Random Boats

 One of my greatest influences as a teenager were the books of Peter Pye, who, along with his wife, Anne, made some significant cruises in an old, converted fishing boat, Moonraker, that they bought for UK £25 in 1931.  Even at the age of 15, I was aware that £25 was worth a lot more in 1931 than it would have been in 1967, but the heart is not ruled by logic, and the idea excited me wildly.  I started scouring the back blocks of Durban Harbour, looking for some old wreck I could convert, but alas, without success.  A few years later, though, my contemporary, Jeremy Walker, found an ancient, lapstrake, teak-planked lifeboat in the Durban docklands and turned it into a delightfully funky world voyager, Jung Jung, which he sailed with his partner to England.  I must have walked past that old hull a dozen times, but it always looked too far gone to my inexperienced eye.  I have a magazine with great photos of Jung Jung somewhere, and one day when I have the time, I'll dig it out and scan them, so you'll have to make do with this drawing for now.  I am currently flat-out putting Last Days of the Slocum Era to bed.

Jung Jung

 

Moonraker with all plain sail, plus topsail.

Peter Pye, who I jokingly refer to as my sartorial guide, in the cockpit of Moonraker.  I remember him once writing about tying his trousers up with a length of old jib sheet, and I thought that was pretty cool.  It might be hard to guess that this man was a medical doctor by profession.

Here, Moonraker is tied up astern of Beyond in English Harbour, Antigua, in the Caribbean, on Christmas Day, 1949.  Anyone who knows English Harbour today will be amused by the lack of development, and perhaps a little envious, especially if they are sailing small, beat-up gaff cutters, and have empty pockets.  Photo by Eric Hiscock, from Voyaging Under Sail.

Moonraker of Fowey on its home mooring before the voyage.

 

Peter Pye said that Moonraker looked like a box and sailed like a witch, while Anne joked that they sailed with one hand in God's pocket (and the other was most likely on the bilge pump).  The boat had internal ballast, which consisted of old cogwheels and other cast-offs from the early industrial age, including, I kid you not, a number of cannonballs.

After their first voyage to the Caribbean and back to England, they met Miles and Beryl Smeeton, who had just bought the 46' ketch, Tzu Hang, and were about to sail it home to British Columbia, despite having never sailed a yacht before.  But the Smeetons were extraordinary people, and they and Tzu Hang went on to become rightly famous.  The Pyes accepted an invitation to visit the Smeetons in British Columbia, and sailed there soon afterwards via Panama and Tahiti, before returning to England via Mexico and Panama, an ambitious voyage for anyone, let alone a frail, middle-aged couple in indifferent health.  They later cruised to the Baltic and Brazil.

 

Moonraker of Fowey setting out to visit the Smeetons in British Columbia.

 

 Moonraker and Tzu Hang on Saltspring Island, British Columbia.

 

Peter Pye died in a tragic accident in 1966, on the way home from a cruise to the Mediterranean.  He'd been suffering from a groin hernia for some time, and was persuaded by a naval friend to have it operated on in the Naval Hospital in Plymouth.  There, a nitrogen bottle wrongly labelled as oxygen was used in the anesthetic process, resulting in his death.

He wrote four books, Red Mains'l, my favourite, The Sea is for Sailing, Sail in a Forest, and Backdoor to Brazil.  The last title is only published in  The Peter Pye Omnibus.  

From Peter Pye I learned to love simple, rugged boats, with basic gear, and developed a distrust of modern bermudan rigs which have no built-in redundancy.  If one cotter pin or stay breaks on a bermudan-rigged yacht, the whole shebang is likely to come down.

Besides gaff rig, I have a deep love, and a certain amount of experience with unstayed junk rigs, having sailed under one for a decade.  I'll be writing more about junk rigs later.