tide by tide

Sea songs

There were pained faces among sailors on yachts nearby and even among some fellow crew members whenever a very good friend brought out his squeezebox of an evening, to sing his repertoire of classic sea shanties. It was all too clearly an uncool thing to do on a modern plastic yacht.

Sadly, my sea shanty friend is no longer around to irritate the neighbours and entertain his fans (including me). But an excellent new recording of sea songs in Welsh and English by the great bass-baritone Bryn Terfel will be a nostalgic substitute on board this summer. The songs in Welsh are especially appealing.

Sea Songs, Bryn Terfel, with guest appearances by Sting, Simon Keenlyside, Calan, The Fisherman’s Friends, Patrick Rimes, producers Morgan and Pochin. Deutsche Grammophon. https://open.spotify.com/album/1Xf1LzLWs1PPOsJE17kWvj?si=QJtFKrrSRtq4nOTegnNhPQ

More on pronouncing bowsprit

My post from four years ago about the pronunciation of the word bowsprit still seems to be getting quite a bit of attention, judging by the number of times it’s consulted. I wrote that I don’t think rhyming the first syllable with ‘cow’ is authentic, though that’s how most people pronounce it nowadays.

Somehow or other, pronunciation of this word touches on a nerve, drawing out the pedant in all of us. So here’s more grist to the mill:

There was an interesting variant in a lovely episode of The Essay on BBC Radio 3, presented by Mac Macregor, a retired Essex boatbuilder and smack sailor.

His pronunciation was somewhere between bo’sprit and boysprit. It sounded to me closer to the former, with the ‘oy’ not very prominent. He definitely did not rhyme the first syllable with cow.

You can’t get much more authentic than the Essex sailing workboat tradition. The East Coast is where the Solent racing yacht owners of a century and more ago found their expert crews, because nobody could beat a smack skipper racing for market – apart from another smack skipper, of course.

I learnt to sail on the east coast. Maybe that’s why I’ve always resisted rhyming the first syllable with cow, even if I don’t sound quite like Mac. Judge for yourselves: the programme went out on BBC Sounds on 2 Feb 2024 and will be available for at least a year. And here is my original post: Bowsprit – pronounced bow, bo’ or bogh?

Lazy sailing for oldies

Tiredness is dangerous at sea, and it creeps up faster as we grow older, so we need to think hard about how best to avoid it. Having good equipment is obviously vital, but top of my list of priorities is not hardware but changing our attitude to the challenges of weather and sea. We must take the lazy option, and stay where we are if it looks too much like hard work out there.

Toppled boats

Here is a view of Kingston yard in Cowes last week, the day before Spring Fever was due to be brought ashore.

Violent winds knocked over one of the biggest boats in the yard, which suffered a huge dent in its aluminium hull; part of a cradle went right through the skin. The big boat seems to have brought down a smaller boat next to it and in the process a trimaran was dismasted.

Grateful thanks to the yard for clearing it up in time to get us ashore very efficiently this week, only three working days late. We were there for a quick inspection and to arrange for some electrical work to be done.

The photo is from the Island Echo.

RYA navigators still last in the fleet

Sometimes I wonder where the Royal Yachting Association has been for the last 10 years. I have just had an email from them saying “in the next ten years or so digital will become the dominant method of navigation”. In the real world of small boats, digital has been the dominant method of navigation for at least the last 10 years.

Rowing the Venetian way

A visit to Venice brought the chance to learn the basics of rowing all over again. We found there’s almost no relationship between how a Venetian rows and the way we learnt at home.

You don’t push or pull vigorously, you glide and slide your oar, tipping it gently to steer the boat, with a light touch and a rhythmic motion.

Oldie plans

And following up my last post, here’s what we’ve been thinking about for next year’s cruise: a third round-the-British-Isles voyage, at an even more leisurely pace than before, giving time to explore places we missed and revisit some of the most memorable.

Oldie sailors

Just realised with a bit of a shock that at the weekend I will be the same age as Spring Fever’s last proprietor when he gave up sailing because he was getting on a bit, and sold the boat to us.

That was nearly 15 years ago. I thought of retitling this blog The Oldie Sailor, but Richard Ingrams, the Private Eye Editor who founded The Oldie magazine for irascible ageing writers, might have something to say about that.

…and back again

We grabbed a brief window of good weather to take Spring Fever back from Suffolk to Cowes. Crossing the Thames Estuary, we retraced our route out, including Foulger’s Gatt, which runs across the London Array windfarm.

After stopping in Ramsgate for the night, we went through the Gull Stream, inshore of the Goodwin Sands. Two Border Force vessels followed us – they had spent a long night finding and rescuing migrants from small boats.

Follow the wind

After leaving the boat in Cowes for a few days for the force sevens to blow over (see previous post) we returned still undecided about where to go: south to the Channel Islands and down to St Malo? But it’s already the French holiday season, the English one is starting and there’ll be packed moorings and marinas everywhere, plus the new customs and immigration bureaucracy.

Furthermore, it looks from the forecast as if the first three days after arriving will be spent sheltering somewhere. After that we’ll be worrying about finding a weather window to get back to Cowes a few days later.

Aimless cruising

Mike Peyton’s annual cruise with his club had a simple policy: don’t discuss where to go, don’t collaborate on planning and all set off about the same time. It seems that at the dictate of wind and tides, the club members would invariably end up in the same place anyway.

I can understand how that happens, after 10 days of this July’s weather. If you are a cruising sailor of a certain age who does not want to exhaust yourself and your crew to windward, the options for where to go narrow right down as soon as you check tides and wind.

*Dartmouth entrance in better weather, last time we visited*

Transadriatica 2023

It was one of the best Transadriatica’s from Venice to Novigrad and back that anyone could remember. Winds in the northern Adriatic are notoriously fickle and changeable, and sometimes disappear for hours to leave a glassy calm. This time, apart from a brief lull or two on the way out, we had steady winds all the way.

Martin and I were sailing two-handed in his Spiuma, starting on Thursday evening in Venice and arriving in Novigrad early on Friday afternoon.

*Receiving our prize in Novigrad for the smallest boat to finish*

*Dinner out in Novigrad – we were with two other crews at this table.*

On the way home, over Saturday night, we managed to finish at the lagoon entrance at 0930 on Sunday. We were back in time for an early lunch, whereas usually we’d be lucky to make it for tea or an early glass of prosecco. The race sponsor was in fact Drusian, a wine producer from Valdobbiadene, one of the best prosecco areas, and each boat was given a bottle.

Dark waters: how the adventure of a lifetime turned to tragedy

This Guardian article was worth reading – not because we ever plan to do trans-ocean passages, but because it illustrates how easily an overstretched, overtired crew can start making serious mistakes. That can happen on a simple cross-channel passage, let alone the Southern Ocean.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/may/11/clipper-round-the-world-yacht-race-adventure-lifetime-tragedy-simon-speirs?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

PS She called it the River Solent – don’t think she’s a south-coast sailor!

Just out – the new Pass Your Day Skipper

The new edition of Pass Your Day Skipper by David Fairhall and Peter Rodgers is now on sale. The book was originally by David but – at his invitation – I’ve expanded it and added lots of new material on electronic navigation, weather, and safety. The illustrations are by the famous sailing cartoonist Mike Peyton.

Peyton’s cartoons are still hilarious for any sailor, and most of the jokes are drawn from real-life incidents of a sort familiar to most of us. Anybody who’s been sailing for a while will have memories of their own mistakes, bad luck or cringe-worthy bad judgements: Peyton pins them all down.

The book is meant to be used as a crammer or revision text to study just before the exam, rather than as a detailed training course manual. It packs a lot of information into a slim volume that fits in a pocket. That means it can easily be consulted in the odd free moment, perhaps when travelling – and even for a last minute refresher on the way to the exam.

Pass Your Day Skipper is published by Adlard Coles, part of Bloomsbury, and costs £14.99. Look for the 7th edition with both authors’ names on the cover. Some websites still seem to offer David’s earlier editions at a cut price alongside the new one.

Pass Your Day Skipper is a companion book to Pass Your Yachtmaster, which I also updated and expanded for a new edition, published in 2021.

Another Admiralty problem

What I didn’t realise when I wrote the recent post on the UKHO delaying the end of Admiralty paper charts was that there was a sting in the tail – they had wanted to drop raster electronic charts as well. That has also been delayed a few years to 2030 while they think about it.