Tag: sailing

The hardest voyage – rowing and sailing a Viking ship from Wicklow to Portsmouth

[ad name=”intheboatshed-post”]

Viking Ship Sea Stallion sailing from Wicklow to Portsmouth

Viking Ship Sea Stallion sailing from Wicklow to Portsmouth

Viking Ship Sea Stallion sailing from Wicklow to Portsmouth

The Sea Stallion making it’s way from Wicklow to Portsmouth. Photos from
the press section of the Sea Stallion website. As usual, click on the images
for larger photos

The Viking Ship Sea Stallion is an extraordinary project to sail and row a reproduction Viking ship in the wake of the the originals – and it’s proving to be very hard work for the crew. The project issued this press release a few days ago:

‘It has been the hardest voyage yet,’ says project leader Preben Rather Sørensen over the ship’s VHF Tuesday morning.

The Viking ship Sea Stallion left Wicklow in Ireland at 12 noon on Sunday, and is now, Tuesday morning, running before the wind up the English Channel along England’s south coast with 56 tired crew members, who will soon have been sailing non-stop for 48 hours.

The crew went to the farthest limits of body and spirit in a dramatic night. When they go ashore this evening in southern England, they will have sailed the Sea Stallion further than ever before. This morning they have already sailed 220 nautical miles. Last year the ship sailed from Roskilde to Norway in 36 hours – 240 nautical miles in all. That record will be broken today.

The ship’s voyage from Ireland was extremely demanding. Lands End met the ship with threats in pitch darkness around midnight. There were three-metre-high waves from the Atlantic and the westerly reached gale force at times. We took three reefs in the sail.

We had to transfer a total of four members of the crew to the support vessel, Cable One – the last one at a quarter to five this morning. All four had been seasick so long that skipper Carsten Hvid feared for their health. They have all recovered now and in a short time will be sailed back to the Sea Stallion again. Cable One is equipped with several RIBs. These are big rubber dinghies with powerful outboard motors, and they cope well with even three-metre-high waves.

‘The Sea Stallion has coped with the enormous pressure just fantastically. It has never been pushed any where near so long and so hard. We have had no problems with the ship at all,’ says Preben Rather Sørensen.

‘But we have certainly had to bale out a lot of water, for in the hard weather we took innumerable tons of water in. It says a lot about the nature of the voyage and the ship’s quality as reconstruction that, despite half of the crew being constantly seasick, we have been able to handle the ship and manoeuvre quite safely, reefing in and out and trimming the sail without any great difficulty – despite the enormous forces with which the hard westerly wind has hit the hull and the rigging.’

By: Lars Normann

The Sea Stallion from Glendalough is a reconstruction of the Skuldelev-2 wreck excavated from the bottom of Roskilde Fjord in 1962. Scientific research has shown that she was built by Vikings in Dublin in 1042. For more information: http://www.havhingsten.dk

Uffa Fox’s airborne lifeboat at the Museum of the Broads

[ad name=”intheboatshed-post”]

Uffa Fox\'s airborne lifeboat at the Museum of the Broads

Airborne lifeboat at the Museum of the Broads. Notice
the unusual Saildrive engine it used on a stand in front,
and also the Norfolk punt on display beneath. Click on
the photo for a larger image

This airborne lifeboat is one of the Museum of the Broads’ great treasures.  Note the Saildrive engine on a stand just in front of the boat – I gather many of these were volunteered by yachtsmen for use in the the airborne lifeboats, which couldn’t use anything else.

These boats were designed to save the lives of bomber aircraft crew – if a crew ditched in the sea and could be found, a bomber aircraft would drop one of these in the hope that the men below would be able to climb into the boat and sail or motor it home. In practice they saved many lives and made something of a hero out of the the inventor.

After the war, along with many other bits of war surplus equipment they were often bought for small sums and and converted into something more conventional – in this case they often became fully rigged sailing boats, and were frequently used for racing. You can’t keep a good Uffa Fox hull down, can you?

For more posts on topics relating to Uffa Fox, click here.

Uffa Fox airborne lifeboat poster at the Museum of the Broads

Poster showing lifeboat equipment. Click on the photo
for a larger image

The Redoubtable at Trafalgar

[ad name=”intheboatshed-post”]

The Redoubtable at Trafalgar

Click on the photograph for a larger image

Talk of Barton Broad brings me to matters of Nelson, as it’s known that he stayed in the area in his youth, and would have sailed there. Legend even has it that he lost a chain and locket in the Broad’s depths.

And thinking of Nelson reminded me I’d taken this photo of a painting produced in 1805 by Louis Phillipe Crépin depicting the brave French ship Redoubtable in action at the Battle of Trafalgar. It hangs in the Paris Musée de la Marine.

One account of the role of the Redoubtable can found at the Wikipedia , but it’s interesting also to see Captain Lucas’s account here.

I think Turner painted the same scene several times, but I doubt he ever depicted the Victory’s Ensign hanging symbolically in the water from a broken flagpole.

An elderly retired Admiral comments: ‘Those bally Frenchmen never miss a trick when they have an opportunity to have a go at us Brits! Tried to keep us out of the Common Market several times. Of course I don’t mind going there on holiday and I’ll drink their wine, but there is a limit and these Froggies haven’t a clue where it might be… Pshaw!”

The Redoubtable at Trafalgar

Click on the photograph for a larger image