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
Barge enthusiast Laura Tomkins has kindly sent me some fine, smile-inducing photos of the Thames Sailing Barge Parade, which was held yesterday.
The event seems to have had the same dramatic skies and occasional showers my pal and I encountered out on the Estuary as we sailed to and fro through the Copperas channel, but don’t the barges look great! Thanks Laura!
My pal Malcolm Woods has just found a new online collection of Victorian photographer Peter Henry Emerson’s atmospheric shots depicting the Norfolk Broads.
They’re stunning – though I can’t help that despite the dreamy tranquility they do seem to depict a hard and narrow-looking sort of life. There would be work and the struggle of getting by all week and on Saturday, of course – and then on Sunday there would other duties for many, often listening to fiery sermons in the chapel.
When novelist LP Hartley wrote: ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,’ he could so easily have been writing about these folks.
Stunning new photographs of Joshua Slocum and Spray have turned up in possession of  an elderly woman whose family spent their summers at Hyannis Point, Massachusetts, across Buzzards Bay from Fairhaven where the solo round the world sailor repaired and relaunched the old oystering boat he chose for his trip.
The photos, which are strikingly clear, can be seen on the Swizzle Media website, along with an article by Bill Springer, grandson-in-law of the lady who owned the collection. The negatives of the Spray photos were in an envelope simply marked ‘Slocum, 1906’.
There – that should make someone’s day!
My thanks to Mark J Hughes of the Duckworks Magazine Facebook group for passing this one along.