Category: Rowing boat

Old postcards: an ‘oil launch’ wins a 1910 regatta prize, Jellicoe and Burton Bradstock

Cause oil launch regatta trophy 1910 Jellicoe postcard

Burton Bradstock postcard

My thanks to regular intheboatshed reader and supporter Jeff Cole for sending over these scans of old postcards. As usual, click on the images for a much larger view.

The trophy is intriguing – who might Mr Cause have been, I wonder, and what would his oil launch have looked like in 1910? I wonder if it was anything like this launch?

If you don’t happen to know the story of Admiral of the Fleet The Right Honourable The Earl Jellicoe, read about his career here.

There’s an interesting page about fishing at Burton Bradstock including some great photos here, and maps of the area here. I’d guess the boats would be the local crab and lobster boats.

Testing prototypes for the world’s largest Viking ship

The Dragon Harald Fairhair project sounds wonderful – and even these little prototypes are clearly great fun.

You may have heard that square-sailed craft without deep keels don’t go well to windward and have to be rowed, but from what I can see, these little boats do remarkably well on that point of sailing, even if we can’t see enough to tell whether they match up to a modern racing yacht.

My thinking is that the Norsemen made the journey to our islands in numbers on a regular basis, and did it in such numbers that most of the villages and features in the area where I grew up were named by them. In making their journeys, they must have sailed towards the prevailing wind on most occasions.

It will therefore be very interested to hear how the new Dragon performs when she’s complete. Read all about her here and here.

My thanks to John  Lockwood for pointing this out.

Two David Moss canoe yawls for sale

Bunny - 15ft 6in David Moss canoe yawl for sale Ethel - 15ft 6in David Moss canoe yawl for sale

Fancy one of David Moss’s highly regarded canoe yawls?

They don’t come up very often, but there are no less than two of the lovely strip-planked boats for sale right now at canoeyawl.org: the 13ft Ethel, which currently belongs to canoeyawl.org editor Dick Wynne; the other is the  15ft 6in Bunny, now owned by Nigel Field.