about tax avoidance – I wasn’t clear whose. But she said that the situation regarding Higgle Piggle’s possibly fraudulent behaviour was so serious she would contact the Border Agency to send a patrol out to check his papers, with a possibility of seeking deportation – after all, Higgle Piggle was hardly an English name, a point I must admit I’d missed.

Also, as I watch Higgle Piggle’s boat mount and fall off the swell, I cannot but ask myself why he is not wearing a life jacket. But then I remember, when, around 2005, the Republic of Ireland made the wearing of life jackets compulsory in boats of less than 7 metres, the Royal Yachting Association explained that it preferred to educate, not legislate water-users (apparently a dead yachtie, unencumbered by legislation, is preferable to a live one) and that it was up to the individual to decide on the basis of his situation, which is what Higgle Piggle has obviously done. So well done, Higgle Piggle.

I mentioned visiting at the National Coast Watch, Cape Cornwall. Much as I like the fact that people are watching for my safety at various headlands, I was sufficiently concerned at the crazy suggestions being made about a slimmed down Coast Guard (such as that Southampton take over a shout from Falmouth at 6 p.m.), that I wrote to the editor of their little journal and asked that there should be a 2 page letters page, so that NCI [National Coastwatch Institute] members- who after all, are the experts in terms of what is happening out there – could express their views. He wrote back saying that he couldn‘t possibly spare the space, so I told him to send his reply to the membership secretary to explain my resignation.

In fact, he was glossing over NCI policy. In Yachting Monthly, December, 2013, p. 10, the present NCW chairman, Alan Richards, is asked ‘Does the NCI support the centralisation of the Coastguard?’ to which he replied: ‘It is not for us to comment on any changes that may be taking place in that organisation’. Not even if it is harmful to seafarers’ safety? Obviously not. Well done, NCI.

LAMORNA

One day, I must anchor off Lamorna, In the meantime, stuck in Newlyn by strong winds, I catch an open top bus heading for Land’s End and get off at the Lamorna turn.

Lamorna is south of Mousehole. They used the granite quarry for the Wolf and the Bishop Rock.

Under James’ Walker supervision, workmen, between 1861 and 1869, constructed Wolf Rock at Lamorna from local granite before shipping it out to the reef. The light became operational in 1870.

One has to call in on the Lamorna Wink, drinking place of the overflow and second generation of Newlyn painters, centred around ‘Lamorna’ Birch (this Birch added the ‘Lamorna’ to distinguish himself from another artist working in the area, Lionel Birch).

It is a steep but rewarding walk to Mousehole. The cliff tops were used for early flowering daffodil and narcissi “plats”, Because of Cornwall’s mild climate, the flowers bloomed earlier than in other parts of the country, so fetched a premium. They were, of course, the main crop of the Scillies.

I follow up the Lamorna theme by taking the bus into Penzance to see “Summer in February” about Alfred Munnings and his unfortunate marriage to Florence Carter-Wood. Not great acting but when the scenery of West Penwith does the talking, it is breath-taking. I recognised most of the scenery as near Cape Cornwall and Priest Cove, by the way, not Lamorna.

Floating around the North Coast of Cornwall and Devon

This account of a sailing season concerns a major aspect of maritime history – commercial sail – and that summer, I explored the region where commercial sail was still being carried out into the 1950s – the North Cornwall/ Devon coast of Bude, Appledore and Velator (Braunton).

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From Newlyn, you can have the tide with you all the way up to Padstow,thanks to a north-going eddy at the Longships [Land’s End] that turns in that direction two hours before the start of the flood up from Pendeen. At no point is there any wind, yet the tide on a number of passages has taken me round the sixty-seven miles in eleven hours.

ST IVES

The Godrevy light is not just of practical importance to the fisherman of St Ives and Hayle. It also figures in one of the classic novels of the twentieth century – Virginia Woolf’s modernist novel, To The Lighthouse, 1927. This was pioneering in its technique of highlighting the characters’ inner thoughts, rather than the author’s descriptions of action.

Woolf’s father was Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography. He bought the lease of Talland House, St Ives from the Great Western Railway in 1881. His purpose was for it to be the summer residence of his large family – four children, one of whom was Virginia, by his second marriage to Julia Prinsep (1846-1895), and two by her first marriage to Herbert Duckworth; and also many guests. The family spent every summer there till 1895, when Leslie gave up the lease because the newly built Porthminster hotel blocked their view and because his wife died in that year. (For a loving and beautifully illustrated account of their years at St Ives, see Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell- Remembering St Ives by Marion Dell and Marion Whybrow, Tabb House, 2003).

To the Lighthouse was the third novel produced during Woolf’s most creative decade, the 1920’s, after Jacob’s Room, 1922, Mrs Dalloway, 1925, and before her witty but telling polemic against the injustices of the patriarchy, A Room of One’s Own, 1929.

The first part, “The Window” uses one of Woolf’s favourite frames – the day’s length. It opens with one of the younger Ramsays, James, asking if they will be able to sail to the lighthouse tomorrow. It ends in magnificent supper, organised by Mrs Ramsay, for her family and guests. In the second Part, “Time Passes”, clearly symbolic of the First World War, Mrs Ramsay dies, leaving a bereft husband, and the house lies empty and mouldering. In the last part “The Lighthouse”, the father hires a fishing boat, skippered by the local fisherman. The now teenage James Ramsay helms much of the way to Godrevy, with his father and a sister. They land, bringing a present to the lighthouse keepers. It is fulfilment, but in the context of loss, a futile gesture.

When I was studying for an M.A. in English Literature, I noticed that, much to the confusion of contemporary critics, Woolf had moved the lighthouse to the Hebrides. I suggested that she was so involved in analysing her family dynamics and rendering them into fictional form, that, despite her usual attention to detail, she did not bother with the implications of this topographical switch. There were obvious errors – one of the guests spends just a few hours reaching them from London; another states that they will go shopping in Edinburgh (as opposed to the much nearer Oban or Glasgow).

Woolf returned to St Ives ten years after her father gave up the lease on Talland House, and her impressions are recorded in A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897-1909. London: Pimlico, 2003, pp. 281-299. She holidayed with her three (full) sibs, staying at Trevose View, Carbis Bay in August, 1905. She writes of the Regatta and her first experience of seine netting the pilchards, the boats being launched and directed by the huer in his look-out on Porthminster Point.

In her much later ‘Sketch of the Past’ (in Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind, University of Sussex Press, 1976), she writes vividly of St Ives and of the heavy cargo and coal traffic (the Haines line) going past St Ives (pp. 109-117).

I wrote this up as a paper ‘Why Move the Lighthouse?’ Cornish Studies, 13, 2005, 53-69. One of the great pleasures of that period of my life was to be asked to give a spoken version and to go down to the Arts Centre, St Ives and look out from the lecture room across the bay to Godrevy …

Various odd thoughts from my many visits to St Ives:

1. You can sail between Godrevy Island and the mainland.

2. The locals wanted the lighthouse outside the dangers it lights (the Stones reef). Trinity House saved money by building the light inside the dangers. Safe water outside the Reefs is marked by a North Cardinal mark.

3. There are now a number of moorings in deep water outside the harbour (whereas previously you had to take the ground against the harbour wall, or anchor). You still roll like a pig due to the waves bouncing off Smeaton’s pier and its collapsed extension.

4. Visiting St Ives, you get a superb view from the café at the top of Tate St Ives. Up to my last visit, you could go to the café without paying to see the exhibits.

5. But you might want to shell out as a ticket also allows you to visit the house and gardens of one of England’s sculptor geniuses, Barbara Hepworth. To see her sculptors in her garden- sensational.

6. On your way down, you will see a large H against a house wall. Not a bit of a Banksie- like graffiti, but almost the last evidence of the major coastal shipping line, the Hain Tramp Shipping Line. Founded 1816, it had 36 ships in 1913. In 1917, it was taken over by the P& O. Its records are at the NMM, Greenwich. Hain is also commemorated by the local hospital that he funded.

7. If you like marine paintings, take the little train to Penzance and walk up to the Penlee Gallery in its tropical gardens, with its stunning permanent collection of the Newlyn school’s paintings of the fishermen around 1900.

8. You’ll pay through the nose for food in St Ives. So, if you have transport, try Hayle. If you want to get melancholic, walk down by its quays.

HAYLE

Downtown Hayle provided little of the way in restaurants, except Indian or Chinese. So over to St Just for breakfast, an excellent bacon butty in the Cookbook, that combines being a café and a good second hand book store. The craft shop next door now has beautiful embroidery and woollen work.

To Cape Cornwall to walk off the bacon butty. The view from the engine house at the top of the Cape towards the Longships and the Wolf are spectacular and a good day you can see the Seven Stones Lightship and the Scillies.

A large number – 100 or more – gannets were in a frenzy diving into a shoal just off the Cape, so I went down to the National Coast Watch station further down the cliff – a really spectacular location. The National Coastwatch Institution, was founded in 1994 after two fishermen drowned off Bass Point, Cornwall, where the coastguard lookout had been closed, to be the eyes of the ever-shrinking Coastguard.

The watchkeeper told me they keep a marine log for a project from Exeter University – sightings of minkie whales and basking sharks etc.

You never see a gannet bring their catch back up, so I assume they swallow it whole like a cormorant. As we talk for quarter of an hour or so, the gannets seem to be sated and just bob on the surface.

The watchkeeper tells me that they have little difficulty recruiting enough for two four hour (but not three) watches from people who retire down to West Penwith. Interesting: can they carry on? They seem quite optimistic, whenever I talk to NCW stations.

PADSTOW

May Day, 2014

This must be my fifth or sixth sail to Padstow for the ‘Obby ‘Os – perhaps it’s my way of saying that ‘summer is a-coming in’.

To get the most out of the ‘Obby ‘Os, you have to know a local person or family. May 1st Padstow. I know an old Padstow family, who follow the Blue ‘Os (created after the First World War to remember the fallen; the Red ‘Os is far older). My friend’s husband’s grandfather was coxswain of the Padstow lifeboat, then based behind Doom Bar. A picture of him looking suitably nautical hangs in the dining room.

It’s a pagan celebration and also of “old” Padstow. You have to follow the bands following the ‘Obby ‘Os to witness how pagan it is – the repetitive verses sung time and time and time again against the repetitive chords of the numerous accordions and the beating of the drums; the dancing and singing is exhausting so to keep on going, copious amounts of drink are consumed; and, of course, the ‘Obby ‘Os trying to capture the maidens. And the belief that if they are captured, they will be pregnant within the year.

There are 20-odd verses to “Summer is a-coming in” and they know them all. Plus a remarkable number of accordion players and drummers of both sexes.

Padstowians, pushed to the outskirts of Steinville by the rich second homers. They told me how someone had clocked Rik Stein during a ‘Obby ‘Os some ten years ago. So the ‘Obby ‘Os procession also has the function of the temporary re-capturing the town by its actual inhabitants. . “We were here before Rick Stein and we’ll be here after he’s gone”, one of the followers said to me.

For the locals, who belong to one of the ‘Osses (red: ancient; blue: created as a memorial after World War One; the large cross on the headland as you sail in sort out fits), The two colours are based in different pubs (Golden Lion for red; Harbour for blue)

The ‘Obby Os celebrations, for the locals, are spread over three days. The members of each ‘Os gather in their respective pubs the night before. Most of the furniture has been stripped out because, on May Day, the ‘Os may come dancing through the pub, knocking down anything in its wild, swinging path.) At midnight, the customers will form into a choir and parade around the town, stopping at various houses to sing for them. The town has already been garlanded with branches and the May Pole has been set up in the square.

Singing starts on the stroke of midnight serenading around the town till 5 am. In olden times, if the owners of the house were unpopular or had committed a sin or crime, the choir would refer to it in their singing.

The next morning, the morning of May Day, the two ‘Osses will emerge at different times and take different routes; and do the same again at 1600 and 1800. The 6 o’clock can see the two ‘osses meet at the maypole. Be there in good time if you want to see anything and don’t suffer from agoraphobia.

The next day, the tourists gone, the two bands of supporters reconvene at lunchtime, and there is one final round of singing around four o’clock.

Informal singing can take place at any time, but more often on that third day. Gilly, my informant, was in the Harbour Inn, listening with one ear to the shanty singers, when her attention was caught by a group that were just in a different league. It was the Fishermen’s Friends from Port Isaac, across the Camel and along. Formed 1995, they became famous for signing a million pound record deal in 2010, an unheard of sum for a group of a capella shanty singers. Apparently, their first public outing since, getting ready to perform at a venue in Guilford on the 9th Feb., a heavy steel door fell on their tour manager, Paul McMullen, and one of the singers, Trevor Grills, killing both.

A yacht entered the inner harbour, sporting a red, white and blue ensign. I took their lines and greeted them as French. They replied a bit tartly that they were Dutch. But an easy mistake to make. The Belgians and Germans share the same colour lines (Black, Red, Yellow) as do the French and Dutch (Red, White and Blue). High time the EEC sorted out this confusion.

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May 5. Went by car over to Charlestown. One of the great visual thrills was to come over the hill out of St Austell and be greeted by a forest of masts of the tall ships moored inside this old clay port. Only one tall ship left now. Rather sad.

Came back to find a major incident in operation and the harbour front closed for ambulances, police, coastguards and the town eerily quiet. A RIB, going the short distance from Padstow back to Rock on the other side of the Camel, had overturned, killing and maiming some of its occupants, all members of the same family. I recalled the eminent yachting journalist, Des Sleightholme’s chilling line: “There’s no such thing as a jolly. You’re either at sea or you’re not”.

On a sunny day, the Camel is a mess of speeding motorboats and ribs. The default speed is as fast as possible by flatout planing. The wash they create is tremendous as they mindlessly dash up and down the estuary.

The reckless ignoring of risk or the unexpected is un-seaman. It seems inevitable that there will be another casualty. Padstow is a harbour with harbour limits, so why is there no speed limit enforced inside the harbour limits (which are out beyond the headlands, so will include all the relevant sections of the Camel, not just the final few hundred yards of the approach channel?

There are bound to be more tragedies in the Camel, most likely again through the killing or maiming of a person in the water by a speeding boat. The Harbour authorities have completely lost control of the river and its safety. Perhaps they lost it once they gave permission for high speed commercial joy rides some decades ago, but those boats are helmed by experienced drivers, unlike many of the boats, capable of very high speeds, being driven by holiday makers; and with the switch from sail to power-driven vessels, there are far more of these on the river in recent years.

By mid-afternoon next day, I’m in St. Ives. As I dinghy ashore, two young children run naked in the sea. There are plenty of craft about – rowing boats, dinghies, inflatables – but they are sharing the sea together. What is happening in Padstow is the death of community. Driving at such speed is an egocentric pleasure. The noise pollution destroys the very beauty their owners have paid so much to have access to.

The passage down to St Ives was not pleasant, being undertaken in very poor visibility. I had the odd experience of two horizons, as visibility out to sea was better than visibility towards land. I was passing Trevose Head light at 200 metres, when it disappeared. And the visibility got no better as the sun rose higher. Gannets would rise in their cumbersome way to get out of my path.

But it’s by no means inevitable. The Salcombe estuary has many powerful RIBs in it, but they do not race up and down the estuary. If they did, they would be banned and their craft confiscated. In Salcombe, they wait till they are clear of the harbour and out beyond the bar. Likewise you don’t see this dangerous behaviour in Falmouth, the Yealm or the Teign.

The Camel is not the only river where a fatality is waiting to happen. Another is the Exe. This river is even less supervised, since there only seems to be a solitary harbourmaster at Exmouth. The boats tend to be speedboats, rather than RIBs, and the owners a bit younger; but as they speed between the moorings, how long before they take out a skier, a kayaker or an angler in a dinghy? In both cases, the complete disrespect for both other uses and the river are such that the only question is when and where.

There’s a traditional mournful ditty involving Padstow:

From Padstow to Lundy Light

A watery grave by day or night

Maybe now we need to add another:

Where will an avoidable death be caused next?

Will it be on the Camel or on the Exe?

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Padstow is the place to be at the end of the season, when. I don’t know whether the Bristol Channel attracts more strange types than most cruising areas, and wherever they’ve been, they are almost bound to call in at Padstow, on their way home, as it is the only accessible deep water harbour on the North Cornish coast, indeed until you get up to Lundy. I recall one man sailing because he had had three heart attacks so didn’t have much time left, a logic I wasn’t sure about; another who left his wife up Channel in May returning in September. Then there were two school teachers in a small boat, who wanted a week’s good weather forecast before they would set off for the Scillies. One character I remember went by the name of Belfast Joe, or some such, definitely Northern Irish. He had his boat, into which he had sunk all his savings on retirement, in the corner of the harbour and he was going blue water. When he was ready, and the weather served. I’m pretty sure I saw him on May Day and again when I returned back some couple of months later. He was nearly ready, but we ended up in the pub opposite the Red Lion, where the locals clearly did not believe him and were roping him into a stag night at the weekend. But he did sail eventually.

Floating about Hampshire

April 30th, 2016: To Selborne, the parish of the famous eighteenth century naturalist, Gilbert White, for a celebration of Theo Rye’s life, with some 200 other mourners. It was the second loss of a major figure in yachting history within a few months, the first being Maldwin Drummond.

Maldwin was a major mover and shaker in the higher echelons of yachting and yacht clubs. Commodore of the Royal Yacht Squadron, Editor of the Royal Cruising Club’s Roving Commissions, chair of the Sail Training Association, and heavily involved in the building of the three masted schooner, Sir Winston Churchill. The only negative in his illustrious career was being involved in the crucifixion of the Cutty Sark and then the shrink wrapping of the corpse, but I have it on good authority that his advice was over-ruled.

He was also a Rennaissance man, with a wide range of talents. His publications can do the talking. He published Salt-Water Palaces (1979), about luxury yachts in the years between 1840 and 1914; on wildlife in The Yachtsman’s Naturalist, with Paul Rodhouse (1980); The Riddle, providing the background to The Riddle of the Sands, and its political plot of an intended German invasion.

He told me a nice story about writing The Riddle. He’d gone down West to see Pophams who’d edited Childers’ writings about his sailing days (A Thirst for the Sea, 1979), and as he was leaving, his host said casually ‘Oh, by the way, would you like to borrow Childers’ actual log book of his Baltic & Frisians voyage?’ Of course, he said ‘Yes’ and was so thrilled by the loan that, as he was driving back to Fawley, he pulled over a number of time into lay- bys so that he could stroke it. Having had a heart bypass operation a few years ago, he was very pleased that he saw the updated second edition appear.

Maldwin was also a talented artist and his most enjoyable book is After You, Mr Lear (Seafarer, 2007). As well as a limerick and humorous poet, Lear was a painter, good enough to tutor Queen Victoria, and painted during his years travelling and living in the Mediterranean (1847-1849). Maldwin followed, on land and by sea and visited the sites of Lear’s paintings. If the idea appeals to you, buy the hard copy as the publishers shrank the size of the paintings for the paperback, which seriously lessens the impact and pleasure.

I had been in communication with Maldwin about Erskine Childers, because I had the idea for an article that Childers was actually spying, or at least charting the depths around the Frisian islands in case the British needed them, for example, as bases from which to monitor and perhaps blockade German shipping movements, either from Wilhelmshaven or through the ports served by the Ems-Jade canal. This would have been similar to Ewan Southby-Tailyour, the Marine and yachtsman, who charted the islands when commanding the Royal Marine Detachment in the Falklands in 1978-1979, His charts were invaluable for the landing of the British troops during the Falkland War, and published after the war in Falkland Islands Shores, 1985. My main supporting evidence was that Childers’ actual voyage in Vixen was from August to mid-December. This seemed incredibly late in the season, so that he was sailing around very shallow waters with short day light hours and higher risk of gales. Maldwin didn’t agree, but he had very kindly invited me to lunch, when, three days before, I sadly heard that, after a very short illness, he had died.

Theo Rye was much younger, but already an internationally leading figure in yacht restoration, especially classic yachts, and he passed some of his knowledge of Victorian and pre-World War Two techniques on in articles in the yachting press, most frequently for Classic Boat, of which he was a consultant editor. He had got wind that I was working on A New History of Yachting, and was most encouraging, agreeing to read a late draft. This was an honour, and an opportunity for constructive criticism not to be missed. When Theo told you you were wrong, you knew he knew ten times more about yachting than you did; and he did so, characteristically, by pushing back his steel-rimmed glasses and speaking with a smile, so you couldn’t take offence. But before he was able to give me that feedback, he e-mailed me apologising for the delay, saying that he’d had a ridiculous accident falling off his bike.

I was attending a committee meeting of the Association of Yachting Historians in September last year. It was held on the balcony of the Royal Southampton. I was sitting there enjoying the sun, when Martin Black told us that Theo Rye had an inoperable brain tumour and would almost certainly be dead within three months. I looked out across the expensive plastic toys and trophies of the rich and life didn’t seem fair, for Theo was only 48.

It was obvious to me that had he lived and wished to, he had a magnum opus in him on how classic boats were built and not just the hulls, but the rigging, the spars, etc. in short, every aspect of a boat. And Theo had the ability to make the technical interesting and relevant. To give one example, he told me that he was writing a double article on glues. Which didn’t sound terribly exciting, but, when the articles came out, Theo explained that these glues were developed to go with hollow masts. Hollow masts were lighter than solid, shaped tree trunks, so gave racing boat with them an advantage. But of course, you couldn’t just drill out a 150 foot mast. So you constructed from a number of pieces of wood, hence the need for suitable glues.

The next morning saw me heading West to Padstow for my annual presence at the ‘Obby ‘Os celebrations. The drinking starts the night before. I was in the Harbour Inn, the home of the Blue ‘Os, the ‘Os of my friends, which was created after the 1914 War to remember the dead, in competition with the time-immemorial Red ‘Os.

I was up early on May Day’ as I wanted to see the Junior ‘Obby ‘Os parade at 0800. It was raining badly and by the time I got down to the Harbour I was soaked. My mood was not improved by hearing a bunch of open, white shirted, middle-aged men, under a plastic shelter, singing ‘I’m bound for South Australia’, in the very meaningful, soulful way that people who don’t know their pushpit from their pulpit, do. I was reminded of David Bone, in his introduction to his Capstan Bars, 1931, a nicely produced analysis of shanties, getting angry with composers like Benjamin Britten, making them songs for concert singers, when they were actually important adjuncts to work.

As I moved away, I thought, ill-temperedly, that it was appropriate that they sang a shanty which didn’t make sense “Round Cape Horn, we’re bound for South Australia”, when of course, on the way out, they would have used the Westerlies and gone round the Cape of Good Hope. But I left them to their singing and grunting, the latter, of course, essential to providing authenticity.

As soon as the Blue ‘Os came out, I went in. In the evening, it has cleared up so I followed the Blue ‘Os. The master of ceremonies, the teezer, led the band down the breakwater, which apparently hasn’t happened for some years, and by now, after all the rain, there were only the Os’ followers, in their white outfits with blue scarfs and belts, surely drawing on a naval costume. To see the ‘Os and a maiden whirling around and the ‘Os’ followers dancing to the music of the drum and accordion band, in the sunlight, with the aquamarine Camel behind, was something special. Then I hastened to the Harbour Inn, which they came into complete with ‘Os (anything breakable is put away, leaving only a few benches against the wall). I’ve heard ‘Summer is a’coming in’ thousands of times over the years, but to hear it filling a room with a low roof, an accordionist bashing it out two feet away from you, so that it vibrates down into your toes, is something else.

The next morning, I rode the ferry across to Rock and paid for a coffee at the Blue Tomato – overpriced, but the view up the Camel and across to Padstow, is to die for. Back in Padstow, I passed the Red Lion, home of the Red ‘Os, I heard male voices singing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ very meaningfully. I popped to check whether they were the same group of middle-aged men in open white shirts that, when last seen, had been heading for South Australia but I couldn’t be sure. I reflected it was a wise career move, as unless they were very unlucky and landed on a cannibal island (and surely the rulers of the Empire had exterminated them in the name of the advance of civilisation – cannibals, I mean, not missionaries), they were more likely to succeed as missionaries than as deckhands on a commercial sailing vessel.

As I walked back up the hill, I saw a sign for the church, so I made my way to St Petroc’s and decided to light a candle for a member of my family, and then I lit one for Maldwin and Theo too.

Floating about Bude

May 2014

I bucked the flood coming up the Camel in order to reach Bude at high water. No possibility of being late if I wanted to get in as the sealock – one of only two working sea gates in the country- could only be held open for an hour. I do make it, but being told to get in quickly by the harbourmaster causes a small amount of panic. Even so, I don’t think I could have worked out where the final approach was since there are boats all over the place. I ground but going astern and an offshore wind blows the bow into the channel.

The lock operation is positively Victorian. The harbourmaster does wind in the gates, but that’s not enough, so 12(!) volunteers are needed to move them. And once through, you have to wait while yet more volunteers remove the net that stops the fish from escaping into the sea.

The sealock survived the winter storms. You can see chains draped over the lock gates to hold them down. This, as the very helpful harbour master Paul Vincent explained, is because the lock gates rest on small ball and sockets. If the gates get lifted up by the storm surge, they won’t come down on the balls and then are at the mercy of the tides and will be wrecked.

But once tied up, this has to be one of the finest parking spots anywhere. From the cockpit, you are only some 500 yards from the sea, but completely sheltered, and with a great view of the rocks and the golden beach. And since the level doesn’t change, Seadog 2 loves it, as he hops on and off at his leisure. At night, the green light on Barrel Rock (barrel, because the starboard marker is shaped like a barrel) winks across the water. And almost all the time, the roaring of the breaking surf. (I think Tennyson is wrong: there is no ‘moaning’ at the bar, more a consistent roaring).

When I was studying for my M.A. in English Lit., I was fortunate to study the Romantics with two fine teachers: Professors Ashley Tauchert and Jane Spencer. What I liked was their empathy with their topic. Ashley said she would never let her daughters anywhere near Shelley, and Jane had a friend, a guest academic who led a seminar on Mary Wollstonecraft, who said she always walked quickly past Putney Bridge, where Wollstonecraft threw herself off after the ending of her affair with Gilbert Imray. In the same way, I can’t look at the razor sharp rocks that run out from Bude (and from the crazily sited Hartland Quay) without imagining the terror of being the captain of a trading vessel closing the North Cornish shore in either fog or at night or in a strong northerly.

So, not surprisingly, Bude had many wrecks as ships tried to get through the surf, or grounded on those rocks that run out from the cliffs. The most notable was the Ben Coolen, a 1415 ton, full rigged schooner wooden East Indiaman, Liverpool bound for Bombay with a cargo of telegraph poles, which ran aground just of the breakwater in mountainous seas at 3 o’clock on the afternoon of 21st October, 1862. By four o’clock, 29 out of 35 of the crew perished. They are buried in St. Michael’s, originally a Chapel of Ease for Stratton, but as Bude expanded, it became the parish church for Bude Haven.

Your intrepid researcher went in search of the mass grave, commemorated by a single headstone in the graveyard of St. Michael’s. Not easy as there is an old and a new graveyard. But with the help of one of my favourite series Church Trails in Cornwall, this set of 10 laminated cards concerning The Bude Area, (available from the very friendly, and dog-welcoming Tourist Office) gave me a pic. of the grave; and fighting my way through the graves at the back of the church, I passed a dead tree that had been shaped like a cross, and behind it, on the back wall of the graveyard, found the stone.

The wreck is commemorated by the name of the bridge carrying the main road on the way out of town. If you wish to raise a glass to the crew, the nearby pub of that name, where one wall has a mural illustrating and telling of the disaster, though you will have to move a couple of benches to read all of the text. I was advised by a number of the locals that the Ben Coolen serves the best pub grub in town. My game pie was very acceptable.

The Ben Coolen pub has a restaurant with a Spanish sounding name attached. The landlady proudly told the story of a customer who banged her spoon on the table one night when it was crowded, rose and pronounced that she had recently dined at Stein’s Seafood restaurant at Padstow and the food here was better. (I could sympathise. It was at least ten years ago since I sailed from the Scillies to Padstow to a meal booked months in advance (only way to get in). We arrived early at the Doom Bar, so to pass the time my fishing-crazy crew, Bob, put out my two lines and soon had 8 mackerel. An hour after they were caught, we were lying in the river and I asked him to make fish pie with them and some Smash, and anything else he could find in the galley. With the sun going down and a good wine from the boat’s cellar (the pocket under the saloon table), he served up an absolutely mouth-watering concoction. It quite ruined spending over £100 the next day on 6 sampler courses and an overpriced bottle.

I lose my nerve at the shipping forecast on Monday, 5 May with its 5-7s for sea area Lundy, and the surf breaking across Summerleaze Beach, so duck out of the offer to lock out that p.m. By the time I get my courage on Tuesday a.m., surf’s up, so there’s no leaving that day, and with neaps coming, I’m locked in for 10 days; and it was Wednesday, the 14th before I left, hoping to get to Appledore.

The next day, I walk the two miles of the Bude canal that brought sand and lime to the farmers inland. On my way, I meet an 80-year old ex-councillor who shows me where the tub-boats started and went inland for another 33 miles. As with the Bridgwater-Taunton canal, the idea was and lime to the farmers inland. On my way, I meet an 80-year old ex-councillor who shows me where the tub-boats started and went inland for another 33 miles. As with the Bridgwater-Taunton canal, the idea was an aquatic transport system that avoided the need to go round Land’s End.

The day after, I walk on the beautiful southern cliffs to Widemouth, with views down South towards Tintagel and further away in the mist, Trevose Head; and the next evening, I walk above Maer Cliff, to the north of the town, where I see Lundy to the northwest standing out like a lozenge in the evening sun, and know I’ll have to call there before I turn for home. On the cliffs is a memorial to the Rangers, who practised on the cliffs here after 1943 as they were similar to those at Pointe du Hoc, where German guns covered both Omaha and Utah beaches. Under the command of Lt. Col. James Rudder, they scaled the cliffs and took out the guns; but not relieved till D Day +2, they suffered 70% casualties.

And another thing I do is learn a bit about bone carving in a 2 ½ session at Beau Nidol on the Lower Wharf. I made a butterfly necklace. Well, the co-owner/ tutor did the fiddly bits. Anyway, it was good enough to send to my wife as a present, and when I got home, she was wearing it!

The Bude Heritage Museum is in the Victorian mock castle built by the engineer Sir Goldsworthy Gurney (1793-1875). He worked out how he could build it on the sand dune on which it floats. It is a good museum, proud of the town. The bottom level concerns Bude as an important port for commercial sail.

On the cabin shelf:

I re-discovered (almost these days, of second-hand bookshops closing in droves, discover) the joys of an old-fashioned second hand bookshop – a literary emporium on two floors – at the bottom of the high street (‘Books by the Sea’, 5-7 Bellevue; sadly, by the time I retraced my steps in 2020, long gone), complete with the owner in a Dickensian cubbyhole at the back. Quite a good maritime section downstairs.

I discover (almost these days, re-discovered) the In there, I find Home is Where the Boat Is by Emy Thomas (Dunedin, Florida: Cruising Guide Publications, 1993). I will need a chapter on long-distance cruising for my The Cultural History of Yachting, (which became The New History of Yachting), so I buy it. It’s an overview of the long-distance, do-it-yourself sailor, not the large yacht with electronic charts, satnav, fridge, T.V. and telephone variety, run on a generator. (I once reviewed a book about a circumnavigation in the latter type of vessel, where the owner/author complained he couldn’t get diesel in some of the pacific islands, or a decent rump steak).

It’s full of sensible advice but it’s also a bit sad. Thomas was a 33 year-old, well-educated American ‘a burned-out journalist wondering what to do next’ holidaying in Tortola in the British West Indies, when she met Peter Hansen, an Englishman, ‘the epitome of a cruising yachtie: independent, handy and resourceful, confident, cheerful, relaxed and poor’ (p.2) and cruises for the next thirteen years with him in a marinised plywood catamaran. Solanderi. Yet:

Every time we went through stormy weather I vowed never again. I swore it was my last passage – but only to myself. I was insecure enough to worry that if I said it out loud, Peter might jump at the opportunity to get rid of me … I knew I would rather live with fear than live without Peter. (112)

In the Philippines, Peter decided to head for Indian Ocean. Her fear of pirates, of rougher passages and fewer islands means:

… fear had finally won out over love. I packed all my possessions in two tiny duffel bags, and badly torn between relief and regret, flew away. (146 – 147)

There is a coda:

Peter stayed in the Philippines, sold Solanderi and designed and built his dream boat. He married and had a daughter and they all sailed on. (Postscript)

Which seemed sad for her. She built a ‘dream house’ to live in the Virgin Islands, which she writes about in Life in the Left Lane (Author House, 2002).

Clovelly and Bideford Bay

The Hartland Peninsula

Hartland Quay is a god-forsaken spot, a tiny sheltered cove, among high cliffs, just down from Hartland Point. The building of a quay here was authorised by an act of Parliament in 1586, Sir Walter Raleigh, Drake and Sir W.Courteny its sponsors. It got swept away in 1887. Seeing the waves smash against the breakwater, I’m surprised it lasted that long.

There’s a little museum across from the hotel (basic food for walkers) which tells you all about it, and the many wrecks on its lee shore.

Lundy stares at you to the North by West and below the coast path, a line of sharp, jagged rocks run out into the sea. No place to enter in any swell.

A mile or two back along the road is the towering spire of St. Nectan, possibly built that tall as a seamark. Some of the tombs in the churchyard are those of drowned sailors.

³³³³³³³

Leaving Bude at last in the early evening of the 14th May, I knew I couldn’t make the Bideford Bar by the time I had crossed the [Bude] bar and had the sails up. I gave it a go and got into Barnstaple or Bideford Bay as it says on the chart. You need the tide with you around Hartland, or you get into a back eddy that slows you to a crawl. I did have the tide with me, but the wind died, so the clearance over the Bideford bar would have been too low for safety.

So I headed for Clovelly, which has a number of moorings, most of which seem to be unoccupied. I dinghied ashore to walk Seadog 2.

David Clement recalled a trip as an 11-year in the Kathleen and May from Pembroke to Appledore. They neared the dangerous Bideford bar in poor visibility. The skipper, Captain Tommy Jewell, at intervals, pulled up a bucket of water and drank some. At last, he declared they were at the Bar and could sail across it. The secret was presumably that the water had higher fresh water content. It is that kind of detail that makes maritime history so enjoyable as one appreciates the skills of its practitioners.

I have the excellent Bristol Channel and Severn Cruising Guide by Peter Cumberlidge (Imray Laurie Norie & Wilson 2008 but not much changes; worth trying to get a second hand of his Bristol Channel and Severn Pilot, 1988, with its black and white chartlets and telling of a different world). He recommends the New Inn at the top of the High Street but that’s a cobbled 1 in 3 and I’ll be up at first light to cross the bar, so content myself with a pint in the Red Lion on the quay.

Getting into Appledore or Bideford or Barnstaple must have been a continual worry to sailing skippers, whenever the seas got up or the visibility reduced because Bideford Bay is a very large slice of water between Hartland and Bull Points, with unforgiving sand banks and breakers if you got it wrong. The dangers of the Bideford Bar are made all too real in Braunton’s Twentieth Century Mariners, pp.31-36 from Braunton Museum).

Careful pilotage is needed across the bar the next morning, as visibility is poor. So, I head down the coast towards Westward Ho!, pick up the 10 metre line which will take me to the Bideford Bar Buoy and come in near to High Water.

Appledore

Appledore is the old coastal trading village at the mouth of the Torridge and of the Taw. One of the problems of being in Padstow inner harbour is that you have little sense of what is happening outside. In contrast, Appledore Pool, is wide open to the sea and wind.

In Appledore, one moors to the spare RNLI mooring. With the link to the maritime becoming ever weaker, the RNLI is now one of the key definers of our relationship to the sea, foregrounding a strong bond between national identity and maritime skills. It offers almost an obsolete stereotype, albeit a powerful one and one they polish assiduously by linking their present activity with their much more dangerous past.

There used to be two RNLI holding buoys in Appledore Pool. Now there is only one. Cumberlidge’s advice to anchor the pool doesn’t take account of the sluicing tide. I wouldn’t trust an anchor to hold. I think default would be sounding in and anchoring in the River Taw behind Crow Point .

Picking up the huge mooring line is a matter of luck and patience. If you arrive late, it can be absolute hell as the tide is pushing you back out to sea as you desperately hold onto this huge, ungainly snake and try and get a rope around it – it’s far too large to get on board. At last I’m successful. I swop the thin line I used to capture it with a brilliant bit of kit bought from one of the few chandlers left where the staff are skilled – Jimmy Green’s in the unlikely location of Beer, near Seaton, Devon. I watched the man bend the warp onto the chain, so that you pull the mooring line through till the chain is around the mooring line. Hence there can be no wear or tear whatever the tide and you get perfect peace.

Ashore, I have to pull the dinghy some hundred yards up the lifeboat slip in order for it not to float away as the spring tide comes in.

I get talking to the RNLI maintenance team working on the inshore lifeboat. Their patch is from Penzance to Mudeford Quay. Puzzling as Mudeford is only a few miles from the RNLI HQ at Poole and the road from Honiton along the coast is hell in summer with the caravans… Meanwhile, it’s so hot the dog goes to sleep underneath the lifeboat.

I walk along historic, narrow Irsha Street, with its small houses, down a quick pint outside the Royal George, and then onto the brilliant North Devon Maritime Museum in its lovely Georgian building in Odun Road, Appledore (open 1st April to 2nd November, adults a bargain £2). One of the organisers talks to me of how they are trying to involve the school children in maritime projects; and that’s so important if we are to keep any interest in maritime history going.

Opposite Room 3 (the Victorian kitchen) is a leaflet regarding the Rolle Canal from opposite by the North Devon Waterways Society, telling you where you can see the sea lock and the aqueduct.

I got talking to the boat restorers opposite. Under cover is a salmon seine netter, partially built in the 1950’s and now being completed as the builder has now retired! There are only two salmon licences for the estuary now, owned by Braunton men. Perhaps one of them is the Cricks – Sid Crick talks of salmon fishing in Braunton’s Twentieth Century Mariners (see below).

The other one, that was being worked on, was a Clovelly picarooner. The gaffer explained to me that this was Spanish for ‘sea robber’ as these 15 ft. lug rigged boats could get in and out of Clovelly’s drying harbour earlier than the larger boats; and coming in earlier, got better prices for the herring. They were also used to row tourists ashore from the steamers visiting Clovelly.

Appledore Pool is one of the most dramatic moorings I know. At low water, there are so many sandbars it looks like that you could easily walk across to Instow on the other side of the Torridge. I have a siesta and when I go up into the cockpit a couple of hours later, the tide has turned and I am in the middle of a huge lake stretching inland towards Bideford (the Torridge) and Barnstaple (the Taw) and out to sea.

In the evening, I take the Appledore-Instow ferry. Appledore has its long history of coastal trade, but Instow has always been much richer. Nicely illustrated by Instow having a deli., and Appledore used to have a Coop with such narrow aisles, if you got behind anyone who was a bit obese, or with a trolley, there you stayed. Try and cross to Instow in the early evening, so that you can take your pint outside from the pub near the quay and enjoy the views up and down the estuary and across to Appledore.

Northam Burrows

For lunch, to Appledore and the Beaver Inn, along Irsha Street, food O.K., the view across the estuary for the confluence of the Taw and the Torridge, just stunning.

Thence to an exploration of the Northam Burrows, using the two toll roads (by car, you only pay once) – one road is along the northern edge with the long ridge coming of Westward Ho!, of smooth, largish pebbles, which keeps the sea out of the land behind. Men in Northam with a kitchen large enough to have a stove on which they could boil a cauldron (‘potwallopers’) had the right to vote and to keep cattle on the marshes, but also the responsibility of maintaining the ridge.

Westward Ho! was a Victorian speculation.complete with railway station, built in 1865, ten years after Charles Kingsley’s best-selling swashbuckler and using its title, which was written in and is set around nearby Bideford.

From the ridge, Bideford Bay stretches out in front of you from Morte Point to Hartland. Except at high water, part or all of the bar is invariably breaking, and it’s a beautiful study in blues and whites.

Rudyard Kipling was a pupil at the United Services College, a public school established at Westward Ho! in 1874 for the sons of impoverished army officers, who couldn’t afford to send their sons to Haileybury. He was there from 1878 to 1882. As he started to fear for the empire, he wrote a poem ‘The Dykes’ in 1902. It starts:

We have no heart for the fishing – we have no hands for the oar – All that our fathers taught us of old please us now no more.

And develops by using the metaphor of a dyke that the fathers had made, but which the present generation has neglected. The inevitable happens and the dykes are breached:

Walking along the wreck of the dykes, watching the work of the seas! These were the dykes our fathers made to our great profit and ease. But the peace is gone and the profit is gone, with the old sure ways withdrawn…

I feel sure that Kipling is drawing on his time when he walked the Burrows and saw the waves crashing across the bar in winter.

The other road bends round to Skerne point and gives great views of the estuary.

On the cabin shelf

In the North Devon Maritime Museum, I discover Charmian Astbury’s three little books: The Story of the ‘Dido C’ ‘The Ketch ‘Ceres’ 1811-1936’ and ‘The Agnes’, The ‘Clara May’ and the ‘Traly’ (Bideford, Sappho, 2002, 2004 and 2007). Astbury has talked to some of the old crew of the commercial sailing craft – Appledore saw commercial sail into the 1950’s. Taken together, the books, whilst less oral history than the Braunton Museum volumes (see below), give a good feel and historical account of West Country commercial sail.

The documentation she prints shows the Ceres built in Saltcombe in 1811. When did it become Salcombe?

There was a triangle: Bude, Appledore, Velator Quay, Braunton (on the River Caen, which joins the Taw) which kept on commercial sail ketches long after it had died elsewhere.

For a fuller account by a professional skipper, see W. (Bill) J. Slade. Out of Appledore (Greenwich: Conway, first published 1959; rev. ed, 1972); for the photographic record of the days of commercial sail, see W. J. Slade and Basil Greenhill. West Country Coasting Ketches. Greenwich: Conway, 1974). The front cover photo is of Appledore and the title page picture of the ketch ‘Ceres’ aground at the entrance to the Bude Canal, waiting to enter.

If you are going to tour by car, then Hidden Harbours of the Southwest (Imray, 2010) by Dag Pike should be in your glove compartment. It has sections on many of the most interesting lost harbours.

Around the Two Rivers

A few weeks later, with a car and the map of the Rolle canal from the Appledore Maritime Museum, we were now in a position to make an intelligent search for the Rolle Canal linking Torrington and the river Torridge. Near Torrington, locate the Puffing Billy pub, which was Torrington station and has a steam engine on site to prove it. Walk upriver along the trackbed of the old railway and on your right is an arch, the Rolle Tunnel, walk through it and viola –the bed and the towpath of the old canal used to bring limestone inland (in the same way as the Bude canal). If you turn to go back towards the Puffing Billy, all evidence of it disappears at the old railway bridge. We also found the old aquaduct which is now the bridge into Beam House, an activity centre. One day, we will locate the sea lock and the inclined plane.

Barnstaple

If you are at all interested in architecture and the history of buildings, then Pevsner’s The Buildings of England series, published in the 1950’s, is still a must, and in North Devon, he raves about it: ‘Easily the most rewarding town in N Devon’(45), as well of the earliest major settlements, and goes on describing its buildings for several pages. By the Heritage Centre, on the river, is the Royal Exchange, which has its Tome Stone, where deals were agreed on, like Bristol’s ‘on the nail’ stone.

To learn about shipbuilding in Barnstaple which went on till after World War One, buy Barnstaple Heritage Booklet: No. l: Shipbuilding at Barnstaple by M. C. Taylor.

Prudence rebuilt?? Talking to the staff, there is apparently a scheme to renovate the quay and create a tourist attraction by re-creating Prudence, a very successful Elizabethan privateer (pirate ship licensed by the state to attack foreign shipping), which returned to Barnstaple in 1590 with four chests of gold worth £16000, making those with shares in her millionaires. Difficult to see how you could get the Health and Safety and Seaworthiness certificates for a genuine replica, and a shore-based replica always looks ridiculous and soon becomes tatty, like the Golden Hinde at Brixham. Probably all a pipe dream anyway with the government’s ferocious attacks on local authorities.

Braunton

On a summer’s day, Braunton was buzzing. It is obviously the surfing retail centre for the area, with surfing beaches at Saunton Sands and the long strand at Woollacombe. It even has factories for surfing gear.

Braunton was on the busy railway line to Ilfracombe from Paddington via Barnstaple. Built 1874, you could travel from Ilfracombe to London without changing. The station is now the village carpark. There is one signal to commemorate the railway. Down at Velatour Quay, there is one faded noticeboard to commemorate its importance. There is no evidence of the Quay’s commercial importance. The river is narrower with silting and reedbeds than it was in its heyday and the berths are now occupied by rotting derelicts and live-aboards.

Dag Pike in Hidden Harbours of the Southwest gets quite upset up this, in the same way that Tony James does in his journey round the old Southwest ports in Yankee Jack Sails Again (Seafarer, 2006).

So, with no evidence of its past, Braunton has created three museums by the carpark – the Braunton and District Museum; the Museum of British Surfing (why not the British Museum of Surfing?) (01271 815155), a bit expensive for one room, although with good material; and the Braunton Countryside Centre.

In the Braunton Museum, in the Bakehouse Centre, Caen St., Monday-Sat 10-4, tel.: 01271 816688), there is some fine footage of the commercial sail days from early TV film. The models of the commercial sailing craft are in the downstairs section and are rather fine.

On the cabin shelf

There are four booklets published by the museum about commercial sail – 2 small ones: Braunton Shipwrecks: Tales of Ships and Seamen Wrecked on Braunton’s Beaches 1850-1900 by Bob and Ann Brock (1999) and Stanley Rogers’ posthumous 1997 Ships and Sailors of Braunton.

The most interesting and detailed account is Samuel E. Ellacott’s Braunton Ships and Seamen, 1980 but published posthumously, where he describes all the skippers across the generations and the ships they sailed. Every skipper has a pen and ink portrait, presumably done at least in some cases from photographs?

When Ellacott wrote, the skippers had retired but were still living in houses in the village and he gives the flavour of a village steeped in its history of commercial sail. None of this is left now.

Also well worth reading is Braunton’s Twentieth Century Mariners, edited by Jenny Jenkins, which is the result of the Museum’s ‘Beating the Bar’ Oral History Project of 2002, and which gives a very good feel of the experience of sailing out of Velator, Appledore and Barnstaple right into the 1950’s.

As a windfall, I got a free CD of a book by Peter R.Newcombe: An Account of the Motor Vessel Eilian and Her Master – Jack Newcombe. Running to over three hundred pages, this is a detailed account of every voyage this boat, built in 1908 and trading in British waters till 1957. Truly a labour of love. (ISBN 978-)-9559343-2-2).

—–o—–

We took the toll road down towards Crow Point lighthouse. From the carpark, it looks like a twenty minute walk along the beach to the light. The main light is still there but there used to be a secondary light to create a transit for boats crossing the Bideford bar. This secondary light, the wooden Low Light, was on a rail, so that as the bar moved, the transit line could be readjusted. All you can see of it now is a metal carcass.

Arlington Court and the Chichesters

The models of the last commercial sailing craft in the Braunton Museum are fine, but they cannot hold a candle to the collection at Arlington House. Rosalie Chichester collected models of ships made out of bone by French prisoners during the Napoleonic wars. They were used to build Dartmoor prison, Princeton and they made a little extra income by building these models and Miss Chichester (1865-1949) could not resist collecting them. The models are not just in the Arlington House museum corridor but also spread out into almost every room.

Her father, the inheritor of the Court built by his Georgian ancestors, was an aristocrat and a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron. Rosalie probably learnt her love of the sea by being taken on her father’s professionally crewed yachts, the Zoe and the Erminia, from a young age. Memorabilia of these yachts are on show in the Tapestry Room.

As a young girl, she wrote an account of one of these voyages: The Diary of a Child 1877-1878 Being an Account of a Winter’s Cruise in the Mediterranean On Board the Topsail Schooner Yacht R.Y.S. ‘Erminia’ 270 Tons Number JMTS and Containing Original Sketches and Enlargements from Photographs Taken by the Writer. She edited this diary 49 years later.

Her father died in a rather sad manner. In 1878, whilst cruising, he ordered a goat to be brought on board to give fresh milk. Unfortunately, the beast gave him brucellosis and he died three years later, in 1881, at the age of 38, leaving his family heavily in debt. His widow, being a woman, was legally unable to raise a mortgage. She made a marriage of convenience to save the family’s estate and it still took Rosalie many years to pay off the debts before starting to indulge in her collecting habits. (Which did not include the Carriage Museum in the stables, which is a National Trust collection.)

There was another branch of the family resident at Youlston Manor a few miles away. From this branch of the family.

Francis Chichester was born to the rector of Shirwell. Go back from Arlington towards Barnstaple and turn right at the sign for Shirwell village and the church is half a mile down the road. To the left of the church porch, Chichester pere is buried, and, on the right, Sir Francis and his wife, Sheila. A plaque, erected by his son, Giles, is on the north transept of the church.

——o——

One morning many tides ago, I was coming out of the river in terrible visibility, with my older daughter helming, and me trying to see the next buoy, when she said ‘Dad, you’ve seen the coaster coming up behind?’ And there it was, a hundred metres astern. They load ball clay on Bideford Quay – a rather primitive operation. The lorries arrive from the nearby Petrockstowe Basin, which has a particularly fine deposit of ball clay, dump the stuff on the cordoned off quay, where it is then loaded onto the boats – it’s great to see a working quay in the west country.

Ilfracombe

There are nine yacht clubs in the Bristol Channel where, at low water, the yachts at their moorings sink into mud. From talking to their members, Ilfracombe is, or perhaps more accurately, was their favourite meeting place. Going against the wall for most of them was no problem as they are bilge keel and could take theground. I’m fin keel so it’ll be harder work but do-able.

I have to leave Appledore at first light if I am to make Ilfracombe by 0930, the latest the Harbour Master tells me that I can get up against the wall in the inner harbour. If I can’t, I’ll have to anchor in the Range, outside the harbour, which misses the point.

When I leave at half tide, the tide is absolutely sluicing into the Pool as I let go the mooring line. It eases a bit as I push the tide up the fairway and once out am making good time. I go inside the starboard hand mark at Baggy Point by staying close inshore, but don’t take any risk at the Morte Stone buoy, especially as I’ve just been reading how the Dido C went aground on the Stone.

What is spooky is that between the Morte and the Bull, there must be a counter-current for, despite the direction of the tide up-channel, I go very slowly. I fear for my e.t.a. and am about to ring the harbour master to tell him I can’t make the inner harbour. But just then, as I’m passing the lighthouse, I notice I’m speeding up. I’m obviously clear of an eddy. No wonder cutting too close to the Morte Stone caused troubles.

I scoot into the harbour and am lying against the wall by 0915. The harbour master and an assistant rush up, take my lines and tie me up, so that I think ‘this is easy’. A motor yacht from Swansea comes in behind me. His fender board is already neatly aligned, as he calmly manoeuvres into a tight spot between me and the angling boats.

The inner harbour slopes. By 1100, the water has gone out and left me with the bow tilting up to the sky, and leaves me fighting to get my fenders behind my fenderboard as the boat leans against the wall. A call to the Harbourmaster reveals that I should have pulled the stern in more and kept the line bar tight

Alison wants pics of Verity, the human Damien Hurst statue of a pregnant woman on Ilfracombe Pier. Coming from the town, you see her large posterior and the books she is standing on. It is only as you go down the steps and see her front, that you get the shock of the skin of one side of her face and body have been removed and there is a developed baby inside her.

I walk round the harbour taking pics of her. Two Verity viewing platforms have been created to the West, and across the harbour, to the East of her.

I had read Cumberlidge: ‘ in the southwest corner of the inner harbour … there are a limited number of wall berths for fin or long keel boats should you be brave enough to dry out’, which is where I am, but thought he was exaggerating. On returning to the boat, I try and get a cup of tea, but there is no water. I can’t understand it, but start the laborious job of climbing up the ladder, going to the tap with the water butts etc. After three trips, I think ‘I’ll now have that cup of tea’ to find that because of the angle at which the boat is at, the water is pouring out of the galley tap. Seadog 2 has not had a walk, but now I, or rather he, has a problem. He cannot jump the eight feet down to the harbour bed, nor be pushed up eight feet up the harbour wall. Thankful between me and a passing German, we manage the latter manoeuvre.

Ilfracombe by the harbour is incredibly attractive and you can see why the Victorians were wild about her – the dramatic hills and steep cliffs enfolding the harbour, the views across to Wales, the rock pools. And the Council has obviously worked hard to make the area attractive to visitors. The most obvious evidence is Verity, the Damien Hurst shop and the trendy restaurants.

But going up the hill into the High Street and the mean little shops is to see poverty and hopelessness. You feel there should be a sign overarching the street: ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here (if you ever had any hope).’

I head back to the harbour area and find the library, and, on the off chance, wander in to see if I can download the pictures of Verity and send them to Alison. I have no idea how to do this but the library assistant spends twenty minutes or so helping me and we(she) is successful. So, I get out my wallet and ask ‘How much do I owe you?’ and she says ‘nothing’ and I ask again and she repeats herself.

I leave and I’m quite emotional – this is the way public services should be, and to at least a certain extent, were. Bude Library had a big sign saying it was going to be closed three days a week.

There is a class war going on: the bedroom tax; the attacks on anyone who’s not working for any reason, whether it’s because there’s no work in their area; they are physically ill or mentally ill or dying of cancer – they don’t bother with such niceties. This isn’t the big society, it’s the big bank account society waging a near-murderous attack on the non-working; and it’s time that they, the attacked, realised it and started fighting back, if they want to survive with any quality to their lives.

After lunch, I want to find the Tunnel Beaches, up the hill past the Landmark Theatre. They are dramatic. A Victorian entrepreneur hired Welsh miners to bore four tunnels through the cliffs to the beaches and then create one large natural pool for the ladies and their bathing huts; and two for the men, separated by a cliff. Segregation was further enforced by patrols. Only the ladies’ pool remains, but the cliff scenery is again dramatic.

There was a period of change in sexual mores around the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1905, mixed bathing was permitted.

In the early evening, the tide returns. It is a spring tide and its rate of advance is quite amazing. It comes round the harbour wall likes it’s walking. On the South coast, a big tide is five metres, here it’s double. This water is on the march. Within half an hour, it’s lapping against the boat.

To work up an appetite, Seadog 2 and I climb Hillsborough Down, a cliff to the east of the harbour, and which gives by far the best views of the town and harbour, Capstone and Lantern Hill, with the fourteen century St Nicholas chapel with its ancient light, being too near. On Hillsborough, there is a large iron age fort. It was here that a Russian student, Ekaterine Frolovage 14, walking in fog on 19 July, 2000 with other students, telling them how fine the place was, fell 400 feet to her death. Her parents erected a statue for her on Capstone Hill.

I go to the yacht club, where a man from Barnstaple, nursing a cup of tea, proudly shows me the balcony and the view across to Swansea and Worm’s Head. In the evening sun, with lights twinkling on the shore, it looks like nothing more than a short day sail.

I come back to the boat and high tide has passed. I tighten the lines and a man comes up and suggests that the simplest way is to take the spinnaker halyard and tie it to the quay. We do and it works a treat. With a tight stern line, the boat settles with only a small heel up the harbour.

The man came back to advise me on the best fish and chips (opposite the boat on the quay; and they are good) and to remind me to release The man came back to advise me on the best fish and chips (opposite the boat on the quay; and they are good) and to remind me to release the halyard as the boat starts to rise, as otherwise it’ll be pulled in.

I release some of the halyard, when doing the 0520 forecast, but fail to realise that, as the mast rises above the quay, the line will become very tight again. On returning from walking the dog, I find the boat at a nasty angle and the dinghy stuck underneath it. We jump aboard. I fight with the jamming cleat and, after a short struggle, release it. The boat shoots upright with a twang, the dinghy gives a large burp and shoots out backwards; and the dog howls in fright.

It’s time to get away. I release the forward lines, but the stern lines have knotted very tightly. A man, who looks like an old fisherman, appears and in a twinkling of an eye, they are undone. I was thinking of going out backwards, as there is little room for error going forward. But he takes hold of the stern line and suggests I go out forward. As I do, he moves along the quay and the boat swings round.

I am starting to realise that the best sailors in Ilfracombe are on the quayside.

I even have time to nonchalantly wish the skipper of the Swansea boat a good trip back. I leave the harbour and head off northwest to Lundy. With the tide with me, it only takes four hours.

Floating around the Bristol Channel

LUNDY

Lundy has declared that no dogs may land, which of course makes for difficulties when you have one on board. My wife’s A-level in law leads her to suggest that as long as the dog stays below the high water mark, they have no jurisdiction.

Lundy is, as ever, magical. The downside is that, even with a little wind, in this strength of tide, you roll like a pig.

I walk along the west coast of the island to get up an appetite for supper at the Marasco Tavern. A light mist rolls in and soon the top of the High Light is invisible. Like Belle Tout, which had to be replaced by the sea level Beachy Head light, it was built far too high up.

My main purpose is to post letters from Lundy with the Lundy stamp. I do this in the office and then offer to pay for being in the harbour. I am told to pay in the Marisco tavern – Marisco fled to Lundy in 1235 after an unsuccessful plot to murder Henry the Second. Anyway, a rather ridiculous conversation takes place between me and a Polish lady who is serving. I: ‘I need to pay for my yacht’. She sympathetically ‘Yes’ (I suppose you do if you bought it). Me: ‘It’s in the harbour’. She nodded: where did I think it was? Floating in the clouds? I gave up and took my pint of Old Lighthouse outside and stared up the Bristol Channel.

In the mid-eighteenth century, Thomas Benson got a contract from the Devon magistrates to take convicted felons to Australia. In an admirable piece of cost cutting, he delivered them to Lundy. That wasn’t what brought about his downfall. He filled the trading vessel “Nightingale” with valuable goods; insured her to the hilt, unloaded her at Lundy and scuttled her in the Bristol Channel. Suspicious competitors got the captain drunk and he spilled the beans. Typical of capitalism, they hung the skipper, while Benson escaped to end his days in Lisbon.

Lundy is now mainly self-catering but it has kept the old cottages. So the lack of new build and the farm they run stops it being as empty of any meaning as Tresco, which is now Islington-on-Sea. Whenever I go there, I expect Tony Blair to come out from behind a bush and want to shake my hand. Anyway, Lundy is much wilder and more barren.

If you come on the Oldenburg and want to do the North lighthouse, the island is deceptively small and it’s quite a hike, so get a move on. Talking of the Oldenburg, its sound signals were wrong. It reversed away from the quay, on one occasion (to go round the island) with one blast, which means ‘I am going to starboard’ which should have been its second signal.

On its return, having deposited those staying on the island, it did do three blasts, but they were very short. It should have been three long blasts. Terrible!

Floating about Watchet

Watchet gives one the sense of being in touch, as you can see the Bristol Channel over the harbour wall.

But the loss of maritime understanding is all too obvious when, in the gathering gloom, I enter Watchet Harbour and marina a couple of hours before high water. As I close the shore, there is no occulting green from the lighthouse and I ground in the outer harbour, whilst waiting for a green traffic light to turn green. Eventually, I ring the Coastguard who tell me to slowly proceed. As I go up between the pontoons, I ground again. At low water, the following morning, most of the marina is a muddy sea of silt.

It was so obvious that without active dredging this had to happen – the silt- or sand- laden Bristol Channel tide comes over the sill and drops its load in the slack. Exactly the same thing has happened at Burry Port marina, on the other side, behind Worm’s Head. What makes that so daft is that Burry Port was originally built as a replacement for the port of Pembury, a mile or two to the West, which is so buried under the sands that just a few groynes remain.

May 19: My beauty sleep is disturbed by the whistle of the steam train on the West Somerset line and a dozen happy anglers waiting to go out for a four hour jolly on the angling hire boat, “Sea Fire” in the next berth. Each has a fishing line and a four pack. By 1330, 8 more serious types have taken their place. The boat comes in, discharges the birthday party group who have caught seven different types of fish, so are well satisfied; and goes straight out while there is still water across the sill, and will stay out till the next high water.

It gets me thinking that maritime history doesn’t concern itself enough with leisure use of the sea – the under-researched area of yachting and the near vacuum about the various forms of surfing, but also leisure fishing. I was in the cockpit one summer morning when the bridge at Weymouth opened and at least 50 angling boats came out.

I read somewhere that the three most popular sports in this country are darts, fishing and sailing. But what do the newspapers’ back pages cover? Football, O.K. But also pages on rugby, where even major games are watched by a few thousand, and cricket, where except for the Test matches, the county games are watched by a handful of old men. My point is that maritime history shouldn’t be following these media distortions but needs to be gathering the relevant data and undertaking the appropriate research and analysis now.

The band from Bristol in the Esplanade pub is younger in both years and taste than I am, so I take my drink outside, as have many other older folk, and look across at the lights of Wales. I have discovered that the silting of the harbour allows one an easy topic of conversation – useful for people like me with rather limited repertoires. My fellow leaner on the railings gives an interesting nuance to the mud. The marina is advertised as having two and a half metres of water at all states of tide. However, most of the time, if you fell in, you would fall into mud and be quite unable to get out. This should leave the grieving relatives in a very strong position to sue.

Sunday: Watchet feels special. Although no longer a working harbour, the layout is the same as when it was a flourishing port (It died in the early 1980s). So with a bit of imagination, you can “see” it. This is quite different from the soulless marinas where housing has replaced all the dock installations, like Sutton Harbour, Plymouth, Penarth and Swansea.

The second reason for its liveliness is the liveaboards. But unlike Bristol, where boats are not meant for sailing but are alternative forms of accommodation, here they are proper boats that could go to sea. Some are being done up, like the sister ship to Ransome’s “Nancy Blackett”, one of only two of a class built by Hillyard of Littlehampton. “80% original”, the owner tells me “the Nancy Blackett is only 40%”; the re-built gun boat, the oil tanker being renovated…. There’s an article on the Watchet liveaboards in the glossy magazine “Exmoor”, no. 63, Summer 2013, 47-49.

On the cabin shelf: In Watchet’s boat museum, you can pick up three CDs celebrating the songs recorded by Cecil Sharp by Shanty Jack in the 1930s. Not the original versions …

Somewhere I have acquired A Few Naval Customs, Expressions, Traditions and Superstitions, by Captain W.N.T. Beckett, first published by Gieves of Portsmouth in 1931. A mine of obscure information.

Sailors originally wore tunics, not trousers up till the mid-nineteenth century. Also:

In 1553, it appears that the Mariners of a squadron commanded by Captain RICHARD CHANCELLOR were apparelled in Watchett, or sky-coloured cloth, made at and called after the busy industrial town of XV., VXI .[sic], and XVII centureies “By the Severn Sea” near “Blue Anchor”… (1932 ed., 18)

It was established in King John’s time, if a man draws a knife with the intent to stab…. he shall lose a hand (8), which is why the ‘present day’s sailor’s knife has no point … A knife with no point was also less liable to damage a sail when cutting the ‘”stops” (19).

One hears frequent references to Davy Jones. This really is the Duffy or ghost of Jonah, Duffy being an old English word for ghost. (28)

³³³³³³³

Floating about Watchet (2)

2017: Back in Watchet for a few days’ holiday with my good lady. And although Watchet is rather far east, one can use the Bristol Channel tides to one’s advantage. So I left Fishguard at 0930 to carefully get through Ramsey Sound at slack, and with little wind, could transit Jack Sound and then with the east going tide off Milford, get to Tenby. A few hours’ sleep during the west-going flow, off at 0200 and I had done 61 NM and entering Watchet at midday.

Maritime sculptures. Jonathan Seagrove mused in a recent Soundings, so here are a few more. Certainly, no-one should miss the donkey that is made out of bottle tops or some such, that graces Portishead Marina housing.

I wonder if the Watchet statues are a job lot by the Swansea sculpture. Again, we have a titchy local hero, this time Yankee Jack and a full size fictional character, the Ancient Mariner. I don’t know how tall Yankee Jack actually was, but I doubt he was that small if he worked on blue water sailing craft.

Changing the subject, the continual thump of the dredger rather ruins one’s idyll. It is a Heath Robinson affair with pipes, which lead over the harbour wall. It seems likely that a fair proportion ends straight back in on the next tide. Whether it does or not, the lack of lock gates to stop the silt flooding in and dropping in the slack water of the marina is so basic, and yet the mistake of only creating a sill was carried out here and the even more silted up Burry Port marina on the Welsh side.

‘I don’t know – There comes a time when you get tired of floating around and just want to settle down’

Kay Harding
Kay Harding

Now, I have a thought. Perhaps like me, you are a bit irritated by the Scots. The English bailed them out when Scotland was stony broke from their losses on the Darien project. In 2008, the Bank of England stopped them going completely broke when the RBS failed; for which they thanked us by nearly voting for independence. Besides, I don’t know what it is about the Edinburgh or received Scottish accent of its politicians, but it sounds so unbelievably smug.

Anyway, as a mild gesture, I think we should correct people who use the phrase ‘painting the Forth Bridge’ and say ‘or, as we prefer to say in the South West Maritime History Society, dredging Watchet marina’. This would lead naturally to 1) where is Watchet?, 2) and tiresomely, ‘what is it watching?, and 3) what is the SWMHS?

This would allow you to explain the merits and benefits of membership.

And, according to Malcolm Gladwin in Tipping Point, it doesn’t take many influence-makers for a trend to take off, which could only be to the good of the SWMHS.

So is there any future in the marina? Now the idea I outline below came from watching a goose cadging a ride on one of the dredger pipe floats to its favourite mudhole. This goose is a resident of some five years, and is known as Derek, although it laid an egg two years ago, but this did not result in a name change.

But why stop at one goose, a few ducks and some of those dull little worm-seeking birds of which there seem to be a dozen varieties, such as ‘dunlin’? I don’t want to go into too much detail, as I run a consultancy business, Yachtiebroker?.com, but welcome to Watchet Marina Bird Sanctuary. I am sure there are ways of attracting birds to a location – think of Slimbridge, perhaps it could help; a few hides on the hammerheads would not cost much; the cockpits of some of the more decrepit yachts could become nesting sites. A couple of video cameras, one on the mast and one on the transom, could be streamed to a suitably rural-looking hut on the quay etc.

Now, it may be that once of year a boat has to enter the marina for it to keep its status, like the church on the golf course across the river from Padstow. It was buried in sand, so, to get his stipend, the vicar had to dig his way down to a window in the roof … So similarly, on the well-publicised Blessing of the Marina day, the Bishop of Taunton, in a wet suit, would be brought in by catamaran on the top of the tide to give the blessing and hold a short service. He could bless the Minehead lifeboat at the same time …

Footnote (or rather head-note): Some of you may have harboured uncharitable thoughts about the committee and its lack of progress and compared it perhaps to a headless chicken. Go on, own up. Now can I offer a more charitable view? The local saint is St Decuman. Unfortunately, Watchet was a bit of a border town between the Saxons who controlled the Severn and the Celts further west. And one Saxon chopped off the saint’s head. Unperturbed, Decuman picked his head up and was floated back to Wales, where he was buried. So, next time you are feeling aggrieved by the Committee’s decisions, or more likely lack of, don’t think ‘chicken’, think warm, peaceful, uplifting ‘saintly’.

Floating about Bristol

The only way up the Bristol Channel if you get out of a river (Appledore) or locked harbour (Padstow, Watchet) is to try and get across to the Welsh side. This is because you’ll only get out near high water and in a couple of hours, the tide will turn against you. The tide turning in the English Channel is a gentlemanly affair, with effectively two hours of slack. In the Bristol Channel, it likes someone throws a switch and the water turns.

So to Cardiff. One of the beneficiaries of Welsh semi-independence are yachtsmen, as the barrage gives them 24 hour a day deep water anchorages. So, I am in a mini-convoy from Watchet.

You can park at a very reasonable price at the Cardiff Bay Yacht Club. The Club building is a striking, two-storey modern building. It is a celebration of Wales getting EEC money and the barrage.

The next day to Bristol. I park opposite the SS Great Britain. Apparently, the ship’s at some risk because wharf borer beetles are eating the oak supports on which it rests (Bristol Post, 27/5/2013).

I am in a city. A constant stream of joggers on the bank, competitive groups of rowers being urged on by their cox are accompanied by the regular sound of police and ambulance wails. And all the boats are live aboards. Great, chunky yachts and motorboats that you certainly wouldn’t want to take into the Bristol Channel.

I walk around a bit and it’s depressing. The high rise blocks are poorly designed in the modern style and each bears no relationship to the next. Only at Hotwells and, on its hill, posh Clifton keep any architectural coherence.

This seems to have been the case for a long time. The next day I am at the M Shed, for an enjoyable exhibition about Fry’s chocolate factory. From the top floor, you look across the harbour to the cathedral. You can barely see the cathedral for parking lots, air vents and modern amusements. But most striking is that the Wills Memorial Tower – presumably commemorating how tobacco funded the university – sprouts out of the cathedral buildings. Surely the Victorian town planners could have worked that out, or weren’t they bothered?

Thinking of heritage, I was walking down the Bristol floating harbour to the New Researchers’ Conference at S.S. Great Britain in March, with another delegate who was most unimpressed by the Cutty Sark renovation. Said the boat had been crucified, which seemed quite apt. The New Researchers in Maritime History conference gives the floor to students, undergraduate but more usually postgraduate, and what makes it so exceptional is that any comments have to be positive. Even if there are glaring omissions in the paper, these are pointed out as ‘perhaps I could help’/ ‘perhaps a bit more emphasis …’. When I think of the undisguised glee at pointing out flaws at psychology conferences, the good will is an incredibly pleasant change. And it continues at meals or in the pub, where you can button hole any of the many professors and lecturers who turn up most years.

The highlight of the 2013 conference on the SS Great Britain was the supper in its restored first class dining room. It was like going back in time. Magical.

Bristol, having lost all its maritime history, is feeding on itself. I am parked outside the Arnolfini, right in the centre of town, and in order to feed the parking meter for the car that my wife has brought up for half term, see the office workers stream across the Pero Bridge – the one with snail’s horns– at 0800, like some old Ealing movie. I thought Pero was the designer, but, no, he was a native of Nevin, brought to Bristol in 1783 by the Pinness family. He died here in 1798. But naming the bridge has little evocative power. Compare it to the desolation of Little Black Sambo’s grave on the shores of Morecambe Bay at Sunderland Point.

Much more impressive is ‘A Ton of (compressed) Tea’ by Ai Weiwei, the Chinese sculptor, which has been bought by the Bristol Art Gallery and Museum. The merchants don’t seem to have done much art collecting at Bristol, which is strange and in contrast to the magnificent collection at the Manchester Art Gallery or Liverpool’s Walker. But it’s interesting to learn that artists, revelling in their romantic sensibility, objected to Brunel’s bridge, which we see as beautiful. But then you think: is it beautiful because it’s such a technical achievement?

The next day, I take the car to the revamped Transporter Bridge in the sad, rundown city of Newport. You can walk up to the gantry and across it, as well as be transported. Amazing structure built so that tall ships could pass upstream; but check that it’s operating/open before going (tel. 01633 656656).

Back in Bristol, for the merchants in ostentatious mode, St Mary Redcliffe was clearly the place to be seen and display. Sadly, the windows they donated were destroyed by the Reformation and Cromwell, but I go to sung matins (1115 Sunday), sung by the choir using Cramer’s text. Sitting in your own pew, with a peg to shut the gate, hearing the words the medieval and Elizabethan new wealthy would have heard being sung, surrounded by stained glass given by more recent wealth, below a complexly embossed ceiling. This is one place where Bristol, as the great trading centre, where fortunes were made, makes flamboyant sense.

The Bristol Ferry company went bust. It’s been refloated (!) and you are encouraged to buy shares in it, as it fights off the more aggressive 7 fleet. But the staff are friendly. One told me a nice story about Bristol’s leaning church tower at Temple (ground once owned by the Knights Templar). It leans as the foundations weren’t deep enough. After the war, the Royal Engineers were given the task of demolishing unstable buildings and were just about to blow up the tower when someone tells them it’s been like that for several hundred years.

In conversation with the Bristol Ferry boatmen, I mention my need to use anti- mosquito candles because of the stagnant water. “It’s cleaner than it was” he replied; “There’s fish. Look at the cormorants”. Actually, they were shags.

I looked and, over the next two days, got increasingly puzzled. I never saw them dive or drying their wings, as they have to do as their feathers don’t have waterproofing oils, I therefore undertook some research in the finest traditions of the SWMHS.

I noted that around 1900 they all flew upstream so I determined to follow them in my inflatable dinghy and found a large number in a cut, off the tunnel under Temple Meads. They were congregated around a shed which I noted could be jacked up.

Hiding behind a “Vibrant Bristol’s Historical Past no. 48” poster, shortly after 1900, I observed, a van with the insignia “Bristol Zoo” draw up and a man emerge with two buckets. He lifted the front of the shed and went inside, followed by the shags. Within a minute, he came out with empty pails and pulled down the shed front.

0800 next morning saw me back, this time behind “Vibrant Bristol’s Historical Past no. 49”. A council van arrived and an employee opened the flap but only 2 birds emerged – I heard later from an ornithologist that, apparently, these two are hyperactive and addicted to perches outside the Machine Shed watching the multiple simultaneous displays. Clearly, the rest of the flock had worked out that they might as well stay in the shed. So, he went behind the shed and jacked it up till, with much squawking, the birds fell out into the cut.

Portishead

After a fortnight, the New Cut had lost its charms. Ignoring a gale warning for sea area Lundy after seeking Avonmouth VTS’ advice, I headed out of Cumberland Lock, up the Avon and across to Portishead. It’s much changed since my last visit 5 years ago. Practically a new town has been built around the Marina.

Taking a pre-prandial walk east from the harbour entrance, I found a nature reserve. It took me a mile or so to find an entrance but for readers who like “twitching”, if you walk along in front of the houses, you come to a tin ass or mule (Being an upmarket development there are “artistic installations” scattered around the site). Turn right through what looks like a locked gate and you’re in the reserve.

If you come to Portishead beach by car, you want to get to the seafront at high water and if you’re lucky, you’ll see a car transporter only 200 metres away. Thence to the Royal at the corner of the land west of the marina. It was built by the Corporation of Bristol in 1830 to encourage the area’s development. Brunel wanted to use it as part of his plan to use Portishead as a transatlantic terminal for his “Great Western”.

Choose a sunny day and take your beer in the garden. The view across to the Severn Crossings is magnificent. A more recent watering hole by the marina is the “H and W” – it’s made out of containers.

Lydney

My reason to be in Portishead is to make for Lydney, the Victorian Harbour built for the Forest of Dean. In its peak in the 1880’s, a quarter of a million tons of coal were shipped out. The railway they built to bring the coal and iron ore out of the hills to the harbour is still there, run by volunteers. The harbour, owned by the Environment Agency, is up for sale.

Only one gate opens – the Environment Agency hasn’t got round to the relatively simple repair … .

On the Saturday, it’s the Lydney Yacht Club Festival. Twelve boats from the Portishead Cruising Club come up on the tide and lock in.

Portishead Cruising Club, founded 1931, was forced to leave Portishead harbour in WW2, so it moved to Pill on the Avon, where the yachts settle in the mud.

Going up the Severn, there’s also the Chepstow and District Yacht Club in St Pierre Pill just North of the Wye entrance. “Ten feet of mud” a member tells me with satisfaction.

The mud-dwelling yacht clubs in the Bristol Channel and elsewhere really deserve investigation. In the Bristol Channel, you get Burnham-on-Sea (River Parrett), Weston on the Axe, Clevedon Sailing Club in Clevedon Pill, Portishead Cruising Club at Pill on the Avon; on the Northern side, Chepstow and District Yacht Club at St Pierre Pill just above the new Severn Bridge, Newport Uskmouth Sailing Club and Barry Yacht Club. (The Blue Book:Yachting and Cruising Guide to the Bristol Channel, now in its tenth edition, produced by the Bristol Channel Yachting Association, is a useful source of information).

As you go up the Bristol Channel, so the sailors get more serious and knowledgeable. They have to be, with those tides; and they’d better get the weather right because once they’re out, if they don’t get back in within a couple of hours, they’re out for twelve. (I researched the development of sailing in the Bristol Channel and the fair number of mudhole clubs in ‘Leisure Sailing on a Hostile Shore’ Maritime South West 28, 2915, 280-315’.)

Talking to members of the club, there is a clearly defined philosophy. They sail small, mainly British-built boats, using sail whenever possible. I don’t think this is from a sense of excess patriotism, but because the early GRP British boats were built when no-one knew how thick to make their GRP hulls, so erred on the conservative side, thus creating very strongly constructed boats. The members pride themselves on being able to maintain and repair their own boats and also to help each other. This is one end of the Victorian dialectic of yachting as illustrating self -help vs. yachting to illustrate one’s status in society.

These are cruising clubs, since the tide, not man, dictates when they are – literally – free to sail, so there can, for instance, be no regular Saturday afternoon race. Cruising requires time, especially if you are staying out for a tide, which modern working man is very short of.

Additionally, since their memberships are generally small and ageing, it will be interesting to see whether these clubs will succumb to extinction (or in the case of Portishead, relocation to the marina, with a different philosophy) or are going to prove hardy survivors.

Lydney Yacht Club has only 50 members but they put on a magnificent three course buffet for £3.

Next day, at high water, all the yachts, except mine, lock out. One of the strange things, for an English Channel sailor used to fixed routes, is that you can look out at low water and decide your own best way across the sands. The direction in the pilot books is across to the Eastern side; but many go down the Western side all the way down to the splendidly evocative Slime Road just before the Severn Bridge.

My wife has come up, with the car, so we go up the Wye. We walk the 365 steps above the Wye, It’s hard to see now what a major industrial area the Forest of Dean was (and what poetic license Wordsworth took in making it a rural idyll in “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”).

We stop at Redbrook, at one time the copper capitol of Britain, and also the site of tin processing. We cross the river by the old Wye Valley Railway bridge to the Boat Inn – flagged floor, real ales, built into the cliff they use to chisel out to use as millstones. You can sit outside and watch the Wye roll past.

The next day I locked out for Cardiff and, as Dave closed the lock gates behind me, it was almost as if I was deserting Lydney.

Floating around Wales

You know you’re in Wales: 8 pages in the sports pages of the Western Mail on the British Lions and only one that Swansea’s first match is against Manchester United and Cardiff – Lydney train: the ticket collector sees I’m reading a Somerset Maugham novel. “Maugham travelled widely, didn’t he? I saw his signature on a wall in Raffles Bar, Singapore”. You wouldn’t get either the friendliness or the cultural literacy from an English ticket collector.

CARDIFF

I headed to Cardiff to check out ‘World of Boats’. Cardiff must be one of the worst sign-posted cities in the UK. The National Museum of Wales has the most impressive collection of Impressionists in the UK- thanks to the bequests of Margaret and Gwendoline Davies, grandchildren of David Davies, who, among other entrepreneurial acts, built Barry Docks (What Two Sister Did for Wales, National Museum of Wales, 2007) yet the National Museum has not a single sign to help you find it. I knew I had to follow the signs to Cardiff Bay but there weren’t any. Anyway, after a tour of the city, I eventually got to the Senate and crossed the bridge to Discovery Quay. Past the ‘Doctor Who Experience’ – don’t know what that’s got to do with Cardiff or Wales – and there are the sheds of the World of Boats (WOB) (there were no signs to either of these attractions).

It was stepping back in time, because most of the exhibits are from the defunct Exeter Maritime Museum. As I wandered around, I found Andrew Thornhill who took the collection over from Major David Goddard, an ex-marine officer. As negotiations became fraught, Thornhill advised caution, whereupon Goddard growled: ‘Fire the mortar first and talk later’.

Driving to the Southwest in our old Morris Minor in the mid-70s, that always needed a service after the trip, if a kingpin in a front wheel hadn’t fallen off, we used to call in at the Maritime Museum and enjoy the higgledy-piggledy collection of boats from all over the world. The WOB is much smaller but has many of the same boats laid out in the same near haphazard manner. In fact, it’s quite hard to work out where the exit is.

The café has a veranda with a great view of the bay. It’s licensed and open till 9.30, almost every day of the year which is handy (Check on 07971 055 811). And if you arrive after the exhibition space is closed, you can ask them to open it up for you. Very civilised. And it only costs a fiver to get in. The WOB desperately needs a booklet to explain the importance of each boat, and it needs more space and more exhibits. Thornhill has plenty of exhibits warehoused elsewhere, including 50 Flying Fifteens, showing every development. He hopes to expand both on land and outside along the quay. So watch this space.

(Sadly closed in 2019? Along with the other collections. Not surprising in Cardiff. The city’s signage is so awful that, once you leave the M4, you’re hard pushed to work out where the National Museum of Wales, with its priceless collection of Impressionist paintings is, let alone the WOB.)

SWANSEA

It must be about my 10th visit to Wales’ second city, which the locals think should be the Welsh capital. The complete difference in the skylines of Cardiff and Swansea tells you that the Euromoney and being the capital has affected Cardiff far more substantially.

In Swansea, there is one very tall block – the Meridian Tower – and at the top, the 27th floor, is a pub/restaurant, with staggering views, showing Swansea’s growth with the hills of the Rhonda encircling it, with their mineral wealth being exported from the dock complexes. I read somewhere that the points system used in the East Swansea docks was the most complex in the U.K.

But the same view shows that Swansea can run but can’t hide. There is development – and more planned – on the East side of the Taw; but the Cork ferry terminal is empty and the dock complex empty except for one coaster.

But I’m fond of Swansea, partly because it feels Welsh, which Cardiff doesn’t. And that amazingly beautiful crescent of golden sand as the tide goes out.

I want to see an old friend who’s driving down from Cardiff and there’s only one place to meet –Verdi’s coffee shop on the Mumbles with the most amazing cakes. It’s a misty day, but the bobbing boats make a beautiful Impressionist view.

The next night, Friday 21st June, I’m back down the Mumbles for the last night of the old Pier theatre – a variety show.. The site is being developed as a hotel. The women rock to a Tom Jones’ imitator, Dean “Buzz” Jones.

Saturday night: To the Swansea Yacht and Sub-Aqua club. It’s heaving but the food is reasonably priced, so I decide to patronise it. Half way through my meal, somebody shouts “Dragon sailing in the basement”. I assume I will be viewing some day-boat racing so, on finishing my meal, I go downstairs. I am greeted by six balsawood dragons on a “course” and invited to bet on the “winner”. I decline and find myself talking to a man who is interested in conserving an old Swansea-based steam driven pilot boat, the “Seamark” – it’s moored by the National Waterfront Museum and it needs a quarter of a million. He tells me a lot more but the dice have started to roll and the punters are cheering their dragons …

On Sunday, I get an Explorer Bus Pass for Gower. The Gower Heritage Museum at Parkmill is enjoyably eclectic and from there it’s a gentle stroll to the beautiful beach of Three Cliffs. Rhosselli beach is just magnificent. In the middle of the beach there is what looks like a stone slab; but in fact, it’s a rudder post. The force of the wrecking is shown by the fact that the rudder post lies at a quite different angle from the rest of the hull. It’s a pity that Sisley got no further west than Langland Bay in his trip to Wales in 1897. He would have had more striking images to paint than Storr’s Rock.

1. I think Swansea is ashamed of its English-speaking, beer-swilling, unhappily and adulterously married poet, and his equally unacceptable wife. Hence the size of the statue.

2. But I get even more annoyed by the full-size sculpture of Captain Cat ringing the chapel bell. He is at an angle, i.e off balance. No experienced mariner would do this. To survive, it was ‘ one hand for the ship and one for yourself’ and balance was a key factor in staying alive.

Many PC moons ago, the first time I sailed into the marina my crew said of a statue of a little fellow: “Who’s the dwarf?” It turned out to be Dylan Thomas, with whom the citizens of Swansea have a decidely ambivalent relationship.

The way Swansea treats what the Dylan Thomas Museum tells us is “the second most quoted poet” is very poor. The Museum never changes its display

The Dylan Thomas Theatre seems rarely used and only by amateur dramatics company performing ‘light’ plays.

The last time I visited the house, some years ago, where he grew up it was empty. You can’t tell me you can’t get hold despite the hype, have a very of pre-war furniture. and the house he was brought up in is empty of all furniture which is ridiculous – Coleridge rented a room at Nether Stowey. None of the furniture to be seen there now is what he actually used but the period has been recreated. So why couldn’t interwar furniture have been put into the Thomas family home?

But this visit, it’s the statue on the port side of the Marina that irritates me – Captain Cat ringing the Town Hall bell. Firstly he’s ringing the bell at an angle, so it’d be swinging all over the place. But even more wrong is that Thomas carefully draws Captain Cat as a merchant seaman but the sculptor has put him on the balls of his feet, so he is off balance, which he just wouldn’t let himself be after years at sea.

Ronald Austin is the doyen of the history of yachting in Swansea Bay. He has paintings and old photographs of the Big Yacht regattas(1896-1929) organised by the Bristol Channel Yacht Club (BCYC), formed in 1875 by amalgamating with the Mumbles Billiards Club. As elsewhere, the early races were between pilot boats, and in Swansea’s case, oyster skiffs. The 1896 regatta was watched by 40,000 on one day. His research into the BCYC can be easily accessed by googling the BCYC. The club’s archives are in Swansea museum.

MILFORD HAVEN

Thursday, 27 June: I am doing well on time up to the St Gowan South Cardinal when the dreaded Castle Martin range request I stay 3 miles south and 4 miles west of Linney Point. I just crawl into Dale before the east-going tide gets too fierce.

At dusk, a laden VLCC slides up past Thorn Island, accompanied by a tug. 3 other tugs, all lit up, nudge it to its berth. It is the first demonstration of trading power and expertise I have seen in two months of coastal sailing.

The next day to Milford Marina. Walking up the town, I keep being greeted by window placards about the town’s history. Bideford was still a cheerful town, despite the large number of charity shops – a fixed smile perhaps. Here they can’t even fill the empty shops – all the sepia enlargements suggest that Milford only has a past. And looking out over the Haven, it’s ridiculous. Billions of gallons of oil and LPG are imported each year and yet the main town and its inhabitants are so poor. Kids hang around in small groups on the street corners. Change the clothing style and they could be out of Bert Hardy’s 1930 photographs of industrial towns in the Depression. But the flower beds are immaculate, like some penurious old lady insisting you drink tea out of her best china, which she has got out of storage.

I need to plan some interesting trips with my wife to the surrounding countryside. Dag Pike’s Hidden Harbours of Wales (Imray Laurie Norie and Wilson, 2011) is just the job. It provides some beautiful photographs of lost commercial harbours. I use it as a guide and it never disappoints.

It’s very confusing on White Sands Beach, just down from St David’s, as there’s a sign to St Patrick’s chapel. (To be exact, it’s under a mound near the car park). Apparently, he embarked from here to convert the Irish and rid them of snakes. Actually, I have a theory that the snake bit was a cover story: “Not another mainlander come to tell us the truth. Eamon, pop down to the cave and get that all-purpose piece of ivy twine, so that we can help this gentleman meet his maker”. / “Me wanting to convert you?! Bless my soul, where did you get that idea from? I’m the new local pest control inspector. Here’s my visiting slate. Snakes my specialty”.

Porthclais is where they imported the stone for St David’s Cathedral; and Solva where they built Trinity Quay to unload the Cornish granite with which to construct the Smalls Lighthouse 20 miles seaward. At Porthgain, there’s enough of the buildings left around the port to see the stages of its use. Built 1851 to export slate, they made slates (1850-1910); made bricks from the quarry dust (1889-1912) and crushed stone for road aggregate (1889-1931). How did the coasters got into the tiny harbour especially as there is a U-turn after the harbour entrance to enter between the piers of the port?

Porthgain has 2 day marks on either side of the entrance to show shipping where it is hidden among the cliffs. I would like to start a Daymark Appreciation Society and for a suitable sum, would lead groups of nerds to St Martins in the Scillies, Gribbin Head, Fowey, Dartmouth on the South Coast and Portreath and Padstow in Cornwall, plus the less certain ones – such as the monuments above Dawlish that leads into the Exe. But Porthgain certainly seems unique in having two daymarks.

July 2nd. Wet, windy day, so confined ourselves to Nolton Haven and Little Haven, both now little more than sandy bays between two cliffs in St Brides Bay. Each was used for the exporting of coal from the nearby coalfield. In Nolton Haven, the Counting House recorded how many wagonloads of coal were being sent down the track. Hard to imagine as the quay, built 1769, no longer exists.

Wednesday 3rd. Into the Preseli hills and into Welsh Pembrokeshire, by crossing the Brandy Brook. For a fiercely Welsh-speaking pub, enjoy the “Tafarn Sinc” at Rosebush, with the start of the line from the nearby slate quarry to Clunderwen in its garden. The landlady gets quite irate that English families are sending their children to Welsh speaking schools, with their higher educational standards. “They may talk Welsh in the classroom” she hisses, rather like an angry goose “BUT they talk English in the playground”.

From the impressive Pentre Ifan Burial Chamber, Newport with the River Neven sneaking seaward behind Dinas Head must have been invitingly close for the Neolithic men who wanted to get the Stonehenge columns out. My sister, an archaeologist, says that they now know exactly where they came from in these mountains. What is still unclear is how they got them to Stonehenge – “They must have been much better sailors that they are given credit for”. Certainly, they did better than the re-enactment out of Milford Haven, which they would never have used as it is miles from the hills. When I first started using Milford Marina around the turn of the century, there used to be a large stone column in the carpark, with rather incongruous bits of polyprop around it. The re-enactors had stuck 2 “coracles” together and put the column across it. They had barely got out of the lock when the whole lot turned over.

To get to Newport harbour, ignore the signs to Newport Beach, a mile up river and turn down the Parrag. It was a major exporter of wool in its day, and the Sailing Club was once a warehouse. All the houses look out onto the river beach and quays – a beautiful scene.

Ally’s last evening, so to the excellent Harbourmaster restaurant at the end of the pier.

When she leaves, I have to re-arrange the boat for sailing. Most notably, restore Trim (ex-Captain Flinders’ cat) to the starboard bunk. Trim is banned to the depths of the quarterberth when Ally is on board. I bought Trim in the chandlers at Brixham – he’s made of rabbit fur. In the spiel that came with him was the information that 10% of the price would go toward rabbit welfare …!

Thursday 4th July: The wind still being lively, I lock out and go up stream to Lawrenny Yacht Station above the Cleddau Bridge.

It seems to me, as one gets older, that it’s daft trying to fit in all the things you want to do before you die, in some hyperactive tour. Rather, one needs to be aware of the things one did that mattered and revisit them.

I learnt much of my sailing skills at Westfleet sailing school based in Neyland Marina; and got taught by two assistants, Mike Dickman, from Teignmouth, and Luke?, who had more feel for sailing in their little fingers than I’ve ever had.

Simon Weston, the school’s owner, encouraged me to skipper a boat to Ireland in a small flotilla and then take my Yachtmaster Offshore.

The exam itself, after we had voyaged to Kinsale and back, was in the Haven. I knew I wasn’t ready but agreed. Feedback was in the Ferry Inn at Pembroke Ferry. “We won’t treat this as a failure, just a dry run” was the verdict from the kindly sailing master. The other thing he said that I remember was “Never lose an inch to windward”. I wonder if this came from the days of commercial sail. I have a suspicion that most yachting sayings do actually come from commercial sail such as “One hand for yourself and one for the boat”. The only expression I can think of that I think comes from yachting was told to me by a lady instructor in Plymouth: “Make a V sign at a cleat”. This neat pun tells you to keep your turn round the cleat open before it goes back to the winch.

Anyway, it was the ‘90s. Interest rates rocketed and the school went under. Two years later, I sailed back up the Cleddau and took my crew for supper at Neyland Yacht Club. While we waited for our pie, chips and peas, I rang Simon to see if he’d come over for an old time drink, but there was no reply. Even if he did listen to my answer phone message, I don’t think he would have come. Remembering the good times can be painful.

SKOMER

Turning at Lawrenny, I begin my way downstream and eventually reach the Heads.

I am going to North Haven, Skomer, and it’s the right time to go through Jack Sound. But it’s an evil place. Nothing much happens till you commit yourself and then from off stage left, the breakers come curling up and hissing around you.

The bird life on Skomer is amazing. The great blackback gulls live off the 100,000 manx shearwaters. The manx are such brilliant flyers – they pop down to the Bay of Biscay for a treat of sardines – but at the cost of rudimentary legs, which means that they shuffle on their bellies along the ground. If they came home in daylight, the gulls would swoop. So, they only come back on moonless nights. If you sit quietly on shore on such nights, you hear the whirl of wings and then a shuffle into the correct hole. How they know which hole of 50,000 to aim for in the dark, I don’t understand.

The next morning, I come up to eat my breakfast in the cockpit, surrounded by 100’s of puffins busily flying off to their day’s work. On the cockpit sole is a dead looking Manx. I decide that just chucking it overboard is not respectful, place it in a bucket prior to going ashore for a proper burial. I go below to put my dinghy harness on. When I come up, the bucket is empty. The bird was obviously stunned by flying into the rigging.

After the scare of Jack Sound, I will treat Ramsay Sound with due respect. Slack water starts at 0800 and at 0755 I am nudging my way past its first rocks. It is like a millpond. A seal watches me lazily.

Once through, and past St David’s Head, I pass into a new sea area – from Lundy to the Irish Sea. Strumble Head light winks, whilst in the sea mist, the South Bishop fog signal sounds.

Off Porthgail, I pass only the second yacht I’ve seen since Milford. Yacht cruising is dying

ABERYSTWYTH

I decide not to stop at Fishguard but push onto Aberystwyth. Very slowly, with the tide now against me, I pass Cardigan, the main Welsh port of the 18th century.

July 6th. After two days’ of sailing and not much sleep in the slop of North Haven, I wander round Aberystwyth. It’s Saturday and its function as a market town is clear in the busy streets. When the railway came, in 1864, it developed as a Victorian tourist resort. Around the pier, at low water, the shore is full of rock pools. One can easily imagine the Victorians trawling these pools and putting their finds into jars.

There is a Welsh bookshop and even a Welsh greeting cards shop. Yet on the hill is the reason why it can only go so far. The university was founded to further Welsh culture, but now is surely firmly limiting the advances it can make. Science and prestige require English speaking. And the chain stores in the High Street offer a transatlantic culture.

You know you’re in Wales 4: In a travel agent’s window, the main advert is to visit Welsh Patagonia. Several different trips are offered, although I am not clear what the centenary is. The “official” date of the Welsh arrival is 1865. I had come across the Welsh in Patagonia in Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, published in1977, where he goes in search of an explanation for a piece of fur that his grandfather brought back. Chatwin was the leading travel writer of his generation, witness Song Lines, 1986, explored Welsh-English tensions in his novel, On the Black Hill, 1982.

On the cabin shelf

An imaginary Welsh-Argentinian war plays an important role in Malcolm Price’s Don’t Cry for Me, Aberystwyth, of which I buy a signed copy in a charity shop. Price’s trope is to take Chandler’s style and detective and place him in West Wales. The first two, Aberystwyth Mon Amour and Last Tango in Aberystwyth were fresh and brilliant but the next, and hopefully last, three were very flat and mechanical; but he does capture some aspects of West Wales well – the caravan as the default accommodation; the religious fundamentalism: the detective talking to a member of a sect that only accepts the Old Testament , The New Testament, this fundamentalist explains, is “a febrile, toffee-coated chocolate box of vile and corrupt sentimentality. Love thy neighbour? How can a man in Aberystwyth follow such a precept?” (37)

ABERDOVEY

I sail for Aberdovey on the morning tide on Sunday, 7th July. I didn’t sail Saturday evening as I thought that on such a lovely evening – the heatwave had started – the half dozen moorings would be crowded. But when I arrive at the mouth of the Dovey, there is only one small yacht rather apologetically coming down the fairway.

On the cabin bookshelf

In the Tourist Office on the quay, I pick up Lewis Lloyd’s “The Brig ‘Susannah’ of Aberdyfi [Aberdovey]” at a giveaway £1.50. It’s undated but from around the mid-1980’s. Lloyd makes two interesting observations – that the small coasters, rather than East Indiamen or tea clippers, have not been studied sufficiently; nor have the working conditions on these boats.

When you add the neglect of leisure uses of the sea, you reach the view that “maritime history” has been too narrowly defined. It would be more useful if the subject matter was “the multiple uses of the sea”, which would incorporate the study of anything that floats that has been or is of interest to mankind.

This re-alignment would provide a welcome change from the fetishistic study of Nelson’s navy, a study which is becoming increasingly aligned with an unhealthy jingoistic imperialism, which maritime history needs to actively dissociate itself from. How can this be achieved? Simply. A moratorium would be declared on all Nelson studies, say for five years. Any essay or research proposal would be quickly word-searched for “nelson” by a junior clerk or intern, and, if present, returned to the student. If repeated, they would be referred to their tutor. The energy thereby released would be of great benefit to maritime history research. (See Floating around Fleetwood, in the companion volume, Floating about British Maritime History.)

Monday 8th July: I have a friend with “Diogenes Syndrome” – he is unable to throw anything away, including newspapers and magazines “in case they come in useful sometime”. It is an act of kindness for me to remove all his old yachting magazines, and, because they were cluttering up my study, I brought them all onto the boat and am slowly working my way through them. I can therefore quote from the Practical Boat Owner of September, 2009. In an article on “Is Cruising the Med for You?” Richard Hare says that each yachtsman has a period of time away after which he or she is satiated. They may not know what this period is till they do it. Four months was about right, which would allow me to obey the injunction given to Mark Fishwick by a Cornish fisherman: “West of the Lizard is no place for a small boat after the end of August”. I had hoped to explore the Cumbrian ports – Maryport, Whitehaven and Workington – but that would need another good month. And now I feel that three months is about right for me, so today is as far North as I will go. (Besides, the logical way to reach the Cumbrian ports is to go up on the Irish side to the Clyde, and then make a leisurely return passage).

I leave Aberdovey at 0600 the next day. There must be a shoal of fish in the estuary for there is a wild, mad rushing of birds – about 20 gannets only going off their short dive, a few gulls and hundreds of manx shearwater. At times, the whirling maelstrom is so thick I cannot see the next buoy.

BARDSEY and PORTMADOG

Bardsey Sound is the logical place to turn round, as to go on would take me into the Menai Straits and northern waters. Also, literature-wise, Hilaire Belloc describes sailing through the Sound in a gale at the start of The Cruise of the Nona, 1925. Belloc is now deeply unfashionable, his views expressed with venom and bile and his anti-semitism and adoration of Mussolini counting against him. However, The Cruise … contains some of the finest writing on sailing as a process (not a task, or getting somewhere) ever penned.

The Sound is, a bit disappointingly, like a millpond. At the headland, Braich Y Pwll, I look up the Lleyn peninsula. Then I turn and go back through the Sound and anchor in Henllwyn Cove, on the southeast corner of the island, landing to walk to the lighthouse.

In the evening sunlight, I sail across Tremadoc Bay towards Portmadog, with Snowdonia as the back drop – magical. I moor against a boat in front of the yacht club, as previously instructed by the harbour master’s staff.

It is blisteringly hot the next day – too hot for the train and bus ride to the Ffestiniog quarries. Besides, I see a train crossing from the north of the bridge. They have re-opened the line to Caernafon and I jump aboard the 1245. The £5 souvenir booklet is good value to orientate yourself as you climb up towards Snowdon and the scenery stunning. At Rhyd Du, on its western flank, as in the best Victorian mystery stories, I run across the platform and catch the down train.

By the time I return, it is near low water, and the Harbour Master, who I meet, points out that my boat has dried out at 20 degrees. I was furious as I had parked exactly where I was told, and the Harbour Master tells me that the empty berth just ahead – which I had originally intended to use – has much deeper water and its occupant is in the Atlantic.

Unable to do anything given the harbour is at the moment mainly mud, I visit the Maritime museum where there is fine collection of paintings and models of the slate carriers, as well as a selection of reasonably priced second hand maritime books.

I walk to Borth Y-Gest, where there were once four shipyards building the Portmadoc slate boats, although nothing visible remains of them. I pass a boatpark with four Celtic longboats – smaller, GRP versions of the wooden Cornish gigs. Apparently, no Welsh harbour is without one, and competition is divided into North and South sections.

By the time I reach the beach at Borth, it is 1830. A mother and young child are wading out to the nearest port hand mark and only getting water up to their knees. This is a bit puzzling as I have been told I can clear out at 0800.

That evening, to my relief, the boat seems O.K. and I move it to the deeper berth. I leave at 0800, which results in me sitting by the previously mentioned port hand mark for 45 minutes. I have an idea that these harbour assistants have been transferred from other jobs, to save making them redundant: “Morgan, we’re moving you from car park fines to harbours”/”But Ewan, I know nothing about sailing. The only time I went out in a dinghy, I was sick”. “Don’t worry. You’ll soon learn”.

BARMOUTH

I am keen to visit Barmouth, as D.W. Morgan in his history of Aberdovey “Brief Moment” (1948) wrote “It [the Dovey] may not vie with the Mawddach [Barmouth’s river] in the grandeur of its setting” (xvii). Fortunately, I can still reach Barmouth in time by squeezing through the inshore end of Sam Badrig (St Patrick’s Causeway) – the East Passage at Mochras Point. I get to the Barmouth fairway buoy and head for the yellow perch as per the pilot advice. Half way there, I realise that it’s on a large sandbank, and the little blobs, which I took to be a few little angling boats are actually the buoyed channel a few hundred yards to starboard. This is the first time ever that I have ever known such misleading sailing directions, which would be inconceivable in South Wales or on the South Coast.

Barmouth harbour is amazing. It’s practically in the sea. Only a seawall on the northern side stops that. It’s dominated by the mile-long railway bridge half a mile up the harbour. In place of Snowdon that you can see from Portmadog bridge, you have Calder Idris behind Barmouth, a beauty recognised by William Daniell, RA(1769-1837) in his paintings for “A Voyage round Great Britain”(1813-1823). He painted Barmouth in 1813.

In Barmouth, as in each West Wales harbour, there is a yacht club. Being in a Welsh-speaking area does not seem to have affected them or made any impact. Yachting is for the successful and its language and culture is English.

On the cabin shelf

In Portmadog maritime museum, I acquired Lewis’ “The ‘Unity’ of Barmouth”. In fact, he describes two sloops both named “Unity”, the first built on the Mawddach in 1766 and sold in Liverpool in 1783; the second launched in 1785. The reason for the publication of the book was the discovery of the disbursement (payment accounts) books. Gwynned Archive Services printed it – I wonder if any library services are still publishing books of local interest. The second Unity, on her first voyage in 1785, took a cargo of culm to Teignmouth, and also visited Exeter (Exon) and Topsham (44). For those of you, who like me, are a bit vague on “culm”, it is “coal in its small variety … yielded very little flame, yet burned with a fierce red glow – invaluable in drying malt or burning lime … when mixed with clay and shaped into balls, it formed an excellent combustion fuel for the kilns”(40).

Lewis recounts how corn was being exported from Ireland and from West Wales, during the bread famine at the end of the eighteenth century, when the price was so high the workers could not afford it. The Irish rebelled in 1798 but the Welsh “remained stubbornly loyal to the English Crown … Welsh loyalty to England and the English throne still requires a convincing explanation” (47-48).

Passage to the Scillies and Going Home

I am reminded of Lewis’ words the next day, 10th July, when making passage to Fishguard. I have to make a long detour to suit Aberporth firing range. In the evening, I reach the beautiful half- moon natural harbour of Fishguard and moor on the Goodwick side, where the Fishguard- Rosslare ferry actually goes from.

I get into a terrible race off the Bitches in Ramsay Sound due to arriving late and mistaking the beginning of the Sound with the actual race a couple of miles further down.

The next day, 13th July, I set off from Dale at 0600. Around midday, I can change from the passage planning chart “Approaches to the Bristol Channel” (Admiralty 1178) to the coastal “Trevose Head to Hartland Point”(1156). This raises my spirits, a mood which is shared by a pod of dolphins, who return later to celebrate the sighting of the “island” of Trevose Head coming out of the heat haze.

I get into the Camel around 2030. I decide to avoid the zoo-animal feeling and the hassle with lines of the Inner Harbour and borrow the RNLI mooring, used by the RNLI for boats they bring in – an unlikely event in such calm conditions. (I pay a donation for its use to the Newlyn coxswain a few days later).

As I come down towards St Ives bay, the gannets are disappearing into the mist after a few wing flaps. I would have liked to take the passage inside the Stones, a couple of miles or so north of Godrevy, but with such poor vis. I am forced to seek the tolling bell of the Stones North Cardinal. It was a nerve-racking sail, as leaving the cockpit to go into the saloon for a minute or two to check the chart or put the kettle on, risked running into a stationary fishing vessel.

Shortly after hearing and then aiming for the cardinal, the vis. clears and I can see all round the bay. My anxiety and tiredness lift.

Later that evening, I enjoy a good fish supper in St Ives with two friends from Newquay, in what was clearly the attic of an old sail loft, with a good view across the harbour. The down-side is that, despite the lack of wind, I rock all night. A local explained that this was because the waves were deflected off Smeaton’s pier, and for a quiet night, one should anchor in Carbis bay.

THE SCILLIES

The next day, I juggle shipping lanes, tide and wind to get round the Long Ships. My first port of call in the Scillies is always the Cove between St Agnes and Gugh, the anchorage protected by the ridge between the two, which only covers at high water. As ever, a short dinghy ride ashore and then a stroll up the hill to see the Bishop Rock light and the Western Isles in the sunset. The Scillies are really England’s only archipelago and the view is +++. Thence to the Turk’s Head, England’s most western pub, to sit outside overlooking St Mary’s across the Sound.

After a lie-in, I circum-ambulate Gugh and then to the bulb shop on St Agnes. What I admire about St Agnes is that it is still, at least in part, a working island, its small fields protected by high hedges, dedicated to bulb and flower production. Usually, I send a gift packet home, but not this time – the wet cold winter had delayed production by five weeks.

In the early evening, I go round the North Western rocks and enter Old Grimsby Sound. I can see why I never sailed here with the family. There are rocks and reefs scattered throughout the Sound; but by myself, I can give my pilotage more complete attention than I ever could as a family man.

Once moored, I sit in the cockpit, admiring this rock-strewn inland lake, when a yellow boat goes quickly past. It is the Inter-Island ambulance, which wends its way across the Sound to St Martin’s. (At Hughtown, St Mary’s, I see an even swisher craft, painted silver with the logo “Doctor, Midwife, Nurse”.)

In the hot morning, I go ashore on Tresco to inspect the solid looking Block House, impressive on its headland. On the other side of the island, in New Grimsby Sound, is Cromwell’s castle. Because of its strategic position in the approaches to the Bristol and English channels, the Scillies is well defended, the most visible indication between Star Castle above Hugh Town.

I wander around Old Grimsby. Tresco has been carefully crafted to be Islington-on-Sea, an eco-paradise. As I walk to the church, a young girl cycles past (a bike is part of the deal) with two fresh baguettes from the grocers/deli in New Grimsby, in her haversack. I decide I must return to the boat so that I can pick up my gash, and dispose of it in one of the discreetly placed wooden enclosures, with five choices of coloured bins.

A coffee is called for, so I patronise the Ruined Cottage café, overlooking the Sound. My milk comes in a little churn. The tannoy quietly plays “Strawberry Fields Forever”. My virtual peace and good will towards my fellow men runneth over.

In the afternoon, I up the pick and am on my way to the island of Nornour and its burial sites for Breton kings. They couldn’t be buried in Brittany, as their influence would be too strong; and they couldn’t be disposed of over the nearest cliff as that would make them angry. For the present of a suitably ornate belt brooch, the priestesses on Normour would do the honours).

I have to dodge a number of just visible reefs, with chilling names like Tearing Ledge and Hard Lewis rocks. Not wanting to make the acquaintance of the Bump at the north end of Great Ganilly, I come up from the south and anchor in West Porth. I dinghy up to Nornour to find a few round, stone-clad holes, and no way of getting to the top of the island through its brambles. Disappointing. And I later read that I should also have visited the passage graves on the nearby Little and Great Arthurs.

I make my way nervously down Crow Sound – it is low water and very shallow near the Crow Rock beacon. Fortunately, there are a few spare moorings left at Hugh Town. I go for a meal at the Mermaid Tavern on the quay. It is not too busy as it is Wednesday and gig racing night. Tonight, it is St Mary’s to St Agnes and the gigs are being followed by spectator boats. There are at least eleven gigs on the Scillies, which claims to be the original home of gig racing.

The idea that maritime history should be widened is emphasised to include its leisure uses, such as gig racing. On Tresco, I met a yacht charter skipper, who tells me that 28 yachts are out to charter this week from a single company – the largest number of boats they can lay their hands on. In Weymouth, I was sitting in the cockpit drinking my coffee when the bridge opened, and over 50 angling boats passed out. When I wander round Hugh Town the next morning, the cruise ship, the “Deutschland”, out of Hamburg on a two week cruise, is anchored in the Sound and 300 Germans are given a few hours’ shore leave. In the afternoon, it steams away. Yacht chartering, angling, the huge growth in cruise liners – none of them feature in maritime history literature.

In the evening, I cross Tresco flats to New Grimsby Sound, so that I can dinghy to Samson, scene of Michael Morpurgo’s Why the Whales Came, which, many years ago, I read to my daughters. The view from the northernmost of its two hills is a breathtaking 360º panorama of the islands. I am tempted to go to the top of the southern hill, which would have an even better view, but it is clear that I would have to cross a breeding ground of gulls, who are already creating an ugly cacophony at my presence.

The next day, July 19, I leave for Newlyn. It always seems to take forever after you lose sight of the Scillies and before you see the Long Ships.

I have enjoyed those four days on the Scillies, but, like any fine location, there is more to be done: explore the Arthurs; pilot among the Western isles and go to Rosevear, where the Bishop’s Rock light was assembled (making sure it’s not the closed season as it is a designated breeding site); a closer investigation of the gaps between the columns of Men-a-yaur; a hamper picnic on Round Island.

Going Home

NEWLYN

I eat well at the Fisherman’s Arms above the harbour. I meet someone mending the fishing boat on the slip. He’s from Appledore, born in Irsha street, knew ‘Bill’ Slade, and remembers/recalls the names of all the last commercial sailing vessels. As I’m going home, it makes a nice coda to my days in the Bude-Appledore area.

I was thinking of the passage of the fishing boat, the Rosebud, in 1937 carrying a petition to prevent the knocking down of areas of Newlyn that Penzance council considered were slums. It contrasts with the lack of political activity today.

The tide won’t serve for the Lizard till mid-afternoon, so I go into Penzance to see the exhibition at Penlee House (Penzance 400 years; its emblem used to be the severed head of John the Baptist. The town is crawling with ‘pirates’. The RNLI is trying to get into the Guinness Book of Records so needs to beat 20,000 “pirates”. In the event, it falls 700 short.

On a calmer night, I was staying with my family at Mousehole when I realised that with the wind in the Northwest, visibility was very good. With the family in a mutinous mood, I drove to the Land’s End hotel and on the veranda, could see six lights: Longships, Wolf Rock; Penninnis and Round Island on the Scillies, and even the Bishop’s Rock, and finally the Seven Ships light vessel. It was brilliant, but my family, sheltering inside the hotel, stayed determinedly inside.

Although there is a heat-wave and a quite stable high pressure system, it blows an Easterly 5-7 over the weekend, so there is no way I can get round the Lizard.

The wind drops Sunday night and, since I need to be home that night for Ally’s birthday, I cannot break the journey. It is always a long haul, as you need the tide with you round the Lizard, which means that, as you make the long crossing of Looe Bay, you will have six hours of foul tide. It also means, with HW Plymouth 0600, an early start. I leave 0415 and crawl into Salcombe at 1945. I dump everything that comes easily to hand into bags and call the water taxi. I once was in a sailing school ship that moored alongside Galway Blazer, the yacht in which, on the third attempt, after two dismastings, Commander Bill King circumnavigated the globe (See his Capsize). Its new owner, Peter Crowther, told me how, when he eventually arrived back in England, King just walked off the boat, leaving everything including his sailing jacket. I feel a bit like that now. I have come home, so there is no point in hanging around. The voyage is over.

Salcombe is absolutely heaving – four boats to each mooring. The water taxi driver tells me that there are five meets and a yacht race has diverted into the harbour.

I get the water taxi ashore as darkness falls. As we near the pontoon, Seadog does an enormous leap ashore; and the next morning, runs down to the sea on his favourite beach as if to reclaim it; and the line comes into my head ‘and then it’ll be like I’ve never been gone’ and I can’t place it; so when I get home, I look it up. It was a hit for Billy Fury in 1962.

2014

Passage to Lancashire

The Longships

When I first doubled the Longships, I did what they tell you to in the pilot/almanac: outside the Runnel Stone and outside the Longships reef. Nowadays, I hug the coast inside the Runnel Stone. There is a rock of uncharted depth a bit offshore but it doesn’t look shallow enough to cause a problem; and then I take the passage inside the Longships. Obviously, I would do neither if it was rough, but then I hope I’d have gauged the shipping forecast and weather conditions properly and wouldn’t be there …

It’s not just the six tides that meet there, as the skipper of the Scillilonian gleefully informed us on the way west, but the barrenness of the water. I’ve never seen the Scillies from the Long Ships- they’re too low lying – so to the west, there’s is only water. And there’s invariably a south going swell and the feeling you are going uphill from the Armed Knight, the large rock off the Land’s End hotel, and Pendeen. ‘My ship is so small’ comes to mind but that’s such a cliché. But this must have been a communal experience, because you have Cape Finisterre in Spain, Finisterre in France (finis = end, terra= earth in Latin) and Land’s End here.

I always feel better once I’ve clear the Three Maidens reef off Pendeen and set my course at 50 degrees True for Trevose.

I have been here, on passage between Falmouth and Fishguard. Emma, my youngest daughter, had been born that February in Lancaster. I had promised Paul, my regular crew, a trip to somewhere warm, i.e France, perhaps Biscay, but it didn’t seem quite fair to leave my wife with two one and none year olds. So, very reasonably, I agreed that I would sail to Glasson Dock and then stay a few days with her at her mother’s place near Kendal. As I write this, it seems pretty indefensibly casual, if not callous, but a yachtie’s got to use his boat, and so she seemed to accept it in a resigned fashion.

The sea state was categorised as ‘rough’ by the Coastguard. I heard them warn over the VHF, which wasn’t much help as we were already there. I don’t know why I hadn’t worked out the conditions but obviously I hadn’t. There was no risk for the boat, as it was my first: a Contessa 26, built when they didn’t really know the properties of GRP and built the hulls thick and the boat was a beautiful sailor.

We were doing that difficult stretch between the Runnel Stone and the Long Ships on a beat against a Southwesterly six. The boat was bouncing away from the three or four metre waves and my crew Paul was steering and I was watching. Suddenly, I saw the top of a mast about fifty yards away at the top of a wave. I seized the tiller from Paul and threw the boat to starboard. A few seconds later, this yacht inward bound from the Scillies swept past us. I don’t think the skipper/helm even saw us …

Unfortunately, Lore, named after my (German) mother, had a very low freeboard (vertical distance between the waterline and the top of the deck), so it took very little for the ‘green stuff’ to come sweeping along the deck or even the coach roof. And you soon learnt that it didn’t matter if you wore cheap yellow oilies or the most expensive, advertised brands, the water still found its way down your neck.

Paul, who had worked the mackerel boats out of Flushing, had a simple philosophy. He dressed down as the sea state got up – i.e. a pair of cut off jeans and sometimes an oilie jacket. His thinking was that his skin dried quicker than clothes. And the theory was much tried that trip, because I had no roller reefing on such a fine boat, so with every change of wind strength, we – well, he; I was skipper, needed to helm and navigate. Anyway, we had to change down to a storm jib and he was bouncing around the foredeck getting the jib down and the storm jib up. (Another of his fashion statements was to buy a roll of J-cloth, cut out the right length and put two holes in it for his arms, and make it his vest).

Once we got clear of Pendeen, it stayed rough, but less rough as we bashed our way north. The idea was to go outside the Bishop and Clerks and then head into Fishguard. As dawn broke the next day, the boat was soaked. In all that bumping around and it was now night, we couldn’t find the source. Unknown to us, the cover of the anchor chain locker had opened in the bashing and was letting in water.

In the watery light with the boat moving across the disturbed, light blue sea, I saw flames shooting out into the sky. I knew enough to know these were chimneys burning off excess gas at the Milford Haven refineries. I decided to get to shore. I altered course for the Haven and a few hours later, was tied up at Neyland with all our bedding and quite a few clothes strung out across the boom and coachroof.

We never made Glasson Dock, because I went up the Lune too early and grounded. This made me head for the safer approach to Fleetwood.

On the return passage, we left Port Dinorwic, crossed Caernafon Bar and headed out into the Irish Sea. The midnight watch always made me depressed. So I used to give Paul the midnight- 0400 slot. When I took over and the dawn came, I could see a lighthouse, which I shouldn’t have. After much head scratching and consulting the almanac, I realised I was looking at the Skerries. We were had been pushed 17 miles farther down the Irish Sea that my dead reckoning had suggested. Scary.

Another memory of that trip is gastronomic. Paul would eat any old rubbish, so purchased a large bag of ends of bacon. But with these, he would make welsh rarebit topped by fried bacon, and served this dripping, carbohydrate charged feast. At 0430, with a milky coffee, it tasted like a gastronomic delight.

To Maryport

I have ventured further than North Wales on three occasions – early on in my sailing career, with Paul to Fleetwood; a later exploration of Fleetwood, Glasson Dock and Barrow; and finally, further up to Maryport .

To reach the Cumberland coast, one sails from North Wales, say Holyhead, which one can leave at all states of tide, and sails across the pretty featureless eastern Irish sea to Barrow, as this is the only deep water harbour on the coast that can be reached in one long day; and since it services nuclear submarines, the channel is well buoyed.

One can pick up a mooring off Piel Island. The landlord of the Ship Inn was called the King of Piel Island.

From Piel, it is an easy day sail up past Windscale to the marinas of Whitehaven or Maryport.

In in 2018, I decided I would like to sail to Whitehaven marina and thence take the Cumbrian Coast line to Maryport and walk up the hill to the Senhouse Roman Museum above the town to the North.

The Museum is remarkable. It is next to a Roman fort, Alauna, and the collection was started in 1570 (1570!) by John Senhouse, Lord of the Manor of Ellenborough.

I am now quoting from the museum website:

In the eighteenth century Colonel Humphrey Senhouse employed a man to preserve and record any carved stonework brought to light during the wholesale removal of much of the Roman Fort to provide building stone for the new town of Maryport. Some idea of the quantity of stone involved can be gained from a visit to Crosscanonby Church. Here, forming the chancel arch, you will see the complete archway to the northeast gate of the fort, re-erected in the church at Humphrey Senhouse’s behest.

Good stuff and there are plenty of Roman exhibits in the museum.

The energy and determination of Brian Ashmore and Joe Scott Plummer, heir to the Senhouse estate, led eventually to the housing of the collection in the building known as the Battery (a Royal Naval Artillery Volunteer Drill Hall built in 1885 to train naval gunners) where it has resided since 1990.

What I was interested in was how did they feed the legions that guarded Hadrian’s Wall, that ended some miles up the coast at Bowness on the Solway Firth? Those legions built the wall around 122 AD and stayed for 300 years.

So they would need feeding and drink. But I found no easy answers. Clearly, the supply lines were a source of concern, because the Cumbrian coasts was inhospitable – the ports of Maryport, Workington and Whitehaven were all built much later, from the sixteenth century(Workington) to the eighteenth (Maryport).

The nearest safe haven was Ravensglass, but clearly the Romans were worried about the Scots sailing to Ireland and raiding the supply lines up to Alauna and the Wall, because they built another defensive wall practically on the shore, down to Ravensglass. Alauna was part of these defences.

The museum says that wine, olive oil and such like were shipped in; but given there were thousands of soldiers to feed, and given not a lot of food grows on the Border, that does not help much. One would have thought it needed a sizeable fleet to bring the food up from the Continent, Did it sail in winter up the Irish Sea with the Welsh and Cumbrian coasts as lee shores with the prevailing South Westerly winter gales?

I read a book or two on the Wall but they mainly told how the wall was constructed and manned.

PRESTON 16 October 2014

Sailing South, you have to aim to be at the mouth of the Ribble about three hours before high water, so that you arrive at Preston Marina at high water, when you can get through the lock.

Preston Marina is located in the old Preston Dock. There’s no commercial traffic now and hasn’t been for decades, but in its heyday, Preston was an important port for exporting textils and importing timber, coal and coffee important enough for a 15 mile training wall to be built along the Ribble till it reached the Irish sea.

Nowadays, the marina is strangely a winter marina – people leave their boats there or work on them in the winter.

One odd feature is a lighthouse upstream of the harbour, which of course, did not need a lighthouse, just lights on the lock gates so that you didn’t keep going up the Ribble, which swings away to starboard. This lighthouse must be one of the very few examples of humour shown by Morrisons, for it is a fake in the carpark of its store.

The only other ‘fake’ lighthouse I know is at Stanley Road, Holyake, the Wirral, although I’m not sure it’s still standing.

On the cabin shelf:

From the shop in the marina offices, which also has a pleasant café, I found Espanola: Edwardian Cutter, self-published by Dr. Martin Birch. Espanola, originally named Irene II, is a 15 ton, 39 foot fast cruiser, built in 1902 by Samuel Bond in his Birkenhead yard. Birch had bought her in 1989 and berthed her at Preston.

Espanola, as she was renamed in 1912, was present at the birth of the Irish Cruising Club, the club formed by crew of five yachts at Roche’s Hotel, Glengariff, at the head of Bantry Bay, June 13, 1912.

They already used the cry ‘Wurra Wurra’ and its reply ‘Tiles and Slates’ to hail each other. Birch has taken the explanation from W. M. Nixon’s To Sail the Crested Sea: The Story of Irish Cruising and the First Fifty Year of the Irish Cruising Club, pp.34-35:

It seems that one moonless misty night well after dusk, the old tops’l schooner Maria Reid, a renowned sailing trader in the Irish Sea, was stealing quietly up the River Liffey into Dublin. The Skipper, well pleased with his fair wind, was standing by to reply to the expected hail from the watcher who recorded movements of shipping in the port. It happened that an old guillemot – probably suffering from digestive pangs, though that is hard to credit – was swimming close to the Hailing Station, croaking violently: ‘Wurra!Wurra!’

In due course the Maria Reid came close and the following dialogue ensured:

SKIPPER (thinking he had been hailed) – Maria Reid

GUILLEMOT – Wurra!

SKIPPER- Tiles and Slates

GUILLEMOT – Wurra! Wurra!

SKIPPER – From Cardiff!

GUILLEMOT – Wurra! Wurra!

SKIPPER (surprised) – Maria Reid, with tiles and slates

³³³³³³³

I never returned to Preston because by the time they let you out of the harbour basin lock at near High Water, you had sixteen miles to cover to the open sea, so unless you had good local knowledge, the navigation marks are so far about that you are likely to go aground on the falling tide. Which I did off Lytham St Annes and needed the inshore lifeboat. In fact, there is a single mooring bouy in deep water off Lytham, so I should have taken two days to get down the Ribble!

Floating around Pwihelli (Discovery of a Valuable Historical Document)

I had arrived at Pwihelli Marina, in the north of Cardigan Bay, intending to spend as little time as possible before sailing home. Whilst talking to one of the marina staff, I happened to mention my interest in maritime history and accounts of voyages. He rummaged in a drawer and said I might be interested in the following document, which apparently dates from August, 2018. I have transcribed it verbatim.

³³³³³³³

August 11. Barometric Pressure 995 at 0530. Forecast for Irish Sea South-West 4-6. Wind howling in rigging.

To Harlech. What a splendid piece of heritage the English left for the Welsh!

I notice all the trains that go to Phwillhelli have Birmingham International Airport as their destination. Not clear why, unless the locals know that, when they’ve taken a plane to Ibiza or the Costa del Sol, they will have better weather.

August 12. Barometric Pressure 995 at 0530. Forecast for Irish Sea South-West 4-6. Wind howling in rigging.

To Caernafon. My, what another piece of heritage the English left for the Welsh! And to think our dear Prince Charles, faithful, loving husband of Camilla, had his investiture there in 1969!

August 13. Sunday. Barometric Pressure 993 at 0530. Forecast for Irish Sea South-West 4-6. Wind howling in rigging.

Couldn’t find any timetables for busses or trains. Probably everyone in chapel. Stayed on boat.

August 14. Am getting a little dispirited. Will I become the Flying Welshman? Stopped taking down the shipping forecast. The howling in the rigging tells me all I need to know.

I spoke to the marina staff about going home by train. They estimated that it would take two days.

Soaked while getting in supplies as it is a half hour walk into town. The natives seem to have a limited gastronomic tastes. Bought three large white loafs and a large pot of peanut butter. At the checkout, a boy said “Maa, look at those pot noodles”. Perhaps they are considered a delicacy in these parts.

Also, on impulse, bought a string-bound stash of Blyton’s Famous Five books from the non-denominational hospice, slogan “We don’t mind which chapel you attend as long as you’re going to die soon”.

Drinks cupboard dry but have filled tank and water butts.

August 15. Searched high and low but cannot find the scrap of paper with the gate code on it. Dare not exit. All the other boat owners, who seem to come from Manchester and Birmingham, went home days ago.

The marina staff gave me a lengthy booklet on the terms and conditions from Gwynned Council. No disposal of waste matter overboard. So have dug out three buckets and placed them in the cockpit

August 16. Should George/ Georgina be seeking advice on gender issues?

August 17. Mobile phone has ceased functioning

August 18. The dinghy, which was slowly deflating, has sunk. I do not have the strength to pull it off the harbour bed. Hard to open hatches, face into the wind and reach the bucket.

August 19. Have finished the pot noodles. Is there a difference between a gluten-free diet and a glutinous-free diet? I am finding it difficult to sort things out.

August 20. I can no longer follow the Famous Five stories Why do they keep getting trapped in dungeons? How do they outwit criminals so easily? Many of my bosses struck me as criminals but i never got the better of them. Rather the reverse. Hence my somewhat uneven CV.

August 21. I thought I heard a BBC announcer saying that better weather might be coming soon, but couldn’t be sure.

Have finished the bread.

August 22. Have barely any strength left. I lie on my bunk all day, except when I crawl painfully into the cockpit.

I have left a note for the marina saying they can sell my boat to pay for the marina fees.

August 23. A knock on the hull, as per Tony Bullimore, and then the hatch slid back. An apparition. My wife. The apparition shook me quite hard. It was my wife! She called out to 2 para-medics who bundled me painfully onto a stretcher with wheels.

At the top of the ramp, someone pressed the Exit button. As the gate clanged behind us, I cried feebly but clearly, “Now we’ll never get back in”, but one of the ambulance men replied, “That’s not our problem. We only have to deliver you to hospital.”

August 24. I am in hospital. I don’t know where and if I did ask. I would probably be none the wiser.

August 24. An absurdly young doctor says I was lucky. Experiments with white rats show that they starve to death if only given a diet of white bread. I must have been saved by the peanut butter. He says once my vitamin levels are back up and the physios have got some strength back in my legs, I will be discharged.

August 25. My wife came onto the ward with her “She who must be obeyed look” demeanour, demeanour, demeanour and told me that she did not know what possessed me to give the boat away in exchange for the marina fees. She has re-negotiated and we will pay them off over several months.

She is going home. She has wasted enough time sorting out my pointless and expensive hobby. She didn’t say, though she often does, that its only merit is that it gets me out from under her feet in summer. I sometimes wonder whether, after all these years of marital bliss, there is something slightly amiss between us.

In the meantime, she says I am to return to the boat, with a view to spending as little time as possible before sailing home.

The Welsh Shore of the Dee

A day trip from Liverpool by car took us to Flint and the Welsh side of the muddy, silted Dee. We headed for the sands at the Point of Ayr, a huge beach so that the couple of dozen dog walkers looked like figures in an impressionist painting. The defunct lighthouse is sadly in need of some TLC.

From the Point of Ayr, you can see the harbour walls of Mostyn, but I couldn’t find a way into the port, which is/was big in supplying the Irish Sea wind farms

For lunch, to nearby Llanerch-y-Mor, where rather incongruously a large steam passenger ship, the Duke of Lancaster is moored. It arrived in 1979, and was a ‘fun ship’, ‘the third most popular tourist attraction’ according to the DOLAS (The Duke of Lancaster Appreciation Society). It used to be a cafe and have shops, but rate demands by the council led to the closure of these facilities and the boat being inaccessible, but still tied there. She is also ‘the last passenger-only steam turbine ship left in existence. She is listed on the Historic Ships Register’ (Daily Post, North Wales, August 13, 2014).

Winter in South Devon

2015

I was walking the dogs down to Challaborough beach, when I saw three serious types – not the usual caravan users – examining a bit of the rather demolished little cliff at the back of the beach. Curious, I wandered over and found they were quite a high powered bunch –the head of Devon Archeology or some such title and a member of Bournemouth University Archeology Dept., which has a high profile reputation. It might have been Dr.Eileen Wilkes, for her website says that she leads the dig of the Iron Age/ Roman-British Settlement up on Folly Hill, Bigbury-on-Sea, or one of her colleagues. They were looking a rather small section of wall … It seems Sedgwell beach is no good – too open ?- so Challaborough could have been where the Romans landed to supply the fort.

Not sure what was left after a few more days of storms.

There was an amusing coda to my inquiries. There was a large piece of stonework next to the rather small Roman effort. ‘What’s that?’ I asked. With barely a glance, ‘oh, that’s the fellow in the bungalow’s garden wall’.

The decline of yachting

Yachting Monthly, August 2013, pp.10-12, reports on a survey by an ongoing market research company called Arkenford. From 2002 to 2012, numbers yacht cruising has gone down from 433,000 from 433 to 328,000; yacht racing from 153k to 106k thousand; small sailboat from 606k to 388k; and our dinghy friends have shrunk from 333k to 165k .

Yacht racing is, I suspect, very much influenced by the Solent, which is its own culture, so outside the Solent, the decline in yacht racing will be much more serious. Among the small boats, the decline is nearly 50%.

Cruising is the least affected, and the commentators or p. 12 say not to worry – the baby boomers will keep us all afloat – the newly retireds will keep sailing going.

I have my doubts. Firstly, people with an emotional attachment to the sea – be it by sailing on it, or watching it witness the success of National Coast Watch in recruiting volunteers – or studying it – are of a particular cohort, which is now passing. Secondly, specifically, with regard to sailing, the optimism is ill-founded. The old have to subsidise the young to do internships, afford children or just pay the rent. And it’s not just the lending of money. More crucial to yachting, is the lending of time, so that they can satisfy the dictatorship of present work conditions, while the grandparents look after the family. So they, the grandparents, haven’t the time to sail.

Synchrony – the loss of the Open Golf Championship by the BBC has led to lots of breast beating. But Richard Williams in the Guardian 7/2/2015, p.11, points out, ‘the statistics in Europe and the United States show a steady drop-off in the numbers of those playing a game whose years of peak popularity appear to have passed. The phenomenon is particularly marked among younger people: in the 16-25 age groups, numbers are down by almost a quarter in the past year alone …’

My guess is that all the Victorian prestige sports – so add foxhunting, shooting, mountain climbing – are suffering from England being a money- and time-poor banana republic of the multinationals; and the poor, out-of-date ‘stuffy’ image of the sport (in the case of yachting, ludicrous titles like ‘commodore’, in golf, no jeans allowed at the bar etc. etc.)

Salcombe

One evening in June, I was at mooring in the Bag and I dinghied Seadog2 ashore and we walked along the shore towards Lincombe. Rounding a corner, I found a man building a fire whom I initially take to be a latter-day Robinson Crusoe, but he was in fact the advanced guard from Island Cruising Club and their students. He told me that it would cost £400,000 to get Egremont down to Penzance and a fitness certificate, £800,000 to do necessary repairs. Egremont is unique, he says, as it’s the last example of a boat put together with rivets (I think). She was built by Phillips and Son, Dartmouth in 1951 to work as a Mersey ferry, and came to Salcombe in 1975.

On the cabin shelf

John Corin wrote a pamphlet (Our Island Story), now available on the net, and its founder, John Baylay an autobiographical account (When the Bug Bites). Even so, there is more to be written by an informed maritime historian about this club, and its self-help philosophy; and its courses being the basis for the first RYA training requirements.

Baylay disliked ‘the welfare state’ – had the self-made man’s dislike of ‘scroungers’ etc. but in fact, I.C.C. was completely in tune with the times of working together for a better future. I’m reminded by getting hold of ‘The trouble with Des’ – reprints of his short articles in Classic Boat (Read him in short bursts as his hyperbolic style is repetitive; but he is the only sailing humourist that can make you/me laugh out loud). Sleightholme was skipper of the I.C.C.’s Edwardian yacht, Hoshi, and to make more space for punters, he and his wife, Joyce, slept in the sail locker. The only thing he wasn’t sure of was: the bag of which sail provided the cushion on which his daughter was conceived?

Feb, 2012. I.C.C. went into receivership just before Christmas. It had a reasonably flourishing dinghy training school, but clearly, if there is no accommodation aboard, the dinghy school could not survive, since b&b accommodation is scarce in Salcombe in summer and very expensive.

Then I hear that the all the boats- dinghies, launches- have been sold, so clearly there is no hope of I.C.C. continuing. But I can’t understand why no appeal was launched in such a prosperous yachting centre; and indeed, why the appeal wasn’t launched years ago sea – that Egremont had to be replaced was surely obvious.

How long will the harbourmaster tolerate a vessel that is at risk of sinking on her mooring? A very sad end to an important part of yachting history.

About Harbourmasters: The Ilfracombe harbour master has held the position for seventeen years. Now my sample of harbourmasters is small. I have been going into Padstow for some twenty years, but I never once met the harbour master. I think he existed because he always sent me a Christmas card. But those I’ve met have been of a type – ex-Royal navy, about 5 foot six, and comfortably built, without being fat. The only exception was the recently retired Salcombe harbourmaster, Ian Gibson. He was about 5’6” but thin. He always reminded me of my biology teacher, who said that thin people might have a tape worm. Or perhaps he was a fitness freak. He managed to get a shower block built for yachties on the quay (previously, if they knew about it, they could use the yacht club). This was an achievement of near-miraculous proportions, and, probably wisely, he retired within the year.

Made me think: what if Jesus had packed in doing miracles after one of his more flamboyant ones, like raising Lazarus or feeding the five thousand: ‘I’m sorry, folks, I’m retiring. No more miracles’? Would the Romans have left him alone? Would history have been different?

The triffid-like spread of the RIB: There’s an article on to be written on this growth. I first noticed this when, a couple of years ago, I experienced the nightmare of when you’re trying to get ashore in a hurry: a diversion to the top of South Pool moorings. Previously, these moorings, being tidal and cheaper, were the preserve of small boats. Now they’ve almost all gone, and their place taken by RIBs.

After picking up the doghair-infested cushions from the boat, as I land at Batson’s, it is RIBs that are being launched. And little sign of inflatable dinghies going out to yachts. And a bit later, walking the dog along Snape’s Point, I see the inside of the residents’ pontoon is now given over to RIBs.

My explanation is that there is much less free time even among the very well-paid than previously (hence, the death of cruising) and that you need your buzz quicker (and forget ‘messing about on the river’ relaxation stuff, that’s been and gone). Also, because they’re expensive and fast, these ugly things are actually prestigious. Amusing note was told to me by a dinghy expert: despite their expense, they’re not made well enough to bear the weight of those very large outboard and the material at the stern gradually deteriorates and comes away.

One evening, I drift round to Hope Cove, an anchorage under Bolt Tail, to the west of Salcombe, which needs settled weather. I run Seadog ashore, and after a bit, he sets up a terrible barking. Two seals are popping their heads out of the water in the gloom. Later, I get him to stay in the dinghy with difficulty. The seals are teasing him by popping up a couple of yards away from the dinghy as if to say ‘ya boo shucks’. He goes mad and I have to hold onto his collar.

There is so maritime history that needs to be done. We must record the history and experiences those who sailed in the British merchant fleet and/or before GPS, satellite phones etc. before it’s too late. To give a simple example, up to the 90’s, Hoshi, an Edwardian yacht with an undersized engine, skippered by Des Sleigtholme and later by the fearsome female skipper, H, (rumour had it she didn’t like being called Henrietta), used to leave Salcombe every week with its paying crew and reach the French coast around dawn, when there was often mist along the rock-strewn coast, and come into Treguier or Lezadrieux up winding rivers, with only echo, compass and not very reliable RDF… week after week without mishap. Accounts of a flourishing British merchant fleet – for how much longer can they be told from personal experience?

I despair that we can make any headway in schools, which now have to stick rigidly to timetables and syllabi. It is very sad how original, creative thought is being systematically destroyed in our children and our grandchildren by the all-absorbing attention to exams and their questions; which is so all time-consuming that any deviation into an interesting topic is automatically discounted.

But we might have more success at undergraduate and especially postgraduate level, if we can produce and advertise a number of enthusiastic historians who can support the student in a wide range of topics. I have absolutely no doubt that this range exists in the South West Maritime History Society and lots of other similar societies, by just listening to the discussion after the papers – the wealth of personal experience and the depth of historical knowledge always makes me feel quite inadequate; and the future may well lie in the website, facebook and twitter links to keep maritime history topical and bring in new members.

One autumn day, I headed down to the Yealm. I ring up an old mate, Mike Merritt to join me. He has been corralled onto the Yacht Club committee so drinks from a glass-bottomed tankard. He tells the story of his predecessor on the Reading Room Committee , now the village’s snooker hall. He said he’d take it for a year, and when he said he wanted to go, the Chair said “Of course, just find a replacement”. He was there for 12 years.

Mike tells the best stories, usually self-deprecating, of anyone I know. He was in St Quay-Portrieux this summer and turning over in his mind whether to go to the Paimpoul Old Boats Festival. The harbour master advised against it “They will turn up with their accordions, jump on your boat, smoke grass and sing shanties till four in the morning and you’ll never get rid of them”.

I walk the dog on Scobie Point, which is opposite Snapes. You take the trail up the hill and you can see how well the long East-West trend of Bolt Head does such a good job of protecting the town and what would have been its quays.

On the eastern side of Scobie, is an artificial harbour with a narrow entrance. What’s its history?

On the cabin shelf:

The Maritime and Patriotism

It so happens that I had just read Wreckers Must Breathe by Hammond Innes, published in 1941, which was rather poor propaganda. The Germans have built a huge submarine pen in cave/mine complex in North Cornwall. The narrator, aided by feisty, stereotyped feisty female journalist and a Cornish fisherman, who has a surprising and never explained degree of education, of course, destroy it.

So, I settled down in my rolling berth and read The Adventurous Four by Enid Blyton. Thanks to the remarkable ‘Interactive Yachting Bibliography’ (what a complete snip at £25), I find that this was originally titled Shipwrecked and published in 1941. The location is islands off the North East coast of Scotland and the leader of the children is a fisherman’s son, Andy, aged 14 (useful these Celts in times of war). On being shipwrecked, they discover a German submarine fuelling and provisioning station, which has been set up in caves on the island.

Of course, once again the Brits are victorious. But what’s interesting is the definitions of Britishness. After Tom, aged 12, has been captured, Andy says to the 10 year old girl twins: ‘We have to be brave now. We are British children and so we have plenty of courage and heaps of ideas. We must all think hard and see what we can do to trick the enemy ‘(p. 69). After a setback: ‘Andy shook his fist at the disappearing ship. “You think you can beat a Scots boy, but you can’t” … Andy’s blue eyes were like stones, and his mouth was stern and straight. Andy was not thinking of crying or grumbling”.(p.91). The twin girls are letting the boys go in a raft they have built whilst on the island: “for the sake of our country, Mary and I will stay behind here without any fuss” (p.101) – what adult socialisation for ten year old girls!

Coming back with professionals sailors to destroy the pen: ‘Oh, golly, wouldn’t I like to join the fight!’ groaned Andy. ‘Oh, couldn’t I sir?’ (p.118).

Of course, the use of the sea and the maritime for propaganda has a long history- there’s a thesis in there surely!, but it’s interesting to see the way it is played out in a children’s story.

Heading East

Start Bay

In the middle of August, I spent a frustrating two days waiting for ex-hurricane Bertha to go away; but it disturbed the weather and sea for a week, so I went nowhere. So, when a reasonable period of good weather was predicted, I thought it time to explore an area that has a very dubious reputation Lyme Bay, as the whole shoreline is a lee shore. But with pontoons now at Lyme Regis and West Bay (Bridport), Lyme Bay is now much more friendly for a fin-keeled boat than previously.

Get overtaken in Start Bay by a Beneteau 40, skippered by a bloke in a quality sailing outfit. In front of the wheel, is a console which I suppose tells him all he needs to know – depth, speed, satnav etc. In fact, he’s not steering, because the boat is on autopilot and when he wants a course change, he presses the relevant buttons on the screen. Pity he hasn’t put the sails up. But probably with a powerful engine, he wouldn’t gain time: the boat as a car with a funny sticky up thing and bits of cloth. But what’s interesting is the continuity with the office. The computer keeps you informed, ‘in the loop’, and for you to input. So, it is comforting that the computer as a means of feeling in control can move seamlessly to the boat.

Sailing to Dartmouth to port starboard is Slapton Ley It was here that Exercise Tiger, a dry run for the D-day landings went so disastrously wrong in April, 1944. E boats got among the poorly coordinated fleets of three nations and 946 American service personnel died.

Ally and I would quite often go down to the beach where the memorial to that disaster stands. And that memorial in turn is a memorial to Ken Small, the man who broke the hush up of the event by rescuing a Sherman tank from off the beach.

Ken Small was easy to find. He was always in the carpark down from the Start Bay Inn, Torcross. Everything about him was black – the tank, his car, his clothes as he stood by his car selling copies of his book The Forgotten Dead.

The Start Bay Inn was reputed to sell the best fried fish in the Southwest, but was very popular. For a quieter, more maritime meal, we used to go to the Hallsands Hotel. Much frequented by divers, it did the best crab sandwiches in the west. In those days, 20 years ago, you could then walk to the ruined village. Hallsands had been a fishing village on the cliff. Then in the 1890s, the Admiralty dredged near the beach to get the material for Keyham Docks, Plymouth. The beach level dropped alarmingly so that there was no longer any protection for the houses and in 1917 the village was washed away.

Neighbouring Beesands was more assertive and threatened to cut the mooring lines of any dredger off their beach. So the Admiralty backed down. And ironically, Beesands was given major sea defences through the depositing of large lumps of stone. The difference between the two communities would make a great play.

Dartmouth

Dartmouth gets a good press in the book. 167 ships from England, Normandy and other parts of Northern Europe sailed on one crusade from there in 1147 and another large fleet left there in 1190 for the Third Crusade. Apparently, on the night before they sailed, there would be a carnival, topped by a flight of Red Bows and Arrows.

March 11, 2014. I decided to save on the cost of craning the boat out in order to get it antifouled, and find a Dartmouth shipwright who will antifoul her whilst she’s against the wall. He does the job very well and then leaves me to wait for the tide to come back in. It’s a small neap and it takes for ever. At last, she comes free and, it now being well dark, I carefully motor back to the visitors’ pontoon near the town.

Across the river, I start seeing a yellow ball. Gradually, it is clear that a ship is on fire. The services are fast and efficient. A fire engine is put on board the lower ferry and taken to the pontoon on the Kingswear side, but the heat is so intense it has to move away. The Dartmouth inshore and later the Torbay lifeboats arrive, plus the harbourmaster’s staff. But it blazes so long and so fiercely that little can be left of it.

At some point, the boat now full of water, is towed to the Dartmouth side and a barrage put around her.

As I leave in the morning, I ask the harbour staff what it is. It is the African Queen, a wooden naval vessel, a Dunkirk little ship, which was used for fishing charters. Most times I crossed the Skerries bank, she’d be anchored on or near them. A sad end to a fine ship.

Stoke Gabriel

A sail with the tide got me into the Dart around high water, and with sufficient height of tide to cross the Flat Owers sandbank above Dittisham and with a large loop, make for the nicely named Pighole Point and pick up one of the two visitors’ moorings.

Seadog 2 needed his walk. Stoke Gabriel has good walks in the woods around the creek, the down river side path being more commodious but stopping fairly soon at a Private No Entry sign.

In the evening, a pint can be bought at the restaurant on the quay and one can sit outside looking at the peaceful view of church and large mill pond. I respectfully admire the 1000 year old yew tree in the churchyard).

Totnes

Many moons ago, in my first boat, a Contessa 26, I had sailed up to the Steam Packet, but with the deeper keeled Konsort, I have never had the nerve. My daughter challenged me to sail up; and High tide Totnes is a convenient 1230, so I am able to sail up to the Steam Packet pub, which has its own short quay, for a pint and a quick crab sandwich. You need the detailed Dartmouth chart and Fishwick’s West Country Cruising, and between them, it isn’t too difficult to avoid the large expanses of mud. It shouldn’t be, although don’t be fooled by the large ferryboats. Their draft is only 3 feet 5 inches; but timber boats used to go to Baltic Wharf on the tide. The town end is being converted to luxury housing, doubtless expensive for the second homers that plague South Hams, which has the highest proportion of any area in the country. Across the river the Totnes Boating Association, a successful club for people who mostly don’t want to sail outside the Dart. Strange, but seems to be flourishing.

Back at Stoke Gabriel, what makes the mooring special is that the locals don’t use them at night, so the peace is near total and the Dart is so wide here, it’s called Dart Lake. Very peaceful as the sun goes down.

On Sunday morning, after watching the skiffs and the kayaks –but very few yachts – coming downstream from Totnes, I row ashore. Because it is such a peaceful spot, I have been rowing, not disturbing the peace by using the outboard. So my splashes mix with the church bells.

Children are starting to gather for their sailing lessons in dinghies. The Stoke Gabriel Boating Association is unusual or perhaps unique. Once you’ve joined (2021: £70 family, £55 individual) you get Unlimited use of the club’s fleet of sailing dinghies, canoes, kayaks and rowing boats for an annual fee of £40 towards the cost of maintenance and insurance. And the fleet seems quite substantial.

Another time, more recently, in 2020, I was walking Seadog2 ashore by the Boathouse and a man came down the shore in a wetsuit, went into the Boathouse, and emerged a couple of minutes later with a paddle board. “Been working at my computer all day, time to unwind.” I dinghied back to the boat and was enjoying the evening sunset in the cockpit, when he drifted past, lying on the board.

The only down side of Stoke Gabriel is if you have to go ashore at low water. There is a great deal of mud, which it is very difficult to avoid when leaping from the dinghy.

On the cabin shelf:

I tie up to the bones of an old ship. And the excellent Lost Ships of the West Country: A Guide to Forgotten Craft from Poole to Gloucester by Martin Langley and Edwina Small (Stanford Maritime, 1988) tells me it is the Glory, a Brixham trawler build in 1906, the name being a nod by the owner to Methodism.

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I stop off in Dartmouth, and ask after the African Queen. It was totally burnt out, so was taken up the slip at the old Philip & Son yard (established 1858, it says on the big shed door) and cut up. It was out with anglers most times I went across the Skerries, and it did look a bit like the steamer in the 1951 film of that name, with Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn.

Apparently, the owner, not surprisingly, is still very cut up. And that made me think that the RNLI accounts of their shouts in their magazine are too triumphalist and don’t take into account the heartbreak of people who have to abandon their vessels.The same point applies to TV programmes that glamourise the rescue but say nothing of the survivors.

And whilst I am on the subject, the RNLI just does boy racer and no green credentials at all. Which is rather short-sighted. No point in saying how fast you’ll get there when the oil runs out.

Teignmouth/Shaldon

The forecasters are talking of the weather breaking, so it is time to get into a safe harbour. I head for Teignmouth, where I’ll meet up with an old mate, Bob. I can’t get in till low water plus two, which is around 1430, so I consider Babbacombe, at the back of Torquay. Moorings, nice little harbour, and a pub above it. When I feel enthusiastic, I dinghy ashore and take the cliff railway at nearby Oddicombe.

There is clearly a new fashion of kayak fishing.Drifting up to Teignmouth, I let out my two amateurish trolling lines, and in an hour, catch four, two of them largish ones.

I don’t like gutting them, but as my friend Paul said: “No-one should be allowed to eat meat, who hasn’t visited an abbatoirr”. If I didn’t want to kill them, I shouldn’t have caught them.

With enough water and no Easterly breeze, there is no difficulty getting into Teignmouth. They keep the channel well dredged for the coasters coming in to collect ball clay from the clay pits further up the Teign.

The estuary is buzzing. There is a regatta on the Shaldon side.

A couple of hours later, in the Ye Olde Jolly Sailor, I solemnly hand the fish over to Bob. That evening, he puts the mackerel fillets under a preheated grill, five minutes each side; new potatoes cooked with rosemary and beans from his garden. I have brought along a suitable wine to accompany this feast …

The next morning, the shipping forecast makes sailing a no-go. Besides, it has been raining since 0600. So, we meet at the Oystercatcher, the café for the intelligentsia and the oddball in Teignmouth. Bob brings back one of my mackerel lines with the new feathers that Louis gave me, as he said mine were no good. Bob has changed them but says they’re too long. They should just cover the hook. So, I ask the waitress for a pair of scissors, and Bob cuts them to the right length, as we sip our mugs of cappuccino. Pleasant.

On the Dene, Teignmouth, Charles Chipperfield’s circus is in town ‘for the first time in 20 years’. The box office is manned by a young lady in a suitable Sergeant Pepper outfit, but the cheapest ticket is £14, so I refrain.

But in the evening, I remember the words of the guy who taught me most of what I know about sailing, Neil Hunter who ran a sailing school out of Ramsgate. He used to say: ‘Go and look at the conditions before you sail’. So I go over to the Shaldon side of the estuary. The last of its regatta is being played out under umbrellas. There are placards, explaining the sea defences and also how well defended the estuary was during the war, at least in part to defend the Morgan Giles shipyards at Teignmouth.

I walk down to the Ness Hotel, order a pint of Badger’s beer, and look at the relatively calm sea. I look back up towards Budleigh Salterton and Sidmouth shrouded in rain mist. I start humming an old Alan Price number ‘I was not born to follow’ and it seems to me that yachting is about doing and seeing different things, despite the somewhat dodgey weather,

I walk back past the Lucette light, the lighthouse for Teignmouth. It says it’s for Philip Lucette but nothing more. I ring up the Teignmouth & Shaldon museum to see if they know. A few weeks later, a nice lady rings back. Philip Lucette (1904-1949) was from Staffordshire and was on holiday in Teignmouth when he died. His wife paid for the light, which was unveiled in 1953.

On the cabin shelf:

My favourite pub in Teignmouth is The Ship, where Crowhurst drank while trying to get Teignmouth Electron ready.

I used to live on the boat on days of lectures when doing my M.A and would pop in for a pint after I returned from uni. One evening, all the newspapers were being read by other customers, and I was reduced to reading the Brixham Free Advertiser or some such title. In it, was a picture of a group of elderly gents appealing for younger blood for their Model Engineering Society.

For the younger generation of readers, model engineering was very big after the Second World War. Nevil Shute’s Trustee from the Tool Room, published in 1960, turns on the international renown of a journalist of the specialist magazine for model engineers. But now – this would have been about 2005 – the society was obviously very keen to meet and help new members, but I felt pretty certain that interest would be low.

Exmouth

Past Brixham, and see the pilot boat go out to service a VLCC (very large crude carrier) oil tanker, as the Brixham pilots must have done now for hundreds of years, taking boats up Channel.

Slow progress up into the Exe. Decide it would be good to have mussels for supper, but won’t get to the fishmonger near the harbour in time. So have the brainwave of ringing the water taxi boss and ask him, when he takes his cigarette break, if he could get me a couple of pounds.

Next day, take the water taxi ashore. The water taxis are odd little boats with bluff bows which might make good landing craft, but seem unsuitable for the fast flowing Exe. I check out on his winter, when he is an abseil supervisor in London. Plate glass windows are put into tall buildings from the outside, but only when it’s not windy. And he didn’t have a good winter, as he’s only paid when he’s working, and there were all those storms last winter.

Seadog 2 finds a ball, which I take back to the boat. Then for some reason, he drops it off the back of the boat. Not understanding about tides, he spends the next hour looking for it under the transom. Even the next morning, he is sitting there, still grieving for that lost ball.

On the cabin shelf:

Norman Lewis’ Voices of the Old Sea is an account of his three year stay in a Catalonian fishing village after World War Two, although only published in 1984. The villagers are full of myths and superstitions, which Lewis lovingly and non-evaluatively records. There is an even the equivalent of a witch doctor, a Curandero, who tells them when it is time to go in search of the tuna. It is a book to be read at sea, when one is more in tune with its rhythms and its assumption of eternity. The epigram at the beginning of the book is:

When asked how the great changes that had taken place were likely to affect his future, a fisherman replied, ‘How can anyone say? One thing is certain. Here we have always been, and here, whatever happens, we shall remain, listening to the voices of the old sea.’

In the second year of his three year stay, a black marketeer moves in and turns the place into a tourist resort within two years – smartens up the hotel and the bar, bad flamenco, only ‘pretty’ fish on the menu, and no sharp tastes to the food. He buys the villagers with higher wages, and when a storm damages the fishing fleet, and the fishermen do not have the capital to replace the lost boat, the transformation is complete. Within a few years, Farol was swallowed up as part of the Costa Brava.

I don’t expect Exmouth had its near witch doctor who told them when to go out for the tuna; but I don’t think we should get too snotty of the destruction of the local culture in the Southwest.

This town was an important port and an early resort, benefitting from the embargo on travel, caused by the Napoleonic wars (Teignmouth, Dawlish, Sidmouth, Lyme all benefitted for the same reason

In Exmouth, I certainly recall a shanty town of huts made of wood and cardboard on the flat lands to the north of the harbour; that the first pilot guide to the West Country warned the sailor to be careful of coasters coming down the narrow channel.

Somebody bought the harbour and closed it and built smart high rise blocks. Now more of the harbour area is being cleared for a ‘gated community’. Logical, as society splits into a few haves and everyone else as have-nots, the ‘haves’ must protect what they have.

Now the council has sold a site on the seafront to a hotel chain.

Still the views across the river as one walks up North across the sands at low water; and looking South on the sea beach are unchanged and remarkable.

If stuck in Exmouth, there is a regular train service along the Exe, with good river views. Make sure you get out at Exeter Central, not Exeter St Davids.

You might like to look at Book Exchange, West Street Exeter. It’s part of Book Cycle, hence the cycle outside and you can swop 3 books for 3 of theirs for free- and the books aren’t tutt. Quite a good maritime section.

You can also get out at Topsham. The South West Maritime History Society traditionally has its Annual General Meeting at the Globe, an old coaching inn. A few doors down the High Street, I scanned the excellent maritime section of the second-hand bookshop.

The Museum, walking down the town along the Exe, you find the museum.. Well worth a visit (Open 2-5, except Tuesday and Friday; museum@topsham.org.uk; 01392-783244).

At midday Thursday, despite a rather poor forecast, I am assured by the locals in the water taxi, that this is an exaggeration, so I sail for Lyme Regis, proudly getting out the rarely used Tidal Atlas for Lyme Bay, Admiralty NP 263.

The start of the Jurassic coast is marked by quite a striking column just outside Exmouth. The first stop on the world heritage is a very large caravan site.

The entrance to the Exe used to be further east. One used to come in to the Exe, using the caravan park’s diamond shape as a rough guide, to the fairway buoy that was about a mile to the East from where it is now (The river broke through to the south between sandbanks a few years ago).

There is a light on the shooting range at Straight Point. I get out the binos out and it is like a railway signal structure.

Heading East in a car, sometime later, I stop at the Grand Western Canal at Tiverton and watch a barge take off and get hitched to a horse, which pulls it down the canal. You can have coffee on a platform in the canal basin. Pleasant.

In the shop that sells the barge tickets, you can buy an informative booklet: Helen Harris’ The Grand Western Canal. It was part of a scheme to cut out the need to double the Longships (Land’s End) by linking Bridgwater in the North to Topsham beneath Exeter. Only Taunton-Bridgwater and the Tiverton link were ever built. (Another such scheme was to link Bude with the Tamar, via the Bude Canal and tubs on rails to get up the hills).

July 31.

My mate from my East End days, Bob, has his 70th at the Oxenham Arms, West Dartmoor. The next morning, the landlord tells me of Oxenham’s maritime heritage. He says it was the crossroads of the Mariners’ Way, which linked the ports of Falmouth, Plymouth, Bideford/Barnstaple and Exeter/Topsham as sailors walked from their port of discharge to their home port; and that these ways were lit at night and that the sailors sang shanties as they walked, which doesn’t make a lot of sense if shanties are work songs to ease pulling loads.

Now when I got home, serendipity. I find an e-mail saying that the symposium at the S.S. Great Britain. ‘Connecting the Oceans’. Graeme Milne is speaking and the spiel tells that he edited a symposium on sea shanties in the International Journal of Maritime History, May 2017, with articles by himself, Gerry Smith and Catherine Tackley. These authors suggest that the shanty came from Irish folk songs and African-American work songs that the sailors picked up in the Caribbean and at American southern ports. Interesting the way shanties have not been given a back history, as if they were invented on British commercial sailing ships. Gerry Smith refers to ‘forebitters’, which were ballads, not shanties and sung by sailors when off-duty. So, I would think the mariners on the Mariners’ Way were singing forebitters.

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Branscombe, west of Beer, is a pretty exposed anchorage so I check out the moorings for fishing boats at Beer, which used to have quite a large fleet drawn up on the beach. I don’t go in too close, but I can’t see that many boats and apparently some fishermen gave up after the winter storms damaged their gear. So Branscombe it has to be.

Sunday morning and Branscombe is at peace, just the odd early morning beach walker. Like a sort of maritime Under Milk Wood.

There is almost always surf at Branscombe, and the first foray ashore using the outboard to try and get ashore was a mistake. The bottom of the outboard caught in the shingle, the dinghy swung round and left me broadside to the sea and soaked. The next time, I cut the outboard outside the surf and lift it up and then row in. Not quite dry but a vast improvement.

Lyme Regis

Just got into Lyme Regis before the weather blows up. Am conned onto the pontoons, protected by the extended pier, in by a harbour staff waving an oar. My sister, her partner and her two grandchildren (‘step grand-children’ as they inform me), aged 9 and 11, arrive. I had thought of sleeping at her place, but the wind makes me uneasy. We find a restaurant on the Marine Parade which looks out on across the Cobb at sunset. Magical. My sister’s partner comments on the string of pack horses that use to leave the town up the valley with salted fish for Billingsgate. (The railway was never a major feature of Lyme, being a branch line from Axminster, only opened in 1903 and closed by Beeching in 1965).

As I came off the plastic pontoon onto the Cobb, I noticed silver fish in the stones and at first, thought they were some kind of decoration. But apparently, the mackerel shoals have chased the whitebait ashore, and on the top of the tide, the whitebait temporarily escaped by fleeing onto the Cobb and got caught by the ebbing tide.

The girls want to play with Seadog 2. So we go back to the boat and feed him and let him loose. They play ball with him, but this is a short term game. If you buy an ordinary tennis ball, his sharp teeth deflate it within three throws, so that, much to his puzzlement, it sinks and he can’t find it. If you buy a £5 unchewable ball, it is so dense, it sinks.

After a while, the dog returns without the girls. So I go and look. They are carefully lifting up individual whitebait and returning them to the sea.

After they leave, I walk down the outside of the Cobb. It really is a massive structure. First constructed of wood in the fourteenth century, it has been swept away at various times. Monmouth landed here for his ill-fated rebellion in 1685, encouraged by William of Orange, who then invaded with a large army in 1688. The southern arm dates from 1690. Its most flourishing period was the eighteenth century, when it was a larger port than Liverpool. It lost importance when it could not accommodate ships as they got larger.

The next morning, I strike up a conversation with the guy in a little motor cruiser parked ahead of me, Steve Belasco. He takes pictures of the Jurassic coast in his spare time, having been a professional newspaper photographer and now is a sub-editor of the group that seemed to own most of the local papers along the south coast.

We have breakfast on the Marine Parade, again with that lovely view out to sea down to Portland Bill in the background, and the Cobb in the foreground. Steve lives near the Hardy (‘Kiss me’, not Thomas) monument, that is on the cliffs down the coast. He tells of an interesting theory: that Nelson didn’t say ‘Kiss me, Hardy’ but ‘Kismet, Hardy’ (originally, an Arabic word meaning Fate/destiny/God’s will), i.e commenting ironically on winning the battle but losing his life.

I pass Charmouth on the way round Portland Bill. It nestles to the west of its harbour. I was working in Plymouth in 1993, when on March 22, a party of eight teenagers from Southway Community College set off with their teachers and two instructors in kayaks for Lyme, four miles and no more than two hours away. None of the children had been in a kayak before. The wind got up, the kayaks got separated and four children drowned. Two instructors from the Active Learning and Leisure Centre had resigned a few months previously, warning that there was insufficient safety gear or personnel. Des Sleightholme said somewhere: “There’s no such thing as a jolly at sea”. He meant that you had to know what you were doing, however nice things looked.

West Bay (Bridport)

On the afternoon tide, I leave for West Bay. The harbour entrance has been widened. One use to enter through a long narrow run between two wooden piers. Once committed, you just surfed in. I used to moor alongside the old coaster berth inside the old harbour, but now they have two pontoons for visitors, OK except for spring tides, when a fin keel boat will touch bottom.

It is coming up to Bank Holiday weekend and West Bay is heaving. The cliff to the East dramatically looms over the town. Of course, it featured in Broadchurch, now filming its second series. Before that, it was used for Harbour Lights, a gentle Sunday soap, and, as Steve Belasco pointed out to me, for The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, a hit comedy TV series in the seventies. Leonard Rossiter abandons his clothes and swims out to sea from East Beach. Historically, the harbour was used to export the rope made in the ropewalks of Bridport up on the hill.

In the evening, I walk Seadog 2 up the cliff to the west of the town, before repairing to the George for a nice pint of Palmers, brewed just up the road. I go outside to find that they are preparing two huge pans of paella and fajita. To go with this Spanish theme, they have hired a flamenco guitarist from Yorkshire. I asked him how he learnt flamenco and it was mainly from watching T.V. Anyway, he starts playing and he seems pretty good.

I go back to the boat and make supper and eat it in the cockpit. The fishermen on the pier become silhouettes as the sun sets.

Saturday morning, and I’m up early to walk Seadog 2 before leaving, on the path up the East Cliff. Lumps of the cliff lie along the beach, so it doesn’t feel too stable.

The harbour is busy with people using the slip. A charter fishing boat is preparing long trolling lines for mackerel. There is a dive boat, heading for M2. M2? An experimental submarine aircraft carrier, so very long – 296 ft., wrecked on 26/1//1930, with all its crew of 60 drowned, at 50 degrees 34.6 minutes north, 2 degrees 33.93 minutes west.

On the cabin shelf:

In Bridport, I found Gilbert Hackforth-Jones’ Green Sailors Beware! (Hodder & Stoughton, 1954). It was one of a series and the author’s note tells us ‘Well, here’s number four, based as usual on last year’s radio plays in the Children’s Hour’. Harry Bennett, of the History Department, Plymouth University talks of our current ‘sea blindness’; and what is striking is the ‘sailing literacy’ assumed by this children’s story. The centrepiece of the book is a long description of a race during Cowes Week in high winds. To get anything out of it, the reader would have to have some basic concepts of sailing, wind direction, the effects of tide, racing manoeuvres, etc. ‘Children’s Hour’, before T.V., was surely listened to by a very large audience of children of a wide socio-economic range, and one must assume that at least a sizeable minority did have this knowledge.

Somewhere in my travels I have picked up a relatively rare Yachting Yarns by the influential East Coast sailor, Francis B Cooke. Founder of the Fambridge Yacht Club on the Crouch above Burnham, Cooke had a very long period of writing ‘How To’ yachting texts from 1890 to 1960, his last article appearing when he was over 100! Yarns came out in 1944 in a wartime economy edition and is a set of pretty dire and formulaic yachting yarns, with unlikely rescues, maidens in distress etc. Interestingly, the last tale ‘Kidnapped’ tells of a bounder who kidnaps the skipper who is likely to beat him. An unknown sailor takes his place and beats the bounder, whose dirty deeds having been observed, is expelled from the yacht club. But the twist is that the unknown sailor is a girl; and the willingness to tolerate women racing but not let them anywhere the yacht club, unless escorted by a male member and only on regatta days, is one of the paradoxes of Edwardian sailing. Another interesting feature is that wherever in these stories, boy meets girl on yacht, they invariably end up marrying each other. The sexual arousal of seeing women dress and act more naturally and in a less restricted manner is continually the cause of the men falling hopelessly in love. The same motif is used in Erskine Childers’ Riddle of the Sands, apparently at the insistence of his publisher. Childers, who was unmarried at the time, didn’t know how to do the romantic bits and was rather unfairly hammered by the reviews for their woodenness.

As a grace note, I have been reading Then, Now: The Past in Contemporary Society by Peter Fowler, who was a Professor of Archaeology at Newcastle University, which I found in the course of my wandering around second-hand bookshops. It was published in 1992, but he consistently uses “the pasts”, when most people would say “the past”. Which suggests that people with an agenda may well want to create your “past” for you. All the more need for history to stay an independent subject, with its practitioners trying to be as objective as possible.

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Steve Belasco waxed lyrical about the beauty of Chesil Beach, so since I have time before my next destination – a mooring off Branscombe – I head East. Lyme Bay is defined by Portland Bill and Chesil Beach, so really belongs to Dorset. Also, you often can’t see the Bill from Devon, and if you can’t see the Bill, except the loom of its light, then you’re not really in Lyme Bay.

The beach starts shortly after another cliff after the East Cliff and then runs southeast till it becomes Chesil. And it’s pretty featureless. At last, I see Abbotsbury chapel – the fourteenth century St Catherine’s – on its hill by the sea. Much preferable to the ‘common’ St Michael’s on Glastonbury Tor. I had hopes of getting married at St Catherine’s but the vicar at the time wasn’t interested, so Camden Registry Office had to do.

You can’t see the Fleet inside the peeble ridge, for the obvious reason that if you could, it would drain into the sea. Instead, all that happens is that the ridge becomes more compact and taller.

On the cabin shelf:

The great children’s/adventure novel is Moonfleet, by John Meade Faulkner, published 1898, which is set on East Fleet.

For the best view of Chesil Beach, I recommend the Cove House pub, Church Cove, the Isle of Portland at sunset.. The pub was built in the early nineteenth century and was one of the few buildings in Chiswell village to survive the storm of 1824. It’s a very solid building built of large square dressed Portland stone.

Good range of beers. One hint: don’t eat outside if the wind is blowing, as it’ll be cold before you finish

Portland

Portland Marina. Sign in the Men’s shower area: “Female operative in male area”. My mind goes back to the early days of my learning to sail with sailing schools in the early eighties. Rather than make the interminable journey on a Friday afternoon across London to join the M3 and then down to the Solent, I found out about Kent Sailing School, owner Neil Hunter, offering weekends “going foreign.” Hard nowadays to imagine the excitement generated by crossing the shipping lanes and eating moules and frites in Calais on Saturday night, before sailing home on the flood tide.

We sailed out of Ramsgate and the road runs steeply down to the Royal Harbour, creating large, arched caverns underneath it, reached by the steps of Jacob’s Ladder. The toilet and shower block occupied one such cavern. One entered and was greeted by a cloud of steam in which was suspended the smell of the well-used toilets and cigarette smoke. Many of the middle-aged yachties had been in the war, and smoked continuously – certainly on the loo, if not in the shower – Senior Service or “full strength” Players. (Filter cigarettes were for sissies). And this scene was controlled by one lady at a small table from whom one bought a ticket, with about 50 or so well-behaved, non-swearing gents, wrapped in their post-rugby match towels moving around.

Poole

On the cabin shelf:

Ignoring Betrand Russell (1950) and Churchill (1953) who did not write fiction and the playwright Harold Pinter (2005), only five English-born novelists have won the Nobel prize for literature – Kipling (1907), Shaw (1925), Galsworthy (1932), William Golding (1983). And Kazuo Ishiguro (2017)

Golding had a long term habit with drink, which made him abusive; and his daughter, in her memoir of him, The Children of Lovers (Faber and Faber, 2011), details some pretty cruel behaviour; and this led me to the doorstopping John Carey’s biography William Golding (Faber and Faber, 2009)

I’m thinking of him because I am in Poole where he trained for the attack on Walcheron.

I’m thinking of him because I’ve got to wonder if he suffered from a long-term post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his war experience. Golding was in charge of a rocket ship – a landing craft tank that had the fire power equivalent to ’80 light cruisers or 200 destroyers’ (Carey, 96). After D-day,by October, 1944, Antwerp had been liberated. If the allies were to advance on Germany, Antwerp had to be available, but access was blocked from the sea by the Germans holding onto the island of Walcheron in the Schedlt. He and other naval personnel practised in Poole Harbour for the liberation of Walcheron by land troops attacking from a variety of quarters. They also dinghy raced.

Many of the craft were essentially diversionary. In the actual attack, the yachts that he had seen in Poole, were sent close to the shore. They were hopelessly under-armed and were machine gunned into oblivion.

Additionally, Golding thought he was sending his fire power into an island only occupied by German troops. However, when he went ashore at Ostend ‘to visit his injured commanding officer. There he found the hospital full of Dutch citizens horribly injured in the attack of Westkapelle, the small town which had been the focus for the seaborne operation. More than two hundred of the villagers had been killed. My father’s briefing had told him that the civilian population had been evacuated’. (Judy Golding, 217).

Dave Hill, long-time webmaster for the South West Maritime History Society, got me started on this present volume by creating a space on the Southwest Maritime History Society website. He had been an I.T. expert at Marconi at Chelmsford before coming West. His website was a state of the art site. The trouble was no-one on the committee was able to understand it.

He was a member of the Redclyffe Yacht Club on the Frome. They held a wake for him. What was nice was that they brought his yacht alongside their pontoon and placed a purple wreath on the bow.

Floating about the Back of the Wight

I popped over to Cowes the other week to see my chums at the Squadron.

Whilst there, I found this cutting from the South Isle of Wight Gazette, written by its crack reporter, Harriet Findet.

Now, my other set of chums, a bit less elevated, namely the committee of the South West Maritime History Society, have had trouble recruiting new members to the committee.

So I thought this cutting of interest both to the committee and the Society’s members and it was published in South West Soundings, no.104, in April, 2017:

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From the South Isle of Wight Gazette,

Jan. 7, 2017

Harriet Findet

We know from our mail bag that many of our readers are interested in the history of the many harbours and havens in this area. So, the rare opportunity to meet the committee members of the well-respected Back of the Wight Sailing and Maritime History Society was not to be missed. As arranged, I presented myself at the pub whose back room they use for their committee meetings, an hour or so before one of its meetings was due to start.

I was warmly greeted by its chair, John Beardmore. I looked around for the other members but could not see them and just assumed that they had yet to arrive or were getting themselves a drink. However, as time passed, no-one joined us, and I asked John how many he was expecting.

“Six in one sense, none in another” was his cryptic reply.

He explained to me that there had been a great loss of interest in maritime history in the last few years. Generally, there was a lack of interest in things maritime in the media, excepting when it was convenient for politicians to wheel out national heroes, like Drake or Nelson. Specialist M.A. courses in maritime history were closing. Membership of regional and national maritime history societies was falling due to the ageing of that membership and the non-replacement by younger people.

“And are there are no exceptions to this trend?” I asked.

“Well, there is the Marine Quarterly, launched in 2011, which you can only get by subscription’”

Strangely, his demeanour changed. He started beaming at me and talking more slowly and clearly, and in an oddly high-pitched voice. “Hullo, I’m Cecily, the membership secretary. I’ve heard its losses are underwritten by the British Marine Federation, so that they can say ‘Look, people are still interested in things maritime’. In the 1950’s, you know, the Pentagon promoted a black general, and his job was to sit in his office with the door open, so that visitors could walk in and shake his hand, and say “Gee, a black general’. That sort of thing”.

Another voice, more clipped came in: “I think Cecily is wrong. My theory is blackmail. Obviously, the editor knows lots of people in various yacht clubs. So, he siddles up to them and says: ‘I’m so glad to see that you and Mrs Bassethwaite-Jones are getting on so well … I wonder if I can interest both of you in a lifetime subscription’. I’m Geoffrey, the treasurer by the way.”

After a short while, John started talking again in his original voice. “I don’t go along with either of them, but I’d agree that the editor of Marine Quarterly seems to have quite a lot of friends. Perhaps he persuaded them to take out standing orders and direct debits, and now that they’ve got older, they can’t work out how to cancel them. Or perhaps, the last few people interested in maritime history are huddling together, like penguins in the Antarctic winter.”

I was getting puzzled about these conflicting views, apparently from the same person.

John picked up my confusion. “Let me explain. Fifteen years ago, we had a very competent, middle-aged committee. So competent that they saw every new task as a challenge and that it would be an insult to ask for help. And this system worked well for many years. Of course, it meant our non-committee members were completely passive, but they enjoyed the talks and the outings we put on for them, so they never complained.” He took a sip of his tea.

“The trouble arose as the committee members or their partners started to get ill or even dying. Fortunately, my health was O.K. but there was no point in asking the non-committee members to help, because we hadn’t asked them for twenty years, so why should they volunteer now? And, if anything, they were even older than the committee members.”

“So what did you do?” I asked.

“Well, I’ve always dabbled in psychology and personality, and one day I came across an article which said that it was a mistake to think of ourselves as a single person, and that we were actually multiple selves, which share one body. For example, you have a partner, and perhaps children, as well as holding down this job?” I nodded.

“Well, you’ll find that you behave quite differently to your children than to your husband – different foods, different ways of talking? And that sometimes as a journalist, you do things that you wouldn’t want your children to know about?”

I nodded. I thought back to the time when we got wind of the extra-curricular activities of our sitting M.P., Linda Likemore. It wasn’t her sitting that interested us, but other positions she was adopting in the net shed on the Old Harbour beach with one of her constituents. I had to pretend to be fishing for bass for two freezing nights – Yes, I could see what John was driving at.

“So, it seemed to me that, if we were composed of these different selves, it might be possible for a single body to be composed of different roles on the committee, and, as the need arose, that’s what I, I mean we, have been doing.”

I was amazed. I felt like Alice in Wonderland. “You mean: you are the committee.”

“No, we are the committee”, said John.

“But doesn’t that mean you all agree all the time?”

“Oh, no, not at all. We see our new committee members grow in confidence as they get the hang of their role.”

“Which can be very irritating’ Henry, beady-eyes, slow speech for imbeciles, took over. “We should be spending our money on the journal, which I edit. That’s what gives us our prestige, but do they listen …?”

Another voice joined in “Hi, I’m Peter, the events organiser. Sorry, I’m a bit late. I know Henry is irritating with his know-it-all way of speaking, but he’s right. It is our shop window.”

There was a short pause and then John returned. “Of course, they don’t have to keep an eye on the budget, which being the chair, I do – and I’ve said this to their faces, if you take my meaning, many, many times. You see, what they can’t do, I have to buy professional help for. We had a marvellous webmaster, Beatrice, but she died, God rest her soul, and the new man – well, to be kind, if he presses the button, and the computer comes on, he’s happy … (I can tell you this, because he’s sent his apologies). But I’ve been pleasantly surprised how people get better in doing their jobs over time”.

He looked at his watch. “Well, time to start the meeting.”

I remembered that I’d forgotten to ask for a picture and whipped out my camera. “You don’t mind?”

He moved a hand as if to cover the lens. “I’m afraid not. You see, your picture editor is bound to use the caption: ‘The chair of the South Isle of Wight Sailing and Maritime History Society’ and that upsets the other committee members, so a couple of meetings back, they passed a motion banning images of our corporate – but, I hope not, corpulent – body. Of course, I abstained. And now” – he stood up – “if you’ll excuse us, we really must get started.”

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I have ventured further East than the Isle of Wight and the Solent. Once, when engrossed in yachting literature, to check out Great Yarmouth, the starting point of Arthur Ransome’s Peter Duck; and once to Brighton in order to cross to Fecamp and then sail West, which included some magical days in Ploumenac’h.

Floating around the Channel Islands and the French coast

Guernsey, September 2013

August 29: You join the international maritime community 10-15 mile out from Salcombe: the laden china clay boat from Fowey is on course up towards Holland; a few venturesome fishing boats are trawling; and you start seeing the traffic coming out of the Southwest Traffic Separation Scheme and heading down channel.

September 2: Only 98 things to do before I do, as I have long wished to enter Rocquaine Bay, which lies behind the reefs around Les Hanois lighthouse. Louis acts as my pilot. I comment that surely today we have the technology to blow up the large German gun turrets. Louis says they are now major tourist attractions.

We land and celebrate safe arrival with a pint of the local ale at the Imperial. The view across from Fort Grey across the bay and out into the Channel past the reefs of Les Hanois is visually staggering.

I have done the crossing to North Brittany from Falmouth to L’Aberwrac’h, but it takes 24 hours and if you aim to arrive around dawn, so that you can be guided by the Ile de Vierge light, the tallest traditional lighthouse in the world, there’s often mist, obscuring the light. A day crossing to St Peter Port and then heading west via Treguier and Lezardrieux and Roscoff is more civilised.

A beautiful place to spend a night heading west is

Ploumanac’h

I drank Calva with Paul in an ‘Irish’ pub we found after a good meal at Ploumanac’h. I discovered this lagoon round the corner from Perros-Guirec one summer when with the family, I’d cruised west from St Peter Port. For a couple of lazy days, we went sight-seeing during the day and in the evening, ate outside at a fish restaurant overlooking the harbour entrance with a Disney castle opposite. On the last night, we decided a couple of Calvados were in order. Unfortunately, while we were sipping them, the tide rushed in and put the ring I had tied the dinghy to three metres under water. I had to strip and swim out to the dinghy and untie its warps and push it into the shore, while Paul bent over double laughing.

Funny when you re-play the video and realise something was happening which you didn’t realise at the time. The most obvious sailing one was when Ally dropped the radio that I used for the shipping forecast. I can see it now – a red plastic case, with a convenient cover that protected the controls. I was angry at the mis-treatment of such a valuable piece of sailing gear. But it was cold hands and the start of arthritis.

In Ploumanac’h, the next day, we were going to leave for home but the sill didn’t cover till mid-afternoon. So, we walked across the beaches with their strange pink granite shapes to Tregastel. I noticed Paul was sweating a lot, but it was a hot day … I had the wit to order a taxi back after lunch at a beach side bistro.

As I recall, we left around 1700 and I had agreed with Ally that if we could get up to the house before 1000, we would join them for breakfast. We were in the bay by 0800, dinghied ashore and walked up the hill, with an oar each, to join her and my sister-in-law, Jan, and her two children eating breakfast in the garden.

Happy, satisfying time.

Within three months, I received a phone call that Paul was in the Royal Free with inoperable cancer. One glance at his distended stomach on his thin frame confirmed the diagnosis. And within another three months, he was dead.

They scattered his ashes from the Flushing ferry.

Ushant

The worse tide I’ve got into was off Ushant. I had sailed down as far as Morgat through the Chenal du Four with Bob and was now returning.

For a few days, he hadn’t been very well. What had happened was that we had sailed from Salcombe and the night before we sailed, we had celebrated the beginning of the voyage in a restaurant then called Claire’s – quite modestly, wine wise, just one bottle between us as I recall. Back on the finger pontoon of the residents’ mooring, Bob, while having a pee, had for some unaccountable reason stepped backwards into the drink. I soon fished him out, but for the rest of the voyage, he would be good for a few hours and then go down with sweats and feeling awful, although a good meal could revive him.

Anyway, we got back to Le Conquet, with a view to having a look at Ushant. He didn’t look clever, so I said ‘Let’s skip it. There’ll be other times.’ Bob said correctly, ‘There won’t’, so it was agreed, given the weather was so calm, we’d go for it.

I had to go for it, because for the whole day, with some tortuous navigation between various islands with large drying areas, Bob could not stir from his bunk. Eventually, with some relief, I moored in the bay at Lampaul, at the bottom end of Ushant.

It was obvious that I had to get some medical help for Bob. Putting him in a dinghy, I headed for the Pharmacy, as I had heard that they were unofficial medics. But the pharmacist took one look at Bob and told us to go to the doctor’s a few streets away.

We were shown in and waited an hour. Eventually, the doctor arrived, I think from a spin in his boat. I now had the task of explaining that Bob was getting ‘tres chaud’ and ‘non fort’. I had my 10 language sailing dictionary with me, but that was mainly concerned with ‘I need a shackle for my main halyard’, so wasn’t much use.

In desperation, I eventually said, ‘Il est tombe dans les eaux de Salcombe’. Instant recognition beamed out of his face. ‘Rhino.something’ he pronounced (I looked it up later and it meant tonsillitis. Apparently, bugs stop at the first convenient breeding ground on the way down.)

Back to the pharmacy for a number of medicaments that seem to bung up every orifice. Waiting for the afternoon tide, I visited the lighthouse museum at Creach. What a contrast to the lumber store at Penzance, called a Lighthouse Museum (even that is now closed) – soft music, spotlights and exhibits set up like works of art.

In the early afternoon, at the appointed time as told by the pilot books, we set off, past an overhead line out to the lighthouse. The waves were ferocious, pyramidal and breaking from any quarter. Perceptually, you felt you would be on the rocks at any time, but looking back, you saw you were being pushed out to sea at a rate of knots.

I was determined to hear the 1756 forecast, which was a good job, as it told of a sudden gale. So we sailed quickly up to L’Aberwrac’h, where a revived Bob and I tucked into a good bowl of mussels, with the last of our French money (we had intended to sail home direct from Ushant).

The next day dawned fine and the wind down. Unfortunately, the gale had left a long swell, which once again did for Bob …

Meanwhile, back in the Channel Islands:

Dielette, Normandy

September 3: I decide to see a bit of France and head across from Sark to Dielette. Bit nerve-wracking as my track is just beneath the Alderney Race, but no need to worry. There is a constant stream of large motor boats heading back to St Peter Port. Interesting how round here the prestige object is the motor boat, not the yacht, of which although it’s Sunday, there are very few around. Why is the motor boat a more obvious symbol of wealth?

This place is in the middle of nowhere. The next village, Flamanville is the site of a nuclear power station. Given the massive one at Cap de la Hague is just a few miles up the coast, you would have thought it would have been cheaper just to add a few more rods. Reminds of the Spinners’ song about Liverpool: If you want a cathedral we’ve got one to spare.

In the marina office, the lady explains that this was the port of a disused iron mine – you can see the original loading quay; and the supervisor’s house and the workers’ dormitory in the town above the power station. So, the commune rather than see the port decline, turned it into a marina. Because no need for a large profit, no new, bland “waterfront” housing for second homers and summer lets attached. But the French have done this a number of times in creating successful marinas, the most obvious being St. Vaast-la-Hougue round the other corner of the Cotentin (Cherbourg), with its continuous stream of yachts coming out of the Solent in summer heading to this once run down fishing port. And you think of Kingsbridge on a Saturday night with the kids scuffling around a dead town centre, when a bit of dredging and a couple of lock gates could easily have created a marina out of those acres of mud.

p.m. to Braye, Alderney. It’s neaps but even so the tide is amazingly strong. I have to steer 270 degrees compass to achieve the desired 330 degree heading. The tide is practically lifting the boat bodily.

On the cabin shelf

My wife has decided she doesn’t want me home straight away, so I am to float around for a couple of days. So I shipped Ian Friel’s The British Museum Maritime History of Britain and Ireland. It’s uninspiring – basically a list of wars and the ships that fought them. But after a while, you get reminded of Churchill’s line that “history is written by the victors”. There is no political analysis at all. Each war is inevitable and, at the end, the Navy is serving democracy against (evil) communism. Tell that to the Afghans or the Iraqis, or even to the squaddies in the navy. Maritime history has to be so careful that it doesn’t serve as fact-dressed propaganda. If it doesn’t ask: whose story is this, it doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously.

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Guernsey 1-4 August, 2016

O600: That passage down Salcombe harbour with all the other yachts asleep and Bolt Head looming ahead, still magical after all these years.

But a slow, tedious sail. No wind, or what there was on the nose, so all passage planning made inaccurate by slow speeds. Managed to work out the tides so that I didn’t have to go east about Platte Fougere but sneaked in along the Doyle Passage into Beaucette marina 15 long hours after leaving Salcombe. (Beaucette rather than St Peter Port avoids all the jostling and warps).

Wednesday: Beaucette was a granite quarry; and in 1968-1969, the Royal Engineers blew a hole in the Cliffside wall to create a marina. The quarry is all around you.

Took the bus into St Peter Port. The town I first knew with Victor Hugo’s house, where he wrote The Toilers of the Sea, (1883) about Guernsey fishermen – that can still be visited. Hugo lived here for 19 years after being exiled from France. His house, which you can visit, is a strange, exotic place.

I had brought the family down in a sail direct from Cherbourg. Cherbourg was liberated in June, 1944 and there is a plaque by the town hall, commemorating the event (Sadly, the G.I. who entered the building first was killed on the Rhine). When I got to St Peter Port, there is a similar plaque, but it’s dated May, 1945. Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, built by slave labour, was so thorough that it would have cost thousands of lives to re-capture the Channel Islands, so was not attempted. With their supplies cut off with the fall of St Malo, both the German troops and the natives starved.

The town centre is becoming less and less interesting. When I first went there twenty or so years ago, there were small French-sounding, Guernsey owned shops, all extolling their tax-free goods. Now only Creaseys remains, and the rest are chain stores, so it’s no different from Plymouth, or perhaps closer, Exeter. The nadir is chain stores of accessories for the kids. Except for some half-hearted price reductions in watch shops, there’s no evidence that Guernsey does not charge tax on goods.

Perhaps the Market area has been spared, so I turn left at the Town Church, but there’s nothing there. The Market Hall is a supermarket. There are a few stalls, one of which says ‘Guernsey Produce’ with a woman wearing an outfit that looked like it’s been hired from a fancy dress hire shop. There’s nothing left. Globalisation is complete. Bev tells me it’s because the rents are so high only the big companies can afford them.

But meeting up with an old colleague, Bev, gets me to the Imperial Inn, Portelet on the West coast, and, as ever, it’s a staggering view, especially towards sunset, sipping a drink (don’t drink the local beer – alcoholic tap water; get a bottle of Randall’s Patois from behind the bar). Along the sandy beach to the old Fort Grey along to the German lookout and gun emplacement and to the island of Lihou, and out in the bay, the rocks just north of Les Hanois light.

Louis, Bev’s husband, mentions he is going out on the morrow to catch mackerel for the barbeque at the Rocquaine Bay regatta on the Saturday. The chance to see proper angling is too good to miss and I sign on.

Thursday and Friday: After a day relaxing on the beach with Bev and the two children, I get back to Beaucette in time to move the boat to the moorings outside the marina, so that I can get down to St Peter Port on Friday evening. Mistake: I should have sailed down that night, as I rock like a pig all night, with the high Channel Island tides rising and falling.

At 0745, Louis arrives outside Beaucette in a fast angling boat with cousin John – old established Guernsey families have a great number of relatives – and we take off for the Great Bank between St Martin’s Point towards St Peter’s Port. Louis knows a double dip inside the Bank, so for the next four hours, we go past the spot, marked on his GPS, cut the engine, and drift back down. We must have done that about a dozen times, before we had to quit so that Louis could get me back to Beaucette and his boat across the sill at St Sampson’s. In that time, we line catch 75 mackerel, 3 horse mackerel (bigger and more flavoursome) and a dozen herring, to be enjoyed by John. I gradually got the hang of letting the line out slowly –sometimes the mackerel already bit as it was going down; and feeling the weight hit the bottom, so I did contribute a few. By the time Louis drops me off at my mooring, they are all gutted, to the delight of the following gulls – a professional operation.

After a siesta, I sail down to St Peter Port and get a space on the pontoons outside the harbour. Since my last visit, they have built a walkway so that you don’t need a water taxi/inflate the dinghy. Quite an improvement.

To Mark & Spencers for provisions. The new potatoes are from Suffolk. Crazy when Guernsey grows potatoes, and Jersey Royals are famous.

These are cooked while I use Louis’ recipe for the mackerel. Spread garlic butter on both sides and then grill for 10 minutes each side. Absolutely superb flesh, so tasty.

On the cabin shelf:

On my travels, I have acquired By a Slender Thread by Barrie Skelcher (Navigator Books, 1995), a ‘political thriller cum yachting yarn’. Skelcher worked in the nuclear power industry and someone obviously suggested that he could write a book about the theft of plutonium. He can’t but the tale is mildly engrossing. Female head of health and safety- ‘Janice Hardman, a tall, slender built lady in her late thirties’ (p.14) spurred on by tragic death from radiation poisoning of fiancée, starts to suspect correctly that plutonium is going missing at a re-processing establishment, and being replaced by an inert metal to disguise the loss. She is unable to convince the head of the establishment, a Brigadier, an over-promoted Colonel Blimp type. She consults Dick England (original names don’t come easy to this author), international expert. Together with help from his daughter and her fiancée, they defeat dastardly Russian plot to explode a plutonium nuclear bomb in Dutch waters.

The baddy, a mole who stole the plutonium, dies a satisfying death under the prop of the Russian mother ship. But in an epilogue, Janice, who you might have thought would have been rewarded for her risk-taking and courage which saved the world, is moved out of her job – because she acted without authority, this had ‘raised doubts over her loyalty’. Likewise, England is ‘shunned by the industry he had worked so hard to support’ while the Brigadier receives a knighthood (p.215).

Bit of unspoken anger there. But I read somewhere that no-one who whistleblew in the NHS and got dismissed, when found to have acted correctly, has ever got their job back.

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Saturday: The 0521 shipping forecast is bad – SW/W 4-5 occas. 6 for Portland. Cartaret would be a lee shore and I would be approaching across a bar. To the sneers of Captain Courageous, Captain Cautious goes back to his sleeping bag.

And later heads out on the bus (£1 wherever you are going) to Portelet and the Rocquaine Regatta. It is a lovely day and the regatta has brought hundreds of families with young children, competing in the numerous events – whelk gathering; crab racing (ideally you go down to the low water line and get one); chariot racing – the partners swopping roles at half way; best sand castle. It’s very gentle partly because there are no expensive prizes – just a rosette. No booze or dogs on the beach.

Only jarring note was at the end after the sandcastles had been judged, the boys – between 3 and 5- started jumping on them and pushing each other. No-one intervened in this learning of aggressive ‘masculine’ roles.

I got the bus back to town and wandered over to the Guernsey Yacht Club. Saturday night in August – it should have been heaving. Instead a small birthday party and me and two Old Gaffer types on their way back from the Dournanez Festival to Portsmouth.

The club is just under Castle Cornet (with its excellent maritime museum). The massive castle ahead of one and the vast expanse of harbours behind one show you how central the Channel Islands were to medieval and Victorian shipping trade (and to smuggling with France).

Cartaret, Normandy, 31 August

Sunday: An early start because high water Cartaret, Normandy is 1230 and it’s 31 NM. There’s a Dutch boat on my outside, but just when I am about to knock on their coachroof, I find the wife eating a large biscuit with one hand and casually undoing the main with the other! We leave together. I have the better wind as it is Southerly and I am on a reach, while they have to plug into it to reach a Brittany port.

Louis told me that cruise boats are frequent visitors to St PP. I am trying to work out where Sark ends, when it moves. It is a large cruise ship. Cruise ship provide pre-masticated experience and ‘symbolic’, i.e stereotyped, national characteristics and sights for the passenger to consume. Ready-to-eat food in the shops, ready-to-consume cruise liner experience.

I am glad that I was cautious as I near the coast. The depth rapidly shelves over a long bar. In fact, as I see at low water, I come in over the end of the beach from the North, instead of from the West. This is because the tide has turned as I approached pushing me North. There isn’t much water in the river as I motor up to the marina; and at low water, the river is one large sand bank with people walking their dogs across. But I have arrived. And the kick of going foreign returns.

In the evening, I go into town. It’s the day of the town’s festival. A brass band is playing a familiar tune. I recognise it as ‘The Leaving of Liverpool’. I eat at the restaurant recommended at the marina office. This is the second year running that the mussels – a kilo for 10 euros – are nearly tasteless. But the local cheese is good. So I decide to drink a calvados to my friend and crew, Paul. ‘Une calva’, says the landlord, and I swear takes a glass and puts it against the correct optic above his head, all without looking.

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The festival at Carteret is coming to an end. The children have chemical wands and wrist bands. They line up behind the band which marches into the town. The noise is the discordant sound of a New Orleans funeral marching band and the procession seems to be timeless, some semi-religious rite out of the middle ages.

I cannot leave till midday, so Monday morning I look around the time. I find an old chapel – well the remains of a deconsecrated church – now given to ‘la culte protestante’, who worship here every Sunday in July and August.

Reason 101 to belong a (French) yacht club: Let’s go to le yacht club, then I won’t have to pack toilet paper.

Horny French youth checking gear for a night out: ‘wallet, comb, condoms … nearly forget, toilet paper’.

Braye, Alderney

At last there is enough water in the river and I can get out over the sill, whose foundations I can clearly see a metre or so below my keel. I follow a French boat, Mona, (I vaguely recalled a book title: Moana(The Vastness of the Waters) by Bernard Gorsky, 1956), on the assumption he knows what he is doing; and if he doesn’t and goes aground, I’ll know where not to go. He seems to keep a crew member on watch at the bow, so perhaps he’s equally worried.

At last, at 1210, I’m out and in deeper water. I now have till 1630 to make the turn along the north coast of Alderney. The time is fairly critical, as after that the tide will turn South and start sweeping me back through the Race. If I’m above that point – near Quenard Point light – the tide continues to sweep west for another couple of hours, giving me plenty of time to make Braye.

With all sail and maximum revs. I get within two miles of the turn. Fortunately, it is neap tides so I can make the turn and by 1830, I am in Braye harbour.

It is packed. All the moorings are full, some with two boats. But there is plenty of room to anchor on the other side of the fairway.

I take the Mainbrace water taxi. The lady driver is cheerful – it has been a good season, and Alderney is a crossroads. She is right – boats stop here from Cherbourg, from the Normandy ports like Dielette, from the Brittany ports, like Treguier, the Channel Islands and coming from England, the South coast and Solent ports and the Southwest.

I take my beer outside the Sailing Club, enjoying its 50th year (so as a collector of such trivia, I pay £5 for a mug declaring the fact). Braye harbour is a large expanse of water sheltering behind its long breakwater, and it looks good in the evening sunlight.

All the eating places are full, so I cook up a rather fine Spanish omelette; and fix a bright riding light before turning in.

The morning shipping forecast, issued at 0600 BST is not clever, W/SW 4/5, 6 later. So 12 hours to get back. I have the main up and head for the Northwest. The tide is sluicing west so I compensate with 20 degrees of uptide. And make good time across the shipping lanes.

After passing the Channel Light Vessel in the separation zone, I encounter some bumpy seas. Which is surprising since the tide and wind are now in the same direction. The tail end of a hurricane is due to arrive Sunday, so perhaps this is the advanced guard. Whatever, I have to be careful down below that I am always wedged against something.

At 49 degree 56.45 minutes North and 002 degrees 32.44 West to be exact, a basking shark comes to have a look, and then showing its large black torso, dives. I make a note and send it to the Basking Shark Watch of the Marine Conservation Society.

After a few hours, the wave size eased down, and life got easier. The English coast was covered in a mist till about eight miles out. But I could now read a page or two between fixes and keeping a lookout.

After 12 hours, I cross the bar. Good time. I seem to remember a 10 hour trip back from Guernsey, but that seems very fast; but what is true, is that Ally poked her head out of the saloon as we neared land, and said ‘Where are we?’. I pointed to Bolt Head about four miles away. She went below: ‘Girls, put your crayons away. Daddy has surprised himself …’.

The shipping forecast was right. Around1900, it rained non-stop for two hours and the wind got up.

On the cabin shelf

Been thinking about sea blindness and sea awareness. The point is that sea blindness did not just happen. And it derives from more than the decline of both the Royal and mercantile navies. For starters, there is sea knowledge – how the sea works; and the skills needed to sail it; and sea relating: feeling a strong emotional relationship with the sea and having it as part of one’s identity.

Sea awareness was, of course, much greater between the Wars. Arthur Ransome tried to install mainly knowledge and really only wrote about the sea in his masterpiece, We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea, where the sea is portrayed as powerful and frightening, a very old representation – think of St Paul.

The much despised Enid Blyton gives little instruction, but many of her novels, especially the Famous Five series, are set by the sea and do concern rowing and sailing the sea, at which George/Georgina is very adept, so that young readers, by the million, imbibed the enjoyment that can be derived from the sea and sailing, and since she is still in print, still do. (As shown by the fact that GWR use the Famous Five getting off the train after a run past Dawlish before and after the local ITV weather forecast).

A bit of background may be useful for the next chapter. It was written for Soundings as the national lock down due to the COVID19 pandemic had started, and I thought a humorous article was in order.

However, my humour rather backfired when the editor, Ray Fordham, censored the first story on the grounds of bad taste, a view, I have to admit, others agreed with. However, my own view is that 1) the real reason was that, as a native of Barnstaple, he resented the line “[the Annales theory] hasn’t reached Barnstaple” and 2) truth must out. Anyway, he is the Ray of the crossover badinage. Readers who feel they might agree with him may wish to jump from the para. starting “Which is where…” and re-enter on “And I introduce

Floating about Hear and There (Spring, 2020)

What does one write that is appropriate to a readership that is in Lockdown? Well, given the age of that readership, focussing on health matters might be appropriate, so this piece will be about two things close to our readers’ hearts – maritime history and hearing loss.

It took me a long time to come to terms with hearing loss and it came about like this. When my wife has “important” things to do, like going on Facebook (which she won’t let me do in case I screw up her security settings), she plonks me in front of the telly and one of those two hour detective stories like ‘Vera’, closes the door and harmony reigns.

I must say I do resent the slow pace of such programmes. Somewhere near the beginning, we see a middle-aged but still presentable lady (excuse the implicit misogyny, it is relevant to the plot) set off from King’s Cross, and it seems to take her most of the programme to reach Newcastle Central where she alights. Meanwhile, Vera, who, let’s face it, does not speak Queen’s English and I have trouble following, has been poking around a council estate in downtown Gateshead and, despite the feeling partly caused by the interminable advertising breaks, that I have been watching it since the day before yesterday, and that the journey North being taken by the middle-aged but still presentable lady, whom we see through the train window –doesn’t she ever need a coffee or a pee? – is in real time, we eventually reach Vera and her young sidekick on the tideline of Redcar beach, where they filmed the Dunkirk scene in Atonement.

We know when the denouement is coming because Vera breaks into her hungry chicken run, and the middle-aged lady, who, it turns out, is not the daughter of the dead man, but his ex-wife, is taken to the station.

Unfortunately, at this point, Vera becomes all empathic: “I know, pet, what happened but I need you to tell me why” but the trouble is that the empathic Vera invariably drops her voice and the guilty person mutters and sobs, so naturally I turn the volume up, at which point my wife bursts in, shouts at me, grabs the remote and, in an act of gleeful, pent-up sadism, presses the mute button. By the time order is restored, we have a long shot of Vera crossing the road, above the beach, with the council estate tastefully omitted, entering a small graveyard, and pausing meaningfully by a gravestone, but why she is doing that I know not.

Anyway, after a few such events, I promised my wife to seek an appointment with the Ear Specialist, and after bureaucratic contortions and much poking in those orifices, I got to see the great man, who told me that my hearing wasn’t too bad but I’d lost the upper registers so I couldn’t hear women talk or birds sing.

Which is where the links with maritime history come in. The first narrative is a little sad. I was working with David Clement on an issue of Maritime South West when we received an article from Jaspar Pengelly, originally from St Agnes but who relocated to Instow, North Devon. It was about sand dredging on the Two Rivers and was quite acceptable, but David said it would be even better with some pictures. So Jaspar went out in his rowing boat to take pictures of the sand banks but unfortunately had a heart attack and was eventually found floating in the surf off Westward Ho!

Both of us editors felt a little guilty and, a year or so later, David said that a suitable time had elapsed and one of us should go and pay our respects to his widow. It should be me, as he was preparing the next issue. This was very true, as he would never let me anywhere near his beloved journal. There had been a committee minute some years before that I should be appointed as “co-editor to give David a hand”, a motion I think to which David had concurred; but he was never a man to let anything as irrelevant as committee meeting minutes intrude on real life, and most certainly did not desire a hand from me. So I arranged to meet Mrs Pengelly in Schooners, a café near the Pannier Market in Barnstaple.

When I got there, I thought I would be meeting a lady in black but not a bit of it. A lady in bright coloured clothes greeted me and as we entered, it was obviously a meeting place for ladies of a similar age, who all seemed to know each other.

We found a free table and I expressed my condolences and she said that, at first, she rather liked the idea of leaving Jaspar at the bottom of his boat, like a Viking warrior, floating in the surf (having removed the outboard motor, as a 4 horsepower Yamaha didn’t quite ring true with a Viking funeral), till someone pointed out that, with the rotation of the tides, he would eventually end up at Clovelly and she would have to pay landing fees each time he came ashore. So she hired a couple of windsurfers to bring him in.

She explained that she was some years younger than Jaspar and after a while, started to miss male company. There was then a discussion among the ladies present as to the quality of the males available on such sites as “Not all my hair is grey”, “Silver Studs” etc. and “Afore Ye Go”, which sounded a bit pessimistic and, being Scottish, might involve a lot of travelling. Anyway, Mrs Pengelly decided to prefer “It’s never too late” to “Only one foot …” and found this rather nice gentleman.

Well, one thing led to another and one day, they were “canoodling” as she put it, when, in the spirit of fun and friendship, she gave his ear a friendly kiss, and then felt something on her tongue. She paused.

The listening ladies scraped their chairs closer to hear the denouement. “Well, I didn’t like to upset the mood by fiddling inside my mouth, so I swallowed whatever it was.”

When they had finished canoodling, she saw that her beau was searching inside his ear and on the floor, and it dawned on her that he had been too vain to tell her that he had a hearing aid inside his ear. “I tried to cheer him up by humming a few lines of “All things must pass” and I pointed out that I was a vegan and while I couldn’t be sure when he would have it back, I could guarantee that he would have it, but he said he would have to claim on his insurance. In desperation, I … [Mike, I think this is quite enough-Ray] [Sorry, Ray]

Onwards and upwards. My second story relates to the understanding of history by the French Annales school [Mike– I thought I just asked you …] [Ray – two ‘n’s – it’s a very famous school of historical understanding] [Hmm, not that famous – I don’t think it’s reached Barnstaple].

And I introduce the Annales school, because they said that history shouldn’t just be about kings and prime ministers and navies, but all aspects of man’s environment that changed, so they were very interested in the history of land use, the history of geography if you like. Which makes the South West Coastal Path an important part of maritime history.

Which is very relevant to my next narrative. You will recall the second thing the consultant said was that I should hear the birds singing. And to my amazement, this was true. Suddenly, dog walking was a new experience. We would go on the coastal path and the fields and there was all this chirping and singing. BUT this was the funny thing – I couldn’t see any of the birds that were doing all this chirping and singing. I would look round, I would take binoculars, but not a single feathered friend did I see.

So I got to thinking. The National Trust spent a lot of money, in Project Neptune, buying up the coastal path and I reckoned that they thought they had to have bird song as part of the package, but then they found that birds weren’t that keen living in wet, rocky crags, so people were staggering along the South West coastal path sans bird song.

Now, at first, I thought that when you opened a gate, that started a bird song tape. But that wouldn’t work, because to keep the volume suitably high 500 yards further on, it would blow your head off at the gate.

It was all explained to me one day when I was in Sidmouth, investigating the Fatberg that was blocking up the town’s sewers, and, at the café above Jacob’s Ladder, I got talking to one of the workers, post-shower and change naturally, and explained my dilemma to him. He just said two words “Cow pats”. Perhaps that’s one word, I’m not sure.

So obvious. No one looks too closely at a cow pat and no-one goes too near one in case you slip in it. What’s more he said they quickly reduced the size of the instrument to make it suitable for use with sheep’s droppings, or rather what looked like sheep’s droppings. That was better because cows, just like birds, aren’t too fond of romantic Cornish cliff sides; and, also, ramblers, seeing cow pats but no cows, would put themselves at risk by peering over the side of the cliffs to see if the cows had fallen off. And he told me that they were working on miniaturising it still further, so that it would fit into “rabbit droppings”.

He was very well educated or knowledgeable or both – I thought it indelicate to inquire into his downward drift – and he said you would almost certainly find the patents that the National Trust had taken out at the Intellectual Property Office.

The rest was simple. Members of the 1805 Society, will know that Pete Turner, does illustrations as ‘AB & Os’ in Kedge Anchor, their rather posh Newsletter, which exists to maintain Nelson’s memory.

The Society made a successful bid of £500,000 from the Libor fines in order to finance six naval history projects, such as purchasing important naval data bases, teaching about the Georgian navy in schools, conserving the Parish Register from the Island of Nevis, where Nelson got married in 1787, and restoring the Anglican Chapel in the Old Royal Naval Hospital in Minorca. One project that they aim to continue indefinitely is the re-invigoration of the Trafalgar Way from Falmouth to the Admiralty in Whitehall.

Pete had become Editor of Kedge Anchor. So, naturally, he has to go to London for very important meetings and I asked him, with his artistic skills, if he could pop into the Intellectual Property Office and copy down the relevant patents.

On the next page, you will see the result. You note the small solar panel, which powers the miniaturised CD and the radar that scans for approaching hikers. As soon as the beam is cut, the flash disk is activated and one of a number of bird songs pours forth. The top of the radar scanner is painted black or whatever colour the creator has decided the droppings will be.

Sea Dog Days

Toasta

It may help if we dispense with questions about my name. I was one of a litter of five pups, my mother owned by a Spanish lady who worked in the kitchens, and who named us Kettle, Fridge, Lactose, Toaster and Jazz. I was the most elegant of the litter and therefore chosen by my mistress.

I spent the first few years of my life with her, the skipper’s lovely daughter, but when she moved into a flat where I wasn’t allowed, I was left with the skipper. He looked at me and said “I’m not calling out after a piece of electrical equipment. I will change your name to Toasta, so that it sounds like you are named after a little known Italian opera.” This attempt at re-branding me failed miserably, as greeting cards to me invariably use my original name

Of more importance to the present narrative was my being press-ganged. One day he said, “You’re crewing for me and we’re off”, packed some hard tack in my kit bag, and a little time later, we were in the harbour launch on our way up to the Bag [Salcombe] to his Westerly Konsort, Boni, named, as he patiently explained to inquirers, after the owner of the self-proclaimed “best fish and chip shop in Barnstaple” [the Silver Cod], who had bought the boat from a Portuguese owner who had given her an unpronounceable name.

Perhaps about six years ago, of course, I was younger and fitter then. It was only in the last couple of years that the arthritis kicked in and made the long trips uncomfortable.

Observing life on the water in the Helford River

But that is to dwell on the more recent times. There were many good times, when, twice a day, we would go ashore for my requirements but also to explore interesting places, like finding the gun emplacements on the north side of Brixham harbour that guarded Torbay in World War Two; or the very path that Henry Tudor came up from Mill Bay at the entrance to Milford Haven, on his way to Bosworth Field.

And I was made welcome ashore. When he radioed ahead to Falmouth Pendennis Marina, the man with the rather rotund retriever would ask if I was aboard. And when we’d got to Padstow, and walked up the hill away from Steinville to Gilly’s, I would hear her say to her six-year old, Issy, “Open the door for Mike” and in his piping voice, he would reply, “Yes, but has he brought Toasta?” and when I appeared, he would swoop down in the kneeless movement of the young and hug me round my neck.

Damn it, was it only last September, after that lovely greeting, I was showing a clean pair of heels to their three year old mutt as we romped in the garden?

We’ve been quite far afield. I enjoyed skanking in McCarthy’s Bar, Castleberetown, County Cork – I had learnt the art whilst living in a squat with my mistress and having to compete with the largest Alsatian I ever saw, so in and out speeds were vital; after a ride in a little train curving on the track up the mountain side on the Isle of Man, walking on the top of Snaefell, from where you can see six kingdoms; and looking out across Rocquaine Bay on Guernsey to the fort, the islands, the razor edged rocks; Appledore Pool, where the anchorage gradually changes from an arm of the sea at High Water to an enclosed lagoon at Low Water.

A hot day on the LIfeboat slip at Appledore

Humorous moments? Well, I got rather sick on a very hot passage from the Helford to the Scillies and he had to take me to the vet, who diagnosed sunstroke and prescribed a diet of chicken breast and rice, which was OK by me. The locals kept telling me I was lucky to be alive and when eventually the skipper asked one of the Hugh Town Harbour staff why, he imitated the vet’s heavy German accent: “Your cat is very sick. SHALL I KEELL IT?”

Of course, in some places, getting ashore was tricky. For example, when you dry out at Ilfracombe, you drop way down the wall and you can’t get into the dinghy sitting on the sand several feet below you. So, before the water ran out, I would jump in the dinghy, the skipper would take the painter and walking along the harbourside, pull me to the town beach. One morning, I could see this fellow, on the other side of the harbour, watching me open-mouthed, in the apparently self-propelled dinghy!

Appledore was always tricky as there was only one hour when the tide was slack. So, the skipper would beg the nearby Lifeboat crew, if they were working on the lifeboat, to see if they would pick us up when they went ashore. One morning, to my surprise, the lifeboat came alongside and the Coxswain said to me, “It’s Lifeboat Day and you’re the guest of honour.” So, the skipper and I jumped aboard and sailed past the waving crowd, down to Appledore Quay.

The good times. The evening promenade of thousands of screaming puffins and guillemots around the North Haven, Skomer. Last year, we had spent the night at the Skomer anchorage and the skipper decided to head for Solva – he had done quite a bit of his sea-school learning at a long-defunct sailing school called Westfleet and the skippers had raved about the place, but being tidal, they had never gone there. On our way, we went round a huge raft of several hundred Manx Shearwater. Although we were a good distance from them, they rose into the air as one and darted away and the sea was covered in those skimming birds.

Swansea: a short hop from the marina and I’m squeezing through the silver fence by the telescope building, up and down a sand dune and then I’m running on the golden crescent of sand that stretches round to the Mumbles.

Bude: Safely through the sea gate and into the canal, the boat safely moored against the quay. I am sunning myself on the coach roof, growling quietly at the retrievers and labradors walking past with their owners from the North.

Was it only last year that we were in Milford Haven and had to be back in Padstow in good time before the harbour gates closed on the evening tide? The best way, the skipper decided, was to take the free flow out of the marina at high water and that should get us nicely into Padstow. So we were walking around Mackerel Quay at four in the morning, and shot through the lock at four thirty. We went from the lights of the marina to the deep inky darkness of the Haven. It was a balmy pre-dawn and I came on deck. The stars were still shining as we came down the fairway and saw the Rosslare ferry, the Isle of Inishmore, ahead of us. We could hear Port Control on Channel 12 bringing in a VLCC, which was convenient as it meant that the ferry took the East Channel and showed us where it was. All we had to do was follow it out.

The Haven was quite calm. It was like sailing on a wide street of black water, so well lit up by the navigation marks that it was like an aquatic Regents Street. We sailed quietly past Thorn Island and turned down the channel to port. Soon we saw the brilliant flash of St Gowan South Cardinal and beyond it, the loom of Caldey Light. A few minutes later, we changed course for Padstow across the Channel and, as the sun came up over the Gower, I went below for some well-earned shut eye.

That was almost my last sail. We tried to get out on the end of a cold front and got out as far as Trevose Head, but it looked rough all the way down Channel, so I was pleased when the skipper said we were turning back. I did not make the return passage as there is a Hitler type in Newlyn who jumps up and down at the presence of a dog, even if he is not going anywhere near the fishing boats. The last time I was on board, he threatened to close the harbour, and unfortunately the skipper started laughing at the idea of Cornish trawlers milling around outside because of me, so it all got a bit heated.

But that is all in the past. This morning I was down on the beach playing ball in the sea with the skipper’s grandson; and then suddenly this evening, I started staggering around. I managed to get to the fire rug in the lounge. My mistress rushed off to ring the vet. I could feel the Skipper moving around – a thousand times of lying in my pit in the quarter berth and opening half an eye to find him at the chart table or putting the kettle on tells you.

He bent down and with difficulty I opened my eyes. “You always had beautiful brown eyes”, he said. We looked at each other to say Goodbye. We both knew that now he must sail on without me. Then I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. And I felt his tears on my fur.

My sea days are over. No more will we jump off the boat to find a suitable place for my ablutions. No more will I hear the welcome sounds of the engine revs being cut down as we go up an entrance channel and the Skipper clumping around on the coachroof, as he lowers the mainsail; cue for me to come up top, forward to the bow, with my red life jacket helping pick me out, and stand there proud, as if I personally helmed the boat on the passage and had now handed over to my crew.

And then we are in, and when he has picked up a mooring buoy or tied up the lines, he comes back to the cockpit and switches the engine off. And as he undoes his lifejacket and makes the closing log entry, a peace descends.

Peace. Dart Lake. We are at anchor. We’ve been ashore and now I get back in, as usual, with my front paws on the top rung of the boarding ladder and his hand around my posterior, giving me a push up – embarrassing but effective. And the sun is starting to set and I bark at the rowers and paddle boarders heading for home.

I settle down at the spot by the mast which keeps its heat and sort out the best way to lie for those back legs of mine. The lights start coming on along the shore and up in the hills.

Peace. No sound across the water. Soon it will be quite dark.

Sailing in the Plague Years

This article was originally written for the Newsletter of the Westerly Owners Association. Its motivation was making sense of a sailing season delayed by COVID and with restrictions in place. It reflects my efforts to make sense of what was happening to me, my family and in the wider world.

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Like all yachtspeople, I lost the early part of the season. So this year, 2020, I have been away from early July to mid-September. Previously, from the early nineties, I sailed with the family in Boni, a Westerly Konsort. In this article, I reflect on what has been different this year and what I think the future holds.

Planning: Like any other yachtie, one of the pleasures of yachting is planning where you will go, new places and passages, how far you can reasonably get etc. Except that this year, that choice was restricted. My favourite early season sail is from Salcombe, my home base, to St Peter Port – a long day sail, rewarded by coming up the Little Russell towards sunset. That was impossible, as Guernsey had a 14 day quarantine period. Indeed, early on in the planning, even Wales was closed.

I decided that I needed a programme that allowed two weeks sailing, one week home.

Ten days in Lyme Bay were very pleasant after lockdown. Sadly, my favourite harbour, West Bay, had not got its pontoons in place as dredging had been delayed, but Lyme Regis was an acceptable alternative and an early morning stroll on the massive structure of the Cobb, even after so many visits, a thrill. Exmouth Marina I am increasingly valuing as a bolt hole, since wind against tide, out in the Starcross Bight, with the bouy banging into the boat, is no pleasure.

Leaving: By the time I returned home, towards the end of July, Wales was open, so it made sense to head for the Bristol Channel. But leaving was different this year. In previous years, my wife engages in her fairly active social and community life, so whilst leaving does create some guilt, it is at a tolerable level, and she may even be glad to see the back of me for a few weeks. But to leave her with her interactions with others restricted to a couple of increasingly dissatisfying Zoom group sessions a week was another matter.

To try and resolve this quandary, given that she had no intention of using motorway service stations, it was necessary that, by the end of two weeks, I was on the English side of the Bristol Channel. Reasonable weather and some long passages meant that I was in Milford Haven some six days after leaving Salcombe.

On the way west, other yachties described Salcombe and its crowds of gormless public school boys and girls and undergrads as acting as if Covid had never happened and the authorities doing nothing. Mind you, in Newlyn, the Coop store was doing absolutely nothing to enforce the mandated use of masks and the pub I ate in had the barmaid chatting to the locals in the same friendly manner that used to be portrayed in B-movies.

No-one seemed to be taking any initiative to combat Covid. Both Falmouth and Penzance had the capacity to organise one way systems on the pavements, so that most of the time one had one’s back to people. Instead, there were constant streams of people coming towards you, and, in Falmouth, allowing cars to use the High Street meant that people were further squashed together. Padstow, with its narrower pavements and very large numbers of visitors, except for some safeguards in the pubs, gave no evidence that a killer disease was at large.

All the skippers I met were heading for the Scillies – the nearest thing to going foreign? – which must have got rather crowded. In the slow crossing from Padstow to Milford Haven, where you frustratingly go backwards with the ebb tide, I got to thinking why one goes sailing. I’ve mentioned planning the voyage and pleasurable anticipation – both damaged this year; the experience of being on the water and sailing; new harbours safely entered and the satisfaction of passages achieved.

After a couple of days at Milford Haven Marina, getting the odd job down and catching up with friends, I floated under the Cleddau bridge and up river to the the splendidly Victorian sounding Lawrenny Yachting Station. The pub was doing good business, but then it had a large outdoor area; and I quickly realised how dependent such establishments were on good weather and the ability of punters, especially drinkers, to enjoy being outside.

Skomer was desolate, no tripper boats, no puffins, not much of anything except silence.

Swansea: I call in at a friend’s, who’s seen no-one since March. Swansea with its crescent of golden sand, the Mumbles and the indoor market where one gets laverbread and Gower cockles, still seemed to have some energy; but Barry was sad. In previous times, the many yachts sinking into the mud at low water were a symbol of yachties who had this direct hands-on connection with the sea, as compared to the softies in Cardiff Bay, who needed the Barrage lock keeper’s permission to go to sea; but only a handful of boats had been launched. The large number of unlaunched boats was a feature of the boatyards I passed. Clearly, many owners had thought it not worthwhile to launch their boat in the foreshortened season.

I would have liked to go up the Severn but the lock gates at Lydney had not been mended and Sharpness had new owners, who did not let yachts stay in the outer harbour. Previously, you could moor up near the Harbour Master’s Office among the lily pads, and be inspected by coots. Now they wanted you through two lifting bridges into the marina – a whole lot of hassle. So, I decided on a personal first – going up to the Newport and Usk’s Sailing Club moorings. The entry, initially nerve-racking as between massive sandbanks, was actually straight forward; and once members of the club had helped me unravel the complications of their moorings –complicated by many untended moorings – I got to their pontoon and had no problem with my long keeled Konsort taking the mud.

I got across to Portishead, left the boat there and went home for a week. Returning to undertake the homeward passage, I was dismayed to find Watchet marina soon after high water just a sea of mud.

Appledore at the mouth of the Taw and Torridge rivers was its usual amazing, beautiful self. Given the strength of the tides, you get two hours ashore a day, so I had plenty of time to start thinking about what was missing this season and to make notes for this article. My other first was to sail into Hayle. True, the boat fell over at forty-five degrees but the Harbourmaster and I put strong lines on it and Boni never floated away …

Accelerated trends/decline: It’s important to distinguish trends that COVID has accelerated from those it’s created.

For example, I start each day with the 0520 shipping forecast as it gives the most complete information on the coming day. Years ago I wrote an article for the Cruising Association Bulletin, warning readers to watch out for the very odd missed station in Coastal Reports. Outdated advice. Looking at a few forecast sheets I brought off the boat, Bridlington has not reported the range of visibility for months, if not years. Scilly (Round Island) was not reporting for much of the summer, very annoying for the Southwest sailor, and Greenwich has also not been reported. Despite ageing, dewy-eyed journalists telling us that the Shipping Forecast, its sea areas and the long-defunct medley of national tunes are part of the British psyche, it has been clear that the BBC has wanted to lose the Shipping Forecast long before COVID.

Yachting magazines: Remember when each issue of Yachting Monthly was the size of a small telephone directory (remember them?) and had the smug complacency of the bourgeoisie? Now, it and the other yachting magazines look like they are suffering from severe anorexia nervosa and are therefore ridiculously priced.

Expensive capital projects: The lock gates at Lydney up the Severn and Bude need replacing, and the cost will be considerable, so will probably not happen, but until they are, these harbours are unavailable. Watchet Marina, within two hours of high water, is a sea of oozing mud and will surely close within two years, since one can only get out of a few berths on spring tides. The non-operational status of the “traffic lights” at the marina entrance nicely symbolised its state.

Like some dire symbol of England’s decline and the furring of English arteries, silting: the Exe silted up so badly once there was no commercial traffic, that they had to move the Lifeboat station; the Taw/Torridge estuary, where the offshore lifeboat cannot get across the Bar at Low Water Springs; Hayle etc. Dredging is expensive and in many of these locations is not happening; In the Camel, it is happening but the profusion of port hand marks tell of the growth of the sandbanks on the eastern side.

Sailing schools: I feel sure that parents teaching their children how to sail on the family boat is decreasing in frequency, So formal tuition is needed. But a large number of sailing schools have closed. Dinghy tuition is available at some yacht clubs, but it is fallacious to think that dinghy sailing competence will lead to the outlay of time and money on a yacht.

Yacht Clubs: Helped to the pontoon by members of the Newport and Usk sailing club, I took my pre-prandial drink on the lawn in front of the clubhouse. I was reminded of the Spinners’ “If you want a cathedral, we’ve got one to spare”, but replace “cathedral” with “power station”. Peter Cumberlidge’s excellent Bristol Channel and River Severn Cruising Guide told me that the members had built this club house; and it reminded me of interviewing the Commodore of the Saltash Yacht Club, when I was researching for A New History of Yachting, who recalled the days that members created the clubhouse by building out into the Tamar and removing tons of mud in wheelbarrows. Those heroic days are long over.

Mud Yacht clubs have long interested me and I investigated the history of the dozen or so along the Bristol Channel (again see Cumberlidge) and wrote up my findings in ‘Leisure Sailing on a Hostile Shore’, Maritime South West, 28, 2015, 280-315. At the time, because of the lower costs, it seemed they might have a future, but that was clearly wrong. Neo-liberal capitalism only sees a person as a unit of labour, and only as valuable as their current utility. All other roles, parent, spouse, relative, churchgoer, member of organisations such as yacht clubs, are quite irrelevant; and the boundary of work and leisure, once nearly solid once you went on leave, is now highly permeable with smartphones and laptops; and, while women were often engaged in bringing up the children, this porosity only affected the male. Now, the woman in the family may have a more secure job than the male and so both are expected to keep in touch. The nature of yachting, with the crew keeping one weather eye on the texts coming in, has completely changed.

As a result of the need to be quickly responsive to the demands of one’s work, aquatic leisure must be available very quickly and be totally predictable in its time allocation. This means that motorised yachts are to be favoured over sail; and at the other end of the market, paddle boards can be slung on the top of cars. Anything in between – sail yachts, dinghies, windsurfing etc. – is dysfunctional. And of course, that just takes out the mud yacht clubs. But more generally, yacht clubs even in deep water rivers are a dying breed. In the face of the demands of work, yacht racing, except among the very rich, is fast declining. They never seem to be open and some, such as the Royal Dart and the Royal Mersey, are on the wrong side of rivers, where the rich yacht owners lived, not where the present population is, so with the risk of losing your licence after one drink, dead in the water, a process that has been going on for some years.

COVID-caused trends: What was so striking in my travels was the lack of cruising yachts, especially in the Bristol Channel, where, if I saw six in six weeks, that is probably an overestimate. On the more sedate Southern side, there were a few more because sailing was safer and the harbours closer together. Most yacht movement seemed to be inside the harbour entrances and consist of granddad taking two generations for a picnic jolly.

Other features were the lack of cultural sites – both at the high end: many of the smaller museums were closed, because the elderly volunteers would not work there; and likewise, the “soft” culture activities. One of the joys of Watchet is the North Somerset steam railway- not running because it needs hundreds of (elderly) volunteers who did not feel safe.

And there was the paucity of usually enjoyable experiences. Friends en route had to be assessed for the COVID sensibleness. Ironically, a chronically ill spouse now became a plus!

The phrase that best describes the season for me would be emotional thinness. I met fewer people than usual, and interacted with them less and often at a more superficial level. I realised that I do quite a bit of my informal socialising during the sailing season.

For example, I go to Milford Haven for quality marine services but also, after the repairs or servicing has been done, drinking and eating at the marina bar; but this year, my colleagues were giving the bar a wide berth. They, or their relatives, had medical conditions. And the marine professionals who I was used to helping and then, after work, have a drink with, were stressed, working long days and 7/7 to catch up on the trade lost from Easter upwards.

Besides socialising with people you’ve never met before; good food and decent beers and wine. And it was in these areas that Covid damaged the experience.

Usually one can go into yacht clubs and if you are lucky, talk to someone who has done some serious sailing, or, if you are unlucky, a prosperous estate agent or used car salesman from Solihull. (I did once find myself at the same table as the owner of a sunbed emporium, Service was slow, and I have to admit conversation became a little stilted.) No odds. But yacht clubs now seem to only open one day a week, never, of course, the day you sail in.

In the Helford Sailing Club, the menu was mainly microwaved, breadcrumbed bits of fish, served in a cardboard container, with plastic cutlery and with a plastic pint glass. It completely lacked any style.

The dimming of the nav lights: But the rituals of sailing go deeper than cardboard plates. There is a ritual to the sailing year – the planning, the consulting others, the fitting out, the summer sail, the Southampton Boat Show, the lifting out. These mark out the year. They create their own calendar and seasonality.

This article is titled “sailing in plague years” because absolutely nothing will change till the elderly – along with the ill and the anxious – believe that there is a credible vaccine, and go out and spend money. And they will not take the Government’s word (“world-beating”, eh?) for it. They will wait for hard evidence before they come out to play again, and feel relaxed enough to go down to harbour towns where younger covidiots are prancing around unheeding. Till then, yachting will be much diminished in activity. I recall staff in a number of marinas telling me that one third of the boats never move, one third move during holidays, and only one third are used with any frequency.

It is unlikely that there will be normal social and cultural activity in the summer of 2021. This means three seasons before “normalcy”, with surely devastating economic effects for the running of harbours and marinas. And with an ageing constituency, such a time lag may well cause a number of owners to lose the sailing habit; and for others to divert their sailing funds to helping their children and grandchildren.

And where does that leave Westerly owners? We were part of a very definite cohort. The first post-war cohort was boys only, wave goodbye for weeks on end to the little woman and the children she would look after, and sail off with your mates. My first boat, a Contessa 26, was of this generation. No food storage. You used the bilges, so an oil leak wiped out supplies. Sailed like a dream, but no freeboard, and foresails you hanked on while on the heaving deck, so you were permanently wet. No finish to the lockers, so if you searched for something at the back of them, you came out with bruised, if not bleeding, knuckles.

Then, with greater wealth, less womanly acceptance of the status quo, boatbuilders saw the opportunity. Westerly, and, a bit more expensive, Moody, supplied that demand brilliantly. The family came aboard, and she wanted decent cooking facilities and room to stow the children’s gear; and some comfort. “No sailing when there is a 6 in the forecast, and tied up in time for The Archers”, so that she could cook in the light – no great depth to the emancipation, truth be told: think how often you still see the female partner fighting to pick up the mooring buoy, while the male preens himself at the helm. In terms of boatbuilders, of course, those brands lost out to the French, with Beneteau, and later to the Germans, with Hanse; and the economic history of the death of yacht building in this country has, as far as I know, yet to be written.

But focussing on us, that generation when the family came on board, we are now coming into old age. The children are long gone. The new and frightening economic situation – millions unemployed by Spring, 2021l, and from all types of jobs, not just low paid – who will want to inherit a yacht and the mooring and maintenance costs, requiring a constant outlay that they cannot guarantee and time they haven’t got? A yacht that may well not have been used for two years, and which can’t be sold, except to almost give away.

Very strange times. We had a pretty good innings – thirty, forty years? And not just the sailing. You can sail past pontoons that overflowed during some Westerly meets. I have this theory that the founders of our Association had religious leanings, and swopped the sip of cheap red wine and the “silver” bowl with wafers in it for the communion of Westerly souls with much cheap red wine and salted peanuts in the bowl, to feed members arriving in yachts, dinghies and water taxi. If it was a hot Bank holiday evening, you sometimes had to keep one eye on the pontoon to make sure it didn’t tip over or sink.

The evening before I left Appledore, an old type Westerly came slowly in across the Bideford Bar. The man was helming and the mother was in the bow, with her arms round her two young children. A sight I had not seen for many a year.

We were a generation or generations passing through time and space. If we are lucky, a paragraph in a textbook of cultural history. When we clear the harbour mouth bar and raise the sails, the boat leans over and becomes alive and we become alive with her; but soon we will be ghosts.

2021

Floating about Dartmouth

In writing this diary episode, I am aware how fragmented it is, but that, it seems to me, reflects life during COVID. The shape of one’s life, one’s direction, lies damaged. Rather, one’s experiences come in bits and pieces.

It didn’t require one to be a genius to see that another lockdown was coming at the end of the Christmas festivities, such as they were, so on Boxing Day, I packed the dinghy and the outboard in the car and headed off for Salcombe. Half way there, I thought I should offer my wife her last chance to get away to Cornwall, so I phoned her, but, with the new, virulent, much more catchable strain rampant, she wasn’t interested.

27th December. Storm Bella is no lady and is hanging around, blowing a gale up the estuary. I catch a water taxi down to East Portlemouth and walk the coastal path. On the side of it is the stone commemorating “the Salcombe lifeboat disaster 27 October 1916/ 13 crew/ Sacrifice supreme they offered/ Every soul save two/ Men who simply did their duty/ Yet were heroes true”. The same inscription can be read on a stone on the other side of the Bar on which they died.

It is dark by 1600. I settle down to writing postcards to people who might enjoy receiving one, telling them I am missing seeing them etc. On picking them up a little later, I notice that some are now adorned with teardrops. I am astonished, and a little pleased, by my sensitivity and carefully wipe my eyes, before realising that it is condensation caused as the cabin has warmed up.

28th. Despite the over-cautious gale warning for Sea Area Plymouth, I sail for Dartmouth.

I sail past the castle. Sychrony. Some twenty years ago, Martin Hazell, who I didn’t know then, was leading a band of the Sealed Knot at the castle the same day, as I visited with the family and observed Elizabethan ladies darning and playing the lute. We were out on the ramparts, which sport two old cannon. “Look, daddy”, said my daughters, “they’re going to fire the guns”. A gun crew, in Elizabethan dress – jerkins, breeches, buckled shoes, feathers in cap – with much ceremony and paraphernalia – sponges, tamping rods, leather shot pouches etc. – were clearly preparing for action. Apparently, Martin had given them permission. At this point, a fine classic yacht came in from the sea and had reached between the two castles.

There were two almighty bangs which echoed off the cliffs. The helmsman, not surprisingly, abandoned the tiller and threw himself flat on the cockpit floor. The sails filled and boat, now out of control, headed off towards Kingswear. The skipper shot out of the cabin, glanced anxiously upwards to see if his sails had holes in them, pulled the helmsman back onto his feet and gradually got things back under control. The girls thought this was great fun.

Back to the present, it was now blowing a Northerly 5 down the river, so I headed for the Dittisham, where there was some shelter.

Synchrony again. I had decided to try and make sense of “children’s classics”, which is very complicated, because children don’t decide which books they want to read – adults do. So how can there be children’s classics? And before Victorian times, there were no books for children, so they read books adults had got hold off. Like Westward Ho!, which I thought I really should read after it had sat on my book shelf for decades. It is hard going. Hundreds of badly written, overblown pages of anti-Catholic ravings and Devon heroes, out of Bideford.

I am moored just above the Anchor Stone, opposite Greenaway House, originally home of Sir Walter Raleigh. The story goes that Raleigh, having bought tobacco from the Southern states of America, used to row out to the Anchor Stone, now marked with a big red beacon, and smoke his pipe on it.

Now Kingsley disputes this. “Not on the banks of Dart, to the banks of Torridge does Europe owe the day-spring of the latter age, that age of smoke (end of Chapter Seven)”. He tells of how the Bideford Pool was full of Virginian traders and “the pavement of her Bridgeland Street groaning beneath the savour bales of roll Trinidado, leaf and pudding”. But what is most interesting, is that he tells of “heathen savages, when they will deliberate war or policy” have smoke blown into their faces from “the sacred cigarro” by a boy, so that “the seed of wisdom has sprouted in every soul”. Kingsley quotes “Dampier’s surgeon, Mr. Wafer” as witness. Wafer(1640-1705) was a ship’s surgeon, but I wonder if there is a confusion between tobacco leaf with peyote or mescaline, which were used by native Americans.

30/12. I move up to Teignmouth. Instead of going ashore, I sit in the cockpit, reading Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Nights, a detective story with Lord Peter Wimsey that runs to 440 pages. I’m interested because I’m researching for a paper on why fictional lecturers of maritime history, such as Lucky Jim, and the lead characters of Swift’s Waterland and Unsworth’s Losing Nelson are such unbalanced characters, and this has led me to a study of “academic novels”, i.e. novels about university lecturers; and chasing up books which feature history lecturers.

There is no point in going ashore. I can see that the Ship Inn is clearly closed and my friend, Bob, who usually joins me for a pint, has rented a place in Spain for four months “in order to avoid Brexit celebrations”. Except there aren’t any. Our only profitable industry, financial services, creating about 80% of our yearly earnings, has been left out of the deal.

Which links indirectly to why I object to, or perhaps more exactly, distrust the Mariner’s Mirror. The main reason is that it makes maritime history so boring, as the previous editor of Maritime South West, David Clement, pointed out to me many times and why he wanted a much greater variety of articles in Maritime South West.

Almost all the articles in the Mariner’s Mirror concern naval matters, and these have been so well mined that they have become trivial. And by making history trivial and with only one focus, obviously, it makes it less relevant than it should be/could be. As Antoon De Baets has shown in Crimes against History (Routledge, 2019), historians have been thrown into prison or even killed, when their views go against the narratives of autocratic states. Hard to think that anyone could get excited about cannonball size and ordnance in the Georgian navy (25), the blockade of Brest (185), or the discovery of a button off Nelson’s jacket (6).

These articles implicitly provide academic respectability to the delusion that the Victorian era of when Britain was a great, exporting country with colonies, that had to take our goods and with an invincible Navy, is still valid.

And by glorifying war, it minimises not only the dead, but also the even greater number of the injured, especially the psychologically injured. Of twelve “academic” novels I’ve read, four have characters suffering from war-caused post-traumatic stress (Lord Peter Wimsey in Gaudy Nights; Delerfield’s To Serve Her All Her Days, Swift’s Waterland and Swanton Morley, amanuensis to the People’s Professor, in Ian Samson’s detective stories, the County Guides, such as Death in Devon).

It would be good if the author of any article concerning naval actions was required to estimate the number of dead and the number physically or psychologically damaged during the action they describe; and how long those effects lasted.

On New Year’s Eve, I leave for Dartmouth. The low sun is shining brightly as I look along from Berry Head down to the Mewstone, and I wonder when I’ll see this view from seaward next.

Enquiries of the harbour taxi man tell me that the passenger ferry will stop at 1900 tonight. So I decide against working up to Stoke Gabriel and stay where I am opposite the Royal Castle and the Inner Harbour. I look out around ten p.m. With the pubs and restaurants closed, there is literally not a soul around. I recall, when the girls were young, at New Year, we would go into the marina on the Kingswear side and take the Lower Ferry across – the one powered by a tug. One New Year’s Eve, they got very scared by a thin man dressed, mask and all, as a skeleton. Another time, I was by myself. I was joined on the ferry by a girl, wearing navy blue gym knickers, a bra striped yellow and black, and a bit of gauze in between. Nothing else. Nothing remarkable you might say on New Year’s Eve. Except it was minus five degrees and so cold that mist was rising from the river.

When you got across, you would be walking on plastic pint glasses. Your only chance of a drink – no point in even trying to get into the pubs – was to buy a bottle of wine from Dartmouth Sailing Club at some ridiculous price.

But despite the total, eerie, quiet, as I looked out, I see again that Dartmouth is at its most brilliant at night. The wide river is jet black and the lights of the ferries stand out strongly against the shore lights.

The end of the year is a time for reflection, and I recall the most bizarre incident of my year, which happened in Hayle.

Hayle is steeped in history – it was a port already in Roman times. In Victorian times, Harveys had a massive foundry there, where two of the three largest steam engines in the world were built to drain Dutch meres. They also built ships. Can you imagine anyone, post-Brexit with our trumpeted independence, going in for such a venture today? And in such a location, so far West?

Returning home down the Bristol Channel in September, I had decided I would like to sail in. After being pulled off one sandbank by two laughing locals in a fishing boat and avoiding another, I lay alongside the North Quay and the harbour master took my lines. All well and good and I arranged to meet an old friend from my Exeter English lit. days for lunch.

The tide started running out remarkably strongly for such a short river; and the boat heeled twenty degrees. “Just settling down” I thought. There was a ping as the line ashore broke and the boat was now at forty five degrees. I decided I did not want to drown in the saloon, shot out and stepped into the dinghy, which was now at the same level as the coamings.

The harbour master and I now tied lots of strong ropes to the mast going ashore, and I went off to lunch with my friend at the café-bistro at the end of the pier. The floor was covered with two inches of sand. When the manager came to take our order, I commented on this touch, “So ethnic, so Cornish” but he didn’t seem that pleased by my compliment.

It did not take long to swop university news (but, in the interest of unbiased reporting, please see the Addendum). She, coming up from Cornwall, was seen as peripheral, and yachting literature was of no interest to the department.

So she asks, “I’ve rediscovered Rex Stout. Do you know him?”

I shook my head, but with that guilty feeling. My only association with Stout is that Murphy’s tastes amazing when drunk on a summer holiday in Southern Ireland, and like vinegar in England. Besides, there is a somewhat pretentious book by a French professor, Pierre Bayard, How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read, the title being the best thing about it. As a Ph.D in English Lit., and claiming to be reasonably cultured, I should have least have heard of him.

“Absolutely brilliant. He was an American writer of detective stories, starting in the mid-30s. Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin” (I wonder if the boat is still upright. Will it float past as I’m enjoying my crab sandwich?).

“The interaction between them is just so good.” (How do I explain this to my good wife?) and then I realise that Covid is making us all mad.

“I’m very worried I’ll finish reading them all again before I die”. I nod sympathetically, although my problem is a little more immediate (It could give a new meaning to To the Lighthouse).

“But I think I’ve cracked it. There are 33 Nero Wolfe novels. If I start on the sixteenth and work my way forward, I’ve still got fifteen in reserve”. This said triumphantly as the solution to this difficult problem was announced.

New Year’s Day. Back in Dartmouth, I leave next morning to return to Salcombe. It is so cold the top halves of the big yellow buoys in the river are covered in rime.

My oldest daughter has given me Salcombe and Hope Cove Lifeboat Stations by Roger Barrett. I read about the 1916 disaster. It’s doubly tragic, as they were going to the aid of the Western Lass, ashore at Langerstone Point, half a mile to the east of Prawle Point. The Chief Coastguard at Prawle Point had dispatched a messenger for the Rocket Machine wagon from East Prawle to be hauled to Langerstone Point, and also the lifeboat to be launched. Due to a faulty telephone line, this message took 30 minutes to reach Salcombe. By the time, the crew had hurried “the long mile away” from Salcombe to the lifeboat station at South Sands, launched the lifeboat and managed to cross the bar in a South Westerly Force 9, the rocket machine had successfully launched a line to the mast of the Western Lass. The lifeboat arrived near the scene, saw that the rescue was proceeding and turned back, only for the boat to be wrecked on the Bar and only two of the 15 men survived. The account was fresh in my mind as I boarded the water taxi. I was telling Symon Cater, the harbour staff helming, about how one had to be careful at Newlyn because so many of the crew were related to the crew who died in the Penlee Disaster, 19 December, 1981. Which led “naturally” to the question whether any of the present Salcombe crew were related to the crew of the 1916 disaster. “Two”, replied Simon, “James Cooper is a relative of Eddie Distin, who was one of the two who survived and took over being coxswain (1917 to 1925) from his brother Samuel, (1911-1916), who died in the tragedy (and who had taken over from his brother, James(1886-1911)”. Eddie was succeeded by his brother, Edwin (1930-1951) and Eddie’s son Bubbles was the fifth and last Distin coxswain (1962-1972).

“And the second descendant?

“Me and my great-great-great uncle”.

Scratch the surface and maritime history becomes alive and living..

³³³³³³³

Addendum

Excerpt from “Possible changes in the use of the Parker Moot Lecture Theatre”, first published in the weekly Internal Communications, Exeter University, 14/1/2021, from a piece by the Vice-Chancellor:

You will all be aware that the present government wishes to give priority to STEM subjects. We do not, at the present time, know what form this prioritisation will take. Hopefully, they will offer extra incentives to students taking those subjects.

If, however, “they rob Peter to pay Paul”, by moving funds from the Humanities to STEM subjects, this could create difficulties in income generation.

The Senior Leadership Forum has looked at the scenario where significant savings have to be made in Humanities subjects, most notably English and History.

They, of course, worked within a framework of prioritising students’ educational journey, their needs and their wellbeing.

It may be possible, with the goodwill of the staff, of whom I am super-proud, to increase the intake of students to these subject areas and I know the staff, committed as they are, will go that extra mile and work that bit harder to optimise that solution, with no loss of quality to the student experience. (Regarding the last, the Senate agreed last month with the proposal of the Committee for the Continual Upgrading of the Student Experience that, when students properties are being renovated, the television screen in the rooms will be replaced by one five inches larger and with an extra ten channels.)

We are working with our I.T. staff to encourage the development of an enhanced wrap-around, environment, focussed on blended learning experiences, so that heightened, immersive, self-directed learning and the development of employer-valued skill sets, as well as enhanced creativity, are combined, through improved interactive opportunities, with a greater sense of peer relationships. These exciting developments will also, of course, be inclusiveness-sensitive. In this way, students will continue to appreciate the excellent value in terms of their educational experience that their fees provide.

Nor need students worry about their learning outcomes. Such is the quality of our intake, that there is no reason why the percentage of students with “good” degrees will not continue to rise.

If however, the numbers of Humanity students are capped, we are faced with the more serious problem of significant adjustments to our revenue stream projections. The members of the Senior Management Aspirational Futures Planning Sub-Committee have come up with concepts regarding the ingenious re-development of the Parker Moot Room, the large Lecture Theatre on the side of the Amory Building, that I wish to share with you.

They propose that this lecture hall be turned into an intensive egg laying unit with individual cages, compatible with the highest Animal Welfare standards, for some two thousand chickens, whose eggs would be of premium quality. Hence the project’s working title, “Egghead.”

Since the lecture hall is already tiered, with the removal of the benches, the slope underneath the wire cages would allow for the natural removal of droppings and other detritus. Therefore, the cost of conversion need not be excessive.

Given that the campus has few students on site for around half the year, it may be possible to turn some of the lawn outside Amory into a chicken run. With the relaxation of European protocols following Brexit, it may then be possible to label the chickens as “free range”, with the benefit of a product premium.

If such a scheme proved necessary, then, there would have to be corresponding redundancies. Some of you might wish to accept our conditions.

For those who do not, and who wish to be part of this story, plans are being drawn up to re-purpose Humanities lecturers, so that they can develop exciting new career pathways in the Agribusiness, under the watchful eye of a newly appointed Professor of Animal Husbandry. Such new careerists will be supported in their journey by mentors, so that their transition, whilst exciting and growthful, is smooth.

I have every confidence that they will bring their skills with students to the care of their new charges.

As with such ventures, senior management will bring their skills and passion into play, especially if developments demand an acceleration of the project.

I fully endorse this plan and its aspirational focus, and I am sure that all forward looking members of the University will feel as I do; and were this exciting venture to enter the feasibility stage, there will be a week of a big conversation with all interested staff, before proceeding.

Our commitment to the highest quality student experience remains unchanged, and I am sure, if we all work together with the compassionate and collaborative commitment that characterises this university, our targets will be reached.

On the Cabin Shelf

Astbury, Charmian. The Story of ‘Dido C’. Bideford, Sappho, 2002.

—. The Ketch ‘Ceres’. Bideford, Sappho, 2004

—. The ‘Agnes’, the ‘Clara May’ and the ‘Traley’. Bideford, Sappho, 2007.

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INDEX

Aberdovey 27-28

Aberystwyth 26

Appledore 19-20, 59-62

Arlington Court 70-71

Bardsey 28-29

Barmouth 30-31

Barnstaple 66-67

Beaucette Marina, Guernsey 88

Beesands 130

Bideford Bay 57

Braunton 68-69

Braye, Alderney 94-95

Bridport 84

Bristol 10-14

Bude 54-58

Cape Cornwall 122-123

Cardiff 113-114

Cartaret, Normandy 92-94

Challaborough 120

Charlestown 8

Cherbourg 88

Clovelly 58

Dartmouth 42-43, 87-88

Dielette, Normandy 37

Dublin 118

Exmouth 99-101

Falmouth 6, 39-41,,74

Fowey 107-108

Greenwich 130-132

Guernsey 38, 88-91

Hallsands 1300o0pl

Hartland Peninsula 70-71

Helford, The 73

Hope Cove 77

Ilfracombe 62-66

Laimpaul, Ouessant/ Ushant 95

Lamorna 123

Longships, The 48-50

Lundy 20-21, 65-66

Lydney 15

Lyme Bay 99-106

Lyme Regis 83, 101-102

Maldron 124

Mevagissey 75, 108-109

Milford Haven 21

Mullion Cove 71-72

Newlyn 36, 48, 72

Northam Burrows 68-69

Padstow 6-8, 32, 51-54, 109

Penzance 123-124

Plymouth 98-99

Ploumenac’h 92, 93

Polkerris 108

Polperro 75

Poole 61, 112-113

Port Dinorwic 51

Portelet, Guernsey 89,91

Portishead 14-15

Portland 104

Portmadoc 29-30

Preston 117

Redbrook, Wye Valley 113

Salcombe 76-77, 81-82, 130-131

The Scillies 33-36

Skomer 25-26

St Ives 42-45

Stoke Gabriel 86-87

Swansea 17-19; 111

Teignmouth/ Shaldon 104-106

Tiverton 84

Topsham 77-81

Totnes 84, 86, 111

HMS Victory, Portsmouth 82-84

Wallis, Alfred 124

Watchet 9-11

West Bay(Bridport) 102-104

Wye Valley 113

The Author

Mike Bender took the pseudonym “Scavenger”, when he took over the editorship of the leading regional English maritime history journal, Maritime South West, from David Clement, the editor for nearly thirty years, who used the pseudonym “Muck Raker”.

He studied Psychology at the University of Edinburgh, graduating with an M.A. and the Drever Prize. He trained as a clinical psychologist and gained his first Ph.D. – in psychology – from the University of Dundee. He created a team of Community Psychologists working in the Social Services Department, London Borough of Newham. For their pioneering work in British Community Psychology, he was elected a Fellow of the British Psychological Society. Moving to the West Country, he set up a Department of Psychological Services for Older Adults, specialising in groupwork and helping those with cognitive loss. During this part of his career he published some ten books and about one hundred papers.

He retired from the N.H.S. in 2002 and in 2003, undertook a part-time M.A. in English Literature at the University of Exeter, and a second Ph.D “Written on the Waves: British Yachting Literature and Codes of Masculinity, 1888-1945”, graduating in 2012. For two years, he was a seminar leader for the History of English Literature module. During this period of study, he created The Interactive Bibliography of British Yachting, with some 9,000 entries, which he continues to update. He was then commissioned to write A New History of Yachting by Boydell and Brewer, which was published in 2017.

He is a member of the Society for Nautical Research, and for many years has been a committee member of both the Association of Yachting Historians and the South West Maritime History Society. He is assistant editor of its journal, Maritime South West. He has given and published a number of papers on yachting history.

He is a qualified Ocean Yachtmaster, with some 45,000 miles under his keel.

Since 2012, he has been an honorary Research Fellow in the History Department of Exeter University.

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