Progress Progresses Progressively

So the boat has been dragged kicking and screaming from it's nice warm haven in Lydney Harbour and towed to Dave's home near Malvern almost without incident. This is not to say that there was not a deal of gentle persuasion with judicious use of WD40 and some lump hammer semaphore which finally persuaded the brakes that there was, in fact, two states of being, on and off. Once this had been established, Dave being something of a machine whisperer, and the wheel bearings inspected for signs of impending disintegration, Missy Moto was hitched up to Pete's Land Rover Discovery and hauled reluctantly to the tidal streams of the Malvern Hills with two sets of ears akimbo for sounds of metal or worse grinding off tarmac. As it turned out boat and trailer behaved impeccably and our purchase is now Dave's latest in a long line of inappropriate garden decoration which his long-suffering wife, Pat, simply accepts with a resigned shrug. (No doubt she has some serious shopping penance in store for him when he least expects it).

Now it begins. The endless list making. The discovery of dire inadequacies of seaworthiness. The dreams of installing navigation equipment worth more than we paid for the boat. The cat's cradle of the rigging which seems to involve thousands of metres of rope of varying thicknesses, lengths and braids in fact the only uniform thing about all this string is the expense of it.

We need some antifouling. Our experienced sailing friend who is well-connected to scientific boffins who've done the research on this stuff advises us to use Compound A. Off I trot to a Poole based chandlers who, when I mention Compound A, gives vent to the longest, sharpest intake of breath I've heard since one of my uncle's farm tractor got a not-so-slow puncture in a tyre, you know, one of the big knobbly one on the back wheels. 'It's veeery expensive. How much do you need?' '2.5 - 3 litres,' says I all innocence and ignorance. 'That'll be £200,' he says. 'What! I only want to anitfoul it, not gild it. Isn't there anything cheaper.' 'Of course there is. This is £90 for 2.5l and this £70 for 3l but I wouldn't recommend it.'

So off I trudge, ninety quid lighter and beginning to realise that the old adage about a hole in the water surround by GRP into which you pour money is all too accurate except that the actual saying involves being surrounded by wood in which case you'll need all the resources of the Federal Reserve but they seem to be broke now too, so maybe George Bush owns a boat.

I have also acquired a tender, spotted for me by a neighbour whose hobby seems to be dumpster diving or whatever is the British equivalent. This he persuaded me was 'a good buy' and would probably be cheap which indeed it did turn out to be though not quite as cheap as I'd hoped. He's promised to repair the mild damage to the engine mount and so he joins the long line of people seemingly put on the planet to make me look inadequate and yes, it is all about me!

We now have a) a boat, b) a mooring and c) a tender plus engine(another of Stig's acquisitions from the aforementioned dump - it's astonishing what people throw away) It's all shaping up rather well.

Meanwhile John hasn't even seen what he's sinking his money into, I have had only the briefest of glances at the little beast and Dave is sitting on our investment wondering where and when to start the Augean stable thing. Ho hum and all's well with the world.
Watch this space, it's surrounded by water.

Why Junk?

'The subtlety of the Chinese junk rig is hard to convey; to be appreciated it has to be experienced, to be lived with, and at length. Enlightenment advances slowly. It is a process of gradual and piecemeal absorption. To an extent it starts, for the occidental, as an act of faith. Too many built-in, scarcely recognised prejudices militate against easy acceptance. Without acceptance, understanding is not possible. The western sailor is, in the main, too impatient. His leaning is for the quick and the obvious. He wants results, and now. Peremptory rejection, scornful dismissal, delivered in double-quick time, is the usual verdict on this most elegant of rigs.

Born of two millennia of infinitely patient trial, error and sinuous inventiveness, graced with a score of tiny details whose relevance hover, like Columbus' egg, just the other side of comprehension until the penny drops with an obvious and embarrassing clunk, infinitely forgiving to mast and sail and hull, supremly easy to manage, the junk rig is a perfect manifestation of the oriental genius. It expresses as well as anything the salient characteristics of the eastern worldview. It is a non-confrontational rig, soft, relenting. It absorbs rather than resists. It turns the other cheek, feinting gently away, while calmly appropriating the forces directed against it. It advances quietly, without thrash or bang. It sets up no strains on the hull it drives. The mast wants to fly, to rise up through the partners and take to the air, rather than drive itself through the keel below; it yields to the wind, curving gently, the pressure of the sail ranged evenly along its height through the regular spacing of the battens and parrels. The sail delivers its power at the slightest of angles to the breeze, its fan-like configuration ready to be closed up in a second or two when reefing is called for. No junk-rigged craft need ever be forced on its ear. The sailing is upright, sedate, unstressed. It strives for a simple non-aggressive harmony with wind and wave.

The contrast with the bar-taut, hard-edged and, until recently, cumbersome rigs of the West is as good a metaphor as any for the great divide between the eastern and the western psyche. The modern occidental rig seems to set itself up in opposition to natural forces. It attacks them, brutally. Its aim is to overcome them rather than to work with them. The principle is to create even stronger materials then stress them to the limit in a triumph of myopic engineering machismo. It is a hotbed of high tension. Every bit of kit is wound up to within a fraction of its breaking point. Everywhere winches, levers, turnbuckles and multi-blocked tackles are ratcheted up to deliver tons of opposing tensile and compressive forces on mast and hull. This is the finest and dandyest of set-ups, go-fast and gung-ho, until a shroud or a swage or a thread or a rivet or a humble pin gives up the ghost and the whole edifice comes tumbling down in a mess of alloy and astonishment.

The aerodynamics of the junk rig are still poorly understoof. Advanced scientific analysis, wind tunnels and all, has not yet come up with a definitve theory as to exactly how it works. The rig seems to defy comprehension. Forget smooth air flow. The disturbances and vortices set up by the battens seem to be a positive attribute. The saggy luffs so hated by the western sailor seem to enhance performance. Eveything is arse-about, counter-intuitive, typically bloody foreign.

No sail is easier to cut and more forgiving of its material than the junk sail. The cloth, and it can be virtually anything you like, even old hessian sacking if that's all you've got, is simply laid out flat and cut to size. No fancy cambers or curved seams are necessary. The sail-maker's skill is redundant. Any Tom, Dick or Ha Jin adept with a sewing machine or a needle and thread can knock up a sail between breakfast-time and the happy hour. Once made the sail will last and last. Minming's main sail, as we left the Faroes astern, was in its twenty-seventh year. Supported at every point by close spaced battens and their multipartite sheeting, the material is seldom stressed. It never flogs. Holes and patches have little adverse affect on performance.

The sail battens are traditionally made of bamboo or tree branches. Just cut to size however many lengths you need and hey presto! A few spares are usually carried on board in case of breakage. In the West the repertoire of materials used has inevitably expanded to include aluminium, plastic, fibreglass. No doubt somebody somewhere is using carbon fibre or kevler or whatever is the latest space-age compund. Each material has its ardent advocates and its indignant detractors; each has its good points and its not-so-good points. In the arcane world of junk rig specialism the debates and arguments and experimentation continue year after year, with little sign of agreement or resolution.' (More Voyages of a Simple Sailor: Mingming & the Art of Minimal Ocean Sailing - Roger D Taylor. Fitzroy Press 2010)

I reproduce this short passage from Roger Taylor's amazing book because it encapsulates perfectly what is so attractive about the junk rig and why it holds so many cruising sailors under its spell. It is a supremely efficient rig that is very easy to manage which makes it more idiot proof than most for an trio of cruising tyros. Time will, no doubt, tell.

To Begin at the Beginning

Q. Why do three men wish to buy a boat? Why do three men wish to buy a junk-rigged boat? What do these three men know about sailing a junk-rigged boat?

A. Dunno. Dunno. Nothing.

Great start.

Let's begin at the beginning. I have had a fascination for the junk rig for some years. Don't ask me why but my interest was sparked by an ex-naval commander who once told me that the junk rig was the most efficient, easiest to sail and cheapest to maintain rig ever developed. Further reading suggested that, not only was he right but that there was a small but significant group of junk rig nuts worldwide, some of whom made their own sails, some of whom had circumnavigated the globe and made other scary voyages under the said rig and a couple of whom had even done super-duper boffin type studies at university to explain how this bag of wind propelled vessels of varying size and tonnage on long, long ocean voyages. They had degrees and everything.

Junk rig supporters are a slightly eccentric bunch who shrug off the derision of their Bermudan rigged brethren to sail in a reportedly more relaxed fashion utilising a sail design that has been used in the far east for many centuries on both coastal and ocean going cargo ships. It's combination of simplicity, comparative cheapness, ease of maintenance and repair has ensured it's survival despite new developments in high tech sail materials and rigging. In short, it seems to be a criminally overlooked, tried and tested mode of propulsion and ideal for simple relaxed cruising.

My own interest was put on hold while I lived in the middle of the country where puddle sailing was the order of the day. On moving nearer to the coast in Dorset I made some initial enquiries but had another brief hiccough when illness intervened curtailing sailing ambitions.

Illness banished by the combined forces of the NHS and supportive CAM I returned to thinking about cruising the Jurassic coast and what craft would fit the bill for such a pastime. Lo and behold, springing as if called forth from the universal lucky bag, came Missy Moto.

As it turned out MM was a Newbridge Coromandel sail number 17 and was currently languishing in Lydney on the River Severn in Glouscestershire.

The Coromandel was a junk rigged version of the famous Corribee the boat in which Ellen McArthur circumnavigated the UK whilst she was still a foetus. The hull is therefore a proven and seaworthy design onto which Newbridge grafted a junk rig to make an unusual sailing boat of manageable proportions with the required rig. To cap it all, Newbridge Boats, although now no more, were built in Dorset so Missy Moto would be returning to her birthplace or thereabouts.
Mentioning my mild obsession to my other half's cousin, also a sailor, I somewhat dragooned him in to going halves with the boat if she should prove suitable (I hadn't even seen her at this stage). The germ of an idea was growing nicely.

We intended to have a short touring holiday in North Wales in June 2011 and went via Lydney Harbour where the Lydney Yacht Club were having their open day and MM's current owner was doing a sterling job cooking for the assembled club members and visitors. We camped in their car park for the night being entertained by watching arriving boats navigate the horrendous tidal flow of the Severn and, as they shot across it into the safety of the harbour, receiving rounds of applause varying in intensity according to how hairy the entrance was. I figured if MM could survive here then she must be some little boat. We had a brief squint at the little craft but it was raining, Paul (the owner) was busy and I had no clue what to look for having never bought or thought about a boat bigger than a sailing dinghy so it was a slightly off-putting experience made even more so by my sneaky other half not putting up any resistance so devolving the whole responsibility to me knowing as she did so that this would cause me to have serious second thoughts. She was right.

We spent an interesting ten days or so on the Llynn Peninsula and returned via Lydney Harbour again mainly as an overnight stop and to have one last look at MM before I reluctantly shelved thoughts of Jurassic Coastal cruising.

Shortly after we arrived back in Swanage some chiropractor friends visited and John suggested he come into the MM partnership to which I agreed with alacrity. We now had three members to spread the cost between. I have subsequently realised that that was not really my decision to make and that Dave should have been consulted but democracy is not my strong point something that's going to have to change I suspect.

When I had arrived back in Swanage I realised that, although I have sailed various dinghies and windsurfing equipment for over 40 years, I knew absolutely nothing about cruising sailing and the general mechanics of how it all worked and I determined to find out about moorings, winter lay-ups and all the attendant gubbins attached to boat ownership. As a preliminary foray into this I quizzed some Swanage Sailing Club members about moorings and their availability etc. How did one go about getting one, how much did they cost, how did one maintain them. Just by chance, I was told, there was one available (in fact they were just about to lay it that very day), it was first come first served and it was within budget. 'I'll have it', I heard myself say. Now we had a mooring but no boat.

So there we were, Tony(me), Dave and John proud owners of a mooring but no boat so, since John, already shirking his responsibilities, was going on holiday, Dave and I agreed to meet in Lydney together with a friend with extensive boating experience to check out MM with a view to purchase. (John's involvement had lowered the risk significantly and meant that this really was a no-brainer much to Lynda's chagrin - the 'resist by not resisting' strategy had clearly failed this time.) Dave is an engineer as is Tim, our nautically experienced oppo, so they fine-toothed the little boat, we examined the sails, battens, yard, boom and finally the trailer. Finding nothing amiss we made an offer and got a massive £100 off the asking price. We now owned a boat.

All we have to do now is to get her to Dave's so he can make some reinforcing for the anchor roller and take stock of her general condition and make three lists 1.Things to do immediately. 2.Things to do this winter. 3.Things we'd like to do but can't afford. Simples.