Category: Sailing ships

HMS Pickle moves to Gibraltar

It’s the bowsprit that hits you between the eyes. Clock the size of it: with something like that you could sail her into port and knock the back wall out of a dockside crimper’s best bedroom…

The 73ft schooner HMS Pickle is a  replica of the 1799-built original HMS Pickle, which had the honour of bringing the news of the battle of Trafalgar back to Britain. It was a big, bittersweet moment: one one hand it was victory in the war with the French, but on the other hand the commander of the British fleet, Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson, 1st Duke of Bronté, had been shot and killed.

The excuse for publishing these striking photos is that from mid-September the superyachts at Gibraltar’s Ocean Village Marina will have HMS Pickle for a neighbour. Gibraltar’s gain is the UK’s loss, but there’s something appropriate about the move.

HMS Pickle’s is to sail from the UK to her new home in Gibraltar via Cape Trafalgar – a route that the original Pickle would have followed many times.

The ship’s operator, Robin James said ‘The connection she has with Gibraltar and the part they both played in British Naval history is a great story to share and I am sure her arrival will be a real boost to tourism… We have received fantastic support from the government of Gibraltar and Ocean Village and can’t wait to get there.’

Robin comes from a family of mariners, and in 2004 took time off work to set off around Europe and America in search of a tall ship of his own – and then found Pickle in Gloucester where she had recently arrived from Russia.

‘Pickle had real appeal because of the original’s rich history and adventures in the Caribbean and Europe.  The first Pickle was wrecked and sunk off southern Spain in 1808 but this 1996-built replica is uncannily similar and gives us a great insight into the methods and technologies of the time.’

Buckler’s Hard and its Ships, published 1906

 

 

A history of this important old centre for ship building, and now a destination for yacht owners and tourists.

‘Many cottages, now no longer needed, and falling to pieces, have had to be pulled down, and closed is the inn kept once by Mr Hemmons, where the shipwrights and caulkers were paid; as is the New Inn, with its traditions of a ”Smuggler’s Hole,” kept till much later times by Mr. Wort, who was succeeded by his son Joseph. James Bown, probably the ancestor of the Bound family today, no longer fires the kiln, and only hollows in a meadow and by the waterside tell where the ”top and bottom sawyers” laboured. The site of the mould-loft in the lower yard can still be pointed out. The blacksmith’s shop, part of which existed in the writer’s time, and which only ceased operations in 1885, is no more. The last of the Buckles went away with its disappearance, to settle down again as a repairer of agricultural implements and traction engines beyond Lymington.

‘Some three miles by land and five by water, away up the wooded estuary lie the shipwrights and caulkers resting in in the peaceful churchyard of Beaulieu Abbey, side by side with the last Hampshire iron-founders from Sowley Pond.

‘The only actual link with the past which has been known to me personally was an old copper riveter, named Glasby, whom I remember quite well, who died at the ripe age of ninety-one. He could well remember working at the ships in his youth, and was proud to talk about his memories of the time when oak, not iron, ruled the waves’

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.