Month: October 2010

Lowlands away!

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Here’s a ghost story for Halloween – the great old slow sea shanty Lowlands, with an engraving drawn from Van der Velde and photos from Geoffrey Robertshaw.

To find out more about Robertshaw and his fabulous photos of the last days of sail, click here.

For more sea songs from our friends and ourselves, click here.

PS – Like many others, I was astonished to learn that this year’s Turner Prize has been won by a sound sculpture featuring this very song.

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Calshot tender tug trust seeks 20ft lifeboats for Titanic maiden voyage 100th anniversary

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Tender tug Calshot with Olympic, sister ship to the Titanic

Tender tug Calshot with Olympic, sister ship to the Titanic

The Tender Tug Calshot Trust is seeking two 20ft ship’s lifeboats for the tender tug Calshot in time for an event marking the 100th anniversary of the day the liner Titanic left Southampton and set off on her maiden voyage.

Sadly, the Calshot’s original lifeboats were left in a yard by the former owners, with the result that they deteriorated to a point where they had to be scrapped.

The anniversary is on the 10th April 2012, and I gather television historian Dan Snow is scheduled to present a live television programme.

In addition to the two replacement lifeboats, the trust is also seeking information about whether any of the original Titanic lifeboats have survived, as it has learned that they were reallocated to other White Star liners following the ship’s famous and tragic sinking.

The Tender Tug Calshot Trust was set up in 1997 with the prime aim of restoring Calshot to the way she was in the 1930s.

She’s included in the National Historic Ships list of 200 vessels of pre-eminent national significance, and in fact she’s no ordinary tug. Built in Southampton by Thornycroft’s at Woolston, she was a tender as well as a tug, and was certified to carry 566 passengers in first and second class saloons: often the larger liners would anchor offshore as it was uneconomic to negotiate into the docks to transfer a few passengers, and Calshot would then ferry these passengers and small items of freight.

In her time, she also manoeuvred the world’s greatest ocean liners, including the Queen Mary, the Queen Elizabeth, the United States, the France and the Olympic, sister ship of the Titanic.

Digitised traditional canoe plans for cedar strip construction

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1883 Southwest Greenland canoe digitised plans

Computer model of 1883 Southwestern Greenland kayak

Paddlinglight.com website guru Bryan Hansel is publishing plans for traditional canoes digitised from material included in a classic book by Howard Chappelle and based on the work of Edwin Tappan Adney.

Here’s what Bryan has to say:

‘Each week this winter, I’m digitising a plan from the book Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America and releasing a set of station and stem plans for cedar strip builders on my website.

‘The plans that are currently finished are found here: http://www.paddlinglight.com/category/articles/free-kayak-and-canoe-plans I’m doing this hoping that these old designs, some not built in 100 years, get built, so we can compare the old designs to modern and see how kayaks and canoeing have changed.’

Plans examples already on the website from include a 1921 Southwest Greenland kayak dating from 1921 and 1883, and a Passamaquoddy ocean canoe of 1898.

Thanks Bryan! These are such elegant boat forms.

Two editions of the original Chappelle and Tappan Adney book are available from Amazon, here and here.