CNYC Meeting Archive – Year 2018
2018
Dusseldorf
Barnaby S and Roger B visited Europe's biggest and most impressive boat show in Dusseldorf in January 2018. Barnaby did it as a day trip, leaving Chadlington at an unholy hour to catch the 0700 flight from Birmingham. Roger spent the previous night in Birmingham, as he doesn't do early (well not that early!). Flybe's little Dash 8 turboprop gets you there in an hour and a quarter, and there's a frequent, direct and possibly free (they never found this out, just got on it) bus from the airport to the show. Flybe fares are not that bad, especially if one books early. One of them did.
It is a fairly stunning show, of enormous scale. The clips in the promotional video (link below), give bit of flavour but mostly show halls they didn't even get round to going into.
February 2018
Frances Miller
The Careened Ship - a pursuit across the Internet
This picture shows a boat being
“careened” (hauled onto her side) for repairs. At our February meeting Commodore Frances Miller told how she’d come across and been intrigued by this watercolour, which was unsigned, undated, with no hint of the ship's name. She was sufficiently interested to start searching for the boat’s identity and why it was the subject of this laborious procedure…..
By chance she came across the same picture in a booklet about Nelson's Dockyard in Antigua, which carried the legend "HMS Formidable hove down at Malta", and this was enough to start. Very soon she had an artist (Schranz) and date (1843). She was now off! Frances worked her keyboard and went on to build a history, in amazing detail, of this 19c ship-of-the-line - a “second rater” of 3,500 tons with 84 guns: a history spanning nearly a century from 1819 when her keel was laid, to her being broken up in 1906.
And the circumstances of the picture? During a full and varied service life HMS Formidable had run aground, off the Spanish coast, 14 miles west of Barcelona. She’d suffered substantial damage and lost her rudder. Guns, shot and water were jettisoned and she was eventually hauled off through the combined efforts of a British warship and two French steamers. She was however leaking badly. From Barcelona she was towed to Port Mahon, a long thin inlet on the south-easterly tip of Menorca, where a new rudder was made for the trip to the dock at Malta for repairs.
In Malta a diver inspection (and this was very early use of a diver’s helmet with air pumped from the surface) determined the extent of the damage, and, as no dry dock yet existed there, the vastly complex process of hauling the ship over and repairing her was planned and executed. 800 or so men were engaged in all, with 360 needed to work the capstans for the hauling-over itself.
After repairs in Malta HMS Formidable saw another 20 years of naval service before being retired for use as a training ship for destitute and neglected boys, and as an Industrial School Ship, for children “committed by the courts”. Frances showed us evocative photographs (looking very staged!) of these youngsters on board. In 1906 Formidable was sold to Castles’ Shipbreaking Company at Baltic Wharf.
So was that the end of the story? Not quite. Formidable’s figurehead was kept by Castles’ until 1939 when it was sold, ahead of the Blitz which destroyed many others, to The Mariners' Museum, Virginia, USA, where it can still be seen.
This was both a fascinating account of a ship’s history, from her commissioning to ultimate breaking-up; and an equally fascinating and intriguing example of how, with determination and imagination, the power of the Internet can be harnessed nowadays to re-discover and picture the past. One finding leads to others, and the problem, as Frances told us, was not so much following the trail as resisting the temptations to go off on tangents and explore other things entirely.
Frances had stepped in at the last minute on this “Beast from the East” evening with this talk to replace the scheduled speaker who had dog and travel problems. We who’d made it through the snow were lucky that she already had this talk essentially to hand, to give to another gathering a bit later. Resourceful, we Chipping Norton sailors!
March 2018
Barry Picthall
Golden Globe Race 2018
Writer and photographer Barry Picthall, Chair of the Yachting Journalists' Association, was our March speaker. He won their “Journalist of the Year Award” in 2008, was Yachting Correspondent on The Times for two decades, and it was meeting Robin Knox-Johnston, back in the 70’s, that proved seminal in sparking his lifelong interest in yacht racing.
Barry showed a short, shaky and blurred film of the start of original 1968/9 Golden Globe race, the first round-the-world solo non-stop race. Although shot a mere (I give my age away here!) 50 years ago, the movie came across as belonging to another era entirely. That first Golden Globe had followed Frances Chichester’s historic 66/67 one-stop single-handed circumnavigation.
Barry had (more-or-less) complimentary anecdotes to offer about many of characters of those days: Bernard Moitessier, Robin Knox-Johnston, Éric Tabarly, Bill King. Barry’s take on Chay Blyth and John Ridgeway was that, as paras, they had been trained to believe they could do anything, regardless of previous experience. Chay had no experience of sailing at all when he set out that first time across the Atlantic, in an “unsuitable boat” (pace Chipping Norton Yacht Club Members David and Helen, in our audience that evening, who have also crossed the Atlantic and back in a similar 30ft bilge-keeled Kingfisher.)
One competitor in the 1968/9 Golden Globe was the ill-fated Donald Crowhurst, about whom the movie “Mercy” was recently shown in The Chipping Norton Theatre. A sad tale of a man boxed in by circumstance who reached the end of his tether.
The 2018 Golden Globe race is “retro”- recreating the ethos of the original. Telecommunications will be limited and only 32 to 36 ft production boats of traditional design with a standard rig may be entered. Navigation is to be by hand, nous and eye (sextant, paper charts, and chronometer) - although each boat will carry a “safety box” of electronics to be opened in an emergency. This time competitors must have sailing experience, unlike some notable participants in the original race.
PPL Photo Agency - Copyright free for editorial use only
Photo Credit: GGR/PPL
The 2018 race is sadly not starting from the UK but from Les Sables-d’Olonne, France, with a pre-gathering in Falmouth to keep an element of tradition going. Barry extended a welcome to members of Chipping Norton Yacht Club, some of whom very much hope to make it.
How have things really changed? Communication technology, for one. Bernard Moitessier fired message canisters by catapult to passing ships; many competitors had no radio, or none that worked. This made the disposition of boats during a race uncertain - allowing Crowhurst to stay hidden, giving false positions and hoping to re-join the race as an “also-ran” so his logs would not be scrutinised. And Nigel Tetley would not have driven his trimaran to destruction, thinking he had Crowhurst on his tail.
What has not changed? According to Barry, the common factor is not the ferocity or loneliness of the oceans: it’s being ready and making it to the start. That, he opined, was and remains the hardest part of the whole daunting exercise.
Barry clearly shares our fascination with boats and the sea and is a relaxed and entertaining raconteur. He’s rubbed shoulders with most of the greats in global yacht racing and been directly involved with covering the events at the time. A most illuminating and engrossing talk!
April 2018
Penny Tranter
Sailing Weather
Penny Tranter has had 35 years working
at the Met office, and is a sailor. So she understands as we do the importance of weather to sailors, but, unlike most of us, can read and interpret the clouds, satellite pictures, weather data, weather maps and so on to explain what is going on and what might happen next. The Met office is one of the top two weather forecasters in the world - the other being another island beside a big ocean, which we failed to guess. It’s Japan.
Portrait photo of Penny Tranterfor Sailing Today.
I am not sure it was a talk, exactly - it had a fairly strong lesson flavour - but that made a refreshing change. It was amazing just how much ground Penny managed to cover, explaining inter alia basic principles of the effects of pressure differences, how and why air rises and falls, and how the jet streams meander at the intersections of the polar, tropical and equatorial “cells” of our Northern hemisphere.
In the UK we come under the influence of air masses coming in from the SW (Tropical maritime), S (Tropical continental), E (Polar continental), NW (Polar maritime) and N (Arctic maritime). The Azores High tends to dominate, generating our prevailing S’Westerlies; that recent “Beast from the East” was an example of a strong easterly, bringing us Siberian weather.
Clouds have much to tell us. Ten defined types with Latin-derived names in three groups (disappointingly not named in Latin but just as Low, Medium and High). The high clouds are ice particles, not water. (Held up how, asked one of us? Answer: they are fine crystals not lumps so no need to worry.) And of course there are many bits of doggerel for us sailors to mutter, as we touch the side of our nose, knowingly, such as “Mare's tails and mackerel scales make tall ships carry low sails”.
We were shown weather maps aplenty. Fronts and occluded fronts abounded. Strong winds go with the steep pressure gradients of tightly packed isobars, light ones where isobars are far between. At one point we were all stood up, with a hand outstretched, to illustrate Buys Ballot's law: in the Northern Hemisphere, where the wind circulation is counterclockwise around low pressure and clockwise around high pressure, a person standing with their back to the wind has the lower air pressure to the left. (Reminded me of Fleming’s motor/generator rule - but with that you hold up the thumb and two fingers of one hand to show relative directions of motion, current and magnetic field. Honest).
A little excursion was made into coastal weather, where air warmed by sunned land has to rise, drawing in air from above the cooler and more temperature stable sea. If the coast is convex or concave there are “focussing” effects.
Penny was asked which of the various sources of weather forecasts we use she rated - the answer being that different sources seem to be better in different places.
I think we passed muster, just, in our responses to the questions Penny occasionally threw at us. Questions like: what’s the difference between weather and climate? And if that’s the cloud formation you’re seeing, what direction is the wind coming from?
Oh - and we should not feel sorry for Michael Fish - he’s dined out on his famous gaffe for years. And is the climate changing? Yes, says Penny - we are getting more extremes than we used to. No doubt a bout it.
A great evening. A bit less laughter than on some occasions, but enriching!
at the Met office, and is a sailor. So she understands as we do the importance of weather to sailors, but, unlike most of us, can read and interpret the clouds, satellite pictures, weather data, weather maps and so on to explain what is going on and what might happen next. The Met office is one of the top two weather forecasters in the world - the other being another island beside a big ocean, which we failed to guess. It’s Japan.
I am not sure it was a talk, exactly - it had a fairly strong lesson flavour - but that made a refreshing change. It was amazing just how much ground Penny managed to cover, explaining inter alia basic principles of the effects of pressure differences, how and why air rises and falls, and how the jet streams meander at the intersections of the polar, tropical and equatorial “cells” of our Northern hemisphere.
In the UK we come under the influence of air masses coming in from the SW (Tropical maritime), S (Tropical continental), E (Polar continental), NW (Polar maritime) and N (Arctic maritime). The Azores High tends to dominate, generating our prevailing S’Westerlies; that recent “Beast from the East” was an example of a strong easterly, bringing us Siberian weather.
Clouds have much to tell us. Ten defined types with Latin-derived names in three groups (disappointingly not named in Latin but just as Low, Medium and High). The high clouds are ice particles, not water. (Held up how, asked one of us? Answer: they are fine crystals not lumps so no need to worry.) And of course there are many bits of doggerel for us sailors to mutter, as we touch the side of our nose, knowingly, such as “Mare's tails and mackerel scales make tall ships carry low sails”.
We were shown weather maps aplenty. Fronts and occluded fronts abounded. Strong winds go with the steep pressure gradients of tightly packed isobars, light ones where isobars are far between. At one point we were all stood up, with a hand outstretched, to illustrate Buys Ballot's law: in the Northern Hemisphere, where the wind circulation is counterclockwise around low pressure and clockwise around high pressure, a person standing with their back to the wind has the lower air pressure to the left. (Reminded me of Fleming’s motor/generator rule - but with that you hold up the thumb and two fingers of one hand to show relative directions of motion, current and magnetic field. Honest).
A little excursion was made into coastal weather, where air warmed by sunned land has to rise, drawing in air from above the cooler and more temperature stable sea. If the coast is convex or concave there are “focussing” effects.
Penny was asked which of the various sources of weather forecasts we use she rated - the answer being that different sources seem to be better in different places.
I think we passed muster, just, in our responses to the questions Penny occasionally threw at us. Questions like: what’s the difference between weather and climate? And if that’s the cloud formation you’re seeing, what direction is the wind coming from?
Oh - and we should not feel sorry for Michael Fish - he’s dined out on his famous gaffe for years. And is the climate changing? Yes, says Penny - we are getting more extremes than we used to. No doubt a bout it.
A great evening. A bit less laughter than on some occasions, but enriching!
June 2018
Cathy Shelbourne
William Dampier, circumnavigator extraordinaire
Cathy is a professional and experienced
speaker, and it showed. Her speciality is maritime heroes, and her normal habitat cruise ships. On cruises she always tries to offer a talk that connects in some way to where they are, but, as she had told us beforehand, finding a nautical topic with a connection to Chipping Norton had proved difficult. So she’d offered us a menu of a dozen heroes, on which Chipping Norton Yacht Club officers voted. There was no consensus. Luckily we sailors know about leadership, and that democracy is flawed, so our hero was chosen by decree.
Cathy started by challenging us: how many of us had heard of William Dampier? Is he the most famous historical figure hardly anyone has heard of? Surprisingly few of the public at large have heard of him, despite him being, inter alia:
• the first person to circumnavigate 3 times;
• the first English travel writer;
• the man who introduced us to a great many words now in common use e.g. : avocado, breadfruit, kumquat, typhoon;
• the first to reach and explore parts of Australia;
• a man whose books were seminal to many famed authors and works.
What makes Dampier (1651 - 1715) stand out most from the other early maritime adventurers/opportunists/pirates/buccaneers were his writings, his knowledge of botany and natural history, and his skills as a draughtsman. (Yes there is a distinction between buccaneers and pirates, which Cathy expounded on, in answer to a question form the floor.)
Dampier’s book A New Voyage Round the World (1697) was highly influential, and indirectly led to both a command in the British Navy and membership of the Royal Society.
Although few of us have read Dampier, his works inspired Nelson and became required Navy reading. Dampier’s rescue of castaway Alexander Selkirk, a former crewmate, probably inspired Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Others influenced by Dampier include James Cook, Charles Darwin, and Alfred Russel Wallace (best known for independently conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection; jointly published with some of Charles Darwin's writings in 1858).
Dampier enjoyed such fame that there are dozens of plants, mountains, islands, and straits carrying his name. Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere drew on an incident in which one of Dampier’s crewmen shot an albatross….
Cathy knows her subject inside out, fielded our searching questions with aplomb, and gave us a dose of culture and history that well complemented our more usual fare of modern-day maritime exploits and yarns. A very well received, enjoyable and illuminating talk! Perhaps we should arrange a follow-up meeting on a cruise ship, in the Norwegian fjords or the Caribbean?
September 2018
Rowena Verity and Paul Atwood
2017/2018 Clipper Round the World Yacht Race
As our Commodore said by way of
introduction, this race is decidedly not for wimps. Although sailors in the audience are accustomed to the privations and discomforts of small boats, the experiences we heard about were, for most of us, something else. Rowena Verity had us enthralled by her account of her time aboard 70ft Garmin in the 2017/2018 Clipper Round the World Yacht Race, sharing the lows and highs of this extreme kind of yachting. Helping her out during the evening was Paul Atwood - Relief Skipper, Clipper Training Skipper and Yachtmaster Ocean Instructor.
The Clipper Race is the longest ocean race there is - 40,000 miles and 11 months long. In the 2017/18 event over 700 crew participated - aged from 18 to 76, 30% of them women, with 40% having never sailed before. Rowena had been sailing for 4 years and already had 1500 miles under her belt.
It is, and this repeatedly stressed during the voyage, a race. Day after day, week after week, the boats crash on. At times heeling 40 degrees and more, decks awash, their crew (who’ve paid for the privilege!) living in wet weather gear, with day-to-day activities - cooking, sleeping, cleaning, visiting the heads - presenting challenges way beyond the usual meaning of the word. And that is fitted around helming, navigating, sail trim and changes, winch grinding, reefing and unreefing the mainsail, and hanging on in fear of one’s life. Crew share a cramped, constantly buffeted space, working a 48 hour rotating watch system with the days divided into two watches and the nights into three. Crew “hot-bunk” - dropping into a bunk just vacated by the crew going up onto watch. As Rowena told us, one gets used to sleeping despite everything, and one copes, day by day.
There were compensatory highs: glorious sunsets; shooting stars; dolphins; whales and seabirds. A swim, in water 3 miles deep, on a calm day. A shower, ashore, after 34 days (the longest leg) without one. The celebrations ashore, and elation after a good placing.
Crew receive 4 weeks of training, in 4 levels. On the race some duties are rostered into every watch (e.g. bilges, cleaner, heads (yuk!), deck, blog) while others are allocated (e.g. Safety Officer). As members of the crew get to know each other, having exhausted the usual banalities of small talk, they develop a rapport, become a close-knit team, and really do look after each other.
The dangers are real - one man was lost from another boat due to a freak twisted loading and failure of a tether hook, and another was wrecked having run aground.
After 140 days and over 25,000 nautical miles at sea in the “Clipper bubble” re-adjustment to so-called normal life was not easy. Asked about whether this pay-by-leg race is good value, she told us that at about £49,000 to do all 8 legs it’s not cheap but she had found Paul as a result!
The talk and videos were exhausting merely to hear and watch, the event itself must have been so emotional that one wondered how they adapted back to the real world after it. Rowena told us that preparing this talk had re-awakened her memories and led to her feeling very positive about the whole experience...
October 2018
Fraser Gunn
the RNLI
‘For Those in Peril on the Sea’
We yachtsmen thought we knew about the RNLI - it rescues people like us, fishermen and merchant seamen in terrible gales. Well it does, but as Fraser Gunn - our speaker this month - revealed, it also rescues huge numbers of walkers, sea-anglers, kayakers etc. as well as, in 2017, 24,000 people aided by RNLI beach lifeguards!
Fraser started by recounting how two 15 year-old lads, first time afloat and crewing on a jaunt to Alderney, met terrible conditions as they approached the UK coast on the way home, lost their rig and, with no engine (this was just post-war), no VHF etc. - had just a single parachute flare to summon help. Fortunately it was seen, the lifeboat launched and they were saved. Fraser was one of those lads! And has been a dedicated RNLI supporter ever since.
The RNLI was founded in 1824 - think 18,000 shipwrecks a year - by Sir William Hilary, in the face of no Admiralty support. The first lifeboats were open and rowed, then came sailing boats and finally powered vessels. The latest Shannon class all-weather-lifeboat is remarkable, can be beach launched and recovered in virtually all conditions and was designed and is built in-house by the RNLI at their Poole HQ. As the RNLI continually renews and upgrades it's fleet their old boats find themselves all over the world underpinning other SAR organisations, many based on and trained by the RNLI. And then there are the inshore boats, and even a few hovercraft.
Apart from a few full time crew members on the Thames and at the isolated Spurn Head station, the lifeboat crews remain unpaid volunteers and now include many women. And whilst the lifeboat crews - a byword for courage and self-sacrifice - are often the most visible part of the organisation, they in turn depend on thousands of shorebased volunteers, from humble fund raisers to the guys that drive the beach launch tractors( into and and often right under boiling surf - as one of Fraser's video clips showed).
The RNLI remains a charity (they flirted with state support for 10 years in the late 19th century but found it too beareaucratic and restrictive and reverted) and needs to raise almost £200m a year to protect all those who venture near water - whether at sea, the coast and even inland.
November 2018
James Byrne
Is there a doctor on board?
Aboard 3-masted Barque Tenacious, one
of two of Jubilee Sailing Trust’s tall ships especially equipped for people with disabilities, the answer is a resounding yes. On three of her voyages our eminent consultant neuroradiologist member James Byrne was the volunteer Ship’s Doctor.
James reminded us of the long history of this noble calling by showing a video clip from movie Master and Commander of Capt Jack Aubrey and his friend the Ship’s Doctor (Naval Surgeon) Maturin playing a string duet aboard. A nice start.
Tenacious cruises with just 8 permanent crew, the other 40 on board being a 50:50 mix of disabled people and their able-bodied “buddies”. James is a specialist consultant and had his anxieties about dealing with the range of illness, accidents and emergencies that may happen aboard, so did a few days in A&E at The Horton as a refresher before his first stint. He and his co-worker on board (the Medical Purser, a permanent crew member) could sometimes “phone for help” but by and large the buck stopped with them. Mid-ocean is mid-ocean, after all.
On James’ third and longest voyage (55 days at sea - a retirement special for him) he told us how happy he was to get within 150 miles of their Caribbean destination, at which point the ship was within helicopter range so he could sleep easier. What did James have to deal with, apart from the normal pressures of crewing and life aboard a tall ship? Going aloft is de rigueur for tall ship sailors, involving much fearful anticipation for many and memorable elation on its achievement. On Tenacious even those with missing limbs, or in wheelchairs, are encouraged and if necessary supported in doing this, which is scary and emotive even to watch. So what medical challenges did James have to deal with? In among the more straightforward problems of a dislocated shoulder and “a foreign body in eye” he was faced with a case of supraventricular tachycardia, and (be kind, oh gentle reader!) paruresis - the inability to urinate in the real or imaginary presence of others - a problem in the confines of a sailing ship. It needed tact and imagination to solve.
The Jubilee Sailing Trust does wonderful work giving people with disabilities a holiday and a life-enriching experience, and, as we learned on that evening, James is not the only Chipping Norton Yacht Club member to have volunteered with them!
It was a great pleasure to hear from James and learn more about the work of the Trust.