small craft

For love of a boat – Birling Gap

/ Bill / 1 Comment

Birling Gap 2009

Here is a problem most fisherman don’t have to face. Note the tideline.

Not only has the boat to be dragged up the shallow beach out of the tide’s reach, but, having hauled it up the scaffold, there is the further irritation of the gear falling out.

The Birling Gap section of this very beautiful coast is eroding faster than the rest, the buildings at the top of the cliff heading for the sea.

Seven Sisters, East Sussex 2009

For the origins and full set of images in this series, here

For love of a boat – Keep turning left

/ Bill

I’ve been watching and thoroughly enjoying Dylan Winter‘s short videos of his trip round the UK.

The series is called ‘Keep Turning Left – around Britain in a small boat’.

The boat is 19 foot. He starts in Bembridge on the Isle of Wight. I have just watched No 16 – we are in the Medway!

I am not convinced by every one of his opinions, but his description is excellent and the camera work great – particularly of the working boats and especially the Thames barges.

Gentle stuff to idle away an evening – passed parts of the country I have visited recently.

For love of a boat – photography

/ Bill / 129 Comments

I have introduced a new category in my links column – Marine photography.

Over a year ago, I started the ‘For love of a boat’ series. It originated during a walk on a Croatian beach in June 2008.

Since a child I have been fascinated by small inshore craft and will seek them out whenever I can. I have photographed them, watched them, read about them. They were always there, there was never a shortage. But now, in later life, I have woken up to the fact that the shapes I love are disappearing – fast. Others are taking there place but in very different times.

In that first post, I wrote:

“The problem is this: here is a fine-looking, well-built, working boat sitting on a beach.

It’s not in its original condition. The hot sun shines on it every day, the seams have opened, a piece of the forefoot has come away. Whether this is repairable or not is irrelevant, this boat is no longer required for its original purpose and it will finish its life as a theatrical prop on a beautiful beach in Croatia.

So, do we care? After all, there are plenty of other boats in the world. What’s special about this one?

Well,  somebody had the idea to build it. Perhaps he designed it – or perhaps he took the lines off another boat-  (I say ‘he’ because it’s less likely in this country to be ’she’ – but not impossible). Somebody sawed the timbers and found the rest of the materials required, then they built it. Maybe he sold it or maybe he used it himself to fish from, and certainly he would have put in the time to maintain it.

You see, this boat has gathered a history around it. It is the story of a life lived on the water. We may never know the details of that story, but it deserves some respect and, at the very least, it can be preserved in a picture.

I hope to post pictures of similar boats (most of them in a better state than this one) at regular intervals.”

I have been posting pictures ever since – more or less weekly. There are now well over 100 images in the back posts of this blog, and rather than invite people to browse back through them, I have posted them all in one set. Each time I add a new Love of a boat post, the image will automatically add to the set.

I have also discovered other people who share my passion, notably AA, whose insight into Greece and Greek boats has been another revelation. He also has built a similar set of images, and has kindly given me permission to link to it.

At the same time there are fine sets from Kostas Sarris and Simone Pierotti.

As time goes on I shall add sets relevant to the other themes in the blog, notably the Folksong, and the Ceres.

My interest in photography is in its ability to inform and to record, as well as in its status as an art in its own right.

For love of a boat – Dungeness 2009

/ Bill

We walked along the shingle at Dungeness from the Britannia Inn to the Pilot Inn keeping close to the surf.

The sun shone and a heavy north easterly breeze made for a bracing walk.

~~~

RX  is the code for Rye and Hastings on this south coast.

At Hastings and here at Dungeness the boats are not moored in port, but hauled up the shingle beaches – either by heavy winches or by caterpillar tractors.

The distinctive sterns are designed to take the surf at launch and haul-up.

What surprised me – (perhaps it shouldn’t have), was the identical fishing boat fifty yards along the beach.

The design is timeless – only the materials have changed.

For the origins and full set of images in this series, here

On sailing a Folksong – evolving designs

/ Bill

In the Trechandiri post  a week or so ago. I was thinking about evolving boat design, talking about it in old man’s ‘generation-to-generation’ terms. But, of course, boat designers are continually modifying their ideas – and boat owners continually modify the designer’s ideas with ideas of their own.

Below is an extract from an interview between Frank Rosenow and Thord Sund, the designer of the Folkboat. It first appeared in Sail Magazine, June 1979, and was reproduced in Yachting Monthly, October 1979 under the heading “Folkboat Encounter”.

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“”I first designed her (the Folkboat) with a fully battened mainsail. It took me quite a while to realize how impractical that arrangement was . . . , another brainstorm was when I saw that a canvas cot I had intended for the cockpit would fit into the forepeak with room to spare.

Another twist was that I had conceived her as a weekend cruiser, with the simplest possible rig and equipment. There were no winches of course since the jib halyard and the jib sheets could be taken care of with two-part tackles.

In spite of all this simplicity, or maybe on account of it, people started sailing Folkboats to and from every conceivable corner of the world. And I’m glad the boat proved equal to it, even without a self-draining cockpit and all the rest of it. . . .”

In 1966, Thord Sund redesigned the Nordic Folkboat for production in fiberglass. On the “inter­national Folkboat” he retained the proven hull sections but increased the freeboard from 550mm to 660mm to obtain more room below.  He also drew out the bow and rounded off the stern, for appearance’s sake. The clinker pattern of the original’s fir planking was dropped, marginally reducing wetted surface.

This time, he opted for a self-draining cockpit, mainly because potential buyers seemed to think it would make the boat safer “They” also wanted a spinnaker, so he raised the headstay attachment point on the mast and settled on an altogether new rig. The new rig configuration allowed the use of higher aspect ratio jibs and of large  over-lapping genoas. Halyard and sheet winches were now called for.

Sunden’s final variation on the folkboat theme came in the mid-1970s when, again responding to popular demand, he designed the M26 (Sunwind) with an even higher freeboard and provision for a Volvo-Penta diesel engine.

Then, with another quantum jump in the freeboard, she had come to the box-like apparition we were sitting in – “Of course, she does have a hell of a lot of space.” mused Sunden.

“We live in a different age.” he said, almost angrily. “People swarm onboard at the boat shows wearing muddy clogs, and the only thing they are interested in is standing room by the galley. So here you have it, the private flush toilet, the walk-in closet, a wall-to-wall carpet and all that garbage.”

He proceeded to decant the sherry, his heavy-lidded, sea-blue eyes staring sadly at the cork.”

~~~

At the same time as Thord Sund was thinking along these lines, Eric Berqgvist had taken the idea and produced the Folksong – this post. He too evolved his design as production proceeded.

All this was happening thirty or so years ago. Since then, technology has leapt forward, construction materials have developed, design ideas are continually being modified. These are exciting times.

Nevertheless, I picked the Folksong for the ideas that Berqgvist and Sund were working on. It suits me.

(With thanks to Mike Burns for pointing out both articles).


For love of a boat – Trechandiri follow-up

/ Bill / 2 Comments

AA comments on my Trechandiri post:

“The word Trehandiri (Τρεχαντήρι) is loosely translated to ‘A fast boat’ which is kind of obvious for the first picture (a long and narrow boat that does not upset the water around it too much, a bit like the rowing skiffs) but not so obvious for the boats in the second picture that look more stable (wide) than fast. So perhaps they were termed ‘Fast Boats’ because they were also powered by motors.

The designers had to strike this balance between speed / stability / useful volume (after all you still need space for all the fish harvest 😀 )…These dimensions and other design elements were defined (or rather homed in) without mathematical models and simulations in different sea states at expensive experimental facilities.

I think that this is a good reason to preserve the boats and relevant pieces of the art from that era…(and of course not only the Greek fishing boats).”

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I think AA has got it exactly right – “These dimensions and other design elements were defined without mathematical models and simulations in different sea states at expensive experimental facilities.”

Boat-building was an art before it became a science.

Men looked at the sea, applied their common sense and, using tools that they created themselves, turned local materials into craft that had value and beauty by virtue of their function.

Did they get it right first time? Probably not. But they learnt by doing. Shapes and designs evolved . . .  and kept on evolving, handed on from generation to generation.

It is the vessels that are the results of this process that are being lost today. (Yes, there are still people building in this way in some parts of the world. But they are getting fewer and fewer).

Science has created a different process. The generation thing is not necessary any more – at least in the sense of person-to-person. It is more technical advance-to-technical advance. This may be spelt out in days or weeks rather than years. For example, every year new advances in technology create new products which lead to new fashions that can be seen everywhere. This year seems to be the year of the small RIB, the sit-on kayak and some very fast boats – as well as touch-screen monitors and AIS sets.

That’s great. As someone, who taps at a keyboard, posting yet more words on the internet, I like technology – and use it more and more.

But, in posting the ‘love of a boat’ series, I have noticed how technology is occluding this one important aspect of our lives: our respect for the deeper layer of human endeavour born of past generations, that lives in the present and will hopefully be passed on to our children.

It isn’t that we do not have the ability to be creative nor the willingness to gain skills, nor even that we do not care, it is that we are being hurried along a certain path that requires us to follow rather than to lead. We barely have time to assimilate one advance before the next one leapfrogs it. The pace of change is increasing.

The price of this is in many, many small losses that individually can be dismissed but in the end will add up to an impoverished society.

The demise of the ‘traditional’ craft is one of these losses.

This:

becomes this:

by doing nothing.

When AA says “I think this is a good reason to preserve the boats and relevant pieces of the art from that era”, I absolutely agree with him.