Diary – 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?

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.

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.

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.

Sigma 362 gets top marks

Practical Boat Owner’s current issue goes to great lengths to praise the qualities of the Sigma 362. It is given three whole pages of an 8 page article on the best cruiser-racers to adapt to cruising.

That’s quite an accolade for a 1980s design that was last built in the early ’90s.

August – Dun Laoghaire to Cowes

Covid caused a full week’s delay in Ireland, and the weather forecast added another three days. By then we were feeling fit, though perhaps tiring a touch more easily than usual. We grabbed the chance to see more of Dublin, along with Rob, who arrived by ferry late on Sunday night.

*Sandy Cove, Joyce’s Tower almost hidden behind the trees on the right*

Near Dun Laoghaire, the James Joyce Tower and Museum at Sandy Cove is fascinating both for its atmosphere and – at weekends – for the fluent storytelling about Joyce and Ulysses by the volunteers who staff it. The tower is the setting of the first page of the book.

July – passage to Ireland

The plan before Covid struck was to allow three weeks for a cruise to the Irish Sea, which is quite difficult to time exactly because of the uncertainties involved in rounding Lands End.

To make the new cruise work on our original pre-Covid timescale, Tony and I had taken advantage of a generous offer from Antony F to arrange a mooring for us at Saltash Sailing Club, an attractive and friendly place near the Tamar bridges (see June post).

*Dolphins all the way from Plymouth to Helford – here’s one about to surface*

A good wind to get to Lands End from Plymouth is often a bad wind for carrying on northwards to Ireland. Strong winds can also prevent rounding the headland for days, as we found in 2007 when we were held up for a week in Falmouth.

June (2) – overnight to Plymouth, fuel consumption

With half a dozen tidal gates on a passage from the Solent round Lands End, we managed to get through four of them in 24 hours last week. The westerlies that usually slow a cruise to Devon and Cornwall gave way to light winds from between north and east, with calm seas.

Two of us were standing ready to sail to Plymouth as soon as we had the right weather forecast, so we would be better positioned for rounding Lands End on our way to Wales and Ireland next month.

*Tony bringing the boat in from our mooring to Cowes Yacht Haven so I could do a pierhead jump – we’re too mean to pay marina day rates*

We went to Cowes on Monday afternoon, left at 5am on Tuesday and were in Plymouth Sound about the same time on Wednesday.

Venice’s Vogalonga

The first boat to appear at the Dogana on the Grand Canal after the 30 km Vogalonga rally round the lagoon and canals of Venice was a coxed eight. It was another 40 minutes before the arrival of the first of the traditional Venetian boats, the ones everyone really wants to see.

All the boats finished further up, beyond the Rialto, and they then paraded down to the official pontoon at the Dogana, which is at the entrance to the Canal.

There they received their awards for participating in the lagoon marathon, which is open to any boat as long as it can be rowed or paddled. It took place on the Sunday before the Transadriatica.

March/April – refit after survey

We finally launched Spring Fever at the end of April, though not without hiccups, because the crane needed to put the mast up broke down.

We launched the boat mastless anyway, and used the time to collect a new cooker – the gas survey for our insurers had brought the expensive news that the cooker was condemned for corrosion and age.

Luckily there was one available at the marina near Newport, Island Harbour, so we chugged up there to collect it, and the gas engineer came to fit it the next day.

The boatyard where we wintered at Kingston managed to hire in a crane. so we went back there. The mast was put up three days late by a very efficient and patient team from Spencers of Cowes, which had made our new standing rigging. Spencers replaced the rigging last time we did it as well, in 2009.

Apart from that, we had the usual long list of bits and pieces to do to commission the boat, but because of the delays we had no time for a trial sail.

Just finished another updating project, this time of David Fairhall’s Pass Your Day Skipper, with cartoons by the late Mike Peyton. It will be published in the New Year. My update of Pass Your Yachtmaster was published last year.

February – survey nerves

Insurance surveys don’t come round very often, but it’s a finger chewing time when they do. What’s going to be found and how much will it cost?

We’ve been lucky with our insurers, who haven’t insisted on a survey since we bought Spring Fever in 2009. Our current insurers gave us a year’s notice that we’d need one this winter.

The survey has just been completed by Adrian Stone of Cowes. The good news is that the main work needed is a job we have been contemplating anyway, which is replacing the standing rigging.

It still looks acceptable on close inspection, but one of the risks with stainless wire and fittings is sudden failure, as likely from a hidden crack in a steel piece as from the wire itself. Some insurers are said to ask for replacement every 10 years but our standing rigging has lasted a full 13 seasons.

January – RYA training upheaval, and ending an electronic chart nonsense

The small craft navigation conference in Cowes at the end of January heard that the RYA is finally promising to overhaul its outdated Day Skipper and Yachtmaster shore-based courses.

The conference was also told that there is to be a concerted attempt to abolish that annoying legal disclaimer on all our electronic charts that they are “not for navigation.” As soon as we switch on a pop-up appears with this message, often with a line underneath saying that only paper charts must be used, which of course almost everybody ignores.

Calm before the tempest

It’s sad to read happy accounts of a peaceful sailing season just before the worst storm ever unleashed on Europe – by which I mean World War II, not the weather.

I’ve been leafing through the 1938-9 Yachtsman’s Annual, picked up for a few pounds the other day in an Oxfam bookshop. It’s not just the handsome young people in bright sunshine helming racing dinghies, who we know might soon be in mortal danger on the front line in a war. It’s also the international cruises and races, some of them to Germany, with skippers and crews displaying no public awareness (whatever they privately thought) of what was happening in the world around them.