Currach on eBay

A 'traditional Irish currach' has been put up for auction on eBay here. At 11ft it is very short for a currach - only the tiny Tory Island currachs are that small and they don't have the exaggerated upturn on the bow. But it looks fun and can be cartopped, according to the vendor. The starting bid is £250, but there have been no takers yet. The auction ends January 15th.
Thanks to Brian Pearson for the tip.
Also on eBay here is this Tasteful 18x24 Art Print. A snip at $22 including shipping. I only wish I'd seen it before Christmas.

Funny business in Victorian Germany

Reading extracts from E.F.Knight's description of his 1887 cruise "The Falcon on the Baltic" on Gavin Atkin's blog inspired me to buy it, and last night I came across this remarkable passage. The Falcon has arrived at Kiel via the River Eider and the old Schleswig-Holstein canal (the Keil ship canal was not yet complete), and Knight raves about the lovely lakes called brednings, what we would call broads. However, Knight is surprised at the lack of boating activity on what he describes as 'the most glorious facilities for yachting'. However, moored up in Kiel Fiord:

"On the morning after our arrival I was reading an English paper in the cabin, when I was startled by a sound that was very familiar, but the last I should have expected to hear in Kiel Fiord. Had I been dreaming, or was I still lying off the Doves at Hammersmith? It was a human voice screaming and cursing in the purest Thames tow-path dialect, reckless of aspirates, rich in horrible invective. It was a Cockney addressing men whom he called respectively Five, Four, Three and so on as if they were so many convicts. He was urging them in impassioned language not to feather under water, to keep their something eyes in the boat, not to sugar, and to do or avoid doing several other things. How often I had been bullied in a similar fashion by a similar tyrant on the Cam! I leapt on deck and lo! There was a genuine racing four pulling by! There were several other fours and funnies on the bay, and it was evident that the “Wasser-sport” was much patronized at Kiel.
I afterwards learnt that the rowing regatta was soon coming off, so all the rowing men were in training, and this particular crew of young Germans had imported a professional coach from the Thames to teach them how to row. They were very enthusiastic and plodding, but the coach with all his skill and blasphemy could not drive any real style into them. It seems strange that the North Germans, well set-up as they are physically, can never approach the English in any athletic sport.
“It’s all that d----d lager they drink,” said a professional oarsman, who had been to Hamburg, to me; “it swells them out till they’re all wool and flabbiness.”
The Kiel rowing men made a good deal of their tutor, admired him greatly, and bore his fearful language with patience. They wanted to row at any cost, and they had been led to understand that it was quite impossible to become a true English wassersportsman unless one has been well cursed through one’s apprenticeship."

The Germans have certainly caught up with the English in sports since then, and over the same period the English have taken up lager. Coincidence? I think not.
I was struck by the use of the term 'funny' for a double scull or pair, which I haven't heard used since I was a kid. Funnies were usually clinker built, so I suppose the word died when shells came in for racing boats and fibreglass displaced wood for leisure boats. I think this charming nomenclature should be revived instantly.
Here is a modern funny featured in Wikipedia, being rowed on the Amstel. The picture was taken by Paul Vlaar.

Viking rowing

I went out in slightly choppy conditions this morning, with a stiffish westerly behind a neap tide. Lots of birds. I surprised myself by a fairly rapid progress from Itchenor to Dell Quay and back.
That statement is probably of no real interest but is there to rectify the impression that I have sitting on the sofa watching TV for the last fortnight.
Tonight it was the BBC's great Timewatch programme, which followed the maiden voyage of the first big Viking ship built in 800 years or something.
The ship, Sea Stallion, is a reproduction of one of the famous Viking ships at the Danish Viking Ship Museum at Roskilde. She is 30m long and has a crew of 60, all of whom can row at the same time but apparently only half the crew would usually row at one time, allowing the other half to rest.
The original ship was built in Dublin in about 1070, according to analysis of the timbers. So the reproduction was sailed and rowed from Denmark to Dublin via Orkney to celebrate.
The oars work in keyholes in the hull, with a rectangular slot for the blade to slide through and a round hole in the middle to hold the loom. The holes are blocked with wooden plugs while sailing, a rather less than watertight arrangement.
The crew rowed with a staccato beat, allowing the boat to glide forwards for a good few seconds between strokes, which looked a bit odd but was presumably easier to keep up for hours at a stretch.
The Sea Stallion was put through a load of tests when stopping at the island of Islay, including comparing upwind performance under sail and oar. Interestingly, she was twice as fast upwind under oar than sail, because of the need to tack.
The other revelation was that they could not row in heavy weather, presumably because of the danger of the handles being pulled out of the rowers' hands by wave action. This meant that when the rudder mounting failed, the ship was helpless and was in danger of broaching.
The BBC has a comprehensive website with lots of video and tracks of the voyage, and the Sea Stallion has her own website as well.

Henley Whalers New Year Row

On New Year's Day, while I was stuck at home with my car off on family business, the Henley Whalers trailed the 27ft new-tech Montagu Whaler Molly to Lymington and rowed her to Yarmouth IoW on a calm, grey day - just the sort of weather that favours rowing. It looks like they had a blast.
The boat has traditional lines but up-to-the-minute technology - a foam sandwich hull with and carbon fibre spar and oars - that would undoubtedly have been used by Admiral Montagu had he been designing boats for today's Navy. Her standing lug rig is very impressive - at any rate, it scares the whillies out of me.

A rudder for row/sailing

A very interesting article on Duckworks Magazine this morning about John Hitchcock's St Lawrence River skiff that he rows and sails around New Zealand.
John sails his boat off the wind, using a small balanced lug.
He used to steer with an oar over the quarter, but found this unsatisfactory. He also wanted to improve tracking.
So he designed a neat 'clasp-knife' rudder that folds up when not needed. Control is by lines running from the rowing seat to a short tiller at the stern.
I am fiddling about with row/sailing arrangements and had come to the tentative conclusion that a rudder is more trouble than it is worth, but I may have to revise that opinion.
And I now want want want a St Lawrence River skiff, said to be one of the most seaworthy and rowable boats in the world, as well as being one of the loveliest. John designed and built his based on lines provided by a Canadian museum.

New Year rowing

I try and get out for a row on New Year's Day simply to say that I did, although here on the south coast of England it never gets really cold because of the Gulf Stream. In New England, considerably south of here, Malcolm on the Openboats Yahoo! group (one of my favourites) reported on his New Year row:

"About 9:00 today I headed off to Kittery, Maine, to go for a New Year's Day row to join nine other people in six boats in a traditional way to start the new year. The temp was about 24°F (-4.4°C) when I left home but had warmed to near freezing in Kittery.
We set off at 11:00 and because of a sharp (& cold) headwind, we headed off into Chauncey Creek for about a mile, where we rafted to a buoy, and spent some time just talking. The forecast was for snow to start at noon; at 12:20 it began to snow, not heavily but there it was. So we "upped anchor" and headed back to the launch ramp.
On the way back I bumped a moored fishing boat and snapped off one of my oar locks. I had to improvise with a piece of line making rowing difficult. The darned of it was that if I stopped to adjust it better, there was enough set to push me into the dock pilings. Lesson learned - bring a spare. The snow was mixed with rain, heavy, wet and wind driven so a trip to the local Weathervane restaurant for warmth, a plate of fried clams and a mug of beer seemed the best idea in the world. Inland it was colder and the snow was deeper, but not as wet and heavy. By the time I got back home there were some four inches of fresh snow in my driveway."

Curraghs on Coast

Number One Son had a party at the back of the house last night and I did the middle aged Dad thing and watched the telly in the front room. The best thing on, apart from Life of Brian of course, was an episode of the excellent BBC/Open University series Coast, in which the amiable Neil Oliver learned to row a currach on the west coast of Ireland. As he had just talked to surfers about the truly terrifying waves that crash into that rocky coast, this was actually rather a courageous thing to do. And by the magic of BBC iPlayer, you can view the whole thing on your computer for the next seven days, here.
To cope with the swell, curraghs use thin oars with barely any blade at all so catching to tops of waves on the return stroke will not cause problems. I think they grip the water because of the length. The oars swivel on thole pins rather than oarlocks so to keep the correct angle to the water.
Curraghs have an amazing seakeeping ability partly because of their flexible canvas-on-frame construction. There was a super example for sale at the Thames Beale Park Boat Show a couple of years back. Coracle maker supreme Peter Faulkner was selling it - you can see him building a currach out of twigs and cowhide here.