Tilman

[Searush]

109,000 tons at 19 knots in a moderate seaway at 0215 am isn't going to notice the odd 70 tons, 250 metres ahead of the airconditioned wheelhouse, when the OOW has his head in the ARPA altering course for big stuff, the lookout is being as much use as the average big ship lookout and everyone else has their heads down.

So the noise & shock is lost in the general noise & movement caused by a seaway? I only have ferry trips to relate to, but it just seems to me that a lump of steel would offer noticeably more resistance than water & the change would be felt wherever you were. I repeat I have no knowledge, just surprised that it is undetectable. Thanks for the heads up.

 

[Kukri]

I don't know what happened, of course, but this seems a reasonably likely explanation for the disappearance of a boat that had made the passage to Rio without alarming her crew. Tilman wrote, in a letter home, that they were the best bunch he had ever sailed with.

 

[Searush]

I don't know what happened, of course, but this seems a reasonably likely explanation for the disappearance of a boat that had made the passage to Rio without alarming her crew. Tilman wrote, in a letter home, that they were the best bunch he had ever sailed with.

Not criticising, I'm just very grateful for the general insight into run-downs.

 

[DownWest]

Minn,
Just interested, an M notice? I am used to the different coloured notices in tha aviation world, having initiated a pink one on autopilots (jammed the controls on one of our air-taxis)
Is this a general warning?
A

 

[vyv_cox]

Thanks for the input Minn, I am amazed by your statement that a 23m steel boat was sunk by a ship which didn't even notice the collision. I have no experience of such matters whatsoever & accept what you say, but can't understand that nothing would be heard or felt by any crew members. Or is it that the "disturbance" was simply ignored?

A few years ago I was given a bit of a tour of a large LNG carrier in Yokohama while I was carrying out an investigation on a small part of it. The Chief Engineer told me that he was walking on deck during a passage and thought the bow wave sounded noisy, so walked forward to investigate. There was a large whale wrapped around the bow! Presumably the ship had collided with it as it lay on the surface but nobody had noticed.

 

[Kukri]

Minn,
Just interested, an M notice? I am used to the different coloured notices in tha aviation world, having initiated a pink one on autopilots (jammed the controls on one of our air-taxis)
Is this a general warning?
A

Yes; that's exactly what it is - originally a Merchant Shipping Advisory Notice, issued by the Board of Trade; but known as "M" Notices for all my professional lifetime.

We are no longer very different from aviation - in the UK flag we have our own CHIRP set up and we have the MAIB - the Maritime Accident Investigation Branch of the DfT as well as the MCA. These changes stem from a recognition that aviation was handling safety better than we were and I must say there has been a huge improvement in merchant ship safety in my lifetime.

The industry as a whole is heading in the right direction - you may like to take a look at this project, (a bit pprunish) run by friends of mine in the Philippines, which gets a good deal of quiet approval from the great and the good in the above bodies because it says what they cannot:

http://maritimeaccident.org/about/

(The Safespace project is particularly good...)

 

[AntarcticPilot]

It may interest people that Smith Island, the unreached destination of En Anant's final trip, would probably have defeated them anyway. The island is extremely inaccessible, being fringed by ice-cliffs nearly all the way round. There are few practicable boat landings on the island, and access to the interior is extremely difficult. The interior consists entirely of sloping, glaciated, crevassed mountainside, rising to 2100 metres (approximately - it has never been accurately measured!). I gather one expedition has successfully climbed the highest peak on the island, but the link outlines several failed expeditions - putting a rather better gloss on them than I have heard anecdotally!

 

[Kukri]

Thanks for that excellent link. Looks like a very commendable effort.

Simon's plan was, iirc, much along the same lines - to land a party by inflatable with stores for six weeks or so and retreat to an island some 140 miles distant. I have forgotten the name of the island that he had in mind but it is an occasionally active volcano and there was the remains of a base on it which he thought he might find something useful in.

 

[AntarcticPilot]

Thanks for that excellent link. Looks like a very commendable effort.

Simon's plan was, iirc, much along the same lines - to land a party by inflatable with stores for six weeks or so and retreat to an island some 140 miles distant. I have forgotten the name of the island that he had in mind but it is an occasionally active volcano and there was the remains of a base on it which he thought he might find something useful in.

It would have been Deception Island, which has an excellent land-locked natural harbour, even if it does occasionally go bang! Deception Island is definitely and active volcano - last eruption was in 1967-1970. I happen to have done research on the activity of the volcano, and it is very definitely active!

 

[Kukri]

Thanks very much; it was indeed Deception Island that Simon had intended to use as the base for the boat - I recall him showing me a chart of it. Your paper makes interesting if slightly alarming reading - as an amateur, I conclude that regular Surtseyan and Stromboli type eruptions do not preclude something altogether more spectacular by way of an explosive eruption - there might be a moral here for the citizens of some more populated places!

 

[AntarcticPilot]

Thanks very much; it was indeed Deception Island that Simon had intended to use as the base for the boat - I recall him showing me a chart of it. Your paper makes interesting if slightly alarming reading - as an amateur, I conclude that regular Surtseyan and Stromboli type eruptions do not preclude something altogether more spectacular by way of an explosive eruption - there might be a moral here for the citizens of some more populated places!

The current advice on volcanic hazards at Deception Island is based on this paper. I do recall that after we wrote the paper, John Smellie and I said to each other that we didn't give much for the lives of elderly, unfit tourists if the Big one happened!

Basically, Deception Island is a caldera - that is, beneath the island is a large reservoir of magma. The history would be that a volcano built up over this pool of magma, creating a classic cone shaped volcano. One day, the pressure over the magma reduced to the point that lots of gas came out of solution, and there was a massive eruption (chamber collapse), and we were left with the present scenario of a doughnut like structure. However, the magma chamber is still there, and magma is slowly building up in the chamber. The present eruptions will continue over time, and as the paper says, the centre of the caldera is slowly rising as magma builds up in the chamber. One day, we will probably have another major event - but when is anyone's guess!

PS, the eruptions aren't either Strombolian or Surtseyan, but associated with the Caldera.

 

[davidfox]

Reading HWT books, he seemed to have had greater problems getting crews as he got older, I dont remember him sailing solo in any of his accounts. There are however some fairly graphic accounts on his later yoyages of crew troubles and even of him having to bribe people not to jump ship. Clearly after the war he sailed with mates/wartime colleagues and there are some hilarious accounts of there antics. HWT didnt believe in radios and such like on a boat, believing that if you got into trouble you got yourself out of it (he was in SOE in Yugoslavia during the war and would have had to be pretty self reliant) Perhaps as time went on, he found that he couldnt rely on his old mates to sail with him anymore and the younger guys who had answered adverts found him a bit alarming and wanted to jump ship when he insisted on frightening them half to death in the ice. Am i right in my recollection that Simon had been in one of his sailing crews?
HWT marvelous man wish i had met him.

 

[Kukri]

Reading HWT books, he seemed to have had greater problems getting crews as he got older, I dont remember him sailing solo in any of his accounts. There are however some fairly graphic accounts on his later yoyages of crew troubles and even of him having to bribe people not to jump ship. Clearly after the war he sailed with mates/wartime colleagues and there are some hilarious accounts of there antics. HWT didnt believe in radios and such like on a boat, believing that if you got into trouble you got yourself out of it (he was in SOE in Yugoslavia during the war and would have had to be pretty self reliant) Perhaps as time went on, he found that he couldnt rely on his old mates to sail with him anymore and the younger guys who had answered adverts found him a bit alarming and wanted to jump ship when he insisted on frightening them half to death in the ice. Am i right in my recollection that Simon had been in one of his sailing crews?
HWT marvelous man wish i had met him.

Yes, Simon was an ex crew member whom HWT approved of, as indeed are Bob Comlay (who went twice) and I. It was said amongst us, on the basis of tales told by people like Charles Marriott (who sailed with him three times) and Colin Putt (twice) who came down to help fitting out, that, if anything, HWT had mellowed with age, and we all believed that he had been a "Tartar" in his fifties.

He certainly never alarmed Bob Comlay or I and I am confident that I can speak for my fellow crew members of the year I sailed with him.

You probably know the story, told by Eric Shipton, about Tilman and Shipton, bivouacked on a ledge in the Himalayas. Shipton was a great talker and Tilman was not - anyway, the story goes that Shipton says to Tilman:

"Tilman?"

(grunt from sleeping bag)

"We have been climbing together for ten years now"

(grunt from sleeping bag)

"Do you think we may have got to the point where you might call me Eric and I might call you Bill?"

"No!"

 

[davidfox]

Yes thats a wonderful story and probably just goes to show his very dry sense of humour which comes over well in his writing, He writes about Charles on I think his 1st trip to Greenland, they were in a particularily out of the way place and HWT had been talking to the natives for the best part of a day and suddenly Charles appears form the bowels of the ship resplendant in a pith hat and HWT remarked that the locals realised that now the real Captain of Mischief had condescended to go ashore. I remember reading of one trip when several of the crew were very unhappy about not having a radio and HWT attempts to penetrate the ice on the east coast of greenland which was particularily bad that year. The bribing the crew incident in the South Atlantic also stemmed iirc from crew being unhappy. but i read these books some time ago! and there were many accounts of strong happy crews.

 

[Kukri]

Roger Robinson was on the last trip South, and recalls that the breaking point was reached when HWT served the previous night's curry for breakfast! Having had curry for breakfast as recently as last Saturday morning, admittedly following my host's quite outstanding birthday party, I feel the crew were a little unreasonable here...

 

[CLP]

I think HWT gets some unfair criticism about having low tolerance with some crews. He was from a different era and I suspect one or two of his younger crews on later trips just could not understand the different attitudes to what seemed to them perhaps undue hardship and HWT's expectations of what a crew should be willing to do or put up with.

Having said that, a sailing/climbing pal of mine here in Nidderdale was with HWT on his Spitsbergen trip and has the highest regard for him. He was in his 20's on that trip and still speaks very fondly of both HWT and the memories of that trip, despite some quite serious things going wrong at the time.

 

[davidfox]

Roger Robinson was on the last trip South, and recalls that the breaking point was reached when HWT served the previous night's curry for breakfast! Having had curry for breakfast as recently as last Saturday morning, admittedly following my host's quite outstanding birthday party, I feel the crew were a little unreasonable here...

Last nights curry is a favorite breakfast dish in this house, even though now I have to accompany it with a handful of Rennies!
HWT was definately a one off, as tough as old boots and from a different era, a survivor of the first world war battlefields, where one really didnt expect to survive, clearly a man of nerve, who understood the dangers of all the activities he undertook, but unlike most of us, who would have run a mile at the risk, thrived on it. It sounds like Roger Robinson had the same dry sense of understated humour that HWT had!
Im probably going to have to get his books out again and reread them!

 

[Kukri]

I think HWT gets some unfair criticism about having low tolerance with some crews. He was from a different era and I suspect one or two of his younger crews on later trips just could not understand the different attitudes to what seemed to them perhaps undue hardship and HWT's expectations of what a crew should be willing to do or put up with.

Having said that, a sailing/climbing pal of mine here in Nidderdale was with HWT on his Spitsbergen trip and has the highest regard for him. He was in his 20's on that trip and still speaks very fondly of both HWT and the memories of that trip, despite some quite serious things going wrong at the time.

YES.

Please see PM

 

[DownWest]

Thanks to Minn, Arcticpilot and others for interesting info and stories.
A

 

[oldvarnish]

I think HWT gets some unfair criticism about having low tolerance with some crews. He was from a different era and I suspect one or two of his younger crews on later trips just could not understand the different attitudes to what seemed to them perhaps undue hardship and HWT's expectations of what a crew should be willing to do or put up with.

I think it was also due to the fact that he had served in the trenches in WW1 and after that experience couldn't see how anyone could complain about anything. My favourite is his mistrust of 'a man who could not eat sardine spines' or 'someone who wore gloves in the north Atlantic in the summer'.