Interlude
Most of the Northern Baltic freezes up over the winter months: it can often take until May for the northern part of Bothnia to be clear of ice again. So I would be leaving Teal for a long time – nearly nine months.
I had to pass the time somehow, but luckily I had found a job that filled the gap perfectly. The remote sub-antarctic island of South Georgia, four days steaming (I wasn't planning to sail) from the Falkland Islands, has a small museum situated at an derelict whaling station, and every summer (which of course is the northern hemisphere winter) they take on two assisant staff. I had passed through South Georgia several times while I was working for the British Antarctic Survey, and been captivated by the wild beauty of the island. It was a great opportunity to get back there, and so 10 days after flying back from the Baltic, I was on another plane to the Falklands, and from there travelled to South Georgia on the fisheries patrol ship 'Sigma'.
The museum curators on South Georgia are Tim and Pauline Carr, who coincidentally happen to be the best known Falmouth Quay Punt sailors in the world. In 1967 Tim and Pauline had bought the rather dilapidated 'Curlew' in Malta. 10 years older than Teal, Curlew had been one of the original working boats, sailed by her first owner Frank Jose for the first 30 years of her life. Tim and Pauline set about turning Curlew into one of the best known and best loved cruising boats of all time. First thing they did was lob the engine overboard (a move of which I heartily approve), and by degrees Curlew was turned into a mean sailing machine. Every unnecessary bit of windage was pared down; not even flag halyards or lightboards were allowed to spoil the airflow. Tim told me they went by the theory that everyone else showed lights so that although nobody could see them, at least they could see everyone else and keep out of their way. Which was fine until the night they met someone else who worked on the same principle; they had a rather close shave. They went perhaps further than I would have done in using modern materials for rigging and sailcloth, but the result was a boat that was both staggeringly pretty, and staggeringly fast. She won many races, and regularly beat Bermudan boats 60 or 70 years younger than she was.
For nearly 25 years Tim and Pauline cruised the world in Curlew, until after 1 ˝ circumnavigations they found themselves working in the Falklands for a while to pay for their stores. There they heard of the new museum being set up in South Georgia, and offered to work there as the first curators. Another crossing of the Southern Ocean was nothing to Curlew, who had already been down to the Antarctic Peninsula, and soon they were exploring the magnificent waters around South Georgia whenever work at the museum at Grytviken was quiet. Which in those days it mostly was, South Georgia being well off the beaten track for most people, although there are ever-increasing numbers of cruise ships that make the passage now. They wrote a superb book, 'Antarctic Oasis', about their experiences sailing around the island, with dazzling pictures that I'm astonished don't draw every reader away from their comfy sofas and coffee tables to buy up old engineless boats and sail them to sub-Antarctic islands.
Tim and Pauline arrived at South Georgia in 1992, intending to stay for one season. I arrived in 2004, and they were still there. I can't blame them – the island is astounding in it's beauty and it's wildlife. But running the rapidly expanding museum had taken more and more of Tim and Paulines time, and the opportunities for climbing and skiing also meant they had less time for sailing. They decided in the end that they could no longer make good use of Curlew, or give her the time for maintenance that she deserved. With characteristic generosity they donated her to the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth, and moved ashore to a cottage by the whaling station.
Naturally, coffee breaks at the museum were full of talk about boats, not least because the other assistant while I was there was also a classic boat sailor (as well as being an ex-rock star – he'd had a mixed career). Hearing Tim and Paulines stories of storms and icebergs off the Antarctic penisula, or skin-diving for a dinner of shellfish at a remote Polynesian atoll made my meanderings in Teal seem rather humdrum by comparison.
Working on South Georgia was fantastic. It's not everyone who gets to commute to work along half a mile of rocky foreshore with albatrosses nesting in the cliffs behind and a 9000 foot mountain range soaring into the clouds across the bay, trying not to trip over penguins and dodging the fur seals who are wondering if a museum assistant might make a tasty change from krill for breakfast. I had a happy time there, but all good things have to come to an end. By early March the season was slowing and it was time to hitch a ride back to the Falklands on a cruise ship.
One benefit of being in South Georgia was being able to persuade a couple of people that they would like to come and crew in the coming summer. Martin, a fisheries biologist at the research station near Grytviken, was soon signed up, and towards the end of the season the BAS ship Ernest Shackleton passed through, carrying the brave souls who had been wintering at Halley, a research station much further south, built on an ice shelf on the Antarctic continent itself. A couple of friends were on board, returning from 18 months of isolation in the snow, and looking forward to hitting civilisation again. Both Rhian, with whom I had shared an office at BAS, and Stephane were soon persuaded to come out in the summer too.
Back in the UK I took it easy for a couple of months while the ice of the northern Baltic began to melt away. I spent some time catching up with friends, and finding myself in Devon at one point I decided to nip down to Falmouth to find out a bit more about quay punts. I hopped on my bike and soon realised that a) its further than it looks on the map from Exeter to Falmouth, and b) it's jolly hilly in the West Country. A hundred miles further on I slept in a field just beyond the little ferry that crosses the Tamar, and arrived at the National Maritime Museum on the Falmouth waterfront early the next morning. I'd arranged to meet Roger Stephens there. Roger is the world authority on quay punts and keeps a file on each boat he has come across. I had known nothing at all of Teals early history, so he was a good find.
The little file he had on Teal comprised his notes made from long searches through Lloyds register and old yachting magazines, a copy of an article in Yachting Monthly written by her first owner, and, more recently a letter from an irate citizen of Alderney who had seen her sitting ashore slowly falling to bits and thought that Something Ought to be Done.
First surprise as I sat in the library perusing his file was that Teal was not her original name. 'Little Pal' was built for a young chap called Percy Woodcock, whose profession at the time isn't very clear. He seemed to have no need to work, and was well-enough off to wander down to the nearest boatyard and order a yacht on a whim. His health was poor, and while still a teenager he had been sent to Falmouth to let the bracing sea air work it's magic on him. In order to get a good dose of it, he went go out sailing on the quay punts as they went 'seeking' down channel to find work from the ships arriving from the west. After a few years of this he had a yacht built by the local yard of W.E. Thomas, along the lines of the quay punts he had grown to love. Zoe was a similar size to most of the working punts, and he hired a hand to help her sail it. It's unclear whether it was parsimony or matrimony that made him decide to get a slightly smaller boat that he could sail by himself or with his new bride; but whatever the reason for his decision Zoe was sold and the keel for Little Pal was laid on the stocks, again at the Thomas brothers yard. Because of his poor health Percy wanted something easily handled, so she was small for a punt, with an engine (unusual for that time) and a relatively underpowered rig. She was launched just after the outbreak of the first world war.
After the war, Percy, contrary chap, decided he needed something bigger again. Little Pal was sold, and was rapidly renamed Teal by her new owner. Or possibly Teale. Or maybe Sea Teale – there seems to have been a fair bit of confusion about what her name really became at that point, and every subsequent entry in the Register of Shipping appears under a slightly different variation. She was Sea Teal when I bought her in Alderney, so I maintained the tradition by dropping the 'Sea' again. Given that Teal are a freshwater species of duck it was a rather bizarre choice of name in the first place.
Whatever her name at the point Percy sold her, she went through quite a number of owners over the subsequent decades. At some point somebody beefed up the rig to the sizeable sail area she carries today, for the picture in Percy's Yachting Monthly article of her original rig does suggest that she would have been grossly undercanvassed.
Disaster struck Teal sometime in the early 1950s. Although Percy had had her fitted with a paraffin engine, at some point this had been replaced with a petrol model. This caught fire, and the planking on her starboard quarter burned through before she was beached and the fire extinguished. Declared a write-off, she lay abandoned on the beach for several years. Quite who rescued her isn't known, but she appears again in Lloyds register in 1957. One day while she was ashore in Maldon Arthur had stopped for a moment as he went by. He sucked in his teeth as he examined the hull. 'There's been something funny going on here' he said. 'Has she had a repair to her quarter?' I couldn't see the slightest difference between the planking forrad and aft of where he was waving his hand, and I soon forgot his comments. Now it all made sense - clearly, he knew exactly what he was talking about.
I suspect too that the years of lying on one side may have permanently distorted the hull, for these days her port side is noticably fuller than her starboard side, which gives her a list to starboard of 5 degrees or so when not corrected by the judicious placement of ballast. It doesn't seem to affect her sailing performance in the least, so I'd learnt not to worry about it.
A few more owners got their moneys worth out of Teal over the next couple of decades, but according to Rogers detailed file by the late 1980s she was again in a pretty perilous state from neglect, lying ashore in a boatyard near Southampton.
After browsing for a couple of hours I went for coffee with Roger in the museum restaurant. He was enthusing about Curlew, who was being brought back into tip-top condition at the museum workshops a couple of miles away. "She'll lie just there on the museum pontoon next year, by the other traditional boats" he said. "Lots of people ask about her." I asked him about how Teal had been rescued from her near death in Southampton, for from this point I knew a few vague details from chatting to her last owner in Alderney.
"Yes, it was Dave Cockwell who rescued her" he told me. "He'd only just left school at the time; he had a tiny shed in Bristol where he did the work. By the way, he now runs a yard just along the road, so you should drop in. It's half a mile beyond the museum workshops where they're working on Curlew. Oh, and did you know that Teal has a sister? She's called Water Wraith: she was built at the same yard the year before Teal, to the same plans – except that they gave her a counter stern. She's at a boatyard just along the road as well."
That was my afternoon sorted for me. I cycled away on the main road out of Falmouth, and found the yard Roger had pointed me to. Water Wraith was easy to spot, for I knew those lines a mile off. The same slender entry, the same deep, solid keel rocking gently down from the forefoot. It was only when you wandered round to the back that you realised there was a big difference – instead of Teals buisnesslike transom, there was a long slender counter, adding perhaps another 4 feet to her length. It was very pretty, though more yachty than workmanlike.
I couldn't see much more, for her decks were shrouded in a tarpaulin and there was no-one around. I didn't have much luck seeing Curlew either, for it was lunchtime and the museum workshop was deserted. Peering through a wire fence I could see her lying in a cradle, looking as handsome as I had seen her in South Georgia the first time I had passed through five years before.
I did however find Dave Cockwell in. His yard was only a few minutes further on, and in the little office he and a couple of apprentices just about to sit down for lunch. He told me about the restoration he had done, and an exciting trip back from the Scillies in a force seven with far too much sail up. He had done much of his sailing single-handed, and had undertaken plenty of passages around the West Country and crossed to Brittany several times. But he always wanted to be a boatbuilder, and in the end he had sailed her to Alderney, where he and the jeweller did a deal. The jeweller would get Teal, in beautiful sailing condition, while Dave took his old boat, a much bigger motor sailor that was - I learnt with little surprise - falling to pieces. Dave sailed her cautiously back to Britain, restored and sold her and with the proceeds started his boatbuilding business. His yard is big now, with quite a number of projects on the go, and 4 or 5 employees. He showed me round his current pride and joy, a replica of a pilot cutter that was under construction.
A few weeks later I was passing near Exeter again, and dropped into a little secondhand bookshop in the village of Topsham. Browsing through the nautical section, a name on a spine caught my eye. Percy Woodcock... wait a minute, that was Teals first owner! I bought it at once, and flicked through the dusty old pages. 'Looking Astern' was written late in his life, a look back at the various boats he had owned. First came a chapter describing his trips out in the channel on working quay punts with the Falmouth Watermen, then an account of his travels in Zoe - and following that were several chapters on Teal (or, rather, Little Pal). He described her maiden voyage in half a gale from Falmouth to Fowey with his new bride and a friend for crew; fishing for mackerel during the war trying to keep his gear from getting caught by passing mine-sweepers (his illness made him unfit for service so it seems he just pottered about in the boat instead); his toddler son 'helping dad to steer' and learning how to steer. The account closes with her sale, and her new owner taking her away. 'I saw Little Pal disappear behind the rocky point with real regret' he writes. 'She was – and under the name of Teal I believe still is – a good little ship'. I'm sure he would be glad to know that so many years after he wrote those words, she is as good a little ship as ever.
It was a couple of months between coming back from South Georgia and returning to Estonia, but the time flew by. Before I knew it, the time had come to rejoin my good little ship again.