Posts
I've had many opportunities to learn how to sail, and successfully completed two courses in Sydney Harbour.
Although I love being on the sea, it seems I'm somewhat reluctant to pursue the sport and I'm not over-eager to take up invitations from friends to go sailing.
I put it down to the coverage of the Sydney to Hobart race in 1998.
That race ended in tragedy . I'll be thinking about it again on Boxing Day. I remember standing on South Head, watching the yachts leaving Sydney Harbour at the beginning of the race. Many yachts soon found themselves in dire distress.
I recall it as if it happened yesterday.
This is how the BBC reported it.
For me, it changed the meaning of Boxing Day.
It's the main reason why I've become a fair-weather sailor.
The Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 was the ultimate nightmare.
The Yetties: Bound for South Australia
Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick, Ship in Distress
A. L. Lloyd, The Ship in Distress
Plain Sailing (Alexander’s 28th Birthday Poem).
Sailing in Stockholm harbour:
I praise his skill.
My son’s the captain now.
June 2004.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
A fitting and humane comment on existence - not just seafaring.
ReplyDeletehttp://democracystreet.blogspot.com/2008/12/internal-polity.html
Honour and respect to those who died. Courage, excitement, plus advanced technology makes ocean racing (like mountain climbing) a temptation to hubris; makes it too easy to deny the difference between rough weather and those times when the sea turns feral. The difference is terrifying. The paintings in 'Ship in Distress' captured it for me long before I ever went to sea. I've never experienced such conditions. I was taught to be a fair-weather sailor by my seafaring mentor Denys Raynor (Battle of the Atlantic then small boat designer) who wrote of the sea being - 'neither cruel nor kind ... Any apparent virtues it may have, and all its vices, are seen only in relation to the spirit of man who pits himself, in ships of his own building, against its insensate power.' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denys_Rayner
I appreciate your comments, which add great value to my random thoughts and postings.
ReplyDeleteAs an afterthought, an excerpt from Ezra Pound's translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem 'The Seafarer':
ReplyDeleteBitter breast-cares have I abided,
Known on my keel many a care's hold,
And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent
Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship's head
While she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted,
My feet were by frost benumbed.
Chill its chains are; chafing sighs
Hew my heart round and hunger begot
Mere-weary mood. Lest man know not
That he on dry land loveliest liveth,
List how I, care-wretched, on ice-cold sea,
Weathered the winter, wretched outcast
Deprived of my kinsmen;
Hung with hard ice-flakes, where hail-scur flew,
There I heard naught save the harsh sea
And ice-cold wave, at whiles the swan cries,
Did for my games the gannet's clamour,
Sea-fowls, loudness was for me laughter,
The mews' singing all my mead-drink.
Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten, fell on the stern
In icy feathers; full oft the eagle screamed
With spray on his pinion.