Category: Sailing ships

The AK Ilen – a film about her restoration

A film about the restoration of the AK Ilen, designed by Conor O’Brien, an Irish intellectual and aristocrat, who in the 1920s sailed Saoirse around the world under the tri-colour of the Irish Free State, and ship builder Tom Moynihan.

She’s expected to be launched this year, and the plan is as follows:

‘… In the summer of 2016, the Ilen will sail away from the eponymous Ilen Estuary and move more than nine waves out from shore to retake Ireland from the sea. 

‘Clearing Clear Island and Mizzen Head she will enter the mysterious arena of the quick and the dead where Donn, the Bull leads the Cow and the Calf, and all who come under his protection, to another world, to the West, to the end of life and its beginning. Oilean na mBeo and the great temple of Sceillig Mhichil marvel and suggest another way under the bright shining banner of Archangel Michael, Psychopompous and leader of souls.

‘Taking a course West of the Blaskets to view them from the sea and the wonders that brought us here in the first place, we will soon have Cuchulain’s Leap to port as the Ilen enters the Shannon Estuary for the first time in ninety years.

‘Here every care will be lavished upon her as she prepares for her playful role of introducing Ireland’s youth of all ages to the oceans… ‘

O’Brien’s book Sea-Boats, Oars and Sails is available from Lodestar Books. Here’s what yachting and boating novelist Sam Llewellyn, editor of the excellent Marine Quarterly, has to say about it:

‘… his strongly opinionated yet vitally informative and practical book, published in 1941 and now re-published to meet ascendant interest in the sail-and-oar cruiser—particularly the small lugger.
Bristling with ideas born mostly of hard-won experience, sometimes of pure conjecture, and studded with revelatory nuggets of sheer common sense concerning small boat construction, setup and handling, Sea-Boats, Oars and Sails merits its place on the bookshelf of every sail-and-oar practitioner or aspirant.’

Samuel Feake’s memorial, Henham,

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My chum Malcolm Woods happened to visit the Church of St Mary The Virgin in the Essex village of Henham the other day and found this amazing memorial to one Samuel Feake and family. He described the ship carved on the urn as ‘particularly delicious’.

I’ve left the images nice and large so that folks will be able to read the inscriptions.

The Henham website has this to say:

‘Samuel Feake was Governor of Fort Bengal, and Chairman of the East India Company. Of his family, his wife died at sea on her way home, and three children died in India: another son died at a later age in India, which took a great toll of their family. Samuel Feake, two sons, and the last of the family, Mary, are buried in the family vault here. Their hatchments, showing the arms of Feake, Hampton, and Cruse, are in the church: a hatchment, or funeral escutcheon contained the coat of arms of the dead person within a black lozenge-shaped frame, and hung over the principal entrance to the house for about a year after death, when it was often placed in the parish church. The ground of the hatchment is black round the arms of the deceased, and white round the survivor.’

I’m left wondering how this grand and successful chap should have been denied any honours in his lifetime. Did he do something wrong, I wonder, or did his demise simply catch his betters by surprise? That must have happened a lot…

My thanks to Malcolm, of course.

Pamir, one of the last commercial sailing Cape Horners

Published in May, 1948, this photo-story about the Pamir, one of the last few sailing cargo ships to round Cape Horn on a regular basis, was written by Alan Villiers and accompanied by photographs taken by Norman McNeill is a remarkable document that describes what must often have been a miserable existence, made bearable, probably, by the camaraderie of the crew and the promise of a landfall.

It also provides a splendid example of how to write seriously salty copy.

I’m grateful to sailing pal, excellent chap and East Coast Pilot co-author Dick Holness for bringing it to my attention.

We shouldn’t underestimate the power this had over the minds of boys and young men of my father’s generation and before…

‘Alone in a world heading into the atomic age, the sailing ship made use of free winds of God without benefit of artifice; and the satisfactions of those who served were deep and real. Every voyage was a challenge; it’s safe achievement a triumph.

‘Beautiful as these ships were, they bred a tough race of men. Crews manhandling their ships across the face of the seas, lived close to Nature. They learned to fight not only for every inch the sailer (sic) made along the road, but for their own existence.

‘In those days men thought nothing of living in forecastles ankle deep in sea water. Intense cold cracked their hands and made tough callouses open, running sores.

‘Nothing could be done about such wounds save to daub them in Stockholm tar. No wonder old-timers boasted that their blood was Stockholm tar, their every hair a rope yarn, their fingers marlin spikes.’