Tag: wooden boat

Row St Kilda to Skye – 100 miles of very hard work

Row St Kilda to Skye

These folks’ project is to row the 100 mile distance from St Kilda – a remote island that was abandoned in 1930 – to the Isle of Skye in a boat that was built in around 1890, and which hasn’t been used since 1913.

The legend says that on that occasion a visiting lady had missed the scheduled steamer, and the boat was used to row her to meet the same steamer at a later stop at Stromeferry – and ever since that day, it has hung in the rafters of a boathouse.

Before she makes her first big outing for more than a century, however, she is being restored to her former glory.

The trip itself will be very weather-dependant: it will need a big high to calm the Atlantic seas to make it possible to row to Portree via the sound of Harris, around the top of Rhuba Hunish, down the sound of Raasay, past the Black Rock and into Portree harbour. There will be four crew members rowing at any time, each with one wooden hollow sculled oar and a fixed wooden seat, and a coxswain whose jobs will be keeping time, navigating, and bailing – out water! Another four rowers will be on a support vessel, and the two teams will change over at intervals.

The group is training – it has no previous rowing experience – and expects to be rowing for anything between 38 and 48 hours. Apparently, they expect blisters, back pain, sleep deprivation, exhaustion and a certain amount of chafing from the wooden seats… I guess long-distance rowers with some experience might well be able to offer them some useful advice.

There’s a charity dimension to the project also; money raised is to go to the RNLI and Skye & Lochalsh Young Carers.

Read all about Row St Kilda to Skye here.

PS Canoe and lute builder, Phil Bolger boat builder and astronomer and Bill Samson suggests has pointed out that some time ago the BBC Alba screened a TV programme about two women from the Stornoway Canoe Club on the Isle of Lewis, Dolina Swanson and Christine Stewart, recreating a 1965 canoe journey by Hamish and Anne Gow.

The Gows became the first kayakers to make the treacherous 40-plus mile sea journey from the Western Isles to the mystical islands of St Kilda.

Lewis boat builder Angus Smith re-create the original plywood and canvas Clyde double kayak – for the trip… See the BBC’s page of information, a clip and photos here. Thanks Bill!

Storms, and Captain Washington’s report following the 1848 storms

Washington_Boat_Map

Talking of storms as most folks probably were last night, I happened to mention Captain Washington RN and his report to Parliament following the Moray Firth fishing disaster of 1848, in which 124 boats were lost, many while trying to enter harbour, and 100 fishermen lost their lives.

Captain Washington’s enquiry proposed improvements to both harbours and boats, which had largely been undecked up to that time. There was a certain amount of resistance to the idea of decking boats partly because the craft would not be able to carry as much fish, and partly, it was argued, because fishermen feared being washed off the decks.

However, what followed was that increasingly fishing boats tended to be decked, and larger so that large catches could still be carried – a trend that led to the development of the baldie and some say to the powerful Zulu. (Also see Kate in Suffolk.) There’s an entry on the Wikipedia that’s worth reading: Moray Firth fishing disaster.

Captain Washington’s report is also important in another way – because he (and presumably his team) also surveyed boat types from around our coasts, including the Deal luggers (see below) and fishing boats at Hastings, and in the process recorded some boat types that would have known rather less about today. It’s a shame, however, that I can’t find a copy of Captain Washington’s report online. If anyone knows where there is one, please let me know in the link below, and I’ll link to it.

Captain Washington Deal lugger Captain Washington Deal lugger 2

 

 

‘Build me straight’ 1963 Scottish documentary about the building of a fishing boat

[This has been pulled from YouTube but is still available from the Scottish Film Archive. My thanks to Iain McAllister of the Peggy Bawn Press for letting me know.]

Thanks to Hans Christian Rieck for pointing this one out.

The poem, by the way (isn’t the Internet wonderful!), the title comes from a poem by the American poet Longfellow, which turns up on the Poetry Foundation website among other places.

Poetry can be a complicated thing, and at a big distance in time its meaning can be lost if no-one explainsd it. So here’s a short quotation from the Poetry Foundation’s piece about Longfellow:

‘The Building of the Ship combines a tribute to the master builder who designed the ship with a love story linking the master’s daughter to the ‘fiery youth’ employed in its construction while making clear that the Union stood allegorically for the United States on the eve of secession. Fanny Kemble performed this poem in dramatic readings, bringing herself and audiences to tears in the memorable emotional crescendo of the last stanza with its invocation to an imperiled country that is nonetheless the best hope for the world: ‘Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State! / Sail on, O UNION, strong and great!’ President Abraham Lincoln, hearing these lines recited in the midst of the Civil War, is reported to have wept before remarking, ‘It is a wonderful gift to be able to stir men like that.’

Nowadays, of course, we tend to titter at ‘ship of state’ analogies and patriotic idealism, and instead of high hopes for the future, instead worry that our political leaders may be influenced a little too much by the rich and powerful. Such different times…

I also note that Longfellow clearly had an inkling about the aims of the ship designer – not too much tophamper, centre of gravity not too high, the importance of hull form in steering, and a stern designed to allow the water to close nicely aft…

(By the way – there’s a fairly recent post on this weblog about another famous nautical Longfellow piece, The Wreck of the Hesperus.)

The Building of the Ship

By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

‘Build me straight, O worthy Master!
Stanch and strong, a goodly vessel,
That shall laugh at all disaster,
And with wave and whirlwind wrestle!’

The merchant’s word
Delighted the Master heard;
For his heart was in his work, and the heart
Giveth grace unto every Art.
A quiet smile played round his lips,
As the eddies and dimples of the tide
Play round the bows of ships,
That steadily at anchor ride.
And with a voice that was full of glee, Continue reading “‘Build me straight’ 1963 Scottish documentary about the building of a fishing boat”