Tag: Swale Match

New Crab Winches (and Twitter!)

April 24, 2014 /

New crab winch

Just a quick note to let you know we have gone a bit rash and spent some cash, replacing the old “crab winches” with new. The old ones, much restored and well used were possibly the original equipment and were from the ‘Seager’ foundry in Faversham, now long since gone out of business and replaced by a housing estate of the same name. These winches, which are mainly used to raise and lower the lee-boards but also have different gearing shafts etc for dolly lines and working with any other aft-end gear (vangs etc), were lovely old things but were constructed of old castings which have now become rather brittle. Let go a lee board a bit roughly and they would tend to shatter off teeth from the main sprockets which then meant you would jump that tooth and smash the mechanism up against the next good tooth and break that, till you had stripped enough teeth to make the winch unusable.

2nd new crab winch

In my own experience, we managed this in a Swale Match and had to come home, tacking up the narrow Swale with one of the lee boards permanently down, tacking board for board with Mirosa. Great fun but not ideal, and I was only the bowlin’ man. I was yards away from the cussing and swearing. You can repair these teeth with a good welder but they are never as strong, so the Trust decided to replace the entire winches with modern, new equivalent kit. I am promised some more detailed information on these but meanwhile a couple of pics to look at.

Meanwhile, I am trying to set up a Twitter account for those of you who follow such things. I will then post notices that there is a new blog post and any other info that comes to hand. Please respond or re-tweet as you think fit. I have also linked this to Facebook, so it may pop up there also. The account is headed @SB_Cambria . I tried to get the real deal, SBCambria but some guy in Rio de Janeiro has grabbed that one already, claims his name is Sebastian Cambia but he has never posted on Twitter. We’ll make do, I guess. Look after yourselves.

SB Decima

September 12, 2012 /

SB Decima; Photograph (and copyright) by Catherine De Bont. Published with permission.

Today’s picture is a superb one of Tim Goldsack’s ‘iron pot’ barge SB Decima taken by Catherine De Bont. Tim, Catherine and Decima all have long and deep associations with Faversham and with Cambria. Tim, of course is our Master Shipwright who managed, and personally did much of, the rebuild of the barge. He has also skippered her in racing, notably when all we volunteers were allowed ‘out to play’ last year. Tim owns the Decima, a ‘tin pot’. I was always curious as to why a shipwright so skilled at working in wood, would own a metal hulled barge but he tells me with a wry grin that it’s all down to the costs of maintenance. Decima has long been associated with Faversham, being previously owned by Faversham resident (and something of a local celebrity), ‘Beefy’ Wildish, still remembered by many of the locals now of ‘more mature years’. Bit of a character, by all accounts. The trophy for the Stays’l Class in the Swale match is named after him (real name Percy Wildish) and, to quote Tricia Gurnett in her Barge Blog (http://sailingbarges.wordpress.com/tag/percy-wildish-cup/) “In the Staysail Class Niagara and Repertor were neck and neck at the finish, with Repertor one second ahead. After a protest on the matter of something earlier in the match, Repertor was given a 5 minute time penalty, giving Niagara the victory. Decima was 3^rd, getting the Percy Wildish Cup which was fittingly presented by “Beefy” Wildish’s son.”

Catherine herself has, of course, a huge association with Cambria and barges (and sailing craft generally of course) not only from her “Barge and Smack News” and other articles in the glossy mag “Traditional Boats and Tall Ships” (http://tallship.typepad.com/my_weblog/wild_news/). She was on board as they brought the old Cambria into Faversham on Hop Festival Day 2007 and it is she who slings the mooring rope ashore in all the videos of this event, including the clip used by Mike Maloney in the “Red Sails” film (http://www.cwideprods.co.uk/red-sails/). She is a major contributor of barge related news and snippets and photographs on the Facebook networking site. Thanks for the photo, Catherine and may your lens never get smeared with salty water.

Swale Match

August 13, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Today my job as blogger could not be easier as Dave Brooks’s Match Report for the Swale 2012 pings across the email and I can pretty much quote it verbatim. He also supplies a couple of lovely photo’s, one of which I publish here. Thanks for that, Dave.

Swale Match 2012, photo by Dave Brooks.

Dave writes “This years Swale Barge Match was the best race of the season so far. We based ourselves on Graveney beach right by the start line and watched Cabby, Orinoco, Phoenician, Greta and Pudge in the restricted stays’l class along with Decima, Repertor, and the newly refitted Niagara in the stays’l class got underway. Niagara was last of her class to start with Cabby leading all over the line. Mirosa, Marjorie and Lady of the Lea contested the bowsprit class but Lady of the Lea had already started with the stays’l barges so only Mirosa and Marjorie started correctly.

Watching the finish was a joy as Niagara and Repertor were side by side heading up to the finish line, Repertor crossing first by 1 second but had earlier incurred a 5 minute penalty giving the win to Niagara in a very impressive first race. With Niagara starting the race at the back of the fleet she was certainly the fastest stays’l barge of the day.

Mirosa and Marjorie were also neck and neck coming to the line with Mirosa winning by the tip of her bowsprit.

Cabby led the restricted stays’l barges from start to finish with Orinoco taking second place as Phoenician who crossed the line before her had failed to go round one of the marks.

Many thanks to an email from Hugh Perks who cleared up all the mystery over the finishing places.

It was nice to see so many barges racing and such close finishes. Niagara looked impressive as she picked off the places after starting last.

Shame Cambria was otherwise engaged up in Ipswich, and the Edme didn’t come it would have been good to see how they would have faired against the Mirosa and Marjorie. Also regular barge match attendee Edith May was unable to attend this year.”

Thanks, as I said, for that, Dave.

Nick Ardley’s Swale

August 12, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Barge and sailing book author and friend of the Cambria, Nick Ardley is first off the marks this time with his report and some superb pictures of the Swale Match yesterday. I publish here a love photo of Repertor and the newly restored barge Niagara crossing the line, borrowed from Nicks’s lovely website http://www.nickardley.com/ but I’ll leave it to you to nip across there and ‘read all about it’ and look through the excellent pictures. Nick generally takes his own sloop, Whimbrel out to go look at these matches, so he can position himself exactly where he wants and can get pictures you would never get from shore-based viewpoints. Nick grew up on the barge May Flower and has a life long love for and interest in all things barge and Suffolk/Essex/Kent sailing (he refers to it rather tongue-in-cheek, as ‘mud-larking’ and ‘ditch-crawling’) and if you’ve not yet caught up with his various books, they are well worth hunting down. Start your hunt on the website above.

Repertor and Niagara cross the line in the Swale Match 2012, picture from Nick Ardley’s website.

Meanwhile, Nick also chips in on the subject of the ‘stone heaps’ with a comment “The barge anchorage was not over the shingle spit running out from Shotley, but further into the Orwell close into the Shotley shore – almost opposite the Fagbury buoy. Unfortunately since the extension to the huge port on the Felixstowe shore the ‘mud’ has gone or been diminished by the channel running harder into what was a fine anchorage. I have seen barges using the ‘dead’ gound upstream of the port…
Th spit is not the Stone Heaps as far as I am aware, it is a natural geographical feature due to the run of two rivers. The name did refer to areas where ballast was dumped though – however ballast was mostly, latterly, landed ashore for re-use before ships had ballast water tanks…” Thanks for that clarification, Nick.