The adventures of Mistral -- from London to Sweden in a small wooden boat


Mistral was a class-boat, a six-meter built in 1899, back in the days when racing such elegant craft was an upper class hobby. She was 32 feet long and named Mistral for a seasonal Mediterranean wind. She had substantial overhangs bow and stern, which added 9 or 10 feet to her waterline length. Originally built as an open boat she had been adapted for cruising by the addition of a cabin, two cramped berths with a folding table in between and a small propane stove. She lacked standing head room so getting in and out of one's berth took some gymnastics.


She had a substantial lead ballast keel and no internal buoyancy making sure that she'd go straight to the bottom if capsized or accidentally swamped. At the time, with the Korean War heating up, many vintage boats like Mistral were sold for the scrap value of the lead in their keels. I bought Mistral with the 300 pounds that had been left me by a favorite uncle (quite a lot of money in those days) but had very little idea (in fact no idea) of the running costs and seasonal expense of owning a boat the size of Mistral   ,

I was an experienced small boat sailor and Mistral, in spite of her size, handled like a dinghy. She was fast, responsive to the tiller and able to turn in her own length. She did have roller reeling but, unlike the usual arrangement the sail was wrapped around the mast, not the boom. By rotating the mast several times one could reduce the sail area by any amount. It was called a ‘McGruer Patent Wrapped Spar and was a clever idea but ahead of its time. The waterproof glues of 1899 were no more than  ‘water resistant’ so our mast was liable to come unwrapped and had to be pulled back together with large hose clamps  I eventually added two rows of reefing points to the foot of the mainsail and retired McGruer along with his patent.

I kept Mistral on a mooring across from the local yacht club and, real or imagined,  I was aware of watchful, critical eyes.  It was a crowded anchorage with a strong tidal current so without an engine it took some experience (experience I lacked but rapidly acquired) to get underway without tangling with the adjacent boats. Members of the yachting club had the usual, snobbish arrogance of the English upper class, loudly contemptuous of anything they considered bad manners or poor seamanship. “Never seen a boat so badly brought up…” they'd proclaim as if it were an errant child.

With such a deep keel (nearly five feet)  we had.  to stick to established channels to avoid running aground. This happened once when we cut a shoal too close and ran on a steep bank of shingle. The tide was ebbing and in a few minutes Mistral had a substantial list with no chance of getting off for at least 10 hours. I soon realized that the boat was heeling the wrong way with the mast pointing downhill, not up. Being so shallow the bilge water was soon lapping around the bunks and we had to rescue the two mattresses and take them on deck.

When the tide turned I realized that the cockpit was going to fill before the hull lifted and we were going to stay right where we were--the latest navigational hazard. We dragged out an old staysail and as a temporary expedient to keep out the water and nailed it to the mahogany coaming around the cockpit. It did the trick, the boat lifted, then floated clear so we pulled out the nails and did our best to repair the scarred coaming.

With the incoming tide the estuary came alive with racing dinghies crewed by the yachting fraternity sporting smart  blazers.We could not have been more conspicuous--perched ignominiously high and dry on a shingle bank. “Hard luck, old chap”  the skippers called out as they raced past.The tide eventually released us but we remained mindful of that half ton of lead under the floorboards and our 4-1/2 foot keel.

My father had made numerous trips across the channel in a boat no bigger than Mistral and so I thought I'd try it too--although I was lacking my father’s age and his many years of experience. I invited two of my fellow students from the University to join me. We loaded up with provisions, bought a new (post-war) chart of the English Channel, and set off one morning. We had an ebb tide to take us out of the estuary, a compass, tide tables--and our passports in case we wanted to go ashore and explore what we still thought of as The Continent.

Never having crossed the Channel before by boat I didn't realize (or had forgotten) that most of the buoys, channel markers and other    navigational aids were ‘foreign’--different shapes, colors and markings from those on the English side. All distances were metric and what was of crucial importance water depths were also metric. This abrupt change of units from one side of the English Channel  to    other must have caused some head scratching--or worse.

Both England and France had been major maritime powers so each wanted the zero meridian passing  through their own capital cities--Paris or London. The British took advantage of the French defeat at the battle of Waterloo in 1815 to settle the matter--to their advantage of course. From then on published charts showed the zero meridian passing through Greenwich Observatory, a dozen miles from London.You can now actually straddle the International Date line in Greenwich with one foot in the Eastern hemisphere and one in the West.   

I kept Mistral on a gravelled area, known as a ‘hard’ in the middle of Itchenor, a small town on an estuary in Sussex. It was only an hour from London so we could go back and forth--usually hitch hiking. The ‘hard’ in Itchenor was considered public property so it was free to anyone that wanted to make use of it. However,  it was tidal so anything with a keel had to be supported on legs or better yet a sturdy cradle. Leaving Mistral on the hard, with nobody looking out for her was risky because at high tide all the boats floated and if there was any wind jostled each other. The result was a cacophony of slapping halyards which only a heavy sleeper could ignore. We would frap the halyards at night since cven my more athletic friends had difficulty climbing a 6-in. dia. wooden mast.

Early one morning I had a phone call from the owner of the local boatyard, a Captain Haynes, to tell me that Mistral had come loose from her supporting legs in the night, overturned and her mast was almost horizontal (it was low tide)  and would I please get there and deal with it. Luckily for me the mast had not fouled the other boats on either side of her but this near miss convinced me that a mooring was a safer, less risky place to keep the boat.

Mistral was not a comfortable boat to sail: It was built for racing and had a cramped, narrow cockpit and a sliding hatch giving access to the cabin. It had two built in bunks but lacked headroom so was good only for sleeping. She sat low in the water with only 18 inches of freeboard so it was easy to scramble aboard if you went swimming or had fallen overboard. We had no motor (and no place to put one) but made do with a couple of sweeps and oarlocks set into the coaming.

I had a contact in Sweden, a lad my own age, Sven Huseby, who was a keen sailor. We arranged a mutual visit since Sven’s family kept a boat on the Baltic and I had Mistral. Sven didn't realize (and neither did I) that during the Second World War England had become a third world country. Practically everything was in short supply--even potatoes were rationed. There was a thriving black market, constant breakdowns in public services and a chronic shortage of petrol. This was a result of the bombing of the industrial heartland and years of neglected maintenance. Electricity supplies were sporadic and cooking gas sometimes had too low a pressure to be usable. I took Sven down to Chichester to introduce him to Mistral and I could tell he was dismayed by the condition of the boat and the work needed to make it seaworthy. We took a short trip out the estuary but Sven was clearly alarmed by the leaking hull, the lack of life jackets and the areas cordoned off as ‘suspected minefields’. “Let us go to the Port” he said with increasing anxiety. Rather than face a one-man mutiny I turned around and we headed back to the shelter of the estuary.

Sven’s parents had friends in London and he was invited to join a  group heading to the Scilly Isles in a chartered Bristol pilot cutter. It was an old boat, heavily built at the turn of the century with tanned canvas sails and required an experienced, able-bodied crew. The vessel encountered gale force winds off Penzance, one of the crew was swept overboard and drowned. Sven had to attend the inquest in Penzance and give evidence. I never heard from him again but he must have been thankful to get back to the peace and  security of Sweden.

Once we had our gear stowed we sailed Mistral down the river but once we were out of the shelter of the estuary we ran into headwinds and a nasty choppy sea. With so little freeboard Mistral was taking water over the bow and a lot was finding its way below deck. Added to that one of my friends from Cambridge, Thom Gunn,  became violently sea sick and although he did his best was incapacitated.  After a brief discussion we decided our French didn't really need improving so returned to the shelter of the Solent.

Thom Gunn recovered quickly and turned out to be an ideal sailing companion. He was not only a poet but a scholar who had memorized segments of Chaucer and other early English poets. When we were becalmed or otherwise idle he would regale us with some of the more indecent episodes from the Canterbury Tales. Thom had a knack for pronouncing the original diction so it was perfectly comprehensible.

We tied up at night and since there were only two bunks one of us had to ‘camp out’ on some nearby boat--first making sure the owner was not at home. When it was my turn I got in the dinghy and rowed over to what turned out to be a Nordic Folkboat. It was a modern Scandinavian design, built lapstrake, and a striking contrast to our six-meter Mistral. Instead of the long overhangs it had a transom and a stubby bow. The rudder was hung directly on the transom and steered with a tiller. I was very taken with its spare simplicity but at the time it was considered rather ‘homely’ since it lacked the elegance of its contemporaries. Thirty years later I acquired a Folkboat and sailed it for years on San Francisco Bay. By that time it had become a ‘classic’ and there is now quite a fleet, including some new boats, on San Francisco Bay.

The Solent, the body of water between the Isle of Wight and the mainland, is an ideal training ground, nursery really, for the novice sailor. It has four tides a day instead of the more usual two which makes for complicated tidal patterns. The important navy base of Portsmouth was bombed during the war and as late as the 1950s unexploded mines were still turning up which added to the hazards.

Portsmouth is no stranger to armed conflict. In 1519, Henry the Eighth’s flagship, the Mary Rose, was on her way out the Solent to engage a Spanish fleet, when she capsized and sank-- to the consternation of the British and the glee of the Spanish. The vessel had been heavily armed for the coming encounter, with cannons and extra troops, and most likely had become unstable. The anti-boarding nets strung over the upper deck added greatly to the loss of life. It wasn't until the 1960s that the vessel was raised and moved into a climate-controlled environment so the contents could be catalogued and conserved. Mary Rose, named after Henry’s  younger sister, is now a prized exhibit in the Portsmouth navy yard. Many of the artifacts have been restored and are back in place so you get a unique sense of a fighting ship of the period, one about to go into action, and how cramped they really were.

Both my crew had to be back in Cambridge for exams so we made  our way back to Chichester to put Mistral away for the winter. We rented a ‘mud berth’, which is the least expensive way to store wooden boats over the winter--if you have tidal mudflats available. We picked a suitably sized berth, tied Mistral up fore and aft, allowing for the rise and fall of the tide, then covered her with a large tarp to keep off the rain, leaving plenty of room for ventilation.

Cooking on board Mistral was cramped and awkward at best and impossible when laid up in a mud berth. So we went ashore for dinner that night in spite of looking (and feeling) rather scruffy. We picked a local eatery named  Chez Pierre so did finally get to practice our French.

Simon Watts

Exeter, 2019




























 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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