Tag: ship

The concertina at sea

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Dan Worralll article Concertinas at sea

This weekend I was lucky to meet Dan Worrall, an anglo concertina player from Texas who has written a series of fascinating articles about the instrument.

His latest paper examining the widely-held perception that the instrument has a strong connection with sailors is required reading for those of us with an interest in sea songs and music!

For some years there has been a widely held view that the ‘tina-playing sailor was a myth – they might bring a concertina bought on the quayside home as a present, but they would be impractical instruments on a boat because steel reeds would be subject to corrosion. With no real evidence to work from, I tended towards this view myself.

However, from the evidence Dan has found, it turns out that sailors in times past did play concertinas. In a way, that should be no surprise when one considers the limited options sailors have had for entertainment during their precious leisure hours at sea – ask a ex-merchant navy seaman over fifty years old who remembers voyages made before video players were widely available, and he’ll usually tell you how important music making was on board ship.

That being so, then why shouldn’t an instrument as popular as the anglo concertina in the late 19th and early 20th centuries be an important part of the music-making scene on board ship, if a way can be found of keeping the instrument dry? After all, many types of instruments are susceptible to damage from damp and salt, not least the fiddle.

For shanties and other sea songs, see Stan Hugill’s books at ABE Books

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Worm in old Poole Harbour carving threatens UK wood jetties, archaeology and boats

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Merman carving found in Poole Harbour contains warm water ship worm

Merman carving found in Poole Harbour contains warm water ship worm

The Poole Harbour merman. I’ve been unable to find any
decent royalty-free images of the blacktip shipworm – please
point us to any you know!

An old carving found off Poole Harbour by Bournemouth University archaeologists has been attacked by a warm-water ship worm that could threaten boats, archaeological sites and wooden structures around the UK.

The carving of a merman in the Swash Channel near the entrance to the Harbour is said to be an important find, but the discovery of the warm-water ship worm Lyrodus pedicellatus or blacktip shipworm in both the carving and in timbers of the wreck could be rather more significant.

‘The presence of this type of borer can be interpreted as an indication of global warming, as it typically lives in more temperate waters, such as the Mediterranean,’ said one of the academics, Paulo Palma.

‘If this species of ship worm continues to spread at its current pace it poses a major threat to all submerged wooden structures around the British coast including jetties and piers, as well as to our underwater heritage.’

It seems pretty sure that this creature eats wood, it’ll attack many of our most important old boats too.

Undergraduate marine archaeology students from BU have spent the last three summers mapping the Swash Channel wreck which emerged in 2004 following dredging work. The wreck is believed to date from the early 1600s, although its exact country of origin remains unknown.

Click on the link to see Bournemouth University’s announcement.

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

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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