Recent content by ferrymaniom

A great site. Spent yesterday evening reading through it. Makes my attempts at boat maintenance look pretty ineffectual and very amateur.

Now that is terrific. A great paint job.

Excellent. Thanks for that. Downloading to the Kindle as I type.:D

Jack Aubrey's career is clearly based in part on that of Cochrane. I seem to remember reading somewhere that Patrick O'Brian mentioned that you didn't have to make any of it up - just read the Naval Chronicle. The Navy of the time did seem to produce a large number of wonderful characters. One...

I fitted the barton rig on my 20' boat last year. Works a treat - reefing or shaking out takes a minute or so. I had the sailmaker put two sets of cringles and reef points in the sail. The second is quite deep. I did have to improvise a bit with the staghorns as there wasn't anywhere suitable...

I think I'm well on my way with respect to the tools, but it will be a long, long time before I can walk through a chandler's and decide there's nothing in there that I want.

I think he should have followed the TSS, irrespective of the amount of traffic around. Looking at his track when he rounded Hartland Point he couldn't have known what the traffic would have been like by the time he got down there. I work for a ship management company and if one of our vessels...

This was a British warship? Sigh......

It's a good story, but a depressing one nontheless. A captain gets drunk, assaults an officer, falls asleep on the birdge and finally runs his ship aground. http://www.maib.gov.uk/cms_resources.cfm?file=/KarinSchepersReportWeb.pdf Following on from the earlier report concerning the grounding...

Would have been smahed to pieces , most likely. The damage to the tanker, on the otherhand would still have been minimal - some scratched paint at worst.

There are a number of different technologies that have been looked at. One being trialled at the moment is flying a large kite from the front of the ship - Skysail, I think it's called. This has the advantage of being comparatively cheap and it can be retrofitted onto existing ships. On the...

Haven't been there for years, but the hotel side of things is, I think, closed so I don't know what facilities they have. The golf club's phone number is 01624 822220. If they don't do food, and you don't mind a short taxi ride I can recommend the Abbey - probably best to book first - 01624...

If they get away with absolutely no damage I would be amazed. If they ran her aground at any sort of speed, then there will be bottom damage, nice sandy beach or not. Whilst you should never jump to conclusions, it probably isn't going to take Sherlock Holmes to work out what happened. Why it...

I think the earlier replies will have answered your questions. There have been older cadets starting in their thirties, so it is possible. The one bit of advice I always give if asked about a career at sea is to ask yourself the question do you really, really want to do it. If there is any...

Interesting, thanks. Still odd, though. Presumably he meant to fly it in preference to the red duster and not just out of ignorance as he would have had to go out of his way to get it as I can't imagine many places would keep such a flag in stock. Unless of course he just nicked it off the front...