Nav Problem - Ocean Navigator

Lunacy at Sea

It was time to leave Horta, though in truth no one ever wants to leave Horta. The Azorean natives are so friendly and welcoming, the anchorage so secure, the bars so plentiful, why would anyone want to leave? Even Peter’s Sport Cafe, perhaps one of the most famous sailor bars in the western hemisphere, though by now, possibly overrated, overpriced and overcrowded, is still a comfort. The little town is bursting at the seams with sailors and traffic. Faial, the island of which Horta is just a small part, is awash in blue hydrangeas and yellow and red nasturtiums. It’s…

Noon Sight Aboard Relentless

In my mind, it was something akin to a big game hunting safari of the 1920’s – not on the plains of Africa, but on the crests and troughs of the Atlantic Ocean. Instead of a gun, I was using a sextant, stalking the long sought-after elusive three-star fix. It had been years since I had the thrill of observing three stars, plotting them into an almost perfect pinwheel. I knew the odds for repeating that experience were long, but as with many other celestial navigators, I live on hope. When I arrived as crew aboard the 110-foot motor yacht…

Transatlantic Passage

In May of this year, I was hired as crew to assist in the delivery of the 110-foot Kingship Marine-built Relentless from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to Montenegro via Bermuda and Faial in the Azores. Across the Atlantic Ocean, down the Mediterranean, into the Adriatic it was quite the passage aboard a stout ship, with mostly fair weather, a happy crew and a trustworthy skipper. Although I have plenty of sea time and had completed a trans-Atlantic passage 50 years ago aboard a 70-foot ketch, much of that sea time has been in schooners moving to and from New England to…

Captain Nat: Part 2

This is the second part of our story about Captain Nat Palmer. The return passage from China to New York was very slow, and Capt. Palmer, frustrated with the progress, took to carving a design from a block of wood combing a sharp, concave bow with a fuller, flat-bottomed hull. A fellow passenger was William Low, one of the family that ran the shipping business A. A. Low & Bros., a highly successful firm in New York. Low was very impressed with Captain Palmer’s design and when they arrived in New York, he brought Palmer and his new design to…

Captain Nat Palmer, discoverer, designer, sailor

In the 1840s, when New York City was the hub of the maritime world, Nathaniel Palmer, “Captain Nat” to his contemporaries, was considered the greatest of all mariners in that port. This was a time when fellow captains included “Bully” Samuels, Robert Waterman and Josiah Cressy. Palmer was described at the time as “a man of great physical strength and endurance … his roughness all on the outside, his heart was filled with kindness and sympathies for the joys and sorrows of others.” Born in 1799 in Stonington, Connecticut, to a family of shipbuilders, Palmer was still in his teens…

Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Great Britain

After the success of Great Western (ON issue 288), Isambard Kingdom Brunel set his sights on an even larger ship, Great Britain, which from 1845 to 1853 was the largest passenger ship ever built at 322 feet LOA. Brunel, an innovator, took radical design leaps as the Great Britain was the first ship to be built of iron and was the first ship to be outfitted with a screw propeller. The ship became the template for all future ship-building construction and was the very first iron, sail-assisted steam vessel to cross the Atlantic. Great Britain was so big that a…

Great Western changes the game

It was not a propitious beginning. In July 1837 in Bristol, England, as 50,000 people gathered for the launching of SS Great Western, the largest ship ever built, an unknown shipyard worker was killed when a large timber fell on him. Despite that tragedy, Great Western went on to an illustrious and profitable career. The ship increased the fame of its designer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, an engineer already of high renown, who had designed the Great Western Railway operation from London to Bristol. At the opening of the railway Brunel was said to have made the comment that there was…

The end of Albatros

In the past two issues we’ve been following the adventures of Ernest K. Gann and his brigantine Albatros. Let’s pick up the story after Gann sold the ship. Following a three-year Pacific cruise and playing a role in the film Twilight for the Gods, Albatros was sold in 1959. The buyer was Christopher B. Sheldon who with his wife, Dr. Alice Sheldon, created and ran Ocean Academy of Connecticut, a prep school for college-bound kids that combined sail training with academics. In the spring of 1961, four instructors, a cook, and 13 students were on a voyage to the Galapagos…

Albatros, the adventure continues

In the last issue we began telling the story of the great sailor, aviator, writer, Ernest K. Gann, who converted the steel schooner Albatros (Dutch spelling with one s) into a brigantine sailing the South Pacific on and off for three years in the early 1950s. He was writing successful novels and movie scripts that were made into blockbuster Hollywood films. Of his sailing adventures, of which there were many, he wrote a book titled Song of the Sirens, an overlooked classic. Similar to the writings of Bernard Motissier, Gann is a master of the lyrical and poetic when writing…

Ernest K. Gann and Albatros

Of all the working pilot schooners built for service in the North Sea, perhaps the most famous is Albatros (the Dutch spelling has only one s). The American writer and aviator Ernest K. Gann bought Albatros in 1952. Built in Amsterdam in 1920 of riveted steel, the 117-foot LOA Albatros worked as a pilot schooner in the North Sea. Albatros was bought by the German government in 1937 and used by the Nazis during WWII as a U-boat relay station. After the war, Royal Rotterdam Lloyd, a Dutch shipping line, bought Albatros for a cadet training ship for future officers…