A forceful nature

The tough old bird pictured above was the first man to sail non-stop, alone, around the world. He did it when a fair portion of you reading were likely unborn or at best, falling out of your water wings at the wading pool. Then he did it again in 2007 at the age of 68 in an Open 60, the oldest ever competitor in the Velux 5 Oceans Race. He's Robin Knox-Johnston, and despite my republican tendencies, I would be happy as hell to call him "sir".

Read this if you want to understand the type of mind that thrives best at sea: a perfect balance of methodical and adventuresome and instinctual.

Knox-Johnston chides himself for not preparing well enough, for starting late, for spending far, far too much time fiddling with balky electronics and cryptic comms devices, and for perhaps having the wrong motives in leaving at all, so recently after the death of his wife from cancer. And yet he is clearly most fully alive at sea, and his deep seamanship, honed by years in the British Merchant Marine and the Naval Reserve, keeps him safe and still moving when other, arguably better equipped and race-ready competitors fall afoul of weather, tactics or gear failure.

You, and most certainly I, will never ocean race at this level, and nor would many of us want to, but the lessons available to even the weekend sailor from Sir Robin can illuminate and improve anyone's messing about in boats.

Pro tips from the amateur's naval architect

A particular interest of mine is the care and maintenance of metal sailboats (see my other blog). Many, many of the things have been designed by the author of this bluntly titled work, Bruce Roberts (the Goodson came later). Mr. Roberts' designs are famous and/or notorious, because he's one of the best marketers of selling them to the general public in the last 30 years. Seriously, if it's homebuilt, looks wonky and sails like a bag of rocks, it's likely to be a Roberts design. No slag to the esteemable Mr. Roberts, merely that the "outsourced" nature of his career means a lot of guys who can't fold napkins are cutting and tack-welding steel using his plans.

My own steel pilothouse cutter, which admittedly looks like a Land Rover on a chine hull, albeit a very cleanly executed one, has been queried as being a Roberts design more than once. It is not. It looks more like a Ted Brewer or a Dutch design, actually, and it sails quite well for its hull form and displacement.

Stating that a lot of Roberts boats are crap is not to blame the man, but the method: Roberts' designs are conservative to start with, and by conservative I mean "potentially slow" and "easily made too heavy". This is because a lot of fellows in the past few decades have welded together from his plans pretty amateurish efforts. I estimate that one out of eight completed Roberts designs I've seen (and far from all are completed in the usual sense, as many weekend shipwrights give up at the bare hull stage) are done in the way Roberts intended. Still, as they say, the problem with democracy is that everyone gets a vote, and undoubtedly, Bruce Roberts' life work has brought boating, and even occasionally a decent boat, to the masses of folk who otherwise would never have attempted to construct their own yacht..

That's why when I was reading "Metal Boats", a 1998 cover-all-bases primer (pun intended) on all things floaty and metallic, I thought, perhaps uncharitably, that this book should have been handed out free with the lofting plans of Roberts' most popular designs, fewer of which would be rusting away, never to be completed, in the lonelier ends of the world's boatyards.

Using his own designs and finished examples as the basis for his commentary, Roberts shows in this book a deep understanding of the topic the sharing of which would be valuable to either the aspiring builder in steel, aluminum or something more exotic, or, like myself, the owner of something already decently built who wishes to keep it that way. Along with fairly methodical breakdowns of the construction process (and how to avoid the pitfalls of the first-time boat builder in metal), useful chapters on corrosion avoidance, electrical systems and tankage outline considerations peculiar to the metal sail or power boat. Oh, yes, Roberts does big metal power boats as well, and he very much hopes you will, too.

Profusely illustrated, if indifferently edited as perhaps is to be expected of a book with a limited potential audience, Metal Boats is a rare find along the lines of Nigel Warren's Metal Corrosion in Boats, which I'll review in the future. Like the boat repair compendiums of Nigel Calder (why are so many boat fixers called Nigel?), it belongs on any sailor's shelf, if what she sails goes "ping" and not "thud".

Seaflower: A reasonable fascimilie of O'Brien and Forester

I thought that I would kick this blog off not with what I was intending, which were hard-nosed critiques of sailing and cruising manuals, guides and related "hard" non-fiction, but with a Good Read.

While it is undeniably true that circumstances (see www.alchemy2009.blogspot.com) demand that I spend much of my reading time devouring technical manuals, marine catalogues and weighty tomes on the finer points of galvanic corrosion, I do try to unwind with a nice story now and then. I expect that my fiction to non-fiction reading ratio will return to the 50/50 point I had until my thirties (as opposed to 95:5 in favour of non-fiction now) when we go cruising, as my impression is that most cruisers, who tend to be avid readers, veer toward the lurid paperback over the Booker Prize winners, because if the former feeds the fish in error, it's no great loss.

Now, sailing stories were, apart from Conrad, not on my fictional menu prior to starting with the real thing in the late '90s. In fact, it was some time before I mastered the rather esoteric and often rude-sounding language of the parts of the boat, along with the fifty or so "nautical verbs" one needs to precisely indicate one's desires to crew on a moving boat in heavy air. I am remarkably common in this regard in having part of my education painlessly supplemented by the 20 "Aubrey-Maturin" novels of the late Patrick O'Brian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_O%27Brian), who, along with the even later C.S. Forester's "Hornblower" series (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._S._Forester), is put in the top rank of novelists mining the rich and seemingly unexhaustible vein of Napoleonic war plots.

I suspect the vein is so rich because the Napoleonic period extended some 20 years, involved dozens of countries great and small, played out more or less around the world, and at one point involved the young if feisty United States versus Great Britain, a country approaching its apogee of imperial power and political and military influence, despite being severely overextended in the process.

The strong arm of Britain's influence was its large and well-trained navy, which overcame defects both structural (the rigid hierarchy that allowed seniority and not merit to secure promotion) and scientific (appalling food and ignorance of scurvy prevention) to secure victories on an almost regular basis. Controlling the seas meant controlling the trade on it, and that's a dramatic way to establish dominance.

Add to the historical facts of the Napoleonic Wars the ample supply of primary materials from the circa 1800 bureaucratic archives, and the historian-novelist can pad out a cracking good yarn with shovelfuls of jargon and background facts that put the reader squarely, or square-sailedly, in the past. The mark of the well-written historical novel, particularly of this well-documented period, would seem to rest on casual reference to obscure knots, the composition of forgotten soups, the proper way to service a musket, or in-depth descriptions of horrendous medical procedures and treatments we now know to be poisonous. The effect leaves the reader feeling that the characters were very brave, but hopelessly ignorant, which, given for instance the difficulty of co-ordination even the most simple actions on a ship of the line, is somewhat ironic. Knowing how to text rapidly would avail one not during a "hot action" between frigates, and a rapid ability to amputate would be a blessing in a world without anesthetics or antibiotics.

Seaflower, the third entry in a series centered on the adventures of Thomas Kydd, a "landsman" impressed, which is to say legally kidnapped and forced to serve in the British Navy, is by Julian Stockwin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Stockwin), a writer with the appropriate naval background and salty-looking beard. Stockwin has cranked out ten in the Kydd series, with an eleventh on the way, and seems to have started once Patrick O'Brian was safely dead. While that might seem harsh, to say that there are similarities between the two series of novels would be understating the case. While O'Brian's Jack Aubrey was a clever, if somewhat impulsive and uncouth, member of the English landed gentry, Thomas Kydd is of the lower classes, who nonetheless finds both opportunity and abilities beyond expectations in the Royal Navy. The most glaring, to me, attempt to ride the coattails of O'Brian is in the character of Nicholas Renzi, a mysteriously cultured swab with secrets aplenty who, in my eyes, resembled a lower-decks version of the ship's doctor/part-time spy Stephen Maturin, the most interesting character in the O'Brian series thanks to his intelligence and insight to the brave new world of scientific inquiry.

Another cavil is the extensive use of what one might term dialectical orthography...the attempt to reproduce various accents and idioms in print. While the occasional "ye blatherin' swab" or "top o' the mainmast, cap'n" lends a certain Pirates of the Caribbean savour to the text, I found wearing the endless stream of apostrophes indicating various dropped consonants. Reading Kydd's "y'arrr" utterances, I started looking for the accessorizing parrot on the shoulder shouting about pieces of eight. Forester, O'Brian, Kent and Cornwell use this sort of thing sparingly, and the story reads better for it, I think.

As for the story, it's certainly eventful: Kydd is shipped out for political reasons to a "sugar island" in the Caribbean for service on the cutter Seaflower, a small, cramped and minor warship that nonetheless finds the requisite "action". Mixed in with this are interesting descriptions of how the Navy was kept in repair and supplied at a typical depot of the time, a bit of sex, lots of war and intrigue, including episodes showing how the British Army and Navy managed to co-ordinate their actions, and a good description of the sort of actions one must take to avoid death in a hurricane.

Stockwin's no literary stylist: This is a straightforward, large-print page-turner propelled by the regular appearance of something going boom or squish every few pages. It's derivative of its predecessors, and its betters, but not painfully so. The meat of the tale is well-salted with historical oddities and asides, and it's clear homework has been done. Would I read the other Thomas Kydd tales? I would respond with a qualified "probably". The Aubrey-Maturin stories spoiled me, because O'Brian used the Napoleonic Wars to explore questions of comradeship, loyalty, politics and betrayal as much as he banged on about Stockholm tar, the heft of a boarding axe, and the proper way to lash down a spanker (I told you sailing was rude). Stockwin's not in this class, and he's not as good with the somewhat dull Kydd as Alexander Kent is with his Richard Bolitho character or Bernard Cornwell is with the complex and equally "from the ranks" Richard Sharpe.

But with a rum-based beverage at hand, gently swaying in a tropical breeze in a hammock slung over the foredeck of a well-found cruiser? Sure, I would happily consume another Kydd adventure like a Harlequin romance in a haze of twelve-pounder smoke and the crunch of ship's biscuit in my ears.