Dick Durham's blog
Latest weblogs from Yachting Monthly's News and Features editor
Killing for fun
3 July 2009
While many yachtsmen may be cheering to the deckhead the macabre new cruises reportedly being offered to those who want to kill pirates, such payback time, strikes me as surreally dystopian like something out of a JG Ballard novel.
The thought of Russian oligarchs, tired of paint-balling holidays in western Europe and dripping with dollars from the rape (pirating?) of their fellow citizens' gas and oil reserves, arming themselves with automatic weapons and lying in wait, drifting on the ocean current, to kill Somalis, is sickening.
The Somali pirates started out trying to protect their fishing grounds from the better-equipped trawlers of more privileged countries. True they've since acquired a taste for large amounts of cash and - like the oligarchs - have selfishly kept the gains to themselves. But so far they have not resorted to killing.
This may now change.
Dick Durham
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Amy Winehouse visits East Coast anchorage
1 July 2009
One of the best anchorages on the East Coast is off Osea Island on the River Blackwater in Essex where the CQR of my friend's little gaffer, Almita, touched bottom this weekend past. We had gone there to watch the Blackwater Barge Match and the night before the race I took my crew - Richard, my nine-year-old son, and his pal Thomas O'Kane ashore for a stroll before dinner.
The shingle beach was deserted and the boys explored a rill from a jungle-like copse from which ran fresh water. Their imaginations fired they explored further until they stumbled across Osea's only house: a grand mansion lurking in the woods.
They came running back as the lowering sun disappeared behind cloud to tell me a 'ghostly face' had appeared at an upper storey window.
It was only two days later I discovered that popular singer Amy Winehouse has been resident at the home in order to recuperate from her hectic lifestyle.This is what she'd have seen from her window. Get well soon Amy, we're big fans.
Dick Durham
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Techno-balls
25 June 2009
A new human lightmeter sets off an alarm when the wearer has been out in the sun too long.So expect boats surrounding you with lobster red crews dashing below when the beep beep beep sounds.
If the wearer is contracting skin cancer, a subcutaneous EPIRB, sends a signal - via satellite - to Roehampton Burns Unit and a bed, in a private ward, will be set aside for him or her.
The MCA think it's a good idea and auxiliary Coastguards will be alerted to take the sufferer to the nearest air ambulance.
Other useful machines in the pipeline include an automated jock-strap which deploys a needle into the inner thigh telling us when our lifejacket crutch strap is too loose; an infra-red deckhead light in isophase mode that comes on when your flares are about to expire and a new fuel-monitoring float in the diesel tank which sends an email to the the nearest RNLI station when you have under a litre left.
Dick Durham
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Gaff v bermudan
22 June 2009
This Saturday I shipped aboard my old boat Almita on a short coastal hop from Levington on Suffolk's River Orwell to Lawling Creek on the River Blackwater, the guest of her new skipper David Smith.
When I had her she was bermudan cutter rigged and was a shocker off or across the wind: we passed boats with 15ft longer waterline lengths on a regular basis. In fact boats a mile ahead which I could see I was creeping up on would suddenly shoot off into the distance again. Later at common moorings they would deny they had turned their engines on but we always knew they had.
She has always been a magic boat. Designed by FB Howden and built in 1906 by Gann & Palmer at Teignmouth, Devon, she is 26ft LOA with a centre-plate which drops down through a ballast keel which only draws 2ft 6ins when raised.
But her one weakness was on the wind in anything Force 4 or over. Then her tall mast was too much top hamper for her low freeboard and narrow-beamed bow. We would always have to run back in a blow.
Not anymore. Now she has been put back to her original gaff rig she has incredible power close-hauled as we found out with one reef tied down she tacked from Clacton to Lawling Creek as other boats around us motored. We even saved our tide into Maylandsea.
The moral of the story is: always look at the original sail plan. It's unlikely you can improve upon it.
Dick Durham
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Eau d'Estuary
12 June 2009
This is an open invitation to boffin Will Andrews, a 'fragrance scientist', for Proctor & Gamble, who is researching odour molecules in a bid to recreate a 'yacht cabin' smell which can be marketed as an aerosol for armchair sailors.
Please fell free to call me at 020 314 84865 and we can arrange to meet on the hard at Paglesham, Essex. Best to arrive at high water otherwise, the black ooze exposed as the tide recedes might compromise your own finely-tuned olfactory sensors. Best bring some fizzy water with you as once onboard I will desist from offering a cup of tea as the fresh water tank needs a clean out and at present has the aroma of old cabbages.
I suggest we jog down to the Spitway if the wind's south-west and I'll drag out some spunyarn from the rope locker: it has a lovely pong of Stockholm tar and you will think you are walking through Wapping circa 1830.
You might want to bring some Petri dishes to collect some mildew off the spare sleeping bag I'll be offering you: it has a certain smell of decay which would be hugely authentic.
If we get wind over tide in a gale and you are seasick try and collect same in a sealable bag. You won't be washing while we are away so you might wish to hang onto your laundry until you get back to the factory.
I'm sure it will be great success: I've always been impressed with the sweet, if slightly sickly smell which emanates from your waterside plant at Grays in Essex. How anything can smell so suspiciously alien which accompanies the smoke from this industrial plant is beyond me. You are clever fellows.
Dick Durham
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The new Crofter Open 30
8 June 2009
Yachting Monthly reader Ewen Hardie has sent me this picture taken north of Oban near Loch Creran, on the west coast of Scotland. 'From a distance it looked like Thor Heyerdhal had taken to the waves again,' Ewen reports.
In fact I believe she is the new Crofter Open 30. Note the hi-tech, hydraulic, non-stayed mast, and outboard tiller extension. The Crofter Open 30 has no guard rails and is marketed as a motor-sailer for inter-island adventuring. She is able to carry peat between the crofts - hence her name - on her flat deck.
Here she is seen with a pilot boat alongside. She is also flying an RNLI pennant and the intrepid staff at the lifeboat HQ in Poole will be pleased to see their 'always wear a lifejacket' campaign is paying off. Although whether that buoyancy aid would be enough to keep the wearer's hobnail boots afloat is debatable.
The dipping lugsail can double as a spinnaker - as can be seen in this photograph - the skipper is craftily flying the sail upside down for major pull.
Dick Durham
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Davy Jones' locker
4 June 2009
I know there are many old sailors who are not sentimental about the sea. The planet's greatest element has given them a living, scared the hell out of them at times, and been a lonely place - without overtime - to earn a crust.
In their dotage the last thing they want to be near is salt water. GIve them an allotment, a pigeon loft or a rover bus pass, but don't suggest a sea trip. My grandfather was like that: at sea his whole life, retiring as Master Mariner in the Port Line, having been awarded a DSO and OBE for services in both World Wars in his reserved occupation.
He loathed the briny by the time he retired and although, in his dotage, he got up in the middle of the night to check all was well on the 'bridge' - his kitchen window - wouldn't have given tuppence for Cowes or Burnham-on-Crouch.
Personally I couldn't give tuppence either for where, those who have the expensive and boring task of dumping my mortal remains, decide upon.
But if I discover I've been poured into one of these tacky little kitsch pirate-style treasure chests I will come back and haunt you forever.
You have been warned.
Dick Durham
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Boris aboard
2 June 2009
News that Boris Johnson is to go off rowing and sailing in a dayboat comes too late for me to have offered him a berth aboard my own Tepco 12ft sailing dinghy. Last week my nine-year-old son Richard and I sailed and rowed from Tonbridge in Kent down the River Medway and back across the Thames Estuary to our home at Leigh-on-Sea.
Had I realised Boris was keen to get afloat I would have offered him a thwart aboard Gina 2. He could have heaved on the oars and trimmed the sheets and camped in a damp tent as we did. It might not have been up to his own standards of travel accommodation, but the fellow would have seen the beautiful Garden of England floating by before it eventually gave way to the salt marsh of the tidal end of the river.
Here it is that the Jolly Green Giant wants to plant Heathrow-on-Sea. Even though we broke our rudder in a blow on the penultimate day and had to use an oar to steer, Boris might just have changed his mind about accommodating the great steel birds of mechanical flight having heard, as did we, the call of the cuckoo, give way to the eerie cry of the curlew.
Dick Durham
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Domesday log
22 May 2009
Now we are all sailing in home waters for our staycations because of the recession and the weak pound, we were looking forward to bathing from the boarding ladder in the Met Office's promised hot summer.
But the Marine Conservation Society has put paid to all that, telling us our beaches are covered in pesticides and sewage.
I for one will not be taking any notice and will swim freely through currents of DDT washed off farmer's fields, plutonium leaking from atom plants, and abandoned mammals flushed down the loo by brassic pet lovers.
It's important to remember your Darwin and know you must evolve otherwise how are you going to survive when half the country is underwater?
Dick Durham
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Trousering it
21 May 2009
Whenever I have been fortunate enough to share a hotel room with a trouser press, I have assembled it as a useful counter for the contents of the mini-bar, while my strides have been woefully ignored and left concertinad in the corner.
That is not to say the trouser press is a joke object, as the Eastleigh MP Chris Huhne has recently found out. The Lib Dem rising star has repaid the £119 he claimed for such an appearance enhancer to the Treasury which is very honourable of him. And I do not think the man's career should go down in a moist hiss of escaping steam because of this. After all a trouser press ain't no moat...although it can be flipped as I have discovered when relying too heavily on its load-bearing capacity.
No, Mr Huhne's dilemma is not that he claimed one on expenses, but that he acquired one at all. Mr Huhne is a member of the All-Party House of Commons Yacht Club and as such should know that all real sailors sleep on their shore-going rig to flatten it out.
Shame on you, Sir!
PS I do not claim the contents of my mini-bar on expenses, Her Majesty's Inland Revenue please note.
Dick Durham
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Greeting the season
15 May 2009
There's a Force 6 north-westerly, blowing against a spring flood tide and your boat is hanging in the travel hoist, the water licking up her sides. You are not sure if the batteries are up to firing the engine and you are single-handed. What do you do?
Row off a warp - or in this case - five warps bent together to the nearest buoy.
As she floats and the strops are lowered simply haul her off stern first to the buoy. While carrying her way transfer the line to the bow. Then safely moored up get the engine going and motor off to the mooring.
Another season awaits.
Dick Durham
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Perham gets his head tested
11 May 2009
People might say of Mike Perham, the diminutive 17-year-old who is heading into the Southern Ocean in winter alone aboard a boat big enough for four gorillas, that he wants his head tested.
Well, I can report that he has! The sailing schoolboy has been psycho-analysed by a sports psychologist to make sure he's up to the challenge.
When I went to meet his father, Peter, last month at their Potters Bar home, he told me that to make sure Mike wasn't just dreaming about a world record, his father 'interrogated' Mike before he went off seeking funding. 'I had to make sure he really wanted to do it. It's one thing saying you want to do it and another actually doing it.' Peter had his son psycho-analysed by sports psychologist, Caroline Heaney, whose company mission statement reads: 'Never give up, never give in. In the end you will win.'
'She asked him questions and got the reasoning behind the answers,' said Peter, ' but I also briefed friends and relatives of ours to ask him questions about this challenge. I needed to know he was up for this. There was too much at stake to back out I had to make sure he was totally passionate about it.'
Mike was expected to be back in Portsmouth in March, now he will not get home until July, missing his girlfriend Becky's high school prom in June. 'If everything looks good for the Horn, he'll go for it,' said Peter.
Of his weather router, Mike Broughton, Peter said: 'He is brilliant, although there have been a lot of false starts for him with reports he has calculated which then don't get used because of the delays.'
Mike Broughton, told me : 'My hunch is that it's leaning more towards the Horn. I have a sixteen-year-old son and if he was in Mike's shoes I'd rather he went round the Horn than get stuck off windless Panama. I wouldn't say that if I wasn't so impressed with Mike's seamanship and prudence: he is head and shoulders above many who are vastly more experienced than him.'
In the front room of the Perham home, Peter is keen to show me an excerpt from Antarctic sailor Skip Novak's website which states that the weather in the Southern Ocean during winter is more predictable than in summer. It is hoped that when Mike has to make his decision he will be getting a weather window to round Cape Horn. If not then his father is hopeful he could either tuck into the Magellan Strait or the Drake Channel for shelter before proceeding. But he will not take any risk - if the predicted weather is severe - Mike will head north.
Dick Durham
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Sailing an Open 60
7 May 2009
Up, up, up came the weather side, over, over, over went the rig and up, over and in came a white explosion of salt water. Dorset passed in a blur and I braced my salt-stained deck shoes against the bar taut back-stay fall which hummed with tension. I pulled the carbon fibre tiller towards me trying to get this Open 60 wind machine away from a broach and into 'the groove.'
'You had seventeen point three, just then,' came the cool voice of her skipper, Steve White, 36. I have never sailed at 17.3 knots before, but hope to do so again one day!
I was like Toad of Toad Hall: how could I ever be wowed by 7.5 knots anymore?
The poor old Contessa 32 is consigned to history: I now wanted one of these. 'Just think: this hull 36ft long, with a centre-board...' I mused to YM's editor Paul Gelder who had joined me aboard Steve's Toe In The Water Vendee Globe sloop for a jolly around Weymouth Bay.
Steve had very kindly fitted us in for a spin and his wife Kim had joined us, too and she was first to spot the bucking and rearing boat under our lee. A figure motioned to the VHF and Steve went below. 'They want us half a mile to the south of the firing range,' he said so we'll gybe over in a minute.'
But Toe In The Water was going so fast, with one reef in the main and the giant genneker that before we needed to make the course change, the range boat radioed again and said we were out of the prohibited area.
My moment of glory over I was now consigned to the grinder: I felt like one of those windmilling weather cocks where the prop turns the man as I furled the genneker - or a small part of it, gasping for breath.In fact just bending over to get through the mouse-hole-shaped companionway to get inside Toe In The Water requires less of a beer gut than the one I sport.
But I still want one. After all I'm not going round the world.
Dick Durham
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Big mother
1 May 2009
It's chic these days to complain about CCTV monitoring our every move, or sinister bureaucrats listening in to our conversations, reading our emails or sussing out our bank accounts.
But sometimes Big Brother ain't always the E-Borders ogre he's made out to be.
As in the case of these pensioners who put to sea in a beautiful pea green boat which had no radio.
Thanks to a lot of hard work by the Coastguard their worried mobile phone call was traced to a spot where these very tired old men were in the Irish Sea and they were rescued.
Sometimes we should think of the poor souls who have to wade through hours of our rubbish conversations about , Jade Goody's longevity, whether our rice pudding's getting burned or the number of rag worms left in the bait box and feel grateful someone's bothered to listen.
Dick Durham
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First cuckoo of the year
29 April 2009
Last weekend I spent some quiet hours in the sun rolling on two coats of anti-fouling paint.
It so happened that just as I was finishing I heard my first cuckoo of the year.
Suddenly I felt as though I was appearing in a Mike Peyton cartoon.
Dick Durham
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Three cheers for the Royal Southern
27 April 2009
Three cheers to the yachtsmen of the Royal Southern Yacht Club who raised £56,000 for wounded servicemen and women. It was reassuring to know such support still exists in this nominally Christian country for our state-financed 'terrorists'. For this is how our servicemen and women are seen by an increasingly vociferous, and not-so minor minority of radical muslims, born here and practising their faith in peace.
Last month the Royal Anglian Regiment came face to face with such protestors when they marched through their home town of Luton.
Yet, serious-minded people, including many in the services themselves, will agree that those demonstrators have a point. The Royal Anglians were returning from the one overseas conflict which is, even now, difficult to justify; Iraq.
Many tens of thousands of children, their mothers and their ailing grandparents have been killed in that war. A war, we were told, would root out weapons of mass destruction. A war which America tried to tell us, was linked to Islamic terrorism and, more directly to 9/11. None of this is true.
Had they been returning from Afghanistan - though this is a futile war which cannot be won - they would have at least been able to claim the moral high ground. For this is a country which does support terrorists, but which does not have weapons of mass destruction and therefore is invadable and can supply the need to be seen 'to be doing something'.
The one country which the western allies are unlikely to set foot in - though it is near to having both weapons of mass destruction and major support for anti-western terrorists, is Iran and we have the very sensible Barack Obama to thank for that. He got in just in time before the maniac George Bush could light any more fires.
Probably the most dangerous country in the world is now Pakistan, it has nuclear weapons and has fallen partly into the hands of militant Islamists: a knock on effect of chasing the Taleban out of Afghanistan.
Pray Obama can find a way through this hellish maze for come the day NATO feels the need to 'support' a pro-western regime in Pakistan, the Royal Southern Yacht Club will need to raise 100,000 times the amount it did recently to Help our Heroes.
Dick Durham
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Moment in Jack Jones' life
22 April 2009
Jack Jones is dead. I'd almost completely forgotten about him. I interviewed the old union trooper back in 1974 for the Scottish Sunday Post. What few realise is that his love of the water - watching the Mersey flow to the sea - led him into his first job in engineering at the docks.
From these early beginnings he became a passionate believer in the rights of the working man. He fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War and was wounded in one famous battle.
And, of course, became the general secretary of the giant Transport and General Workers Union, which is when I was despatched to interview the great man.
As a cub reporter I was a trifle nervous and arrived at the TGWU HQ early. I got lost in its precincts and stumbling through corridors went eventually through several doors until I opened one which was a Gentleman's loo.
There was Jack Jones, trousers round his ankles, on the throne, reading a copy of the Daily Telegraph spread out on the floor below him.
'SSSorry" I said and backed off. The interview went well and he never once asked me not to mention he was reading a Tory rag.
Dick Durham
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Cod end
15 April 2009
The French fishermen now throwing a tantrum over fish quotas have no-one to blame but themselves. As they blockade the Channel ports and set fire to bald tractor tyres they remind me of a woman I know who describes her bad-tempered husband as being 'old s**t and stamp in it', whenever he goes into one.
When I worked for the Daily Star we carried out an investigation into trawling on both sides of the English Channel. The French had subsidized, fast-moving boats which looked like stink-pots and netted everything in the sea. By comparison our fleet chasing the same finny tribe - hake in the western approaches - were wooden, outdated, inshore boats manned by young men in state housing trying to repay massive marine mortgages and risking their lives in so doing.
What sticks in my mind were the number of fish inspectors the UK then had patrolling the quaysides of British fishing ports and seizing fishing boats with £70,000 fines for landing the wrong kind of fish. Our struggling fishermen were genuinely scared of these chisel-faced officials. Then - this was back in the mid-1990s- the UK had 150 fish inspectors. France had 15. Spain had three.
Shocked at such disparity we then went to Boulogne's (then the largest fishing port in France) fish market with a retired fish inspector from the UK (no-one still employed in the industry dared take on EU ire). He picked out no less than 17 fish piles laden with undersized creatures from lemon sole to dabs.
Dick Durham
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Legacy of the Golden Globe
14 April 2009
What on earth can be left to say about the ill-prepared Sunday Times Golden Globe Race which made Robin Knox-Johnston a knight and a household name, taught Chay Blyth that a bilge-keeler was not a boat in which to sail the Southern Ocean, and sent weekend yachtsman Donald Crowhurst to a watery grave?
Plenty if you read BBC reporter Chris Eakin's book, A Race Too Far, published by Ebury Press at £16.99. Mr Eakin is a sailor himself, and a competent one, he has crossed Biscay twice in his Hallberg Rassy 36, with only his wife Deborah, a GP, as crew.
He has tracked down anyone still breathing whose life was affected by the race and has some fabulous stories to tell. Take Eve Tetley, now living on Alderney, the widow of Nigel Tetley whose trimaran sank after breaking up just 1,100 miles from the finish. He believed Crowhurst was not far astern and gaining so he pressed on when he should have eased up. Three years after such huge disappointment he was found hanged on a tree branch, dressed in lady's stockings and suspender belt. Understandably Eve had not spoken - ever - of her husband's demise. And Mr Eakin kept her away from me - when I tried - in classic doorstepping style!
Having read his book I can understand why. His story with Eve is a cracking exclusive. Her hatred for Crowhurst still runs deep.
But that's not all, he tracked down French sailor Bernard Moitessier's widow Francoise and discovered the mystic hero was also a serial adulterer who pleaded with his Paris-based wife to send wool out to Tahiti so his mistress could knit clothes for his love-child!
He also has a lengthy conversation with Crowhurst's widow Clare who bought a wooden house in the middle of the Australian outback where she spends six months every year. Having had journalists camping in her garden and still, occasionally, banging on her front door 40 years on, it's the only place she feels free of the 'Golden Globe fallout' as Eakin describes it.
Shining through the pages rides Sir Robin Knox-Johnston a hero in every sense of the word. He gave his prize money to the Crowhursts, allowed Eve to live in his Hamble boatyard at cost, and helped move her to Alderney in the boat she and Nigel never finished. There is an unforgettable image of Sir Robin nipping up the quayside ladder in Bray, with Eve's baby in a carry-cot held between his teeth.
Like The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst and Voyage for Madmen, A Race Too Far is a cracking book. I can't recommend it too highly.
Dick Durham
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Destinations: Eyl
9 April 2009
Eyl, Somalia is an exciting run ashore for the Blue Water yachtsman who likes to explore places off the beaten track.
Entry
Local pilots will take control of your boat and steer you in safely through the reefs. Though care should be taken to protect the deck gel coat from unshouldered rocket-propelled grenade launchers and semi-automatic rifles.
Mooring
Once inside you will be directed to a visitor's anchorage shared with supertankers, bulk carriers, and freighters.
Eating out
You will be breaking bread with other hostages in any restaurant you choose: 'special restaurants have even been set up to prepare food for the crews of the hijacked ships,' the BBC reports.The going rate for ransom payments is between £168,000-£838,000, so expect to be well fed and watered. Since the hi-jack of an American container ship last week local sources believe a McDonalds franchise is being sought.
Things to do
The piracy industry, including those who feed the hostages, has become a mainstay of the Puntland economy, and souvenir shops have now opened where you can buy colourful hijabs, ash-trays beaten from shell cases, and goat-hoof door stops.
Dick Durham
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