I got this for Christmas and finished it within 2 days. But then I am a bit of a S&A buff. This book looks at the series of novels by Arthur Ransome about those Swallows, Amazons and Coots from a more analytical viewpoint. It goes in depth into the background, considering how Ransome's own life is revealed (or not) in the books and how it connects or differs from the society in which he lived and times during which they were written, namely 1930 to 1947.
Those years, like Ransome's life, were packed with events and historic changes. Lovelock considers how both England (in particular, rather than Britain) and Ransome related to women and the colonies, the differences and similarities, and how that affects how we read it today.
The book is structured as one chapter for each of the 12 books, starting with Swallows and Amazons and ending with Great Northern? with diversions as themes are picked up and analysed.
I found it fascinating though I didn't always agree with Lovelock, and looking at the reviews online can see there are others that disagreed with him. I have so many thoughts jotted down that I'm going to have to post them separately on another occasion.
An interesting buy to anyone who loves the books as much as I do, and there's even a foreword by Sophie Neville - a great pleasure as always to hear from this expert on all things related to S&A.
There comes a time when you've heard all the talks, checked out the interesting new boats, browsed the boat show and had a bite to eat when the day seems to have been rather long and the exit beckons.
Outside was the magic twilight in which docklands glowed, reflecting in the hotel-yacht nearby.
A quick peak out at the quay-side by the ExCel exhibition centre and it was clear there were no boats on display:
It was rather cold: time to take the DLR and head west.
There're always some off topic stands at the London Boat Show.
For some reason many are basically the sort of thing you'd see at an Ideal Home Show, in particular kitchen and bedroom focused, with knive and pans sets or new beds. I did wonder if they never left but the stands stay there all the time.
This one make me immediately think of one of the Greendale courses on the TV show Community, namely Ladders:
Though they didn't describe itself as ladders but instead something about "Access Solutions".
At the London Boat show saw another of those cross-ocean rowing team expeditions things. I know its all for a good cause (*) and terribly hard work but really can't get that enthusiastic - sorry guys!
I just can't see why you'd row when you could sail. Maybe I've seen too many SV Delos videos but they seem to be having a lot of fun while this just seems like making life hard for yourself.
Also, wasn't that the route that the debris from that the Malaysia flight 370 aircraft crash followed, washing up at Mauritius too?
Anyhow, there's a web site about there voyage here.
(*) raising money for to support those with Parkinson's Disease which really is horrid so worth funding
A couple of years ago I went to a talk by Skip Novak at the Southampton Boat Show (as blogged here).
Afterwards wandered around looking at boats with two chaps I'd met at the talk called Henry and Emil. It turned out there were planning to charter a Challenge 72 to sail to high latitude destinations such as Jan Mayen island, home of the mighty Beerenberg.
Alas that sailing trip didn't work out due to complicated reasons and it was to set a pattern for the next few years where I'd get all excited about an adventure sail only to get sick and not go.
Anyhow, I met Henry again at the London Boat Show where he and his company Kraken Travel had a stand. They do just the sort of exciting sailing to interesting places that I'd like to be doing - see the video above (gold stars for those that spot Henry in it) - so had a good chat and catch-up.
Here's hoping at some point will be able go on voyages like these again.
I used to go round the boat show visiting the yachts on display and imagining sailing away in them. But now there aren't that many boat builders at the show and those that are on display are usually either plastic gin palaces or the potter round the Med types with fat beams.
The new Golden Globe Race will leave on the 30th June 2018 from Portsmouth and re-create the classic race, avoiding modern designs and technology. As this web site puts it "iPhone, no mod cons, just solo with the sun stars and horizon".
I'd met Emma Bamford at last year's boat show and bought her two books about her cruising life, Casting Off & Untie the Lines, which I'd read, enjoyed and reviewed (see this post).
But they left me with the inevitable question about what happened next, so went along hoping to hear there was a third book out that would give answers.
Alas it was just the two books I'd already read available but I had a quick chat afterwards as to what she was planning.
Apparently she is working in sailing journalism in the UK and is writing a novel about yachties in the Indian Ocean arriving at Chagos Islands where there's a baddy and the plot thickens (so to speak). One to look out for ... whenever. Not sure when as it sounded like it might not be available for next year's boat show.
So I left the Boat Show without picking up another book.... ah well, I have a good stack at home.
I arrived particularly early for the Legends sailing talk with Tracy Edwards and Sam Davies (above) and that was just as well as it was really popular - with good reason.
Tracy Edwards, MBE, was of course skipper and driving force behind Maiden, the first female crewed yacht in the Whitbread Round the World Yacht race (now the Volvo), which won 2 of the 5 legs and ended up second overall.
She has inspired many others to follow her footsteps and helped them directly, including Sam Davies, inviting her to join the crew of the multihull Royal SunAlliance.
Both have mega projects they are working on. Edwards has rescued Maiden and is now planning a global voyage to raise funds for charities that support female education. Apparently there will be berths available in return for contributions - worth looking out for that later this year. You could even sail with Edwards, though I get the impression she could be a bit of a tough cookie.
And Davies is off again on another Vende Globe! Must admit to be rather thrilled by this one in particular as she really lit up the 2008-9 circumnavigation. She really seemed to be not just relishing the challenge but actually enjoying it, and you can see why France has taken her to heart with her natural girl-next-door charm:
Her new boat is being upgraded to the latest foils and then she'll have a good long period to get familiar with it before the race. Bon courage, Sam!
My chat with Conrad Humphreys touched on navigation techniques but later there was to be a whole talk about it from Pete "Stokey" Woodall (above).
I'd seen him at a previous London Boat Show when he'd described the star clock (below) for which the answer was not 42 but 41.5. I'd even gone off and done a bit of maths to work out that it was really 41.58 which I guess is close enough.
It was a very entertaining talk, including such gems as rolling up a chart into a cone and using it to locate fog-horn directions to within a few degrees (apparently that really works). Also a metal frying pan can be used to shield an AM radio so that the direction of the transmitter can be identified from the two possible directions 180 degrees apart.
There was also some more celestial navigation tips based upon one of the stars in Orion, Mintaka, that rises or sets due East / West:
Last year Channel 4 broadcast a programme called "Mutiny" in which they re-created the voyage of Captain Bligh after the Mutiny on the Bounty in which he was cast adrift in the Pacific in small boat.
The programme showed 9 men sailing a 23 foot open wooden boat 4,000 miles from Tonga to Timur and there was plenty of drama on the way. The boat itself was on display at the last boat show (as blogged here).
The channel's notes can be found here and it can be seen that there was only one named crew member, namely "Anthony Middleton, of SAS: Who Dares Wins".
There is a difference between a non-sailing commissioning editor and a sailor, because from my viewpoint the crew was round the world sailor Conrad Humphreys and some bloke from the marines (apologies to Anthony Middleton for that lack of knowledge).
In most cases there was perfect agreement between the two apart from the final leg where a lack of wind and water meant there was a discussion about whether to row towards wind patches.
TBH, if I'd been on that boat I know which of the two I'd have listened to the most carefully, namely the one that had sailed round the world and knew a thing or two about how to keep moving when trapped by a high pressure, but the episode was cut by someone who shared the channel's view that saw first and foremost a TV personality from the SAS.
Anyhow, it was great to meet Conrad Humphreys at the London Boat Show and hear about the voyage first hand and see some of the photos on his iPad. He also showed some of the ship's biscuits they survived on and if they were only eating a couple of those a day its no wonder they lost a lot of weight.
We also had a brief chat about navigation and the techniques they used which was pure old school techniques like dead reckoning and celestial navigation. I asked about whether he'd read Tristan's "How to Read Water" book and he hadn't but knew about Tristan and was wondering if he should reach out, to which I said yes, as that sounds like a great combination.
It was all very interesting and I look forward to hearing what he does next.
The weather seems to be in the news a lot in the first few weeks of 2018.
The difference in temperature between my friends in Australia and east coast America seems to be about 60C compared to which our blighty weather seems comparatively mild.
But we did get storm Eleanor blow through around the time of the full moon which led to fears of a storm surge on top of a spring tide and so the Thames Barrier had to be closed.
From what I understand (via Twitter) the barrier was closed at 12:15 and it can be seen that there is a sudden dip in the water height at Chelsea, but not at the same time. It seemed to take 45 minutes for there to be a significant change in the height, but then there are several miles from the barrier to this gauge.
After the dip, the levels continued to rise but more slowly, due to the Thames river flow rather than incoming tide, with a maximum delta from predicted height of 2.23m - though the flow had been less than predicted anyway. Danger averted the barrier opened when the water levels equalised later in the day.
So lots of factors from the moon to the weather to one of London's largest infrastructure assets all influencing one simple gauge.
G'day all! Buff Staysail here! Buff by name and Buff by nature!
Well here's one for the books. I gave me ol' ma an iPhone and she'd has been getting into texting me at all times of night and day. But she says she doesn't understand Buff's replies - all this OMG and LOL nonsense.
So as its Christmas, Buff offers this easy to remember translation of the most common terms:
LOL: Luff Or Leach? Jeez, who can remember which side of the sail is which? Does it matter anyway?
OMG: Or Maybe Goose-winged? That's sailing downwind, not the Christmas day roast, obv.
IMHO: I Might Hike Out. Or not. Probably not.
TLC: Total Lines Cock-up. Typically happens during a spinnaker hoist - the skipper should never have asked for a gybe set
WTF: Wingsail Takes Flight. As in the America's Cup, until that nose dive of course!!
FFS: F*** Foiling Sailing. What traditionalists say about the America's Cup.
BTW: Boat Taking-on Water. Now where's that safety boat?
ISO: I'm Sozzled, Ok? While not technically a sailing thing, it is a good excuse for navigators that "forget" one of the marks
NSFW: Not Sailed For Weeks. JP, I'm looking at you!!!
IRL: I-forget-what-about-the Reaching Line. Seriously, mind's a blank on this one
Well there are probably more but its xmas and ol' Buff needs to lie down for a bit for some mysterious reason. But maybe you can fill in some of the missing ones for me.
Work on the Super Sewer (aka the Thames Tideway Tunnel) progresses fast up in Fulham.
As previously posted, a giant "acoustic shed" has been constructed down which a shaft is being dug to get down to tunnelling level.
Down this great shaft will be lowered the Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) which was came up the river at the end of November in bits on a barge from Kehl, Germany:
These bits are currently being assembled into the TBM (top pic) before it is moved inside the shed and down the shaft to start its job drilling the main tunnel itself.
Before that it was, of course, important to get that all important photo of the crew with the cutting head:
It certainly gives a sense of the scale of the tunnel to see the engineers in their orange jackets dwarfed by the tunnelling machine they are constructing and will guide through those kilometres of London clay.
This TBM is called Rachel after Rachel Parsons who sounds like an amazing women. Her Wikipedia article describes how she was director on the board of the family's Parsons Marine Steam Turbine Company and had a Master Mariner's Certificate. In 1920 she was one of a group of eight women who founded the engineering company Atalanta Ltd, which for a time had offices on the Fulham Road.
Sounds like she'd have got on really well with Victoria Drummond, who's book about her life as a marine engineer with the Blue Funnel Line (amongst others) blogger earlier.
The answer is no, which could partly be related to how they are historic objects and partly to the fact that they are typically close to shore in drying parts of the Thames estuary, well away from the shipping channels.
The one on the north is described as "City or Crow Stone" while that on the south as "London Stone", and nearby the latter can be seen the buoy marking the creek's entrance.
There was no sign of the lost Yantlet or Lobster Island, washed away over the centuries, though I did notice an anchorage at the inlet to Yantlet Creek.
This remote location had no yachts bobbing at anchor the day I visited, though some yougsters did zoom up and down the creek in a jetski:
Today the Cambridge University Women’s Boat Club crews have their Trial Eights match-up and they have name the two crews Wingardium Leviosa and Expecto Patronum.
Given that Cambridge University does indeed look like something out of Harry Potter this is very appropriate.
As to which is which (above & below photos) I must admit I have no clue.
However it is possible that I have been hit by a confundus charm.
I initially had the wrong idea about this book. For some reason my expectation was that given the author was someone's grandson he must be young, but it turned out if anything he was older than the grandfather in question.
The author sailed round the world in the years 1998 - 2000 while the grandfather did his half-circumnavigation just before the start of the Second World War in 1938-39. Indeed, it was the start of the war that cut the voyage short in New Zealand.
It was an enjoyable read though not without flaws. The book is part written by Ian Tew and part the diary of his aunt who was crew of the first voyage. It must be said that the earlier writing is a lot better and the later rather full of exclamation marks.
Indeed the first voyage seemed to have numerous advantages, including:
- a more beautiful yacht, 30 foot gaff yawl called Caplin
- more sympathetic crew and master in Commander Graham and his daughter Marguerite plus Dopey the ship's cat (the author admits he's quick tempered and not the easiest person to get along with)
- more unspoilt locations, before the times of ubiquitous development and no doubt plastic in the oceans
If you read blogs or vlogs of those doing circumnavigations you'll know the sort of thing they encounter. Things break and they have to wait for replacement parts, there's confusions and tensions about paper work not being right, locations are idyllic apart from those that are over-developed, crews get sea-sick and argue....
An addition to the circumnavigator's bookcase rather than a classic like Hiscock's Around the World in Wanderer III or Liza Copeland's Just Cruising.
The expedition set sail in 1845 with two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror and 129 men: all were lost.
At first they just vanished, last seen by some whalers sailing west, and then nothing was heard for years and years. Expeditions were sent to rescue them, then when hope was lost, to discover the truth about their fate. In the last few years the ships themselves have been found, sunk in icy waters.
This brilliant exhibition considers this tragedy from many angles. It starts with a description of the land and its people, the Inuit. It is remarkable how much of the story of the Franklin expedition was recorded in their oral history, and shaming how little it was believed by Victorian Britain.
One artifact on display was this Inuit model of a European ship, the wood it was made from no doubt drifted from outside those treeless wastes:
Note this photo, like all images on this post, comes from the NMM web site as it was one of those "no photography allowed" exhibitions.
There was also a copy of the wood map of the coastline around Tasiilaq, as posted previously. This one had a copy of the copy which you could feel.
After the scene has been set there is a description of the British view, from Frankenstein to the art work showing explorer's ships battling mountains of ice:
There was amazing video that showed the various expeditions and how they gradually revealed what has been called the Arctic Labyrinth:
There was then a description of life on-board the boats, with lots of artefacts, the rescue missions and Franklin's wife Jane's exertions to find them.
Alas what they discovered was too much for Victorian Britain, and the tales of cannibalism considered so horrible that none other than Charles Dickens slandered the explorer who repeated what the Inuit had told him.
Finally there was the discovery of the wrecks by the Canadians and some videos of dives plus the bell from the Erebus.
It was very moving to think of the possessions of the men, such as the shoe in the photo at the top, found in the wreck, kept unchanged by the icy waters.
Also, amazingly, many of the officers had had their photographs taken which were on display, so there was the feeling that they were not just names but real people.
It must have been a terrible end, stuck in the ice, tragically close to the break-though and achieving their goal of discovering the North-West passage.
Definitely worth a visit: on in Greenwich until 7th January 2018.
I've blogged before about the Thames Tideway Tunnel, aka the Super Sewer, and at the time of those posts it was mostly in the planning stage, with debates about where the access sites should be.
Now work is progressing rapidly and there was an open day at the Carnwath Road site where you could have a look round and talk to engineers.
The most visible sign of progress is the huge "acoustic shed" (top and bottom pics, before cladding was put on) which is designed to keep the noise down when drilling gets serious to allow 24 hour operation. Within it will be a shaft down which the tunnel boring machine (TBM) will be lowered.
This can be seen in the model below: the real thing is 150m long with 8m diameter head, part of a set of TBMs to drill the 25km of tunnelling required:
This will generate a lot of waste and rather than hammering the local roads will be taken out by boat with two new tugs on order called Felix and Christian to handle the lighters from the Fulham site.
When the work is complete there'll be a small public park where the shaft end of the acoustic shed is at the moment plus the quay side for the lighters will remain as a protected wharf.
I'm looking forward to seeing how the works progresses!
Initially it was a bit confusing, given that there were, after all, six of them.
But apparently the name relates to the Five Cowries Creek in Lagos, which is where the artist Polly Alakija got the inspiration. The traditional fishing craft were painted by school children there and then brought to London.
There's been a lot of excitement in London recently at the repeated sightings of a dolphin (or maybe porpoise) far up the Thames, reaching up to Richmond!
Its been seen on several days and on Sunday was in the Putney area and I managed to see it and shot a short very jerky and blurry video of which the above frame is one of the better ones.
News reports suggest that this could be a good thing - as in its come in search of fish - rather than a bad thing it being in distress.
Anyway, worth looking out at the river to see if you can see its fin passing by!
