Tag: weblog

Cooking the traditional way aboard the Light Trow Onawind Blue

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Cooking on board Ben Crawshaw’s Onawind Blue

I don’t know about you, but I find just looking at this photo of Ben’s dinner cooking on board his Light Trow named Onawind Blue sets my senses off. I’m sure I can smell this dish as it cooks.

To quote Ben:

‘According to the great Catalan writer Josep Pla (1897-1981) fish stew as cooked and eaten by fishermen is the most ancient of Mediterranean dishes. Regardless of the religion, the rulers or the nationality of the neighbouring shores fish stew has been a constant.

‘A simple dish with a long history that, marrying fish, onion, garlic, tomato and potato in the pot, produces sustaining, sumptuous yet delicate fare. From this fundamental marriage the Provencal bouillabaisse was born and also the less elaborate suquet of Catalonia, a dish that has attained an almost legendary status (at least on its home shores) and one that usually carries a price tag to match.’

Find out how to cook it – the recipe is simple and you’ll find it at Ben’s excellent weblog The Invisible Workshop.

For more on trows in general and the Light Trow in particular, including boatbuilding plans etc, click here.

Cinque Ports watercolours by Jack Merriot

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The Cinque Port of Hythe

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The Cinque Port of Sandwich

We have some jolly railwayiana this morning. High-class award-winning amateur boatbuilder, unassuming Sage of the Little Green Shed and man with strong railway connections, Chris Perkins has put a series of five scans of a series of prints commissioned for the railways of Cinque Ports by the artist Jack Merriot on his website StrathkanChris’s Little World.

He suggested intheboatshed.net should link to them, knowing full well that I can’t resist a nice old-fashioned artworks like these. See the full set, as well as some immaculate boats built to Iain Oughtred plans and the first build of the new Michael Storer Raid boat at Chris’s website.

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Making a moustache fender using manila

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Michelle makes a moustache

I was pleased to find a post including some nice photos of the making of a ropework moustache fender over at Scott B Williams’ weblog Scott’s Boat Pages.

There’s a lot of interest in old-fashioned rope fenders and moustaches, not least because modern plastic types look so out of place on an old-fashioned hull, but also because there aren’t too many suppliers around to make them up. What’s more, they look as if they could be a lot of fun to make during the winter. See the links to earlier intheboatshed.net posts on ropework fenders at the bottom of this post.

The story Scott tells is of how his ropework specialist girlfriend Michelle made a moustache fender for a rowing boat being built to Iain Oughtred’s Guillemot design. The new boat is to spend its life as a tender to a 1929 John Alden schooner, Summerwind, and its new owner wanted a fender that would was just right for the job.

Made from 1/2in manila, the fender has a protective section 36in long, with 3in eyes at each end. The central section is 5in thick, tapering down to 3in at the ends;  the taper was achieved by adding varying lengths of the 1/2in  manila, and binding them in position with smaller cord. Shorter lengths were bound into the aft side to create the bent shape.

Michelle covered the whole thing with a series of continuous half-hitches, using 1/4in manila. There are a lot of half-hitches and a lot of line in a fender like this – this small one swallowed up over 200 feet of the 1/4in stuff, and Scott says that it takes a lot of patience to pull all that through a half hitch hundreds of times over.

I’ll bet it does – and I’d guess that you need to physically quite fit to be able to do it from a cross-legged position and keep smiling!

Earlier posts about ropework fenders:
A question of puddings and moustaches
How a moustache is made
Almost certainly not the final word on puddings, fenders or whiskers…

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