Category: Techniques

Wrinkles in Seamanship or a ‘Help’ to Salt Horse, by Lieut. C Cradock, RN, part 1

I love the advice about taking in the spanker very quietly to avoid waking the skipper.

In thought this book might be particularly useful for Mal Nicholson, master of HMS Pickle. As it happens, it’s only a few days late for his birthday…

Author Lieutenant C Cradock seems to be the same gentleman as Rear-Admiral Sir Christopher “Kit” George Francis Maurice Cradock a British officer of the Royal Navy who earned a reputation for great gallantry.

If he is the same Naval officer, he died fighting the German fleet led by Admiral Maximilian von Spee’s during the Battle of Coronel off the Chilean coast along with the entire crews of HMS Good Hope and HMS Monmouth, who together numbered 1570 men.  It is said that Cradock was outgunned and ill-equipped to fight Spee’s fleet.

These events followed soon after Rear-Admiral Ernest Troubridge was court martialled for failing to attack a superior enemy force.

Chronometer maker Harrison vindicated

Brilliant clockmaker and inventor of the navigational chronometer John Harrison must be laughing in his grave after a 100-day trial of his ‘clock B’ was officially declared by Guinness World Records, to be the world’s ‘most accurate mechanical clock with a pendulum swinging in free air’.

Remarkably, Harrison designed the clock more than 250 years ago – after developing the chronometer, he claimed that he could make a pendulum timepiece that would be accurate to within a second over a 100-day period.

The challenge would be impossible, his enemies insisted but the Guinness trial shows that Harrison: scientists at the Greenwich observatory this week revealed that the clock built to the Harrison’s clockmaker’s design and owned by artist and clockmaker Martin Burgess had successfully run for a period of 100 days during official tests, during which it had had lost only five-eighths of a second.

For more information see The Guardian, and the British Horological Society press release.

How to make a half hull model

From this and this:

halfmodel1

halfmodel2

To this:

halfmodel3

RodgerBodger shows how it’s done here.