Gavin Atkin's weblog for the sort of people who like looking inside boat sheds. It's about old boats, traditional boats, boat building, restoration, the sea and the North Kent Coast
I missed this the first time – but the latest news is that the digitised papers from ships captured in battle are to be put online. I think it’s wonderful and surprising that they’ve been preserved for so long. They say that some of the letters have never been opened…
Thanks once again to Chris Brady for pointing me to the information.
I recommend this for its insights, entertaining salty writin and L Francis Herreshoff’s trenchant opinions (though you may not always agree), and of course Off Center Harbor’s videos are just great.
My thanks to Lew Clayman for pointing it out. He knows what I like…
The little town of Salcombe at the southern tip of Devon has a smashing, packed little community museum that’s open from 10.30am-12.30pm from April to October – it’s definitely worth a trip, as it’s full of great exhibits about shipping, boatbuilding, fishing and pleasure boating.
One of the many things I learned was that Tennyson wrote his iconic poem Crossing the Bar in 1889 after arriving at Salcombe in a very impressive and comfortable looking steam yacht.
I wonder what the bar looked like that day, and what stories he heard about it. That bar has a history: just a generation after Tennyson wrote his poem in 1916 the town experienced a terrible lifeboat disaster in which 13 crewmen drowned.
If you can take a dinghy down for a sail or a motor on the lovely estuary, I recommend that too…
