All our yesterdays

[Kukri]

Hoisting signal flags to request permission to enter or leave harbour before we had vhf.
Losing(heavily:nonchalancein a race involving Ted Heath

Being told on West Mersea Hard, in tones of shock, that Ted Heath had taken the heads door off Morning Cloud* to save weight.

My sister and I boarding our pram dinghy in Woodbridge and being asked for a lift out to his dinghy by a rather dapper chap with a goatee beard, because the tide had covered the anchor, and being tactful enough not to recognise Maurice Griffiths, who had just made the very same mistake that he describes in the first pages of "The Magic of the Swatchways"!

*The first of that ilk, the S&S 34

 

[sarabande]

At the planning sessions of the first wooden Cloud from Lallows, Owen Parker made it clear that the paid crew would have a curtain... and they did.

MC1 (the S&S34) had an engine under the saloon table and a rather funny propshaft arrangement. Almost impossible to sleeep on deliveries.

Despite being a foot shorter, we used to beat Heath on corrected time , usually to his displeasure

 

[Kukri]

At the planning sessions of the first wooden Cloud from Lallows, Owen Parker made it clear that the paid crew would have a curtain... and they did.

MC1 (the S&S34) had an engine under the saloon table and a rather funny propshaft arrangement. Almost impossible to sleeep on deliveries.

Despite being a foot shorter, we used to beat Heath on corrected time , usually to his displeasure

I think you win!

 

[Guise]

lovely thread!

to add to it I recall our first channel crossing when I was a boy in the late 60's, in a 22' Dauntless with five of us on board, we crossed from Ramsgate to Breskens with a chart, old RAF compass, binoculars and a douglas protractor as the only navigational instruments, mind you I recall my Dad doing weeks of preparing courses, tidal options etc. Emergency gear was flares and a hired liferaft lashed on the cabin top. We spent three weeks in board, getting as far as Zierikzee with the wooden roller reefing gear unfurling the whole jib in a squall in the overfalls just past the 'walking bridge'. The trip back was a flat calm and we did Breskens to Harty Ferry in one hit powered by a 5hp Stuart Turner which decided to only run if the fuel pump was manually operated, hour after hour. Just off Margate the rudder plate bolt fell out, which took half an hour to fix but all was well in the end.

Not sure what would be thought of anyone doing such a trip nowadays in such a boat. I do recall looking enviously at those large 26 footers as they overtook us, but I recall a very happy family sailing holiday and many adventures in that small, slow, old boat.

About 1972 we moved up to the luxury of the 25'6" Wendy May (lately owned by Dick Durham), joining the 1974 OGA Heineken rally from Stone to Amsterdam, crossing to Ijmuiden in 20 hours or so with a SW 6-7 behind us, again with five on board, every boat fuelled by two cases of Heineken.

One thread ran through sailing in those days, and that was bad engines, a Stuart Turner, a Brit Sprite, Renault Couach - all of which honed our sailing skills and meant the sails were never harbour stowed until safely moored.

Oh - JohnAlison - that sailmaker in Ipswich was JO Whitmore, I well recall the wonderful smells in that sailoft.

 

[Greenheart]

Great story, Guise. I'd never heard of the Douglas protractor before. I Googled it, and ordered one within 90 seconds. I'm not sure how I've ever properly enjoyed charts and maps without one. :encouragement:

I think I'm more inspired by the idea of reviving the old entry-level fearlessness, than by the aspiration to get a bigger boat which won't need me to be bold.

It'll be cheaper, too.

 

[Seajet]

Dan,

you make a good point.

What Fisherman said is probably the real answer, ' experience teaches us what could go wrong '.

Also in those days if we cocked it up we wouldn't end up on here and Youtube !

Re previous nav systems ' counting dots and dashes ' both sides in WWII had aircraft systems like this, at Tangmere museum there's a good mockup of a Heinkel bomber cockpit, with the radio beam guidance ' dots increasing if one veers off course to one side, dashes if to the other side '.

It's spiffing until one closes the south UK coast when the British countermeasures ' bent the beam ' and it's really difficult to get on target; the ' Starfish 16 ' visual decoys of false fires around and on rafts in Langstone Harbour put them off their stroke away from Portsmouth docks too which is why Langstone Harbour is still full of soft circular patches of mud - bomb craters.

It always amuses me that the Allied codename for the German system was ' Headache ' and the countermeasures to bend the beams were ' Aspirin '.

 

[zoidberg]

I'd never heard of the Douglas protractor before.

'Old and bold' RAF navigators were issued with the Douglas protractor, and a wooden pencil box. I still have a couple..... Some time ago, when I still taught the RYA's Shorebased stuff on winter evenings, I'd print a Douglas protector on acetate sheet and issue one to each student, with a set of 'how to' instructions. They could 'try before buy'. I also showed them, during a spare minute or three, my 5" Douglas protractor with shaped holes ( triangle, square, circle, slot ) for meticulous plotting. "This small one," I intoned, "is used on small-scale charts. This large one," showing them the 10" protractor, "is used on large scale charts."

Three rows of puzzled blank faces.

It was usually one of the ladies who came up to me afterwards, and challenged my 'feeble joke'......

 

[Guise]

Great story, Guise. I'd never heard of the Douglas protractor before. I Googled it, and ordered one within 90 seconds. I'm not sure how I've ever properly enjoyed charts and maps without one. :encouragement:

:

I've used one ever since (actually the same one my father was using 50 years ago on the Dauntless) and do all navigation with it - so much easier than fiddling with a parallel ruler. There's a neat trick I only found recently of putting a piece of string (or whipping twine) through the hole in the middle, then simply place that on a navigation mark on the chart and read off the bearing.

Re Zoidbergs comment my father was an AOP pilot in 1944 and I suspect this is where he started using one - navigating on his knees where a paralell ruler would be useless.

 

[Seajet]

I think I'd discovered it before, but the excellent tutor Colin...? at our night school RYA Nav 2 classes ( I understand such classes are unavailable now in most places which is a huge disgrace and frankly a safety problem ) specified a Douglas Protractor among the dividers, charts and stuff one had to bring.

Now I suppose it's ' here's your GPS, have a battery monitor ' which is begging for a generation or two of numpties but good for the RNLI accountants

 

[zoidberg]

I still get the occasional postcard from somewhere exotic, from an RYA 'stude' at least 12 years back. I did this little self-marketing trick of suggesting that "When you're sitting on that tropical harbourside restaurant patio, looking outr at your anchored boat and sipping your second cold rum-aperitif while the lobster is grilled, and you've completed the obligatory family postcards... you've always got one left over? Yes? So send one to me. Better still, send it to the college principal. She likes getting them..."

That did the biz.

I was out of that stressy environment about 10 years and 3 principals ago. The postcards keep coming....

Am I in the wrong job....?