Tall Ship's Official Seal

This is the Official Seal of the tall ship Mercedes, a brig on which I had the honour to sail at Easter.

When I say 'sail' I mean I sat there as excited as a ship's dog and they did all the rope work and sailing, then we went back to port and had lunch there as it was too fresh to try that on the waves.  I had fish - what else would you eat at sea. 

Mr Raft, who likes roller coasters, was standing on the prow so he could ride the waves outward. I stuck to the midship, me hearties, and watched the land because the potential for seasickness is obvious in us wet-bobs. The journey home was serene as we were running smoothly with the waves under the silence of the sails. 

I can't say that I will ever be a sea sailor but I do love to look at tall ships - doesn't everyone?  The good news is that in late summer 2014 there will be a tall ships regatta in Falmouth where they hope to assemble a world-class fleet of the most beautiful vessels ever built by man. (*).

Here's a video of Mercedes under sail



(*) Concorde is the most beautiful craft ever built by man if you include flying.


Update 15 May 2013

Dates for the Tall Ships Regatta 2014 have been confirmed.   There will be three days of festivities from August 28 and the race will be on 31 August.

Everybody will be able to enjoy the spectacle of  a fleet of up to 50 tall ships coming in to harbour, where the public will be able to see round some of them.  The ships will race from Falmouth to Wight. 

H/T The Falmouth Packet

Racing coordinated by Sail Training International

Twitter updates from Falmouth Tallships Association

Whitby Gazette and Jon Stokoe

The Whitby Gazette is the city paper of the Goth capital. It was also the first paper to publish the work of Lewis Carroll, a regular visitor from 1850-70.  Encouraged by the public reception - although self-critical about his early efforts -  the Reverend Dodgson went on to write the books which dominate children's literature upon which millions of pounds and thousands of jobs have depended.

Then in 1885 The Gazette recorded on 24 October:

"The Russian schooner Dmitri of Navra, with silver sand, came in suddenly, in heavy weather, but going ashore in Collier’s Hope because a total wreck"

The event camd to the notice of a visitor to Whitby, Bram Stoker, who also happened to find a name in a geography book in the local library which fired his imagination.  That wreck became the Demeter out of Varna, carrying the potent fictional character Dracula, which is why his landfall became the Goth capital.

Who knows, but if the editor of the Whitby Gazette had not carried that report perhaps Stoker might have had him come ashore somewhere else, thus depriving Whitby of millions of pounds of tourism income over a century later. 

Since 1854 the paper has maintained its place in the town and travels all over the world.   There is an online version but the interesting thing about the Whitby Gazette is that it is still growing in its paper distribution.  The online version is searchable but there is really no substitute for the discerning Goth or Steam punk or explorer; one simply must have a paper copy to read over tea no matter where that tea is taken.  The object itself, not just the data, is part of the experience with its nautical masthead and distinctive typeface.

Strange then that the owners, Johnston Press, are proposing to dispose of the editor.  Jon Stokoe bucks the trend in local papers.  While others are struggling,The Gazette is growing.  What ever he is doing, it is working.  Even asking the question makes only about as much sense as sacking Rumplestiltskin because it costs money to provide him with beer and sandwiches.  He's spinning straw in to gold, for goodness' sake.  Keep him at it.

A petition to save the editor has been set up to plead with Johnston to show economic sense. Jon Stokoe is worth the money and should be kept on.




Go here to sign the petition. 

Teatime Fiction. The Harbour Adventure. Part 4

Big Fat Helen has been rescued from the harbour but the alarm has given the Magistrate the excuse to encroach on the Harbour Master's territory.



The Magistrate arrived. To represent The Law In The Land, he had jammed his Bowler hat on to his head, which is what he wore when he was out and about. He reserved his top hat for ceremonial occasions, not least because it was his best hat. His Bowler was more the working hat and could be easier replaced. It was also lined in thin cork and was more likely to float if it wound up in the water.

"If anybody is dead, I am the Coroner's Deputy" he announced.
"Nobody is dead, thank The Lord." said the Harbour Master, curtly.
"Well, I'm glad you now thank The Lord for that and have give up appeals to heathenish gods" replied the Magistrate "And all that is needed is for you to respect some of the other Christian principles, and we'll all be better off"
"What do you mean by that?" spluttered the Harbour Master.

The Magistrate opened his mouth to answer but was shouldered out of the way by Little Fat Helen, who arrived with towels and a pair of stretcher-bearers, carrying the green canvas stretcher.
"Let me through. Got to get her home, lads" ordered LF Helen, as if the wet Helen might dissolve or shrink. The stretcher bearers looked doubtful, but rolled her on to the groaning canvas, then got another couple of mates to help heave the stretcher up. Eventually the four of them took a handle each and LF Helen walked alongside to make sure her sodden sister didn't roll off. The wooden spars creaked but did not crack.

The Harbour Master turned to Dadder and took out his note book and pencil. Pushing his nautical cap, the sign of his office, back a little, he squinted at us.
"Now then, what happened?"
The Magistrate broke in.
"Your daughter jumped in the dock when she was surprised by a seagull. Silly girl. These children saved her."
The Harbour master looked offended at this slur on his child.
"How do you know, Sir?"
There was an awkward silence.
"I saw it".
"How? You came from the other side of the bridge. It's miles away. Your eyesight must be good."
There was a long, awkward pause.
"I happened to be glancing out of the window".
"What window? The court has only got a little fanlight in that wall, and that in the upper gallery".
"If you must know, I was watching for the ... Mail packet from the West Indies. Yes. That was it."

The Harbour Master leafed back through his notebook of events from the past week.
"That boat arrived two days ago. The Post Mistress herself collected that mail, and she'll have sorted and distributed it by now. If there was anything on it for you, you should have had it early this morning."
"There's no law against a magistrate looking out of his own courthouse window."
"I never said there was. I just remarked that you must have very good eyesight."
"He could be using binoculars" interjected Dadder, remembering how these things go in Agatha Christie books.
"You have no proof of that" stuttered the Magistrate.
"Well what's that round your neck, then?" Dadder blundered on.
"Ah yes, these are...these are...birdwatching. My new hobby."

The Harbour Master shut his notebook with a snap. "I think I've heard enough to establish that there is no Foul Play here. Fowl play, yes. Foul play, no. My daughter overbalanced and, by the Grace of God, did not perish. I will put it in the incident book and the Harbour authorities can examine them as an when they think suitable."
"I'll be the one to decide if there has been Foul Play." Spat the Magstrate. He paused. "And I have found that there has not".
Dadder jammed his woollen hat back on his head.
"If you gentlemen have done agreeing, I'll take these children home" he said.

He was shooing the Raft children in to line, oblivious to the Magistrate and the Harbour Master looking daggers at each other. He suddenly remembered why he had come, and turned round.

"Blessed if it didn't go right out of my mind. Begging your pardon, Your Worship, but I came to ask the Harbour Master if it was alright to push a Revenue Man off the Raft, on account of him being an illegal boarder, but he says 'No' on account of the Revenue is the state's business and that's how the libraries are paid for. How say you Sir?"

The Magistrate thought about it for a moment, and then bearing in mind the legal opinion of the Harbour Master, gave his own.

"I should say that it depends on whether the officer has identified himself. If he has not, then you are entitled to take whatever steps seem sufficient to you, but you should take care not to go beyond sufficiency."

Dadder bowed. "Much obliged to you Your Worships. I can push him off the raft but not keel haul him. See, isn't that preciserly what I told Mrs Raft. Come along duckerlings, time to go home".

The End

Teatime Fiction. The Harbour Adventure. Part 3

Big Fat Helen has been knocked in to the harbour. She held up a Flying Saucer sweet and a huge seabird swooped at it from behind her.



The tide was high so she didn't fall too far, but she was fully dressed and she had her shoes on, and the little Rafts didn't know if she could swim the way wetbobs do. Seadogs are superstitious like that; they may never learn to swim as they think it invites drownding. Wetbobs learn to swim sooner than they walk because they are bound to fall in and swimming is the best way to survive.

"Quick Baba, the bell". Baba Raft ran over to the emergency bell and began to swing on it, dinging it madly. Middle Little Raft ran to the life-belt ring which was hanging on a hook and wrestled it down, heaving it in to the water where it hit BF Helen on the head. Big Little Raft went down the steps with a spare rope from the harbour-side, attached to a ring in the wall.

BFH was dressed, but she was big and buoyant, she hadn't hit the water too hard so she hadn't gone right down, and she was close to the steps. Her clothes spread on the surface.

By now grown-up sea boots were thundering down the steps, a cockleshell boat had appeared and great knuckles were grasping BF Helen, pulling her back from the sea's hungry mouth. She was slapped on to the dockside, coughing, spluttering, and being sick.

"Bloody kids" said a voice. "Always causing trouble".
"No" moaned BF Helen "albatross".
"We haven't got any albatrosses, nor golden eagles neither. We've got some pushy seagulls, if that's what you mean".

By now the Harbour Master had rushed down to clasp his daughter to his bosom and Dadder Raft was shaking us "What happened, what happened?" Baba Raft was crying, possibly because of the loss of the flying saucers, which were dotted over the water like rice paper petals and dissolving in a fizzy scum.

"I told you to deal with those gulls, didn't I. I said they would have somebody over" complained a voice in the crowd. There was a mutter of consensus. The public enquiry had found in under three minutes that this was all the fault of the Harbour Master, probably inevitable, and only justice that it had very nearly been his own BF Helen who was a goner. Perhaps that would persuade him to Do Something.

The alarm had gone round the harbour and up the cliff, and the Magistrate, who had been hard at work with his binoculars, came thundering over the swing bridge, carrying his Legal Authority in to Enemy Territory, in case the Harbour Master had been negligent in any way.

To be continued. Harbour Adventure part 4

Teatime Fiction. The Harbour Adventure. Part 2

Dadder Raft is on his way to get a legal opinion from the Harbour Master on whether he is permitted, under Water Law, to push a Revenue Man off the Raft.



The river path gave way to the broad paved harbour with its adjoining squares of warehouses basking on the gentle slopes. At the far end of the harbour, close to the pier, was the Harbour Master's Office, an exceptionally fine building in the manner of the Magistrate's Court, which was on the other side of the estuary, over the swing bridge. On the Magistrate's side the terracing was steeper and the the houses clung to the cliffs like barnacles, keeping their glittering glass eyes on the comings and goings of the ships, tutting at the women going aboard in defiance of custom and inviting disaster. The Magistrate kept a pair of binoculars in a box in the upper balcony of the court. He would perch up there while the court was closed and he had no registry work to do, scrying the Harbour Master's side through the small fanlight window.

Matters of disagreement arose between the Magistrate and the Harbour Master. For instance, the Magistrate maintained that the moment a sailor or similar nautical - reprobates, pirates, convicts, drunkards, philanderers, blasphemers and general ne'er do wells - set foot on dry land, then landlaw was their lawful master.

The Harbour Master maintained that as the harbour edgings and pier were man-made and projected over the water, then he was the lawful authority according to Maritime law. Moreover, he believed that a little traditional maritime discipline would work wonders and he still had the Cat in its mahogany box, and he could use it, by Neptune he would, if the situation demanded it. Throwing a man in chokey was, in his view, cruel, whereas a quick stripe and back to work made the point without costing much or affecting a man's livelihood.

The Constable, the Harbour Bailiff, and indeed the thieves, reprobates, pirates, blasphemers, etc had all got used to waiting while the Magistrate and the Harbour Master had their procedural wrangles. It took so long that the drunkards were often sober by the time it was decided what should happen to them, so they went home or back on board, if they could remember where either were, when the Constable nodded them off. The pirates sat nervously in the lock-up - a desperate bunch of men - in case the Constable decided on a spot of pre-emptive hanging as a result of a jurisdictional misunderstanding.

Everybody knew that the real cause of disagreement between the Authorities was the extraordinary kindness shown by the Magistrate's wife to the Harbour Master when his wife died. This was not something the Magistrate could complain about - one is expected to show kindness when the mother of young girls passes away - but even so, there are limits. The Magistrate, the most upright of men if you don't count the Vicar, which he didn't because he didn't trust that Vicar further than he could throw him, suspected those limits had been breached on several occasions.

The pinnacle of the Harbour Master's undisputed authority was that he was in charge of the swing bridge over the estuary which divided the town. He decided if the bridge was to be swung, hence breaking the road, and the Magistrate could only howl in impotent rage if his lawful prey had already escaped over it. It was miles upstream before the river could be crossed by the Constables, so the Magistrate kept a boat on his side but knew that by the time it was crewed and launched, the miscreant would be long gone.

The Magistrate and his wife had no children, which perhaps explained a lot. The Harbour Master had two girls, each named Helen, as were all the women in the Harbour Master's family, for the famous Helen of Troy whose face Launched A Thousand Ships. Nature then determined that older would be Big Fat Helen and the younger Little Fat Helen. It had to be this way because you can't call a nineteen year old woman "Old Fat Helen".

Dadder Raft went in to the Harbour Master's Office, a temple to mahogany and polished brass. He dinged the ship's bell hanging over the counter and Big Fat Helen bustled out to warn the little Rafts to not put fingerprints on the brass, she'd just finished polishing that.
"Might One hinquire as to the precise nature of One's hinquiry?" she politely asked Dadder, who had whipped off his knitted beany bobble hat because he was in an Official Office, and was wringing it in his hands.
"It's a personal matter. I need to speak to the Master."
"Ah" said BF Helen sympathetically, with a broad wink. "I'll get him. I'll take the children for a walk".
"No, it's nothing like that, but thank you, the children could do with some air".

Outside the office, BF Helen immediately took the Rafts to the sweet shop and bought a bag of flying saucers and offered them round. Taking a pink one for herself and nibbling it, she instructed them. "Don't fall over the edge, don't go down the steps, don't get on any strange boats and don't feed the rats, cats or seagulls." She stretched out her arms with her shawl spread behind her head "An albatross this big carried off a kid last week. Never seen'im agin. If you hold up food for them, they'll grab you in their talons." Baba Raft looked on the verge of tears. "It's alright" cooed Big Fat Helen. "They only do it if you feed them. Don't feed them and you'll be alright".

Baba Raft howled as a huge white bird which had been cruising over the harbour spotted BF Helen's pink flying saucer and came at her from behind as she spread her arms in imitation of an albatross. It zoomed at her, its beak open, and scooped up the sweet, screaming as the sherbet began to fizz in its gullet.

The shock knocked BF Helen over the edge of the harbour, tripping her against the low chain which marked the boundary, and with a shriek she fell in to the water.

To be continued Harbour Adventure Part 3.

Teatime Fiction. The Harbour Adventure. Part 1

The Raft raft was moored inside the estuary just at the boundary where the Harbour Master's authority waned and the River Authority's authority waxed. Dadder Raft could get a little money by labouring, by transport, by buying and selling at the borders of these jurisdictions. There was, if absolutely necessary, The Social but they were a nosy lot and brought in their wake the gulls of the Revenue, not that they'd pick much off the spars of the Raft.

Every now and again one of the noisy Revenue buggers would land on the fairing, stamp up and down accusing Dadder of having a concealed sea-chest of golden doubloons, and eventually flap off with a token, having satisfied themselves that they had scavenged all there really was to have.

"Good riddance" Dadder would mutter, and we'd wonder if somewhere there was a glittering hoard, our patri-money. In truth, he had only his gold earring, the traditional cost of an emergency burial. In Dadder's view, Revenue men belonged to landlaw, not waterlaw, and this was sufficient to make their presence an illegal boarding. Could he lawfully push them over the side, make them walk the plank, or keel-haul them under the Raft's weedy hull?

Nana Raft (who was Mummy Raft in those days) had heard this line of legal reasoning several times and was no nearer an answer, although she had made a special trip inland to the library to answer it. The librarian offered her to look at the reference copy of the 1896 volume Dicey, Morris & Collins, The Conflict of Laws, but Mummy said it would take too long to find, let alone copy out the relevant passages. Beside, she was fairly sure this was a criminal matter, and what they really wanted to know was: was it maritime law or inland waterways?

"Depends precisely where the Raft is moored, I should think" said Miss Elizabeth, the librarian, "But you'd have to ask someone who knows because it might make a difference if it is an ocean-going ship or an in-shore boat." The librarian paused, wondering if a boat carried its legal jurisdiction within its timbers. It used to - that was the law of the sea. She fiddled pensively with the wheels on her date stamp. "I wouldn't mention it to the vicar. He might think you were looking to get in on the wedding business. In my opinion, you should try Agatha Christie. You can take books those out. She's always killing people and she usually explains where it is legal. I think you can kill someone on a train if you are coming back from abroad. Providing you do it before France that should be alright." she stamped the books and took the index cards out, popping them in to brown-card loans pockets. "But I'm not a lawyer".

Dadder asked Nana what she had found out, but he got no reply as she had reached a thrilling part. He decided to take this matter up with the Harbour Master. "No point in asking the Magister-rate, is there?" he announced "He's landlaw, so it stands to reason he won't know". "Uh-huh" said Nana, which he took to be agreement.

He strolled off up to the Harbour, a gaggle of little Raft tenders bobbing along in his wake. The Harbour was an adventure and there might be a chance of begging sweets.

To be continued, Harbour Adventure Part 2